The months since her father's death spread into the second year before
Stephen began to realise the loneliness of her life. She had no
companion now but her aunt; and though the old lady adored her, and she
returned her love in full, the mere years between them made impossible
the companionship that youth craves. Miss Rowly's life was in the past.
Stephen's was in the future. And loneliness is a feeling which comes
unbidden to a heart.
Stephen felt her loneliness all round. In old days Harold was always
within hail, and companionship of equal age and understanding was
available. But now his very reticence in her own interest, and by her
father's wishes, made for her pain. Harold had put his strongest
restraint on himself, and in his own way suffered a sort of silent
martyrdom. He loved Stephen with every fibre of his being. Day by day
he came toward her with eager step; day by day he left her with a pang
that made his heart ache and seemed to turn the brightness of the day to
gloom. Night by night he tossed for hours thinking, thinking, wondering
if the time would ever come when her kisses would be his . . . But the
tortures and terrors of the night had their effect on his days. It
seemed as if the mere act of thinking, of longing, gave him ever renewed
self-control, so that he was able in his bearing to carry out the task he
had undertaken: to give Stephen time to choose a mate for herself. Herein
lay his weakness--a weakness coming from his want of knowledge of the
world of women. Had he ever had a love affair, be it never so mild a
one, he would have known that love requires a positive expression. It is
not sufficient to sigh, and wish, and hope, and long, all to oneself.
Stephen felt instinctively that his guarded speech and manner were due to
the coldness--or rather the trusting abated worship--of the brotherhood
to which she had been always accustomed. At the time when new forces
were manifesting and expanding themselves within her; when her growing
instincts, cultivated by the senses and the passions of young nature,
made her aware of other forces, new and old, expanding themselves outside
her; at the time when the heart of a girl is eager for new impressions
and new expansions, and the calls of sex are working within her all
unconsciously, Harold, to whom her heart would probably have been the
first to turn, made himself in his effort to best show his love, a
_quantite negligeable_.
Thus Stephen, whilst feeling that the vague desires of budding womanhood
were trembling within her, had neither thought nor knowledge of their
character or their ultimate tendency. She would have been shocked,
horrified, had that logical process, which she applied so freely to less
personal matters, been used upon her own intimate nature. In her case
logic would of course act within a certain range; and as logic is a
conscious intellectual process, she became aware that her objective was
man. Man--in the abstract. 'Man,' not 'a man.' Beyond that, she could
not go. It is not too much to say that she did not ever, even in her
most errant thought, apply her reasoning, or even dream of its following
out either the duties, the responsibilities, or the consequences of
having a husband. She had a vague longing for younger companionship, and
of the kind naturally most interesting to her. There thought stopped.
One only of her male acquaintances did not at this time appear. Leonard
Everard, who had some time ago finished his course at college, was living
partly in London and partly on the Continent. His very absence made him
of added interest to his old play-fellow. The image of his grace and
comeliness, of his dominance and masculine force, early impressed on her
mind, began to compare favourably with the actualities of her other
friends; those of them at least who were within the circle of her
personal interest. 'Absence makes the heart grow fonder.' In Stephen's
mind had been but a very mustard-seed of fondness. But new lights were
breaking for her; and all of them, in greater or lesser degree, shone in
turn on the memory of the pretty self-willed dominant boy, who now grew
larger and more masculine in stature under the instance of each
successive light. Stephen knew the others fairly well through and
through. The usual mixture of good and evil, of strength and weakness,
of purpose and vacillation, was quite within the scope of her own feeling
and of her observation. But this man was something of a problem to her;
and, as such, had a prominence in her thoughts quite beyond his own
worthiness.
In movement of some form is life; and even ideas grow when the pulses
beat and thought quickens. Stephen had long had in her mind the idea of
sexual equality. For a long time, in deference to her aunt's feelings,
she had not spoken of it; for the old lady winced in general under any
suggestion of a breach of convention. But though her outward expression
being thus curbed had helped to suppress or minimise the opportunities of
inward thought, the idea had never left her. Now, when sex was,
consciously or unconsciously, a dominating factor in her thoughts, the
dormant idea woke to new life. She had held that if men and women were
equal the woman should have equal rights and opportunities as the man. It
had been, she believed, an absurd conventional rule that such a thing as
a proposal of marriage should be entirely the prerogative of man.
And then came to her, as it ever does to woman, opportunity. Opportunity,
the cruelest, most remorseless, most unsparing, subtlest foe that
womanhood has. Here was an opportunity for her to test her own theory;
to prove to herself, and others, that she was right. They--'they' being
the impersonal opponents of, or unbelievers in, her theory--would see
that a woman could propose as well as a man; and that the result would be
good.
It is a part of self-satisfaction, and perhaps not the least dangerous
part of it, that it has an increasing or multiplying power of its own.
The desire to do increases the power to do; and desire and power united
find new ways for the exercise of strength. Up to now Stephen's
inclination towards Leonard had been vague, nebulous; but now that theory
showed a way to its utilisation it forthwith began to become, first
definite, then concrete, then substantial. When once the idea had become
a possibility, the mere passing of time did the rest.
Her aunt saw--and misunderstood. The lesson of her own youth had not
been applied; not even of those long hours and days and weeks at which
she hinted when she had spoken of the tragedy of life which by inference
was her own tragedy: 'to love and to be helpless. To wait, and wait, and
wait, with your heart all aflame!'
Stephen recognised her aunt's concern for her health in time to protect
herself from the curiosity of her loving-kindness. Her youth and
readiness and adaptability, and that power of play-acting which we all
have within us and of which she had her share, stood to her. With but
little effort, based on a seeming acquiescence in her aunt's views, she
succeeded in convincing the old lady that her incipient feverish cold had
already reached its crisis and was passing away. But she had gained
certain knowledge in the playing of her little part. All this
self-protective instinct was new; for good or ill she had advanced one
more step in not only the knowledge but the power of duplicity which is
so necessary in the conventional life of a woman.
Oh! did we but see! Could we but see! Here was a woman, dowered in her
youth with all the goods and graces in the power of the gods to bestow,
who fought against convention; and who yet found in convention the
strongest as well as the readiest weapon of defence.
For nearly two weeks Stephen's resolution was held motionless, neither
advancing nor receding; it was veritably the slack water of her
resolution. She was afraid to go on. Not afraid in sense of fear as it
is usually understood, but with the opposition of virginal instincts;
those instincts which are natural, but whose uses as well as whose powers
are unknown to us.