AT ROGER MICHAEL'S
On an early April afternoon in the year 1902 a man and woman were
crossing, with much leisureliness, Trafalgar Square.
"We won't get run over! It isn't like Paris."
"Aren't you tired, Molly? Don't you want a hansom?"
"Tired? No! What could make me tired a day like this? I want to go
stroke the lions."
They gravely went and did so. "Poor old British Lion!--Listen!"
News was being cried. "_Details of fight at Bushman's Kop!_"
Christopher Josslyn left the lions, ran across and got a paper, then
returned. "A small affair!" he said. "How interminably the thing drags
out!"
"But they'll have peace directly now."
"Yes--but it's Poor old Lion, just the same--"
They moved from the four in stone, striking across to Pall Mall.
"There was a halcyon time in England, fifty years or so ago, when, if
you'll believe what men wrote, it was seriously held that no civilized
man would ever again encroach upon a weaker brother's rights! Æons
were at hand of universal education, stained glass, and ascension
lilies. At any rate æons of brotherhood. Under the kindly control of
the great Elder Brother England. And they had some reason--it looked
for an illusory moment that way. I always try to remember that--and
moments like that in every land's history--at moments such as these.
Why doesn't that moment carry on over? There's something deeply,
fundamentally wrong."
He looked along the crowded street. Men were buying papers--that seemed
their chief employment. _Delarey--Kitchener--Report of fight at Hartz
River._
"Not far from a billion dollars expended on this war--and those East
Side streets we went through yesterday--Concentration Camps--and
the Coronation--this reactionary Administration with its Corn Laws
and Coercion Laws and wretched Education Bill, and so on--and the
Coronation talk--and Piccadilly last night after nine--"
"Oh," said Molly sharply. "That's the sting that I feel! It's women and
children who are suffering in those Concentration Camps, I suppose--and
it's women's sons who are lying on the battlefields--and it's women
just as well as men who are paying the taxes--and it's women, too, in
those horrible slums, wretched and hopeless--and bad legislation falls
on women just as hardly as on men--but the other! There we've got the
tragedy mostly to ourselves--and there's no greater tragedy below the
stars!" She dashed a bright drop from her eyes. "I'll never forget that
girl, last night, on the Embankment--thin and painted and that hollow
laugh.... I wish women would wake up!"
"Women and men," said the other. "They're waking, but it's slow, it's
slow, it's slow."
The softened, softened English sunlight bathed the broad street, the
buildings, the wheeled traffic, the people going up and down. The
two Americans, here at last at the latter end of their six months
abroad, delighted in the tender light, in the soft afternoon sky
with a few sailing clouds, in the street sights and sounds, in the
English speech. They strolled rather than walked; even at times they
dawdled rather than strolled. They developed a tendency to stand
before shop-windows. So strong and handsome a pair were they that they
attracted some attention. Thirty-five and thirty-two, both tall, both
well-made, lithe, active, both aglow with health; she a magnificent
rosy blonde, he blue-eyed, but with nut-brown hair; both dressed with
an unconventional simplicity, fitness, and comfort; both interested as
children and happy in each other's company--those who observed them did
not call them "Promise-Bearers"; and yet, in a way, that was what they
were. There were three children at home with as splendid a grandmother.
A University had sent Christopher to make an investigation, and the
children had said, "You go, too, mother! It'll be splendid. You need a
rest!" and Christopher had said, "Molly, you need another honeymoon."
The English weather was uncommonly good. As they came to Green Park
a barrel-organ was playing. Spring was full at hand; you read it
everywhere.
Two men passed, talking. "Yes, to confer at Klerksdorp, with Steyn and
Botha and De Wet. Peace presently, and none too soon!"
"I should think not. I'm done with wars."
"Little Annie Rooney," played the barrel-organ.
"There is more than one way for societies to survive," said
Christopher, "and some day men will find it out. You can survive
by being a better duellist and for a longer time than the other
fellow--and you can survive by being the better toiler, also with
persistence--or you can survive by being the better thinker, in
an endless, ascending scale. Each plane makes the lower largely
unnecessary, is, indeed, the lower moved up, become more merciful and
wiser. Survive--to live over--to outlive. The true survivor--wouldn't
you like to see him--see her--see _us_, Molly?"
"Yes," said Molly soberly. "We are a long way off."
Christopher assented. "True enough. And, thank Heaven! the true
survivor will always vanish toward the truer yet. But I don't know--it
seems to me--the twentieth century might catch a faint far glimpse of
our lineaments! I am madly, wildly, rashly optimistic for the twentieth
century--even when I remember how optimistic they were fifty years ago!
Who could help being optimistic on such an afternoon? Look at the gold
on the green!"
The barrel-organ played an old, gay dance.
"Do you suppose," said Molly, "that, in Merry England, the milkmaids
and shepherdesses danced about a maypole at thirty-two? For that's just
exactly what I should like to do this minute! How absurd to be able to
climb the Matterhorn, and then not to be let go out there and dance on
that smooth bit of green!"
"You might try it. Only I wouldn't answer for the conduct of the
policeman by the tree. And if you're arrested, we can't dine to-night
with Roger Michael."
Roger Michael lived in a small, red, Georgian house in Chelsea. Her
grandparents had lived here, and her parents, and she had been born
here, nearer fifty than forty years ago. It had descended to her, and
she lived here still. She had an old housekeeper and a beautiful cat,
and two orphan children who were almost the happiest children in that
part of the world. She always kept children in the house. There were
a couple of others whom she had raised and who were out in the world,
doing well, and when the two now with her were no longer children she
would find another two. She did not believe in orphan asylums. She
herself had never married.
She remembered George Eliot, and she had known the Rossettis, and more
slightly the Carlyles. Now in her small, distinguished house, with
its atmosphere of plain living and high thinking, fragrant and sunny
with kindliness and good will, she set her table often for her friends
and drew them together in her simple, old-fashioned, book-overflowing
drawing-room. Her friends were scholars, writing and thinking people,
and simply good people, and any one who was in trouble and came to her,
and many reformers. She was herself of old, reforming stock, and she
served humanity in all those ways. She had met and liked the Josslyns
when she was in America years before, and when they wrote and told her
they were in London she promptly named this evening for them to come to
Chelsea.
They found besides Roger Michael a scientific man of name asked to meet
Christopher, a writer of plays, a writer of essays, a noted Fabian, and
as noted a woman reformer. The seventh guest was a little late. When
she came, it was Hagar Ashendyne.
"What an unexpected pleasure!" said the Josslyns, and meant every word
of it. "How long since that summer at the New Springs? Almost nine
years! And you've grown a great, famous woman--"
"Not so very great, and not so very famous," said Hagar Ashendyne.
"But I'm fortunate enough--to-night! You're a wind from home--you
mountain-climbing, divine couple! The Bear's Den! Do you remember the
day we climbed there?"
"Yes!" said Molly; "and Judge Black waiting at the foot. Oh, I am glad
to see you! We did not dream you were in London."
"We--my father and I--have been here only a little while. All winter we
were in Algeria. Then, suddenly, he wanted to see the Leonardos in the
National."
Her voice, which was very rich and soft, made musical notes of her
words. She was subtly, indescribably, transfigured and magnified.
She looked a great woman. While she turned to greet others in the
room, one or two of whom seemed acquaintances of more or less old
standing, Molly and Christopher were alike engaged in drawing rapidly
into mind what they knew of this countrywoman. They knew what the
world knew--that she was a writer of short stories whose work would
probably live; that her work was fabulously in demand; that it had a
metaphysical value as well as a clutching interest. They knew that she
was a world-wanderer, sailing here and there over the globe with a
father whose insatiable zest for life crutches and wheel-chair could
not put under. It was their impression that she had not been in America
more than once or twice in a number of years. They read everything she
published; they knew what could be known that way. They had that one
summer's impression and memory. She was there still; she was that Hagar
Ashendyne also, but evolved, enriched....
Roger Michael never had large dinner-parties, and the talk was
oftenest general. The fare that she spread was very simple; it was
enough and good; it gained that recognition, and then the attention
went elsewhere. The eight at the round table were, through a long
range, harmoniously minded; half, at least, were old friends and
comrades, and the other half came easily to a meeting-place. Thought,
become articulate with less difficulty than usual, wove with
ductileness across and across the table. There sounded a fair deal
of laughter. They were all workers here, and, necessarily, toward
many issues, serious-minded enough. But they could talk shop, and
one another's shop, and shop of the world at large, with humour and
quick appreciation of the merrier aspects of the workroom. At first,
naturally, in a time of public excitement, they talked the war in
Africa, and the sick longing the country now felt for peace, and the
general public foreboding, undefined but very real, that had taken the
place of the old, too-mellow complacency; but then, as naturally in
this company, the talk went to underlying, slow, hesitant movements,
evolutionary forces just "a-borning"; roads that people such as these
were blazing, and athwart which each reactionary swing of the pendulum
brought landslides and floods enough, mountains of obstruction, gulfs
of not-yet-ness. But the roadmakers, the pioneers, had the pioneer
temper; they were spinning ropes, shouldering picks, stating to
themselves and one another that gulfs had been crossed before and
mountains removed, and that, on the whole, it was healthful exercise.
They were incurably hopeful, though at quite long range, as reformers
have to be.
The Fabian told a mirth-provoking anecdote of a Tory candidate. The
scientific man, who possessed an imagination and was a member of the
Society for Psychical Research, gave a brief account of Thomson's
new Theory of Corpuscles, and hazarded the prediction that the next
quarter-century would see remarkable things. "We'll know more about
radiation--gravity--the infinitely little and the infinitely big.
And then--my hobby. There's a curious increase of interest in the
question of a Fourth Dimension. It's a strange age, and it's going
to be stranger still--or merely beautifully simple and homecoming,
I don't know which. Science and mysticism are fairly within hailing
distance of each other." The talk went to Christopher's investigation,
and then to mountain-climbing, and Cecil Rhodes's Will, and Marconi's
astonishing feat of receiving in Newfoundland wireless signals from
a station on the English coast, and M. Santos-Dumont's flight in a
veritable airship. The writer of essays, who was a woman and an earnest
and loving one, had recently published a paper upon a term that had
hardly as yet come into general use--_Eugenics_; an article as earnest
and loving as herself. Roger Michael had liked it greatly, and so had
others at the table. Now they made the writer go over a point or two,
which she did quietly, elaborating what she had first said.
Only the writer of plays--his last one being at the moment in the hands
of the censor--chose to be strangely, deeply, desperately pessimistic.
"I am going," he said, "to quote Huxley--not that I couldn't say it as
well myself. Says Huxley, 'I know of no study which is so unutterably
saddening as that of the evolution of humanity.... Out of the darkness
of prehistoric ages man emerges with the mark of his lowly origin
strong upon him. He is a brute, more intelligent than other brutes; a
blind prey to impulses which, as often as not, lead him to destruction;
a victim to endless illusions which make his mental existence a terror
and a burthen and fill his physical life with barren toil and battle.
He attains a certain degree of comfort and develops a more or less
workable theory of life ... and then for thousands of years struggles
with varying fortunes, attended by infinite wickedness, bloodshed,
and misery, to maintain himself at that point against the greed and
ambition of his fellow-men. He makes a point of killing and otherwise
persecuting all those who first try to get him to move on; and when he
has moved a step farther, foolishly confers _post-mortem_ deification
on his victims. He exactly repeats the process with all who want him
to move a step yet farther.'--That," said the writer of plays, "is
what happens to brains, aspiration, and altruism in combination--rack
and thumbscrews and auto-da-fés, and maybe in five hundred years or a
thousand a picture skied by the Royal Academy--'Giordano Bruno going to
the Stake,' 'Galileo Recanting,' 'Joan of Arc before her Judges.' My
own theory of the world is that it is standing on its head. Naturally
it resents the presence of people whose heads are in the clouds.
Naturally it finds them rather ridiculous and contrary to all the
proprieties, and violently to be pulled down. Moral: keep your brains
close to safety and the creeping herb."
"I think that you worry," said the Fabian, "much too much about that
play. I don't believe there's the slightest prospect that he'll think
it fit to be produced."
The woman reformer was talking with Molly. "Yes; it's a long
struggle. We've been at it since the 'fifties--just as you have been
in America. A long, long time. The Movement in both countries is a
grey-haired woman of almost sixty years. We've needed what they say we
have--patience. Sometimes I think we've been too patient. You younger
women have got to come in and take hold and give what perhaps the
older type couldn't give--organization and wider knowledge and modern
courage. We've given the old-time courage all right, and you'll have to
have the patience and staying qualities, too;--but there's needed now
a higher heart and a freer step than we could give in that world that
we're coming out of."
"I think that I've always thought it right," said Molly, "but I've
never really come out and said so, or become identified in any way.--Of
course, it isn't thinking so very positively if you haven't done that--"
"It is like that with almost every one. Diffused thought--and then,
suddenly one day, something happens or another mind touches yours, and
out of the mist there gathers form, determination, action. You're all
right, my dear! Only, I hope when you go home you will speak out, join
some organization--That is the simple, right thing that every one can
do. Concerted effort is the effort that tells to-day."
"Are you speaking," asked Hagar Ashendyne, "of the Suffrage Movement?"
They were back in the drawing-room, all gathered more or less
closely around a light fire upon the hearth, kindled for the comfort
of Americans who always found England "so cold." It softened and
brightened all the room, quaint and old-fashioned, where, for a hundred
years, distinguished quiet people had come and gone.
"Yes," said the older woman. "Are you interested?"
"Yes, of course--"
She had not spoken much at dinner, but had sat, a pearl of listeners,
deep, soft eyes upon each discourser in turn. There was in the minds of
all an interest and curiosity regarding her. Her work was very good.
She had personality to an extraordinary degree.
Now she spoke in a voice that had a little of the Ashendyne golden
drawl. "I have been--in the last eight years--oh, all over! Europe,
yes; but more especially, it seems to me, looking back, the Orient.
Egypt, all North Africa, Turkey and Persia, Japan and India. Yes, and
Europe, too; Greece and Italy and Spain, the mid-Continent and the
North. Around the world--a little of Spanish America, a little of the
Islands. Sometimes long in one place, sometimes only a few days....
Everywhere it was always the same.... The Social Organism with a
shrivelled side."
The writer of plays was in a mood to take issue with his every deepest
conviction; also to say banal things. "But aren't American women the
freest in the world?"
Hagar Ashendyne did not answer. She sat in a deep armchair, her elbow
upon the arm, her chin in her hand, her eyes dreaming upon the fire....
But Christopher entered the lists. "'Freest'--'freest'! Yes, perhaps
they are. The Italian woman is freer than the Oriental woman, and the
German woman is freer than the Italian, and the English woman is freer
than the German, and the American is freer than the English! But what
have they to do with 'freer' and 'freest'? It is a question of being
free!"
"Free politically?"
"Free in all human ways, politically being one. I do not see how a man
can endure to say to a woman, 'You are less free than I am, but be
satisfied! you are so much freer than that wretch over there!'"
Hagar rose. Her eyes chanced to meet those of the man who had talked
physics and mysticism. "We shan't," she said, "get into the Fourth
Dimension while we have a shrivelled side. We can't limp into that, you
know." She crossed the room and stood before a portrait hung above a
sofa. "Roger Michael, come tell me about this Quaker lady!"
She left before ten, pleading an early rising for work that must be
done. And Molly and Christopher would come to see her? She might be a
month in London.
Christopher and the Fabian saw her into her cab, and she gave each her
hand and was driven away. "That," said the Fabian, as they turned back
to the house, "is a woman one could die for."
It was a long way to the hotel where the Ashendynes were staying.
A mild, dark, blurred night; street lights, houses with lights and
darkened houses, forms on the pavement that moved briskly, forms
that idled, forms that went with stealthiness; passing vehicles, the
horses' hoofs, the roll of the wheels, the onward, unfolding ribbon of
the night. The air came in at the lowered window, soft and cool, with
a hint now of rain. Hagar was dreaming of Gilead Balm. Up over the
threshold had peered a childhood evening, and she and Thomasine and
Maggie and Corker and Mary Magazine played ring-around-a-rosy, over
the dewy grass until the pink in the west was ashes of roses and the
fireflies were out.