Thus, half against his will, Alan Merrick was drawn into this irregular
compact.
Next came that more difficult matter, the discussion of ways and means,
the more practical details. Alan hardly knew at first on what precise
terms it was Herminia’s wish that they two should pass their lives
together. His ideas were all naturally framed on the old model of
marriage; in that matter, Herminia said, he was still in the gall of
bitterness, and the bond of iniquity. He took it for granted that of
course they must dwell under one roof with one another. But that simple
ancestral notion, derived from man’s lordship in his own house, was
wholly adverse to Herminia’s views of the reasonable and natural. She
had debated these problems at full in her own mind for years, and had
arrived at definite and consistent solutions for every knotty point in
them. Why should this friendship differ at all, she asked, in respect
of time and place, from any other friendship? The notion of necessarily
keeping house together, the cramping idea of the family tie, belonged
entirely to the _régime_ of the man-made patriarchate, where the woman
and the children were the slaves and chattels of the lord and master.
In a free society, was it not obvious that each woman would live her
own life apart, would preserve her independence, and would receive the
visits of the man for whom she cared—the father of her children? Then
only could she be free. Any other method meant the economic and social
superiority of the man, and was irreconcilable with the perfect
individuality of the woman.
So Herminia reasoned. She rejected at once, therefore, the idea of any
change in her existing mode of life. To her, the friendship she
proposed with Alan Merrick was no social revolution; it was but the due
fulfilment of her natural functions. To make of it an occasion for
ostentatious change in her way of living seemed to her as unnatural as
is the practice of the barbarians in our midst who use a wedding—that
most sacred and private event in a young girl’s life—as an opportunity
for display of the coarsest and crudest character. To rivet the
attention of friends on bride and bridegroom is to offend against the
most delicate susceptibilities of modesty. From all such hateful
practices, Herminia’s pure mind revolted by instinct. She felt that
here at least was the one moment in a woman’s history when she would
shrink with timid reserve from every eye save one man’s—when publicity
of any sort was most odious and horrible.
Only the blinding effect of custom, indeed, could ever have shut good
women’s eyes to the shameful indecorousness of wedding ceremonial. We
drag a young girl before the prying gaze of all the world at the very
crisis in her life, when natural modesty would most lead her to conceal
herself from her dearest acquaintance. And our women themselves have
grown so blunted by use to the hatefulness of the ordeal that many of
them face it now with inhuman effrontery. Familiarity with marriage has
almost killed out in the maidens of our race the last lingering relics
of native modesty.
Herminia, however, could dispense with all that show. She had a little
cottage of her own, she told Alan—a tiny little cottage, in a street
near her school-work; she rented it for a small sum, in quite a poor
quarter, all inhabited by work-people. There she lived by herself; for
she kept no servants. There she should continue to live; why need this
purely personal compact between them two make any difference in her
daily habits? She would go on with her school-work for the present, as
usual. Oh, no, she certainly didn’t intend to notify the head-mistress
of the school or any one else, of her altered position. It was no
alteration of position at all, so far as she was concerned; merely the
addition to life of a new and very dear and natural friendship.
Herminia took her own point of view so instinctively indeed—lived so
wrapped in an ideal world of her own and the future’s—that Alan was
often quite alarmed in his soul when he thought of the rude awakening
that no doubt awaited her. Yet whenever he hinted it to her with all
possible delicacy, she seemed so perfectly prepared for the worst the
world could do, so fixed and resolved in her intention of martyrdom,
that he had no argument left, and could only sigh over her.
It was not, she explained to him further, that she wished to conceal
anything. The least tinge of concealment was wholly alien to that frank
fresh nature. If her head-mistress asked her a point-blank question,
she would not attempt to parry it, but would reply at once with a point
blank answer. Still, her very views on the subject made it impossible
for her to volunteer information unasked to any one. Here was a
personal matter of the utmost privacy; a matter which concerned nobody
on earth, save herself and Alan; a matter on which it was the grossest
impertinence for any one else to make any inquiry or hold any opinion.
They two chose to be friends; and there, so far as the rest of the
world was concerned, the whole thing ended. What else took place
between them was wholly a subject for their own consideration. But if
ever circumstances should arise which made it necessary for her to avow
to the world that she must soon be a mother, then it was for the world
to take the first step, if it would act upon its own hateful and cruel
initiative. She would never deny, but she would never go out of her way
to confess. She stood upon her individuality as a human being.
As to other practical matters, about which Alan ventured delicately to
throw out a passing question or two, Herminia was perfectly frank, with
the perfect frankness of one who thinks and does nothing to be ashamed
of. She had always been self-supporting, she said, and she would be
self-supporting still. To her mind, that was an essential step towards
the emancipation of women. Their friendship implied for her no change
of existence, merely an addition to the fulness of her living. He was
the complement of her being. Every woman should naturally wish to live
her whole life, to fulfil her whole functions; and that she could do
only by becoming a mother, accepting the orbit for which nature
designed her. In the end, no doubt, complete independence would be
secured for each woman by the civilised state, or in other words by the
whole body of men, who do the hard work of the world, and who would
collectively guarantee every necessary and luxury to every woman of the
community equally. In that way alone could perfect liberty of choice
and action be secured for women; and she held it just that women should
so be provided for, because the mothers of the community fulfil in the
state as important and necessary a function as the men themselves do.
It would be well, too, that the mothers should be free to perform that
function without preoccupation of any sort. So a free world would order
things. But in our present barbaric state of industrial slavery,
capitalism, monopoly—in other words under the organised rule of
selfishness—such a course was impossible. Perhaps, as an intermediate
condition, it might happen in time that the women of certain classes
would for the most part be made independent at maturity each by her own
father; which would produce for them in the end pretty much the same
general effect of freedom. She saw as a first step the endowment of the
daughter. But meanwhile there was nothing for it save that as many
women as could should aim for themselves at economic liberty, in other
words at self-support. That was an evil in itself, because obviously
the prospective mothers of a community should be relieved as far as
possible from the stress and strain of earning a livelihood; should be
set free to build up their nervous systems to the highest attainable
level against the calls of maternity. But above all things we must be
practical; and in the practical world here and now around us, no other
way existed for women to be free save the wasteful way of each earning
her own livelihood. Therefore she would continue her schoolwork with
her pupils as long as the school would allow her; and when that became
impossible, would fall back upon literature.
One other question Alan ventured gently to raise—the question of
children. Fools always put that question, and think it a crushing one.
Alan was no fool, yet it puzzled him strangely. He did not see for
himself how easy is the solution; how absolutely Herminia’s plan leaves
the position unaltered. But Herminia herself was as modestly frank on
the subject as on every other. It was a moral and social point of the
deepest importance; and it would be wrong of them to rush into it
without due consideration. She had duly considered it. She would give
her children, should any come, the unique and glorious birthright of
being the only human beings ever born into this world as the deliberate
result of a free union, contracted on philosophical and ethical
principles. Alan hinted certain doubts as to their up-bringing and
education. There, too, Herminia was perfectly frank. They would be half
hers, half his; the pleasant burden of their support, the joy of their
education, would naturally fall upon both parents equally. But why
discuss these matters like the squalid rich, who make their marriages a
question of settlements and dowries and business arrangements? They two
were friends and lovers; in love, such base doubts could never arise.
Not for worlds would she import into their mutual relations any sordid
stain of money, any vile tinge of bargaining. They could trust one
another; that alone sufficed for them.
So Alan gave way bit by bit all along the line, overborne by Herminia’s
more perfect and logical conception of her own principles. She knew
exactly what she felt and wanted; while he knew only in a vague and
formless way that his reason agreed with her.
A week later, he knocked timidly one evening at the door of a modest
little workman-looking cottage, down a small side street in the
back-wastes of Chelsea. ’Twas a most unpretending street; Bower Lane by
name, full of brown brick houses, all as like as peas, and with nothing
of any sort to redeem their plain fronts from the common blight of the
London jerry-builder. Only a soft serge curtain and a pot of mignonette
on the ledge of the window, distinguished the cottage at which Alan
Merrick knocked from the others beside it. Externally that is to say;
for within it was as dainty as Morris wall-papers and merino hangings
and a delicate feminine taste in form and colour could make it. Keats
and Shelley lined the shelves; Rossetti’s wan maidens gazed unearthly
from the over-mantel. The door was opened for him by Herminia in
person; for she kept no servant—that was one of her principles. She was
dressed from head to foot in a simple white gown, as pure and sweet as
the soul it covered. A white rose nestled in her glossy hair; three
sprays of white lily decked a vase on the mantel-piece. Some dim
survival of ancestral ideas made Herminia Barton so array herself in
the white garb of affiance for her bridal evening. Her cheek was aglow
with virginal shrinking as she opened the door, and welcomed Alan in.
But she held out her hand just as frankly as ever to the man of her
free choice as he advanced to greet her. Alan caught her in his arms
and kissed her forehead tenderly. And thus was Herminia Barton’s
espousal consummated.