The next six months were the happiest time of her life, for Herminia.
All day long she worked hard with her classes; and often in the
evenings Alan Merrick dropped in for sweet converse and companionship.
Too free from any taint of sin or shame herself ever to suspect that
others could misinterpret her actions, Herminia was hardly aware how
the gossip of Bower Lane made free in time with the name of the young
lady who had taken a cottage in the row, and whose relations with the
tall gentleman that called so much in the evenings were beginning to
attract the attention of the neighbourhood. The poor slaves of
washer-women and working men’s wives all around, with whom contented
slavery to a drunken husband was the only “respectable”
condition—couldn’t understand for the life of them how the pretty young
lady could make her name so cheap; “and her that pretends to be so
charitable and that, and goes about in the parish like a district
visitor!” Though to be sure it had already struck the minds of Bower
Lane that Herminia never went “to church nor chapel;” and when people
cut themselves adrift from church and chapel, why, what sort of
morality can you reasonably expect of them? Nevertheless, Herminia’s
manners were so sweet and engaging, to rich and poor alike, that Bower
Lane seriously regretted what it took to be her lapse from grace. Poor
purblind Bower Lane! A lifetime would have failed it to discern for
itself how infinitely higher than its slavish “respectability” was
Herminia’s freedom. In which respect, indeed, Bower Lane was no doubt
on a dead level with Belgravia, or, for the matter of that, with
Lambeth Palace.
But Herminia, for her part, never discovered she was talked about. To
the pure all things are pure; and Herminia was dowered with that
perfect purity. And though Bower Lane lay but some few hundred yards
off from the Carlyle Place Girl’s School, the social gulf between them
yet yawned so wide that good old Miss Smith-Waters from Cambridge, the
head-mistress of the school, never caught a single echo of the
washerwomen’s gossip. Herminia’s life through those six months was one
unclouded honeymoon. On Sundays, she and Alan would go out of town
together, and stroll across the breezy summit of Leith Hill, or among
the brown heather and garrulous pine-woods that perfume the radiating
spurs of Hind Head with their aromatic resins. Her love for Alan was
profound and absorbing; while as for Alan, the more he gazed into the
calm depths of that crystal soul, the more deeply did he admire it.
Gradually she was raising him to her own level. It is impossible to mix
with a lofty nature and not acquire in time some tincture of its nobler
and more generous sentiments. Herminia was weaning Alan by degrees from
the world; she was teaching him to see that moral purity and moral
earnestness are worth more, after all, than to dwell with purple
hangings in all the tents of iniquity. She was making him understand
and sympathise with the motives which led her stoutly on to her final
martyrdom, which made her submit without a murmur of discontent to her
great renunciation.
As yet, however, there was no hint or forecast of actual martyrdom. On
the contrary, her life flowed in all the halo of a honeymoon. It was a
honeymoon, too, undisturbed by the petty jars and discomforts of
domestic life; she saw Alan too seldom for either ever to lose the keen
sense of fresh delight in the other’s presence. When she met him, she
thrilled to the delicate fingertips. Herminia had planned it so of set
purpose. In her reasoned philosophy of life, she had early decided that
’tis the wear and tear of too close daily intercourse which turns
unawares the lover into the husband; and she had determined that in her
own converse with the man she loved that cause of disillusion should
never intrude itself. They conserved their romance through all their
plighted and united life. Herminia had afterwards no recollections of
Alan to look back upon save ideally happy ones.
So six months wore away. On the memory of those six months Herminia was
to subsist for half a lifetime. At the end of that time, Alan began to
fear that if she did not soon withdraw from the Carlyle Place School,
Miss Smith-Waters might begin to ask inconvenient questions. Herminia,
ever true to her principles, was for stopping on till the bitter end,
and compelling Miss Smith-Waters to dismiss her from her situation. But
Alan, more worldly wise, foresaw that such a course must inevitably
result in needless annoyance and humiliation for Herminia; and Herminia
was now beginning to be so far influenced by Alan’s personality that
she yielded the point with reluctance to his masculine judgment. It
must be always so. The man must needs retain for many years to come the
personal hegemony he has usurped over the woman; and the woman who once
accepts him as lover or as husband must give way in the end, even in
matters of principle, to his virile self-assertion. She would be less a
woman, and he less a man, were any other result possible. Deep down in
the very roots of the idea of sex we come on that prime antithesis—the
male, active and aggressive; the female, sedentary, passive, and
receptive.
And even on the broader question, experience shows one it is always so
in the world we live in. No man or woman can go through life in
consistent obedience to any high principle—not even the willing and
deliberate martyrs. We must bow to circumstances. Herminia had made up
her mind beforehand for the crown of martyrdom, the one possible
guerdon this planet can bestow upon really noble and disinterested
action. And she never shrank from any necessary pang, incidental to the
prophet’s and martyr’s existence. Yet even so, in a society almost
wholly composed of mean and petty souls, incapable of comprehending or
appreciating any exalted moral standpoint, it is practically impossible
to live from day to day in accordance with a higher or purer standard.
The martyr who should try so to walk without deviation of any sort,
turning neither to the right nor to the left in the smallest
particular, must accomplish his martyrdom prematurely on the pettiest
side-issues, and would never live at all to assert at the stake the
great truth which is the lodestar and goal of his existence.
So Herminia gave way. Sadly against her will she gave way. One morning
in early March, she absented herself from her place in the class-room
without even taking leave of her beloved schoolgirls, whom she had
tried so hard unobtrusively to train up towards a rational
understanding of the universe around them, and sat down to write a
final letter of farewell to poor straight-laced kind-hearted Miss
Smith-Waters. She sat down to it with a sigh; for Miss Smith-Waters,
though her outlook upon the cosmos was through one narrow chink, was a
good soul up to her lights, and had been really fond and proud of
Herminia. She had rather shown her off, indeed, as a social trump card
to the hesitating parent—“This is our second mistress, Miss Barton; you
know her father, perhaps; such an excellent man, the Dean of Dunwich.”
And now, Herminia sat down with a heavy heart, thinking to herself what
a stab of pain the avowal she had to make would send throbbing through
that gentle old breast, and how absolutely incapable dear Miss
Smith-Waters could be of ever appreciating the conscientious reasons
which had led her, Iphigenia-like, to her self-imposed sacrifice.
But, for all that, she wrote her letter through, delicately, sweetly,
with feminine tact and feminine reticence. She told Miss Smith-Waters
frankly enough all it was necessary Miss Smith-Waters should know; but
she said it with such daintiness that even that conventionalised and
hide-bound old maid couldn’t help feeling and recognising the purity
and nobility of her misguided action. Poor child, Miss Smith-Waters
thought; she was mistaken, of course, sadly and grievously mistaken;
but, then, ’twas her heart that misled her, no doubt; and Miss
Smith-Waters, having dim recollections of a far-away time when she
herself too possessed some rudimentary fragment of such a central
vascular organ, fairly cried over the poor girl’s letter with
sympathetic shame, and remorse, and vexation. Miss Smith-Waters could
hardly be expected to understand that if Herminia had thought her
conduct in the faintest degree wrong, or indeed anything but the
highest and best for humanity, she could never conceivably have allowed
even that loving heart of hers to hurry her into it. For Herminia’s
devotion to principle was not less but far greater than Miss
Smith-Waters’s own; only, as it happened, the principles themselves
were diametrically opposite.
Herminia wrote her note with not a few tears for poor Miss
Smith-Waters’s disappointment. That is the worst of living a life
morally ahead of your contemporaries; what you do with profoundest
conviction of its eternal rightness cannot fail to arouse hostile and
painful feelings even in the souls of the most right-minded of your
friends who still live in bondage to the conventional lies and the
conventional injustices. It is the good, indeed, who are most against
you. Still, Herminia steeled her heart to tell the simple truth—how,
for the right’s sake and humanity’s she had made up her mind to eschew
the accursed thing, and to strike one bold blow for the freedom and
unfettered individuality of women. She knew in what obloquy her action
would involve her, she said; but she knew too, that to do right for
right’s sake was a duty imposed by nature upon every one of us; and
that the clearer we could see ahead, and the farther in front we could
look, the more profoundly did that duty shine forth for us. For her own
part, she had never shrunk from doing what she knew to be right for
mankind in the end, though she felt sure it must lead her to personal
misery. Yet unless one woman were prepared to lead the way, no freedom
was possible. She had found a man with whom she could spend her life in
sympathy and united usefulness; and with him she had elected to spend
it in the way pointed out to us by nature. Acting on his advice, though
somewhat against her own judgment, she meant to leave England for the
present, only returning again when she could return with the dear life
they had both been instrumental in bringing into the world, and to
which henceforth her main attention must be directed. She signed it,
“Your ever-grateful and devoted HERMINIA.”
Poor Miss Smith-Waters laid down that astonishing, that incredible
letter in a perfect whirl of amazement and stupefaction. She didn’t
know what to make of it. It seemed to run counter to all her
preconceived ideas of moral action. That a young girl should venture to
think for herself at all about right and wrong was passing strange;
that she should arrive at original notions upon those abstruse
subjects, which were not the notions of constituted authority and of
the universal slave-drivers and obscurantists generally—notions full of
luminousness upon the real relations and duties of our race—was to
poor, cramped Miss Smith-Waters well-nigh inconceivable. That a young
girl should prefer freedom to slavery; should deem it more moral to
retain her divinely-conferred individuality in spite of the world than
to yield it up to a man for life in return for the price of her board
and lodging; should refuse to sell her own body for a comfortable home
and the shelter of a name—these things seemed to Miss Smith-Waters,
with her smaller-catechism standards of right and wrong, scarcely short
of sheer madness. Yet Herminia had so endeared herself to the old
lady’s soul that on receipt of her letter Miss Smith-Waters went
upstairs to her own room with a neuralgic headache, and never again in
her life referred to her late second mistress in any other terms than
as “my poor dear sweet misguided Herminia.”
But when it became known next morning in Bower Lane that the
queenly-looking school-mistress who used to go round among “our girls”
with tickets for concerts and lectures and that, had disappeared
suddenly with the nice-looking young man who used to come a-courting
her on Sundays and evenings, the amazement and surprise of respectable
Bower Lane was simply unbounded. “Who would have thought,” the
red-faced matrons of the cottages remarked, over their quart of bitter,
“the poor thing had it in her! But there, it’s these demure ones as is
always the slyest!” For Bower Lane could only judge that austere soul
by its own vulgar standard (as did also Belgravia). Most low minds,
indeed, imagine absolute hypocrisy must be involved in any striving
after goodness and abstract right-doing on the part of any who happen
to disbelieve in their own blood-thirsty deities, or their own vile
woman-degrading and prostituting morality. In the topsy-turvy
philosophy of Bower Lane and of Belgravia, what is usual is right;
while any conscious striving to be better and nobler than the mass
around one is regarded at once as either insane or criminal.