It was a changed London to which Herminia returned. She was homeless,
penniless, friendless. Above all she was _déclassée_. The world that
had known her now knew her no more. Women who had smothered her with
their Judas kisses passed her by in their victorias with a stony stare.
Even men pretended to be looking the other way, or crossed the street
to avoid the necessity for recognising her. “So awkward to be mixed up
with such a scandal!” She hardly knew as yet herself how much her world
was changed indeed; for had she not come back to it, the mother of an
illegitimate daughter? But she began to suspect it the very first day
when she arrived at Charing Cross, clad in a plain black dress, with
her baby at her bosom.
Her first task was to find rooms; her next to find a livelihood. Even
the first involved no small relapse from the purity of her principles.
After long hours of vain hunting, she found at last she could only get
lodgings for herself and Alan’s child by telling a virtual lie, against
which her soul revolted. She was forced to describe herself as Mrs
Barton; she must allow her landlady to suppose she was really a widow.
Woe unto you, scribes and hypocrites! in all Christian London, _Miss_
Barton and her baby could never have found a “respectable” room in
which to lay their heads. So she yielded to the inevitable, and took
two tiny attics in a small street off the Edgware Road at a moderate
rental. To live alone in a cottage as of yore would have been
impossible now she had a baby of her own to tend, besides earning her
livelihood; she fell back regretfully on the lesser evil of lodgings.
To earn her livelihood was a hard task, though Herminia’s indomitable
energy rode down all obstacles. Teaching, of course, was now quite out
of the question; no English parent could entrust the education of his
daughters to the hands of a woman who has dared and suffered much, for
conscience’ sake, in the cause of freedom for herself and her sisters.
But even before Herminia went away to Perugia, she had acquired some
small journalistic connection; and now, in her hour of need, she found
not a few of the journalistic leaders by no means unwilling to
sympathise and fraternise with her. To be sure, they didn’t ask the
free woman to their homes, nor invite her to meet their own women: even
an enlightened journalist must draw a line somewhere in the matter of
society; but they understood and appreciated the sincerity of her
motives, and did what they could to find employment and salary for her.
Herminia was an honest and conscientious worker; she knew much about
many things; and nature had gifted her with the instinctive power of
writing clearly and unaffectedly the English language. So she got on
with editors. Who could resist, indeed, the pathetic charm of that
girlish figure, simply clad in unobtrusive black, and sanctified in
every feature of the shrinking face by the beauty of sorrow? Not the
men who stand at the head of the one English profession which more than
all others has escaped the leprous taint of that national moral blight
that calls itself “respectability.”
In a slow and tentative way, then, Herminia crept back into
unrecognised recognition. It was all she needed. Companionship she
liked; she hated society. That mart was odious to her where women
barter their bodies for a title, a carriage, a place at the head of
some rich man’s table. Bohemia sufficed her. Her terrible widowhood,
too, was rendered less terrible to her by the care of her little one.
Babbling lips, pattering feet, made heaven in her attic. Every good
woman is by nature a mother, and finds best in maternity her social and
moral salvation. She shall be saved in child-bearing. Herminia was far
removed indeed from that blatant and decadent sect of “advanced women”
who talk as though motherhood were a disgrace and a burden, instead of
being, as it is, the full realisation of woman’s faculties, the natural
outlet for woman’s wealth of emotion. She knew that to be a mother is
the best privilege of her sex, a privilege of which unholy man-made
institutions now conspire to deprive half the finest and noblest women
in our civilised communities. Widowed as she was, she still pitied the
unhappy beings doomed to the cramped life and dwarfed heart of the old
maid; pitied them as sincerely as she despised those unhealthy souls
who would make of celibacy, wedded or unwedded, a sort of anti-natural
religion for women. Alan’s death, however, had left Herminia’s ship
rudderless. Her mission had failed. That she acknowledged herself. She
lived now for Dolores. The child to whom she had given the noble
birthright of liberty was destined from her cradle to the apostolate of
women. Alone of her sex, she would start in life emancipated. While
others must say, “With a great sum obtained I this freedom,” Dolores
could answer with Paul, “But I was free born.” That was no mean
heritage.
Gradually Herminia got work to her mind; work enough to support her in
the modest way that sufficed her small wants for herself and her baby.
In London, given time enough, you can live down anything, perhaps even
the unspeakable sin of having struck a righteous blow in the interest
of women. And day by day, as months and years went on, Herminia felt
she was living down the disgrace of having obeyed an enlightened
conscience. She even found friends. Dear old Miss Smith-Waters used to
creep round by night, like Nicodemus—respectability would not have
allowed her to perform that Christian act in open daylight—and sit for
an hour or two with her dear misguided Herminia. Miss Smith-Waters
prayed nightly for Herminia’s “conversion,” yet not without an
uncomfortable suspicion, after all, that Herminia had very little
indeed to be “converted” from. Other people also got to know her by
degrees; an editor’s wife; a kind literary hostess; some socialistic
ladies who liked to be “advanced”; a friendly family or two of the
Bohemian literary or artistic pattern. Among them Herminia learned to
be as happy in time as she could ever again be, now she had lost her
Alan. She was Mrs Barton to them all; that lie she found it practically
impossible to fight against. Even the Bohemians refused to let their
children ask after Miss Barton’s baby.
So wrapt in vile falsehoods and conventions are we. So far have we
travelled from the pristine realities of truth and purity. We lie to
our children—in the interests of morality.
After a time, in the intervals between doing her journalistic work and
nursing Alan’s baby, Herminia found leisure to write a novel. It was
seriously meant, of course, but still it was a novel. That is every
woman’s native idea of literature. It reflects the relatively larger
part which the social life plays in the existence of women. If a man
tells you he wants to write a book, nine times out of ten he means a
treatise or argument on some subject that interests him. Even the men
who take in the end to writing novels have generally begun with other
aims and other aspirations, and have only fallen back upon the art of
fiction in the last resort as a means of livelihood. But when a woman
tells you she wants to write a book, nine times out of ten she means
she wants to write a novel. For that task nature has most often endowed
her richly. Her quicker intuitions, her keener interest in social life,
her deeper insight into the passing play of emotions and of motives,
enable her to paint well the complex interrelations of every-day
existence. So Herminia, like the rest, wrote her own pet novel.
By the time her baby was eighteen months old, she had finished it. It
was blankly pessimistic, of course. Blank pessimism is the one creed
possible for all save fools. To hold any other is to curl yourself up
selfishly in your own easy chair, and say to your soul, “O soul, eat
and drink; O soul, make merry. Carouse thy fill. Ignore the maimed
lives, the stricken heads and seared hearts, the reddened fangs and
ravening claws of nature all round thee.” Pessimism is sympathy.
Optimism is selfishness. The optimist folds his smug hands on his ample
knees, and murmurs contentedly, “The Lord has willed it;” “There must
always be rich and poor;” “Nature has, after all, her great law of
compensation.” The pessimist knows well self-deception like that is
either a fraud or a blind, and recognising the seething mass of misery
at his doors gives what he can—his pity, or, where possible, his faint
aid, in redressing the crying inequalities and injustices of man or
nature.
All honest art is therefore of necessity pessimistic. Herminia’s
romance was something more than that. It was the despairing heart-cry
of a soul in revolt. It embodied the experiences and beliefs and
sentiments of a martyred woman. It enclosed a lofty ethical purpose.
She wrote it with fiery energy, for her baby’s sake, on waste scraps of
paper, at stray moments snatched from endless other engagements. And as
soon as it was finished, she sent it in fear and trembling to a
publisher.
She had chosen her man well. He was a thinker himself, and he
sympathised with thinkers. Though doubtful as to the venture, he took
all the risk himself with that generosity one so often sees in the
best-abused of professions. In three or four weeks’ time _A Woman’s
World_ came out, and Herminia waited in breathless anxiety for the
verdict of the reviewers.
For nearly a month she waited in vain. Then, one Friday, as she was
returning by underground railway from the Strand to Edgware Road, with
Dolores in her arms, her eye fell as she passed upon the display-bill
of the _Spectator_. Sixpence was a great deal of money to Herminia; but
bang it went recklessly when she saw among the contents an article
headed, “A Very Advanced Woman’s Novel.” She felt sure it must be hers,
and she was not mistaken. Breathlessly she ran over that first estimate
of her work. It was with no little elation that she laid down the
number.
Not that the critique was by any means at all favourable. How could
Herminia expect it in such a quarter? But the _Spectator_ is at least
conspicuously fair, though it remains in other ways an interesting and
ivy-clad mediæval relic. “Let us begin by admitting,” said the
Spectatorial scribe, “that Miss Montague’s book” (she had published it
under a pseudonym) “is a work of genius. Much as we dislike its whole
tone, and still more its conclusions, the gleam of pure genius shines
forth undeniable on every page of it. Whoever takes it up must read on
against his will till he has finished the last line of this terrible
tragedy; a hateful fascination seems to hold and compel him. Its very
purity makes it dangerous. The book is mistaken; the book is poisonous;
the book is morbid; the book is calculated to do irremediable mischief;
but in spite of all that, the book is a book of undeniable and sadly
misplaced genius.”
If he had said no more, Herminia would have been amply satisfied. To be
called morbid by the _Spectator_ is a sufficient proof that you have
hit at least the right tack in morals. And to be accused of genius as
well was indeed a triumph. No wonder Herminia went home to her lonely
attic that night justifiably elated. She fancied after this her book
must make a hit. It might be blamed and reviled, but at any rate it was
now safe from the ignominy of oblivion.
Alas, how little she knew of the mysteries of the book-market! As
little as all the rest of us. Day after day, from that afternoon forth,
she watched in vain for succeeding notices. Not a single other paper in
England reviewed her. At the libraries, her romance was never so much
as asked for. And the reason for these phenomena is not far to seek by
those who know the ways of the British public. For her novel was
earnestly and sincerely written; it breathed a moral air, therefore it
was voted dull; therefore nobody cared for it. The _Spectator_ had
noticed it because of its manifest earnestness and sincerity; for
though the _Spectator_ is always on the side of the lie and the wrong,
it is earnest and sincere, and has a genuine sympathy for earnestness
and sincerity, even on the side of truth and righteousness. Nobody else
even looked at it. People said to themselves, “This book seems to be a
book with a teaching not thoroughly _banal_, like the
novels-with-a-purpose after which we flock; so we’ll give it a wide
berth.” And they shunned it accordingly.
That was the end of Herminia Barton’s literary aspirations. She had
given the people of her best, and the people rejected it. Now she gave
them of her most mediocre; the nearest to their own level of thought
and feeling to which her hand could reduce itself. And the people
accepted it. The rest of her life was hack-work; by that, she could at
least earn a living for Dolores. Her “Antigone, for the Use of Ladies’
Schools” still holds its own at Girton and Somerville.