Human lack of power in moderating and checking the emotions I
call servitude. For a man who is submissive to his emotions is
not in power over himself, but in the hands of fortune to such an
extent that he is often constrained, although he may see what is
better for him, to follow what is worse.--SPINOZA'S _Ethics_.
CATHLEEN lived in Bloomsbury with a friend of hers, a Miss Cleethorpe,
who managed a hostel for young women, clerks, schoolmistresses, shop
girls. René took her there after their long conversation in Kensington
Gardens, and then, feeling the impossibility of going back to Mitcham
Mews, went up to Kentish Town to see his friend the sandy-haired
railway porter. He had visited him once before, about a year ago, and
could think of no one else with whom he might take refuge. The little
man was delighted to see him:
"It's the sleeper!" he cried. "Lord! I've often wondered if you'd go
off again, and when you told me you were in the taxi-driving, I said
to myself: 'Well, that'll keep him awake.'"
Yes. He would be glad to let him have a bed. Wanting to sleep, eh? He
often felt like that himself: day after day, day after day, working,
and the suburban traffic growing so fast that they couldn't put on
enough trains, and the station morning and evening was like Bedlam.
"London," he said, "is not what it was when I first came to it. I used
to know all the regular gentlemen. But now--well, I tell you, they
don't have a nod for anyone. A bee-line for the city in the morning,
and a bee-line for home in the evening. It makes you feel small, it
does."
René sympathized with him. His days also had been devoted to
impersonal service, and he had known the humiliation of it.
Now his only desire was to see Cathleen again. To taste once more the
vigor and keen energy with which her presence filled him. The thought
of her was not enough. It roused a flood of emotion too strong for his
unpracticed control. He warmed to the idea of her beauty. When he was
with her her beauty was axiomatic, food for rejoicing without
disturbance, a mere accident, one to be thankful for, yet no more than
a light bidding to the thrilling pursuit of her elusiveness.
He had arranged to see her the next day in the evening. She worked as
secretary in an Art School and was not free until after five. He spent
the day in happy brooding over the coming delight of seeing her, and
preparing with boyish dandyism for it. He had his hair cut and his
chin shaved (he had grown a mustache), and he bought a clean shirt and
collar. In a book shop he saw the anthology from which they had read
together and could not resist going in and buying it. He was ashamed
of himself when he had done that, and hid it away among the railway
porter's rather strange collection of books--More's _Utopia_, _The
Master Christian_, _Marcus Aurelius_, some books of Edward
Carpenter's, _Foxe's Book of Martyrs_, and _Arsène Lupin_.
Cathleen received him in her little bed-sitting-room at the top of the
big grim house, which smelled of food, ink, and washing. She had made
her den very pretty, and he recognized a picture he had given her long
ago, and one or two trinkets that her mother had had in her boudoir in
Scotland. The walls were of plain brown paper, and there were
gay-colored stuffs by the windows and on the sofa.
She took in his spruceness at a glance, was pleased by it, and
laughed.
"I must give you a buttonhole," she said, "as I used to do. You look
so wonderfully the same."
René trembled as she came to him and pinned a flower in his coat.
"Sit down," she said. "I think we can talk better here."
René sat awkwardly on the sofa, she by the fire, which she stirred
with the poker.
"Well," she said, "I feel rather a beast. I couldn't help flirting
with you a little yesterday. That's got to stop."
"Were you--flirting?"
"I was."
"I thought you were glad to see me--as glad as I was to see you."
"I was glad. I'd been having a foolishly miserable time. Living in
this house is rather terrible with nothing but women, unmarried women.
You don't know. They come here young, many of them from the country.
Then they go out to work in the day and come in in the evening. They
haven't enough money to pay for amusements. They're too respectable to
look for fun in the streets. They hardly dare have a man-friend, the
others are so jealous, so rigid, so uncomprehending."
René said:
"I had a feeling that my presence here was an offense."
Cathleen laughed:
"That's why I asked you. I thought it would do them good to see you.
It did me so much good. I think I was getting infected by it. Lotta,
my friend, escapes into the country now and then. She has a cottage. I
go too sometimes, but her consolations are not mine. She has a garden
and makes jams and fruit-wines. I want something more than that. I
don't want to console myself until I have to. If I were going to do
that I might just as well have stayed with my mother. On the other
hand, I don't want to flirt with you, my friend. It wouldn't be fair
to you."
"What do you want, then?"
"I want to be able to assume that we love each other. We can be frank
then. It sounds uncomfortably intellectual, I know, but that will be
less disastrous than being uncomfortably emotional. You used to think
about these things. You made me think. You haven't stopped?"
"No. No. But I have such a longing for simplicity. I don't know why
there is all this fuss made about love."
"Because people will exploit the first excitement of it. Blake said:
He who catches a joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sunrise."
"I don't know about that," said René. "All I know is that I don't want
to let you go."
"But you may have to. We had a wonderful thing yesterday. We may not
be able to rise to it again."
"I don't care about that. I want _you_."
"Only because we had that moment yesterday."
"I don't know why it is."
"But I know and I care, and I want to keep the memory of it. I don't
mind it's being darkened by circumstances, if it must be, but I do
mind it's being spoiled by our own weakness. Men are always girding at
women for caring about nothing but love. They may gird fairly when we
are untrue to love and let men belittle it with their impatience and
arrogance. I ought not to say that to you, because you have tried, and
I have done nothing but argue with myself."
"I think you have found something which I have not even begun to see."
"And argued about it."
"I don't see what else you could do."
Cathleen thrust silently at the fire and said savagely:
"Oh! don't you? I thought I was going to be so free with my two
hundred pounds. Free, to do what? Walk in suffrage processions, break
windows, insult policemen. I was free to do what I liked, but I liked
nothing very much. I was too fastidious and could not take what came.
Things did come. They lacked this or that necessary for my
satisfaction. When my money was gone I had to creep into shelter away
from the freedom I did not know how to use, and ask for work to keep
myself alive, just like the girls and women in this house, who keep
themselves alive for nothing, so far as I can see, except the pleasure
of being tired and bored and malicious. I was in a bad way, René, when
I met you. I used to go to Rachel, who is the only one of the family
who will have anything to do with me, and sometimes I envied her in
her stupid, unhappy comfort. She doesn't get on with her husband, but
she has a nice house and two children who alternately infuriate and
amuse her. That was impossible for me. I'd hate it, just living with a
man to keep a household together. But then even now I've hated the
alternative I had arrived at, this being huddled away with a lot of
useless women. Working women! A genteel occupation to support a
genteel existence. The selfishness of it! People like to pretend that
motherhood solves everything for a woman. It may give occupation to a
dependent woman, but why should it destroy her selfishness any more
than another physical fact? If she insists on it too much, it cannot
do anything but accentuate her selfishness. Women can be just as
greedy about motherhood as about eating or drinking or love, and they
can just as easily spoil it with overindulgence. Don't look so
unhappy, René. I'm not arguing with you. I've had to think so much,
and for months I haven't had a soul to talk to like this. Even Lotta
has her world so shaped and trim (she's efficient, you see) that all
my doubts and wonderings are just an annoyance to her, though no one
could be kinder. I don't know what I should have done without her. It
was such a comfort to find a woman working really well, without
insisting that hers is the only way of living, and doing good without
wanting to be thankful for it. She made me patient. When you have
decided what you do not wish to do, you are apt to think anything
different must be better. You're not sorry you made the ordinary
career impossible for yourself?"
"Sorry?" said René, puzzled. "It was never a thing to be sorry about
or glad about. It just happened and I felt better. And now I have met
you and everything is changed again. I didn't go to my home last
night."
"No?"
"I went to an old friend of mine who lives happily and contentedly. I
wanted to see happiness and contentment. Somehow you had made me sure
of myself, and I felt that everything was changed. But the change was
in myself. In nearly everybody I have been more conscious of the
things they lack than of the things they have. I had been bolstering
myself up with contempt--for myself as well as everything else. It was
that or being sorry for myself. Always a struggle. I can't see it
clearly yet: like righting without weapons and without a cause. I had
no desire to live irregularly and uncomfortably or to come in conflict
with accepted opinion as to conduct. But I don't see why opinion
should be antagonistic to a man's private affairs. I wasn't
antagonistic. I was only doing confusedly what I felt very clearly and
had always felt to be right. I feel certain now that I ought to have
done so long before. I'd like to explain that to all sorts of people,
except that honestly I can't take much interest in it. I had a vague
sickening feeling that the end of the world had come, but that was
only because I could not see an inch before me. The end of the world
did not come, neither for me nor for--her. It seems stupid to be
explaining all this to you. I know you will not think I am excusing
myself, because I am sure you accept me as I am----"
"Theoretically," said Cathleen, looking up at him with a quick smile.
"You see, I have lived on theory, not my own, either; Lotta's. And I
don't know whether my theory can hold out against your practice, any
more than my sentimental girlish fictions could. You upset them, you
know, and you are just as disconcerting as ever. Shall you go on with
your work?"
"I can't think of anything else I should like so well."
"And that girl?"
"That's what we have both been thinking about all the time."
"Yes."
Cathleen rose and walked over to the window and looked out. She stood
then for so long that René followed her and laid his hand on her
shoulder. The window gave on to a row of back gardens with a few
trees, black and bare. Opposite was a lighted window through which
could be seen four girls sewing--stitch, stitch, stitch.
"I have often watched them," said Cathleen, "and wondered what might
be in their lives. Desire? Religion? Love? What is it makes it
possible for them to work so mechanically and so happily."
"Fun," said René. "They want fun, spiced with the risk of having to
pay for it."
"Is she like that?"
"She was. But there is something more."
"There would be," said Cathleen. "She couldn't love you without being
moved out of herself and the habits of her class. That is why I am
sorry for her. Are you going back to her?"
"Not yet."
"I think you ought to write to her."
"I was waiting until I had seen you again, and made quite sure----
"And you are sure now?"
"I feel now that we shall always be together, gazing out on the
world."
"And finding it so wonderful."
They were silent then, and in each for other was the same song of life
and love, a music passing thought and understanding. So they remained
for a time that was no time, hardly conscious of their bodies whose
slight contact gave them strength for flight. Easily they ranged back
in spirit to their youth, and caught up its sweetness and melody.
They were broken in upon by Miss Cleethorpe, a pale, gray-haired lady
whose eyes smiled kindly amusement at their helplessness. Bringing
help to the helpless and forcing them to help themselves was the whole
practice of her life. Lovers, dogs, indigent young women, were the
material in which she worked.
She was presented to René, and gave him a grip of the hand that
startled him with its vigor. Turning to Cathleen, she said:
"The girls have sent up a deputation to me to say you have had a man
in your room for the last two hours, that it is against the rules, and
that it is not quite proper. Ten minutes they could have overlooked. I
said that Mr. Fourmy was a very old friend, and that I knew all about
it, but they insisted that I must come and chaperone you, and here I
am. Speaks well for my authority, doesn't it?"
René was so distressed at the thought of the young women contemning
Cathleen that he was almost speechless. He muttered that he must go.
"You mustn't go," said Lotta, "before I have thanked you for what you
have done for Cathleen. She came home last night looking perfectly
radiant--and look at her now." (She had turned up the lights.)
Cathleen was standing with her hands lightly clasped in front of her,
her head thrown back, her lips parted, and in her eyes a golden
tenderness. She smiled and shook her head slowly, and came to her
friend and kissed her. Lotta put her arms round her and hugged her.
"You two poor sillies," she said, "what a heavy burden you have
shouldered."
René grinned:
"I don't feel the weight of it," he said.
Lotta gazed full at him. He met her eyes, searching him.
"Are you going back to your stables?" she asked.
"I want two more days of this."
"Would you like to take it down to the country? There's a west wind
blowing over my hills, and winter is coming in."
Like children, René and Cathleen gazed at each other in surprised
delight.