Nothing in No. 9 Redcliffe Square ever got done; it happened, as leaves
drop in autumn, or as dust accumulates, percolating softly and
persistently through doors and windows.
The Warings had reached Redcliffe Square as accidentally as a tramp
takes shelter under a hedge. Professor Waring, whose instinct was to
burrow like a mole, blind and silent, into his researches, failed too
completely to teach what he had discovered; and as he had never made the
discovery that teaching was what he was paid for, his payments gradually
ceased. When he found himself faced with an increasing family and a
decreasing income, he thought of the South Kensington Museum. He thought
of it as an habitual drunkard evicted for not paying his rent, thinks of
the public house.
He brought his family as near to it as he could, dumped them down in a
silent and slatternly street, and disappeared into the museum regularly
every morning at nine. When he came out he wanted only cocoa, a back
room, and the postage necessary for his researches. A Peruvian mummy
went to his head like gin.
Mrs. Waring had been a gentle, dreamy girl with a strong religious
tendency. She had married Professor Waring because he had wide blue eyes
and a stoop and did not look at all coarse.
Professor Waring had married her because he wanted to get married a
little and had noticed her at that time. He was under the impression
that women managed households, meals, and children without bothering
their husbands. Mrs. Waring tried not to bother her husband. She lost
her religion because the professor hadn't any, and she thought at first
he was sure to be right. When she ceased to have this magic certainty,
she sought out fresh religions that told you you had everything you
wanted when you knew you hadn't.
She got through maternity in a desultory way, with a great deal of ill
health and enormous household bills. She did not manage anything, and
when she was very unhappy she said that she was in tune with the
infinite.
From their earliest years her children fended for themselves, Eurydice
with storms of anguish and through a drastic series of childish
epidemics; Cicely with a stolid, cold efficiency; and Stella with an
intuitive gentleness so great as to hide a certain inner force.
About two hundred pounds a year trickled in on them from uncertain
sources. Mrs. Waring never knew quite when to expect it, and when it
came it soaked itself solemnly up on non-essentials. The children never
had proper clothes or a suitable education. They were Egyptologists
before they could spell, and the Koran was an open book to them when
they should have been reading "The Water Babies."
The professor spent what he considered his share of their income upon
hieroglyphics, and Mrs. Waring, never personally extravagant, bought
quantities of little books to teach people how to live, how to develop
the will, how to create a memory, and power through repose. They had one
servant, who had to have wages and insisted every now and then upon a
joint of meat.
There was no waste-paper basket in the house, and a great deal of
linoleum. When Mrs. Waring made up her mind that she must be more
economical, she always went out and bought linoleum. She had been told
it was a great saving. She never tidied anything up or put anything
away. What was lost was never seen again, or seen only when you were
hunting for something else. It was like a gambler's system at Monte
Carlo: you looked for a bootjack, and were rewarded by black treacle; or
you played, as it were, for black treacle, and discovered the bootjack.
Mrs. Waring never finished anything; even her conversations, which began
at breakfast, jogged on throughout the day, and were picked up at much
the same spot in the evening. She had covered a quantity of ground, but
she had invariably escaped her destination. Through long years of
perpetual indecision she had nearly succeeded in outwitting time and
space.
Nobody minded this attitude except Cicely. She fought against chaos from
her youth up. They all dreaded her tongue and clung persistently to
their habits. The professor fled earlier to the museum, sometimes in
carpet slippers. Immediately after breakfast Mrs. Waring retired with a
little book to an untidied bedroom.
Eurydice, dropping manuscripts, hair-ribbons, and defiance, escaped to a
locked attic; and Stella remained as a gentle adjutant to her severer
sister. Cicely did get a few things done. She saw that meals were
cooked, windows opened, beds made, and clocks wound; but nothing
continuous rewarded her efforts. The power of the human will is a small
weapon against consolidated inertia.
For five years Cicely played upon No. 9 Redcliffe Square like an
intermittent searchlight; then she gave it up, and became a student in a
women's hospital. The household breathed a sigh of intense relief at her
departure, and collapsed benevolently into chaos.
Nobody except Stella regretted it. The professor was openly thankful.
"She may become a student," he observed coldly when it was explained to
him where Cicely had gone, "but she will never become a scholar. She
has a superficial hunger for the definite.
"I really do not think it will be necessary for me to take my supper at
a given hour. Stella will know that, whenever I ring my bell, I mean
cocoa."
"Dear Cicely is a pioneer," murmured Mrs. Waring, with a gentle sigh. "I
can always imagine her doing wonderful things in a desert with a
buffalo."
"Now I shall be able to have my friends at the house without their being
insulted," cried Eurydice, triumphantly. "Last time when Mr. Bolt was in
the middle of reading his new poem, 'The Whirl,' a most delicate and
difficult poem set to a secret rhythm, Cicely burst in and asked for the
slop-pail. It looked so lovely! I had covered it with autumn leaves and
placed it half-way up the chimney. It might have been a Grecian urn, but
of course she dragged it out. She drags out everything."
Eurydice had a profession, too. She was a suppressed artist. She felt
that she could have painted like Van Gogh, only perfectly individually.
She saw everything in terms of color and in the shape of cubes. Railway
lines reminded her of a flight of asterisks. Flowers subdivided
themselves before her like a tartan plaid. She saw human beings in
tenuous and disjointed outlines suggestive of a daddy-long-legs. She
could not afford paint and canvas, so she had to leave people to think
that the world looked much as usual.
Eurydice had always felt that she could write out her thoughts as soon
as she and Stella were alone and able to arrange her room in black and
scarlet. When Cicely left, Stella bought black paper and pasted it over
the walls, and dyed a white-wool mat, which had long lost its original
purity, a sinister scarlet.
Eurydice did not want very much, either. None of the Warings wanted very
much. What as a family they failed to understand was, that not having
the money to pay for what they wanted, some more personal contribution
of time and effort was necessary in order to attain it.
Stella grasped this fact when she was about eighteen. She said afterward
that she never would have thought of it if it had not been made plain to
her by Cicely. Still, before Cicely had gone to the hospital Stella was
taking cheap lessons in the City in shorthand and type-writing. None of
the three girls had what is called any "youth." They were as ignorant of
young men as if they had been brought up in a convent. Neither Professor
nor Mrs. Waring had ever supposed that parents ought to provide
occupations or social resources for their children, and the children
themselves had been too busy contributing to the family welfare to
manage any other life. Cicely had read statistics and mastered
physiological facts at fifteen. She was under the impression that she
knew everything and disliked everything except work. Her feeling for men
was singularly like that of a medieval and devout monk toward women. She
had an uncomfortable knowledge of them as a necessary evil, to be evaded
only by truculence or flight. When her work forced her into dealings
with them, she was ferocious and unattractive. She was a pretty girl,
but nobody had ever dared to mention it to her.
Even Stella, who in an unaggressive, flitting way dared most questions,
had avoided telling Cicely that she herself liked men. Stella often
felt that if she could meet a man who was capable of doing all kinds of
dull things for you, very charmingly, and had a pretty wit, it would add
quite enormously to the gaiety of life to put yourself out a little in
order to make him laugh.
The men Stella worked with wouldn't have done at all. They wouldn't have
cared for the kind of jokes Stella wanted to make, and of course Stella
hadn't time to meet any other men. Perhaps she wouldn't have believed
there were any if it hadn't been for Marian. Marian knew them; she knew
them literally in dozens, and they were generally in love with her, and
they always wanted to make her laugh and to do dull things for her.
Stella used to be afraid sometimes that Marian, in an embarrassment of
riches, might overlook her destiny. But Marian knew what she wanted and
was perfectly certain that she would sooner or later get it. Stella had
no such knowledge; she had long ago come to the conclusion that the
simplest way of dealing with her life was to like what she had.
She took a scientific secretaryship at nineteen, and left it only at
twenty-six, when her scientist, who was very stout and nearly sixty,
died inconveniently from curried lobster. He left Stella an interesting
experience, of which she could make no immediate use, and a testimonial
which won her job at the town hall. It was very short. "This young
woman," the learned scientist wrote, "is invaluable. She thinks without
knowing it. I have benefited by this blessed process for seven years."
It did not seem to Stella that she was invaluable. She always saw
herself in the light of the family failure, overlooking the fact that
she was their main financial support.
Cicely was the practical and Eurydice the intellectual genius; but she
was content if she could be the padding on which these jewels
occasionally shone.
Sometimes she met Cicely in a tea-shop and had a real talk, but Eurydice
was her chief companion. Eurydice shared with Stella nearly every
thought that she had. She seized her on the stairs to retail her
inspirations as Stella went up to take her things off. She sat on her
bed late at night, and talked with interminable bitterness about the
sharpness of life. Even while Stella buttoned up her boots and flung
things at the last moment into her despatch-case, Eurydice pelted her
with epigrams. She sometimes quoted Swinburne while Stella was jumping
on the corner bus, till the bus-conductor told her not to let him catch
her at it again. There was only one subject they did not discuss:
neither of them voluntarily mentioned Mr. Bolt. Mr. Bolt was the editor
of a magazine called "Shocks," to which Eurydice with trembling delight
contributed weekly. Mr. Bolt had met her at a meeting of protest against
Reticence, and he had taken to Eurydice at once; and almost at once he
told her that her charm was purely intellectual. Emotionally he was
appealed to only by fair, calm women with ample figures.
Mr. Bolt knew plenty of fair, calm women with ample figures. Eurydice
only knew Mr. Bolt. She made an idol of him, and he used her like a
door-mat. No early-Victorian woman ever bore from a male tyrant what
poor, passionate twentieth-century Eurydice bore from Mr. Bolt, and
Stella could not help her. Stella abhorred Mr. Bolt. She would not
listen to his Delphic oracle utterances upon style and art and life. She
was outraged at his comments upon sex. She was desperately, fiercely
angry with a secret maternal anger that Eurydice should have to listen
to these utterances. It carried her as far as an abortive appeal to her
mother.
"My dear," said Mrs. Waring, placidly, "these things are outworn. They
are stultified thought products; they do not really exist. Sex is like
dust upon the house-tops; a cleansing process will shortly remove it.
Mr. Bolt is a misconception, a floating microcosm. I really should not
bother about Mr. Bolt. He is not nearly so tangible as the butcher, and
I have made up my mind never really again to bother about the butcher.
Perhaps you will see him for me if he calls about his bill to-morrow.
"It seems so strange to me that business men should not understand that
when there is no money bills cannot be paid. Even the minor regions of
fact seem closed to them."
Stella agreed to dip into the minor regions of fact with the butcher,
but she went on bothering about Mr. Bolt. It seemed to Stella that he
was the only real bother that she had.