Over the shop door, on to the street, gold letters on a black ground
said: LYDIA PROTHEROE, Theatrical Costumier and Wig-maker. Lydia was not
the name by which the proprietress of the shop had been baptized,
neither was Protheroe the name of her parents; her husband’s name it
could not be for she had never had a husband. What her real name was she
had long since preferred to forget, and it was not difficult to do so,
for as Lydia Protheroe she had made her fame, and in the town where she
had come as a stranger there was no one to know her as anything else.
The fame and the business she had built up together, amorously,
jealously. It had taken her forty years. Somewhere back in the eighties
she saw herself, young, determined, deaf to the outcry of her family; a
young woman in a bombazine gown, with smooth bands of hair like
Christina Rossetti, and arms folded, each hand clasping the opposite
elbow; she saw herself thus, standing up, surveying the circle of her
relations as they expostulated around her. They were outraged, they were
aggrieved; they were respectable people who naturally disapproved of the
stage; and here was Lydia—only to them she had not been Lydia, but
Alice—announcing her intention of setting up a business which would
engage her inevitably in theatrical circles. That a young woman should
think of setting up business on her own account was bad enough, but such
a business was an affront beyond discussion. She would bring shame upon
them (here the personality of Lydia Protheroe first brilliantly
germinated in Alice’s mind). They threw up their hands. Alice, who might
enjoy all the advantages of a gentlewoman; Alice, who might reasonably
have looked for a husband, a home, a family, of her own; Alice, who up
to the age of twenty-one had given them scarcely any anxiety, who had
been so very genteel, all things considered—in spite of a certain
element of Puckishness in her which had peeped out so very rarely, a
certain disrespect of their ideals—a mere trifle, a mere indication, had
they but had the wit to read, of what was brewing beneath.
And what did she reply to their remonstrance? In what phrase, maddening
because irrefutable, did she finally take refuge? That she was of age.
It was true. She was twenty-one, and she had a thousand pounds left her
by her grandfather. She could snap her fingers at them all if she chose.
She did not literally snap her fingers; she was gentle and regretful,
she said she did not wish to cut herself adrift from her family, and saw
no reason why they should cut themselves adrift from her. She would not
bring their name into disrepute. She would trade under another name; she
would cease to be Alice Jennings, she would become Lydia Protheroe.
Secretly she was elated to escape from a name of whose homeliness she
had always been ashamed, but this she was careful not to betray to her
family; to her family she made the announcement with an air of
sacrifice. Since they were humiliated by her, and by the trade she had
chosen, she would go away; she would conceal her identity in a distant
town. No; she shook her smooth head in answer to their protestations;
what she had declared she would carry out; they should never say they
had cause to blush whenever they opened a theatre programme. “Wigs by
Jennings.” That should not offend their eyes. “Wigs by Protheroe,” and
they could sit snugly in their stalls, being Jennings, looking Jennings;
connected with the stage in any way? oh dear, no! Let them only think
kindly of her in her lonely and distant—yes, distant—struggles. No doubt
Miss Protheroe would find it hard at first, unfriended and unsupported;
but armed with her thousand pounds she would survive the first reverses;
and adversity was good for the character. Indeed, as she talked, always
gentle and regretful, but perfectly obdurate, she felt her character
stiffening under the test of this first adversity. The Presbyterian that
was in her, as it was in all her relatives, welcomed in its austere and
cheerless fashion this trial that made a demand upon her endurance. She
enjoyed the self-satisfaction of the martyr. And yet, secretly, all the
while, a little voice gibed at her “Hypocrite!” She knew her hypocrisy
because, in spite of her affectation of martyrdom, she was rejoicing in
her new isolation. She knew that she would embark on her adventure with
a greater gusto since she was not to embark on it with the approval of
her family. It was all very well for her to appeal to their sympathy
with poor Miss Protheroe, unfriended and unsupported; the phrase sounded
well, but the truth was that she wanted neither their friendship nor
their support. “I want to get away from all this,” she cried suddenly
and despairingly. She wanted independence; she wanted the fight. She
would have been defrauded of both, by the lap of a comfortable
middle-class family spread out behind her to receive her if she fell.
Backed up by her family, she would have felt herself backed up by the
whole of the English middle-class, cushioned, solid in the consciousness
of its homogeneity and resources, an enormous family of Jennings,
swarming in every town and with its place of assembly in every
town-hall, inimical to the exotic, mistrustful of the new, tenacious of
the conventions that were as cement to its masonry; a class sagacious
and shrewd, nicely knowing safety from danger, and knowing, above all,
its own mind, since nothing was ever admitted to that mind to which it
could not immediately affix a label. This was the class to whose
protection Alice Jennings had the birthright now rejected by Lydia
Protheroe. She marvelled how she could have endured it for so many
years. She made a gesture as she finally rejected it; the hands that had
been clasping the elbows were unloosed, and the right hand tossed up in
a gesture definitely histrionic, as one who tosses a feather to the
wind. Her family had almost groaned when they saw it, for they
recognized it as a defiance, a symbol and an enemy. She stood there, in
their midst, a slim revolutionary, not visibly tremulous, and although
her hair still lay in those sleek bands plastered down on her forehead,
they felt that the moment was near at hand when they would cease to be
sleek and would become rumpled; even curly; even puffed out; and that
the snuff-coloured bombazine of her gown would become metamorphosed into
some gaudy intolerable fustian. They looked at her as though they were
looking their last. They uttered a preliminary caution; she smiled.
Seeing her smile, they ceased the expostulations which had been wrung
from them in their first dismay; they gathered themselves up in dignity
and sorrow; they said that since nothing would turn her from this
reckless, this unbecoming, this ... in short, this idea, and that since
she was of age, as she had not scrupled to remind them, she must, they
supposed, be allowed to follow her own course. But let her not expect to
return to them when the consequences of her folly were heavy upon her.
Let her not (it was her father who enunciated this figure of speech,
shaking his finger solemnly at her), let her not hope to exchange for
the glare of the lamplight the oil-lamp of the warm parlour of home.
Once an outcast she should remain an outcast for ever. She had a sudden
attack of panic as these impressive words boomed upon her ears. She saw
herself alone in a deserted theatre, the holland covers over the stalls,
the lights turned out, and the great pit of the stage yawning at her in
front of the gaunt skeleton of the scenery; and simultaneously she saw
the circle of her family—who were, after all, familiar, even if not
particularly enlivening—seated at their snug evening tasks in the glow
of that oil-lamp of which her father had reminded her. She came near to
weakening; she knew that if she held out her hands to them, even now,
they would receive her again into their bosom—but how they would cackle
over her! they would pat her kindly; they would talk of her having come
to her senses, of being once more their little Alice; and this her pride
would not endure. She discovered that she could tolerate patronage even
less than security; and for the rest of her days, if she capitulated
now, she would be at the mercy of her family. She would be among them on
sufferance. Sooner any loneliness, any quandary, sooner even starvation,
than shelter on such terms. Inclining her head, she accepted her
ostracism without a protest. As soon as she had accepted it—as soon,
that is, as the worst had been definitely spoken and she had definitely
survived it—she felt the sense of her liberty flooding over her. Her
very name dropped from her like a piece of old skin. She became that
unique being, the person who has no relations. Alice Jennings had had
relations, Lydia Protheroe had none, Lydia Protheroe had never even had
a mother. Independence could scarcely go further. She swept one last
slow look around their circle, and passed out of the room.