smiling. She had watched the dancing with that half-ashamed sort of
amusement which some of us feel when we see others making fools of
themselves. And because she smiled, the priest came and sat beside her.
He considered himself a temporary shepherd in charge of this maritime
flock, and you could see in his eye the craving for souls to save. He
had hardly noticed the suffragette until her smile caught his eye, but
directly he did notice her he saw that she was not among the saved. He
therefore approached her with the smile he reserved for the wicked.
“Very amusing, is it not?” he said.
Now the suffragette liked to see the young busy with their youth, but
because she was a snake she could not bear to say so. Especially in
answer to “Very amusing, is it not?”
So she said, “Is it?” and immediately cursed herself for the inhuman
remark. Some people’s humanity takes this tardy form of hidden
self-reproach after expression, and then it strikes inward, like
measles.
“Well, that’s as it may be, yerce, yerce,” said the priest, who was so
tolerant that he had no opinions of his own, and had hardly ever been
guilty of contradiction. “That is your husband, is it not?” he added, as
the gardener extricated himself from the knot of fallen dancers.
The suffragette actually hesitated, and then she said, “Yes,” and
narrowly escaped adding, “More or less.”
“A most interesting young man,” said the priest, who, with the keen eye
of the saver of souls, had noticed the hesitation.
“Naturally he interests me,” said the suffragette.
“He is so original,” continued the priest. “Even his occupation strikes
one as original. A gardener on an ocean liner. The march of science,
yerce, yerce. Most quaint. I suppose you also are interested in Nature.
I always think the care of flowers is an eminently suitable occupation
for ladies.”
“Perhaps,” she admitted. “But I am not a lady. I am a militant
suffragette.”
The priest’s smile changed from the saintly to the roguish. “Have you
any bombs or hatchets concealed about you?” he asked.
“I wish I had,” she replied. I fully admit that her manners were not her
strong point. But the priest persisted. He noted the absence of any
answering roguishness, and recorded the fact that she had no sense of
humour. True to his plastic nature, however, he said, “Of course I am
only too well aware of the justice of many of women’s demands, yerce,
yerce. But you, my dear young lady, you are as yet on the threshold of
life; it is written plain upon your face that you have not yet come into
contact with the realities of life.”
“In that case it’s a misprint,” said the suffragette. “I am twenty-six.”
“Twenty-six,” repeated the priest. “I wonder why you are bitter—at
twenty-six?”
“Because I have taken some trouble not to be sweet,” she said. “Because
I was not born blind.”
As a matter of fact she had been born morally short-sighted. She had
never seen the distant delight of the world at all.
The priest did not believe in anything approaching metaphor. He
considered himself to be too manly. So he deflected the course of the
conversation. “And your husband. What are his views on the Great
Question?” (A slight relapse into roguishness on the last two words.)
“I have never asked him. I know he does not believe in concrete
arguments from women. Though he approves of them from men.” She fingered
a bruise on her arm.
“The arguments about women’s lack of physical force are the most
incontrovertible ones your cause has to contend with,” said the priest.
“Say what you will, physical force is the basis of life.”
“I think it is a confession of weakness.”
“There is something in what you say,” said the priest. He did not really
think there was, for he had taken no steps to investigate. He was busy
thinking that this was an odd wife who did not know her husband’s views
on a question that obsessed her own thoughts.
The gardener had by now extracted Courtesy from the tangle, and was
steering her towards a chair.
“Your husband appears to know that young lady with the auburn hair,”
said the priest. “He knew her before he came on board, did he not?”
“Apparently he did,” said the suffragette. “I didn’t.”
She was providing him with so many clues that he was fairly skimming
along on the track of his prey. When he left her he felt like a
collector who has found a promising specimen.
“Altogether on the wrong lines,” he told himself, and added, “Poor lost
lamb, how much she needs a helping hand”; not because he felt sorry for
her, but because word-pity was the chief part of his stock-in-trade.
Next morning the _Caribbeania_ had flung the winds and waves behind her,
and had settled down to a passionless career along a silver sea under a
silver sky,—like man, slipping out of the turmoil of youth into the
excellent anti-climax of middle life.
Similes apart, however, the _Caribbeania_ was now so steady that an
infant could have danced a jig upon her deck. Several infants tried.
Amusements rushed upon her passengers from every side. A week passed
like a wink. Hardly were you awake in the morning before you found
yourself pursuing an egg round your own ankles with a teaspoon. Sports
and rumours of sports followed you even unto your nightly bunk.
Everybody developed talents hitherto successfully concealed in napkins.
Courtesy found her life’s vocation in dropping potatoes into buckets.
She brought this homely pursuit to a very subtle art, and felt that she
had not lived in vain. Not that she ever suffered from morbid illusions
as to her value. The gardener brought to light a latent gift for sitting
astride upon a spar while other men tried with bolsters to remove him.
The suffragette, when nobody was looking, acquired proficiency in the
art of shuffling the board. When observed, she instinctively donned an
appearance of contempt. Mrs. Paul Rust settled herself immovably in a
chair and applauded solo at the moments when others were not applauding.
The priest, looking in an opposite direction, clapped when he heard
other hands being clapped, in order to show the kind interest he took in
mundane affairs.
While occupied thus, one day, he found himself next to Courtesy. That
determined lady had her back to a Whisky and Soda Race then in progress,
and looked aggrieved. She had been beaten in the first heat, whereas she
was convinced that victory had been her due. Courtesy suffered from all
the faults that you and I—poetic souls—cannot love. She was greedy. She
was fat. She could not even lose a race without suspecting the
timekeeper of corruption. All the same, there was something so entirely
healthy and human about her, that nobody had ever pointed out to her her
lack of poetry, and of the more subtle virtues.
The priest, who had also never been able to lose a game without losing
his temper too, sympathised with Courtesy, and employed laborious tact
in trying to lead her thoughts elsewhere.
“Trinity Islands are your destination, are they not, yerce, yerce?” he
said.
“Yes,” replied Courtesy. “And I wish this old tub would buck up and get
there.”
“You have reasons of your own for being very anxious to arrive?”
suggested the priest archly.
“Nothing special that I know of,” answered Courtesy. “I’m only an
ordinary globe-trotter.”
Frankly, she was being sent out to get married. But this, of course, was
among the things that are not said. Her father had become tired of
supporting a daughter as determined to study art in London as she was
incapable of succeeding at it. He had accepted for her a casual
invitation from a cousin for a season in the Trinity Islands. The
invitation was so very casual that Courtesy had appreciated the whole
scheme as a matrimonial straw clutched at by an over-daughtered parent.
But her feelings were not hurt. She had bluff, tough feelings.
“How curious that you should have found former friends on board!” said
the priest. “How small the world is, is it not?”
“Yes, isn’t it?” assented Courtesy, whose heart always warmed towards
familiar phrases. “And so odd, too, him being married within the week
like this.”
The priest pricked up his ears so sharply that you could almost hear
them click. “So quickly as that?” he encouraged her.
“Yes, when he left the private hotel where he and I were both staying
just over a fortnight ago, he was not even engaged. He says such quaint
things about it, too. He says he picked her up on the way to Paradise.”
The mention of Paradise confirmed the priest’s worst suspicions. But
“Yerce, yerce....” was his only reply to Courtesy.
Late that night the priest walked round and round the deck trying to
peer into the face of his god, professional duty. His conscience was as
short-sighted as some people’s eyes, and he was often known to pursue a
shadow under the impression that he was pursuing his duty.
“Of course I must warn the Captain,” he said. “And that bright young
lady who unconsciously gave me the news. And Mrs. Rust, who encourages
that misguided young man to talk. And Mrs. Cyrus Berry, who lets her
children play with him. As for the woman—I always think that women are
the most to blame in such cases.”
Although he was altogether narrow his limits were indefinite, except
under great provocation. He had not strength enough to draw the line
anywhere. “Wicked” was too big a word for him; and although he believed
that the gardener and the suffragette were in immediate danger of
hell-fire, he could only call them “misguided.” This applies to him only
in his capacity as a priest. In his own interests he was very much more
sensitive than he was in the interest of his God.
Sometimes I think that angels, grown old, turn into enemies to trap the
unwary. The angel of tolerance was the great saviour of history, but now
he saps the strength of every cause. Either I Am Right, or I May
Possibly Be Right. If I may only possibly be right, why should I dream
of burning at the stake for such a very illusory proposition? But if I
am right, then my enemy is Wrong, and is in danger of hell-fire. That is
my theory. My practice is to believe that belief is everything, and that
I may worship a Jove or a stone with advantage to my soul. Belief is
everything, and I believe. But if my enemy believes in nothing, then I
will condemn him. Why should I be tolerant of what I am convinced is
wrong?
The priest, in the dark, found some one clinging round his knees. A
woman—a little woman—wrapped so tightly in a cloak that she looked like
a mummy. Her face was grey, and her lips looked dark. Her hair lay dank
and low upon her brow, and yet seemed as if it should have been wildly
on end about her head. The whole of her looked horribly restrained—bound
with chains—and her eyes, which should have given the key to the
entreaty which she embodied, were tightly shut. For five seconds the
priest tried to run away. But she held him round the knees and cried,
“Save me, save me!”
Nobody had ever come to the priest with such a preposterous request
before.
“Let me go, my good woman,” he said, audibly keeping his head. “Be calm,
let me beg you to be calm.”
She let him go. But she was not calm.
It was very late, and the deck-chairs had been folded up and stacked. As
the woman would not rise to the priest’s level, he saw nothing for it
but to sink to hers. They sat upon the deck side by side. He felt that
it was not dignified, but there was nobody looking. And otherwise, he
began to feel in his element. Here was a soul literally shrieking to be
saved.
“What is it? Tell me. You have sinned?” he asked.
“Certainly not,” replied the woman in a hard thin voice. “I have never
deserved what I’ve got. It seems to me that it’s God who has sinned.”
“Hush, be calm,” the priest jerked out. “Be calm and tell me what has
upset you so much.”
The woman began to laugh. Her laughter was absurdly impossible, like
frozen fire. It lasted for some time, and the world seemed to wait on
tiptoe for it to stop. It was too much for the priest’s nerves, and for
his own sake he gripped her arm to make her stop. She was silent at
once. The grip had been what she needed.
“Now tell me,” said the priest.
She paused a little while, and seemed trying to swallow her hysteria.
When she spoke it was in a sane, though trembling voice. “I am not
Church of England, sir, but you being a man of God, so to speak, I
thought ... I am suffering—terribly. There’s something gnawing at my
breast ... I’ve prayed to God, sir; I’ve prayed until I’ve fainted with
the pain of kneeling upright. But he never took no notice. I think he’s
mistaken me for a damned soul ... before my time. Why, I could see God
smiling, I could, and the pain grew worse. I’ve been a good woman in my
time; I’ve done my duty. But God smiled to see me hurt. So I prayed to
the Devil—I’d never have believed it three months ago. I prayed for
hell-fire rather than this. The pain grew worse....”
“Have you seen the doctor?”
“Oh, yes. And he said the sea-voyage would do me good. He couldn’t do
nothing.”
“Poor soul!” said the priest, and found to his surprise that he was
inadequate to the occasion. “Poor soul, what can I say? It is, alas,
woman’s part to suffer in this world. Your reward is in heaven. You must
pin your faith still to the efficacy of prayer. You cannot have prayed
in the right spirit.”
“But what a God—what a God ...” shouted the woman with a wild cry. “To
hide himself in a maze—and me too distracted to find out the way. Why,
my tears ought to reach him, let alone my prayers. I’ve sacrificed so
much for him—and he gives me over to this....”
“This is terrible, yerce terrible,” said the priest. “My poor creature,
this is not the right spirit in which to meet adversity. Put yourself in
God’s hands, like a little child....”
The woman dragged herself suddenly a yard or two from him. “Oh, you
talker—you talker ...” she cried, and writhed upon the deck.
“Listen,” said the priest in a commanding voice. “Kneel with me now, and
pray to God. When we have prayed, I will take you to the doctor, and he
will give you something to make you sleep.”
“I won’t touch drugs,” said the woman. “And I don’t hold with that young
doctor in brass buttons. If I pray now with you, will you promise that I
shall be better in the morning?”
“Yes,” said the priest. It was spoken, not out of his faith, but because
that seemed the only way to put an end to the scene. And when he prayed,
in a musical clerical voice, he prayed not out of his heart, but out of
his sense of what was fitting.
The stars bent their wise eyes upon the wise sea and bore witness that
the priest’s prayer never reached heaven’s gate.
“Now you feel better, do you not?” he asked, when he had said all that
had occurred to him, and intoned a loud Amen, as if to give the prayer
an upward impetus.
“No,” sobbed the woman.
“Who are you? What is your name?”
“I am Elizabeth Hammer, Mrs. Rust’s maid,” she replied, and staggered in
a lost way into the darkness of the companion-way.
“To-morrow it will be better,” the priest called after her. And wished
that he could think so.
The world smiled next morning, when the sports began again. Elizabeth
Hammer was invisible, probably concealed in some lowly place suitable to
her position. The sea was silver, the sky blazed blue, the sun smiled
from its height, like a father beaming upon his irresponsible family.
Mrs. Paul Rust looked incredible in a pale dress, designed for
peculiarity rather than grace; pink roses sprigged it so sparsely as to
give the impression of birth-mark afflictions rather than decorations. I
am not sure whether the feather in her hat was more like an explosion or
a palm tree. The gardener rolled upon a deck-chair with three children
using him as a switch-back railway. Theresa was smiling from her top
curl down to her toes. Even the suffragette was talking about the
transmigration of souls to the fourth officer. Everything on the surface
was highly satisfactory, and, on board ship, nothing except the surface
matters a bit.
The priest had a leaky mind. He never poured out all that was in it, but
he could not help letting a certain proportion of its contents escape.
He paused in his daily walk of thirty times round the deck, and found a
seat beside Mrs. Paul Rust.
“Your maid seems to be in a shocking state of health,” he said.
“She suffers from indigestion,” replied Mrs. Rust. “Some fool of a
doctor has told her that she has cancer. She has quite lost her head
over it.”
“At any rate she appears to be in great pain,” said the priest, who
considered that indigestion was rather too unclothed a word for ordinary
use. “And pain is a terrible thing, is it not?”
“No,” said Mrs. Rust.
“You mean that you consider it salubrious for the soul?”
“No,” said Mrs. Rust.
“Then I wonder in what way you consider pain desirable?”
Mrs. Rust, who had meant nothing beyond contradiction, shut her eyes and
looked immovably subtle. The priest changed the subject. He had a real
gift for changing the subject.
“Have you made the acquaintance of that dark young man who acts as the
ship’s gardener?” he asked.
“An excellent young man,” said Mrs. Rust, immediately divining that the
priest did not approve of him.
“Yerce, yerce, no doubt an excellent young man,” agreed the priest
mechanically. “But I have reason to believe that his morals are not
satisfactory.”
“Good,” said Mrs. Rust.
“I do not think he is really married to that aggressive young woman he
calls his wife.”
“Good,” said Mrs. Rust. She did not approve of such irregularities any
more than the priest did, but she disapproved of disapprobation.
The priest, being constitutionally incapable of argument, and yet unable
to broaden his view, was left wordless. But an interruption mercifully
rescued him from the necessity of attempting a reply.
Elizabeth Hammer, Mrs. Rust’s maid, appeared at the companion door. Her
eyes were fixed hungrily upon the sea.
There was a race about to be run, and the starter stood ready to say the
word. But Elizabeth Hammer brushed past him and walked across the empty
strip of deck. She climbed the rail as though she were walking upstairs,
and dropped into the sea.
“Hammer,” barked Mrs. Rust hoarsely, as she heard the splash. That word
broke the spell. A woman shrieked, and Captain Walters shouted, “Man
Overboard.”
The suffragette was not a heroine. What she did was undignified and
unconscious. The heroine should remove her coat, hand her watch to a
friend, send her love to a few relations, and bound gracefully into the
water. The suffragette, fully clothed, tumbled upside down after
Elizabeth Hammer. No noble impulse prompted her to do it. She did not
know of her intention until she found herself in the water, and then she
thought, “What a fool!” She could not swim. The _Caribbeania_ looked as
distant as heaven, and as high. She felt as if she had been dead a long
time since she saw it last. She paddled with her feet and hands like a
dog, her mouth was full of water and of hair. She had never felt so
abased in her life, she seemed crushed like a wafer into the sinking
surface of the nether pit. For centuries she wrestled with the sea,
sometimes for years and years on end a wave tore at her breath. She
never thought of Elizabeth Hammer.
“This is absurd,” she thought, when eternity came to an end, and she had
time for consecutive thought. She felt sure her eyes were straining out
of their sockets, and tried to remember whether she had ever heard of
any one going blind through drowning. Then she cried, and remembered
that her head must be above water, if she could cry. She knew then that
there was some one on her side in the battle. The sea seemed to hold her
loosely now, instead of clutching her throat. She had a moment to
consider the matter from the _Caribbeania_’s point of view, and to
realise what a pathetic accident had occurred. It dawned upon her that
her own hand, wearing her mother’s wedding ring, was just in front of
her, holding the cord of a neat white life-buoy. “Caribbeania” painted
in black on the life-buoy seemed like a wide mad smile.
“This is absurd,” bubbled the suffragette. “I shall wake up in a minute
now. It’s the air makes one sleepy.” And then she thought of something
else for ages and ages, and could not find out what she was thinking of,
though she tried all the time.
On the promenade deck of the _Caribbeania_ the gardener stood dumb with
enormous astonishment. His soul was dumb, his limbs were numb, his
mental circulation was stopped. He had a sort of impression that the
Atlantic had been suddenly sprinkled with a shower of women, but he
could only think of one drop in the shower.
“How red her face was as she went under—and what a dear she is!”
The _Caribbeania_ had flung the two women behind her, and swept upon her
way, only for a second had the red face of the suffragette floated like
a cherry upon the water beside the black wall of the ship. The fourth
officer had flung a life-buoy. Theresa had fainted. There was a black
cork-like thing a thousand miles away which the fourth officer said was
the head of one of the women. The _Caribbeania_, checked in her scornful
attempt to proceed uncaring, was being brought round in a circle. A boat
was being lowered.
There was a long silence on the promenade deck.
Presently—“Is it—her?” asked Courtesy in a husky voice by the gardener’s
side.
“Of course,” answered the gardener.
Elizabeth Hammer had found the sleep she sought without recourse to
drugs.
Everybody watched the distant boat receive the thin small warrior out of
the grasp of the sea, and then sweep in wide circles on its search for
Elizabeth Hammer.
The dream ended. The boat drew alongside. The suffragette, who had to
some extent collected herself, made a characteristic attempt to step
unassisted from the boat. It failed. Everybody had come down to the main
deck to gratify their curiosity. The suffragette was carried on deck,
though she obviously supposed she was walking. She looked somehow out of
proportion to the elements with which she had battled.
“You poor lamb,” said Courtesy, looking very dry and motherly beside
her. “How do you feel? I’m coming to help you into bed.”
“I am perfectly well, thank you,” said the suffragette.
“Why did you jump overboard if you couldn’t swim?” asked the fourth
officer, who was young and believed that there are always reasons for
everything.
“It was a mistake,” said the suffragette testily, and was led below by
Courtesy and a stewardess.
Tongues were loosened. Everybody reascended to the upper deck to vent
their sympathy on Mrs. Paul Rust.
She had remained in her chair, because she felt that any other woman
would have retired below after witnessing the suicide of an
indispensable part of her travelling equipment. But she could not
control her complexion. Her face was blue-white like chalk, beneath her
incongruous hair. She would reply to no questions, and the priest, after
making several attempts to create for himself a speaking part in the
drama, was obliged to abandon his intention as far as she was concerned,
for lack of support. He turned to the gardener, whose stunned mind was
now regaining consciousness.
“I do indeed congratulate you on the rescue of your—your wife,” said the
priest. “Yerce, yerce. As for that other poor soul, I was afraid she
might make some attempt of the sort. She was suffering from some
internal complaint, and had lost control of herself. Of course she had
confided in me—yerce, yerce. I was so fortunate as to be able to say a
few words of comfort. Perhaps it was a merciful release. But I hope she
was prepared at the last. I hope that in that awful moment she thought
upon her sins.”
“I hope so too,” said the gardener. “It is good to die with a happy
memory in the heart.”
The general impression was that Elizabeth Hammer had made a mistake,
poor thing. She was the subject of much conversation but little
conjecture. The big problem of her little mind was not so much buried as
never unearthed. She had made a mistake, poor thing. That was her
epitaph.
The suffragette was of course a heroine. She was a heroine for the same
reason as Elizabeth Hammer was a poor thing—because nobody had analysed
her motives. It would have been heresy to suggest that the heroine’s
motive had been pure hysteria. She had done a very useless thing in a
very clumsy way, but because it had been dangerous she was promoted to
the rank of heroine.
“I have been a damn fool,” mourned the suffragette, writhing profanely
on her bunk.