temperature well into three figures. So for some time Mrs. Rust was not
allowed to see the patient.
By the time the gardener felt better, the earthquake, in the eyes of the
townspeople of Union, had become not so much of a horror as a disaster,
a thing possible to dilate upon and even to lie about. The homeless were
beginning to look upon homelessness as a state to be passed through
rather than the end of things, the bereaved were discovering little by
little that life may arise from ashes, and that sackcloth may be cut
quite becomingly. Those ghosts of dead hope who still searched among the
ruins were looked upon as “poor things” rather than companions in
sorrow. Young nigger ladies, dressed in pink and silver, flaunted their
teeth and their petticoats around the firemen who worked desultorily at
the little gaseous fires that broke out among the lamentable streets.
The one church that remained standing was constantly full. (The picture
palace had met the fate it perhaps deserved.) There is nothing in the
world so saved as a saved nigger. And nothing so lost as a lost nigger.
After an earthquake it always occurs to these light and child-like minds
that it is safer to be saved. The horse has fled from the stable, but
the door might as well be attended to, and the padlock of salvation is
not expensive. Fervent men and women throng the pews, shouting hymns
down the back of each other’s neck, and groaning away sins they do not
realise, to the accompaniment of words they do not understand. Those who
have lived together in innocent sin hurry to the altar for the ring,
which, to these harmless transgressors, is as the fig-leaf apron of
Eden, and heralds virtuous tragedy.
When the gardener became well enough to resent being ill, he was allowed
visitors, among whom was one, by name Dallas Tring, Esquire. This was a
very honest man who, in spite of having an excellent heart, believed
that he always told the truth at all costs. The only lie he permitted
himself, however, was constantly on his lips. It was: “I take your
meaning.”
It was obviously unnatural to him to be enthusiastic. It is to most very
honest people. He came into the gardener’s room like an actor emerging
from stage fright on to the stage.
“You saved my children from being crushed to death,” he said, and seized
the gardener’s hands. “Thank you, thank you.”
“Oh, not at all,” murmured the gardener. “I pretty nearly crushed them
to death myself. Have a whisky and soda.”
This last is the Trinity Island retort to everything, its loophole, its
conversational salvation. The average Englishman takes several weeks to
acquire the habit in the real Island style, but the gardener was always
more adaptable than most.
Privately he did feel unreasonably conceited about the rescue. He would
have admitted that the impulse to gather Aitch and Zed beneath his
prostrate form had been unconscious, but he considered that unconscious
heroism proves heroism deeply ingrained. Nevertheless, the people who
voice your conceit for you are only a little less trying than the people
who relieve you of the duty of being humble. One must do these things
for oneself.
Mr. Dallas Tring was glad to have accomplished his duty, which was not
spontaneous, but had been impressed upon him by his wife. Left to
himself he would have said: “Say, that was good of you. I’d have been
cut up if anything had happened to the kids.”
His wife not having warned him how to proceed, he began now to talk
about the banana crops. It was only towards the end of the interview
that he risked himself once more upon the quicksands of emotion.
“Look here, you know, it’s altogether unspeakable—what I owe you. Those
are the only children we have. Aitch is a fine boy, don’t you think?”
“Fine,” agreed the gardener, relieved to be allowed a loophole of escape
from, “Not at all.”
“You’re a fine boy yourself,” added Mr. Tring. “When you get well, will
you come and help me?”
“What to do?”
“To start again.”
“Oh, yes,” replied the gardener. “I love starting again. What I never
can do is to go on.”
After this the gardener, considered to be stronger, was allowed to see
Mrs. Rust again. She was now but little better than a fretful echo of
Courtesy.
Some people seem born to walk alone, and others there are who are never
seen without a group behind them. Courtesy was as far a leader of men as
can be compatible with having no destination to lead them to. She never
knew what it was to be without a “circle.” Acquaintances were as
necessary to her as air, and she used them, as she used air, innocently
for her own ends.
Mrs. Rust never attained to the dignity either of being alone or the
leader of a group, though she worshipped independence. She believed she
had bought precedence of Courtesy for £200 a year.
And on the occasion of this visit to the gardener, she believed that she
was about to shock and surprise that wise young man.
“Do you know what I have done?” she asked, when she had to some extent
overcome the nervous cautiousness of behaviour impressed upon her by the
absent Courtesy.
“I do not,” said the gardener, whose gently irreverent manner towards
her was his salvation in her eyes. “It’s sure to be something that any
one else would be ashamed of doing.”
Mrs. Rust bridled. “It was partly to annoy you that I did it,” she said.
“Because you dared to advise me not to. I have sent my son Samuel a
cheque, so as to launch his hotel.”
“Rash woman,” protested the gardener. “If you knew your son Samuel as
well as I do——”
“I know he is my son, so he cannot be altogether a fool.”
The gardener bent his thick threatening eyebrows upon her.
“Do you know what else I have done?” she continued.
“I tremble to think,” replied the invalid.
“I have advertised for your suffragette in the Union Paper. Courtesy
said what a mercy it would be if she should have got safely away and
wouldn’t come back, so I advertised, just to show that I disagreed. I
never knew her name, so I described her appearance....”
“Her little size ...” he said eagerly. “Her small and hollow eyes. Her
darling-coloured hair that always blew forward along her cheeks....”
“Well, I didn’t put it like that,” said Mrs. Rust.
“She had such wonderful little hands,” said the gardener, upon whom a
sick-bed had a softening, not to say maudlin effect. “You could see
everything she thought in her hands. They were not very white, but pale
brown. You might have mentioned them. But she is obviously mine. Nobody
could overlook that. Nobody could overlook her at all.”
“On the contrary,” said Mrs. Rust, “she is a perfectly
insignificant-looking young woman. And I am sure that she would strongly
resent your describing her as though she were a dog with your name on
its collar. She had sensible views about women.”
You have been intended to suppose all this time that the suffragette had
succumbed to the earthquake, but as she is the heroine—though an
unworthy one—of this book, I am sure you have not been deceived. Loth as
I am to admit that a friend of mine should have been so near to such an
experience without reaping the benefit of it, I am obliged by tiresome
truth to confess that she was never aware of the earthquake as an
earthquake at all.
She was in the train when it happened, a little Christian the Pilgrim,
making her way through many difficulties up to the Delectable Mountains.
Far off they stood, defying the pale sea and the pale plains, shadowed
mountains, each with its cool brow crowned by a halo of cloud.
The train service in Trinity Islands is not their chief attraction.
First, second, and third class alike may watch the vivid country from
the windows, otherwise there is no compensation for rich or poor. The
price of a first-class fare is supposed to guarantee your
fellow-passengers matching yourself as nearly as possible in complexion;
it also entitles you to a deformed wicker chair in a compartment that a
cow would appeal against in the Home Country. The wicker chair,
unsettled by its migratory life, amuses itself by travelling drunkenly
around the truck, unless you lash yourself to the door-handle with your
pocket-handkerchief, or evolve some other ingenious device.
The suffragette was always without inspirations in the cause of comfort.
She was a petty ascetic, and never thought personal well-being worth the
acquiring. Her body was an unfortunate detail attached to her; she
resented its demands, and took but little more care if it than she did
of the mustard-coloured portmanteau, another troublesome but
indispensable part of her equipment. She put her body and the
portmanteau each into a wicker chair in the train, and promptly forgot
how uncomfortable they both were.
(There is much fascination in the big world, but I think the most
wonderful thing in it is the passing of the little bubble worlds that
blow and burst in many colours around you and me every minute of our
lives. In a ’bus or at a ball, in a crowd around a fallen horse, meeting
for a moment as reader and writer of a book, or shoulder to shoulder in
church singing to a God we all look at with different eyes, these things
happen and will never happen exactly that way again. How I wondered at
the cut of your moustache, O stranger, how I wondered at the colour of
your tie.... But your little daughter with the thin straight legs and
the thin straight hair pressed to your side, her glorying face filled
with the light of novelty, and prayed that drive to heaven might never
cease. And next to you was the girl who had just discovered the man by
her side to be no saint, but a man. And he was trying by argument to
recover his sanctitude. “But strite now, Mibel, I never dremp you’d tike
it so ’ard. ’S only my bit of fun....” There was the man in khaki, next
to me, born an idler, brought up a grocer’s assistant, and latterly
shocked into becoming a hero.... There was the conductor, a man of
twisted humour, chanting the words of his calling in various keys
through the row of sixpences that he held between his lips, while the
little bell at his belt tolled the knell of one ticket after another....
A little oblong world glazed in, ready to my hand. But I got out at the
Bank, and the world went on to Hammersmith Broadway.... These things
are, and never shall be again. The finest thing about life is its lack
of repetition. I hate to hear that history repeats itself. My comfort is
that history is never word-perfect in so doing. Fate has always some new
joke up her sleeve. Sometimes the joke is not funny, but certainly it is
always new.)
There were two Eves and an Adam in the world which evolved from chaos
under the suffragette’s eyes, as the train moved out of Union station.
Also a dog. We are never told about Adam’s dog, but I am sure that he
had one, and that it wagged its tail at him as he awoke from being
created, and snapped at the serpent, and did its best to propitiate the
angel with the flaming sword.
Dogs seldom ignored the suffragette. As a race they have either more or
less perspicacity than ourselves—you may look at it as you will—and they
seldom concur with the public verdict of humanity on its own species.
And in the suffragette a confiding dog was never disappointed, for she
knew the exact spot where the starched buckram of one’s ear is sewn on
to one’s skull, on which it is almost unbearably good to be scratched.
This dog was the sort whose name is always Scottie when he is owned by
the unenterprising. He wore his forelegs so short and so bent that he
looked as though he were continually posing as being thoroughbred. When
he drew himself up to his full height, the under outline of his figure
was about three inches from the ground. When at leisure he walked
broadly and foursquare, as a table would walk, if endowed with life;
when speeding up, he cantered diagonally—forefeet together—hindfeet
together—no one foot moving independently of its twin.
The sort of conversation that this dog and the suffragette immediately
began did not prevent the latter’s hearing the conversation that was
woven by her fellow-passengers across the loom of the train’s roaring.
The fact that the dog’s name was really Scottie should give you a clue
as to his mistress’s character. It was perhaps malicious of me to
describe her as an Eve; that would have made her blush. For she was very
fully clothed in blue serge. It is almost impossible for the average
woman to conduct the business of life except in blue serge. We travel in
blue serge (thin for the tropics, thick and satin-lined for our native
climate), we sit at our desk in blue serge, we meet our Deity or our
stockbroker in blue serge, in blue serge we raid the House of Commons.
Perhaps the root of the feminist movement lies in blue serge. If I were
defended by a crinoline, or rustled in satin or gingham or poplin, I
might have been an exemplary spinster in my sphere to-day.
The other Eve, attired (for she was obviously cosmopolitan) in fawn
tussore, occupied an undue fraction of the little universe. She was the
sort of person whose bosom enters a room first, closely followed by her
chin. Black eyes and a hooked Spanish nose led the rear not unworthily.
She intended to be looked at, and she hoped to be recognised as a
notorious novelist. For she was a momentary novelist with a contempt for
yesterday and no concern at all for to-morrow. A public of a hundred
thousand housemaids was all she asked.
One of the virtues of men is that they are not intended for fancy
portrayal. Why should one ever describe the outward surface of a man,
unless he is the hero of one’s book, or unless one is engaged to marry
him? The particular Adam in this compartment comes under neither of
these headings. He is copiously reproduced all over the world, but
clusters thickest in Piccadilly. Possibly you see him at his best very
far away from Piccadilly. There is something that transfigures the
commonplace in the fact of having kissed the very hem of the Empire’s
wide-flung robe.
“I say, Miss Brown, how’s Albert?” asked the young man.
For the other occupants of the little world seemed mutually familiar. It
occurred to the suffragette that Fate always threw her with people who
knew each other and did not know her.
Miss Brown, the Eve in blue serge, bridled. To all women so flawlessly
brought up as Miss Brown, there exists a sort of electricity in the
voice of man which sends a tremor across their manners, so to speak.
“Albert, Mr. Wise, is still very weakly. I sometimes wonder whether I
shall rear him. His mental activities, I am told, have outgrown his
physical strength.”
The young man fanned himself. And indeed mental activities sounded
unsuited to the climate. The sun spilt square flames upon the floor
through the window. The silhouette of the passing landscape scorched
itself across the sky-line. Tattered bananas looked like crowds of
creatures struck mad by a merciless sun.
The voice of the lady novelist seemed to reach the suffragette through a
veil.
“That child will make his mark. He has the most marvellous mental
grasp....”
Two hills to the northwest moved apart in the middle distance, like the
curtains from a stage. And there was Union Town lying white beside her
sea, white, but veiled by her green gardens. Port King George, on an
attenuated isthmus, stretched its parallel form along to shield the
mother coast from the Atlantic. Even from here you could see the white
gleam of the ocean’s teeth, as they gnashed upon the reef. A spike of
calm steel water lay between Union Town and her defending reef. The
suffragette thought: “A skeleton in the grass with a sword beside
it....” She also looked at the toy figure of the _Caribbeania_, so close
to land as to be disguised as part of the island. Her two funnels
mingled with the factory chimneys by the wharf.
“But he is sure to have landed by now,” thought the suffragette. She
felt unsentimentally interested in the fact. It was too hot to feel
more.
“I happened to mention the Book of Genesis,” said the lady novelist.
“And Albert produced a most ingenious theory about the scientific
explanation of the fable of creation. I wish I had such a nephew. What a
marvellous link with the coming generation!”
“On the other hand,” said Mr. Wise, “I happened to mention _Alice in
Wonderland_, and he said it was out of date, and, as a dream, most
improbable.”
“I am sorry he criticised the Bible in your hearing,” apologised Miss
Brown. “I am afraid he has a tendency towards irreverence.”
“I wish he had,” muttered Mr. Wise.
Acres of sugar filed past the window. High waved the proud crests of it,
all innocent of its mean latter end as a common comestible. The
suffragette’s mind laboured under a rocking confusion of green tufted
miles,—and somewhere on the outskirts of her thoughts, a little sallow
Albert entrenched behind an enormous pair of spectacles.
“A glorious child,” said the lady novelist, in her monopolising tones.
“Simply glorious. Quite an experience to have met him.”
“Good copy, eh?” grinned Mr. Wise.
“Excellent. You know I collect copy.”
Now the suffragette collected copy, but she did it without
self-consciousness. There are several kinds of copy-collectors. Some of
us squeeze our copy into little six-shilling novels, or hack it into so
many columns for the benefit of an unfeeling press. Some of us live
three-score years and ten, and then wake suddenly to find our
copy-coffers full. Upon which we become bores, and our relations hasten
to engage a paid companion for us. But some of us carry our lives about
with us sealed up in our holy of holies, and take pride in hiding the
precious burden that we bear. Copy-collecting may become a religion; to
the suffragette, who never put pen to paper for any one else’s benefit,
and who never told an anecdote, this pursuit was the great consolation
for a bleak life. At the gate of death, or on the step of Paradise, such
a soul may be found filling its pockets with the gold of secret
experience. I think the mania is most acute when no thought of eventual
print intrudes. Its most encouraging characteristic to the lonely is the
sense of irresponsibility it brings. After all I may go and turn
cart-wheels down the Strand, I may murder you, or throw my last shilling
into the Thames, I may go half-way to Hell, and if I miscalculate the
distance and fall in—it’s all copy. To the lady novelist, however, copy
was but a currency to spend. Every experience in her eyes formed a part
of a printed page, surrounded by a halo of favourable reviews. She never
wrote a letter without an eye on her posthumous biography, never met a
notable individual without taking a mental note for the benefit of a
future series of “Jottings about my Generation.” Both she and the
suffragette kept diaries, but only the suffragette’s had a lock and key.
The engine was approaching the climax of its daily task. It faltered.
Looking out of the window, Mr. Wise described its arrival at the foot of
a pronounced hill. The engine gazed up the perspective of its duty, and
panted prophetically, as pants an uncle before a game of stump-cricket.
“This hill is always a surprise to the engine,” said Mr. Wise. “Every
day it has two or three tries, and yet it never learns the knack.”
The suffragette’s fingers tore at the arm of her chair. It was not only
too hot to travel, it was also much too hot to cease to travel. She felt
a crisis approaching.
Her window had stopped artistically opposite a little slice of distant
world, carved out between the trunks of two great cotton trees. Union
Town, perceptibly diminished since its last appearance, languished again
around its bay. Against the white water you could see the cathedral and
the factory chimneys, the spires of God and the spires of mammon.
The suffragette, as she looked, saw the cathedral spire cock suddenly
awry and bend over, like a finger in three joints.
“The heat,” she thought. “I believe I’m dying.”
Almost at once after that the train suffered a great spasm, as though
yearning for the top of the hill.
“She’s going to try again,” said Mr. Wise.
The suffragette’s head cocked suddenly awry, she bent over in three
joints like a finger, and slid off her chair in a faint.
A prostrated suffragette is a contradiction in terms. This one became a
child, lying in ungraceful angles, in need of its mother.
“By Jove!” said Mr. Wise. Miss Brown, after lifting up her skirt
carefully, knelt upon her petticoat.
An ebony ticket-inspector rushed into the compartment.
“Ull right! Ull right!” he shouted. “Ull ovah! Nobuddy killed!”
“Certainly not,” said Mr. Wise. “Why should they be? Only a faint.”
“Earthquake, sah, earthquake!” yelled the inspector. “Jes’ look at the
steeple daown in taown!”
There was no steeple to look at.
“My—what an eventful journey!” said the lady novelist.
“Poor little thing,” said Miss Brown to the suffragette, in almost human
tones. “Better now, better now?”
The suffragette began to struggle a little. Even had she been in her
grave, I think pity would have aroused a spark of militant protest in
her bones.
“Tell her to make an effort,” said the lady novelist, who had never in
her forty years been guilty of physical weakness. “Pretend not to notice
her. Probably hysteria.”
This well-worn accusation touches a familiar chord in the ear of any
rebel. It opened one of the suffragette’s eyes. She had black eyebrows
which suggested that she might have fine eyes, but she had not. When her
eyes were shut you only saw the hopeful suggestion.
“Come, come,” said Miss Brown, handing Mr. Wise’s brandy flask back to
him, and becoming aware that her petticoat was bare to the gaze of an
unmarried gentleman and a negro inspector. “Might I trouble you to lift
the young lady on to a chair?” she added, as she rose.
Seven stone of political agitator takes but little time to move.
“A most eventful journey,” said the lady novelist.
Miss Brown, now decently seated on a chair, stroked the suffragette’s
hand. “Are you going to friends, my child?” she asked.
“No, enemies, I expect,” said the suffragette drearily.
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“You must know where you are going,” said the novelist severely.
“Booked to Greyville,” said the inspector, who had picked up her ticket,
and was thoughtfully clipping it all over.
“Do you know any one in Greyville?” asked Miss Brown.
“No.”
“Were you going to an hotel?”
“I suppose so.”
Some kind deeds are so obvious that they are impossible to escape.
“Albert can move into the back room,” said Miss Brown.
And the train, as if relieved to have this affair settled, moved on up
the hill.
By the time the chapel bell, which Island engines always wear, had begun
to sound its warning to the pigs upon the line at Greyville Junction,
the suffragette’s independence was a thing dissolved. Her protests had
no weight. Constitutionally she was unable to be politely firm. She must
either be militant or acquiescent; she knew not the half measures of
civilisation. And it was impossible to be militant in the face of Miss
Brown’s impersonal sense of duty.
“If only she had been a more interesting person this might have been
like the beginning of a novel,” murmured the lady novelist to Mr. Wise.
That young man, who was wearing the sheepish look peculiar to the
Englishman in the presence of matters which he considers to be feminine,
shrugged his shoulders.
At Greyville station Miss Brown emerged like an empress from incognito.
A black coachman, with so generous an expanse of teeth that you
suspected them of being the only line of defence between you and the
inner privacies of his brain, was on the platform. He seemed torn
between acquired awe of Miss Brown, and an innate desire to conduct the
welcome heartily. The station-master bowed. The porter chirruped to
Scottie.
“New visitor, missis?” gasped the coachman, looking at the suffragette.
He had taken some time to assimilate the visitorship of the lady
novelist. His mind was being educated at too great a speed.
“Gorgeous fellow,” said the lady novelist, who considered all black
people gorgeous because they were not white. The conversation of John
the coachman had already filled two note-books, though he had never said
anything original in his life.