gardener. “I will introduce you to the enemy.”
The gardener agreed absent-mindedly. He was helping Courtesy to buy
baskets. The Island is the paradise of basket lovers. Those hearts are
rare which do not thrill at the sight of a plaited basket in many
colours, and I believe that nobody ever left the Island without
succumbing to the charm. I suppose the reason why Island baskets never
get on to the market at home is that everybody loves them so much, they
never part with them. Courtesy, who always loved the popular thing, had
been very busy buying baskets since the first moment of her arrival.
Mrs. Rust was busily occupied in refusing to buy anything. “Buy a pine?
Why should I? I loathe pines. Lace? No, I won’t buy lace, my
underclothes are already overcrowded with it. What’s that? A basket to
keep my letters in. I keep my letters behind the fire. Why,
gardener—look—here’s——”
“Mr. Gardener,” tittered the novelist, “here is the enemy behind you.”
“You dream,” said the gardener, “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
With an amiable smile the suffragette allowed her hand to be shaken an
enormous number of times. She was looking plainer than the gardener had
expected. With the pretty obtuseness of men, he had in his dreams
forgotten that brown hat with the weary flowers in it. He had imagined
her dressed in blue, he had thought her eyes were blue to match, he had
created a little curl in her hair. Yet somehow he was not disappointed.
For he had also forgotten in his dreams the comfort that lies in lack of
ornament. It isn’t love that makes the world go round, it’s the optimism
of men.
“Why, it’s quite nice to see you again,” said the suffragette in a voice
of surprise.
“Courtesy,” shouted the gardener, “from this moment I’m not a fit
companion for Mrs. Rust. Courtesy says I’m not respectable when I’m with
you,” he added to the suffragette.
“I don’t see anything very disreputable in your behaviour with me,” she
replied. “But it’s only for a little while, Courtesy.”
“Oh, Lor’, no,” said Courtesy. “He’s come to stop.”
“I haven’t,” said the suffragette.
The gardener would never have put into words the appeal that came into
his eyes.
“Yes,” said the suffragette, “you are thinking that I am growing more
and more militant every time you see me.”
“I was not,” he answered, “I was wondering how I could manage to see you
apart from all this noise.”
“Quite easily. You can walk back to Park View with me now. I have got
the oranges for Albert.”
So they squeezed out of the market-place, and side by side paced the
avenue of donkeys which on market days lines the village street.
“What are you waiting for?” asked the gardener. “What’s wrong with me?
When will you want me?”
“It isn’t you I don’t want. It’s what you stand for. Possibly I haven’t
mentioned to you that I am a suffragette of a special kind. A cat that
walks by itself.... Or rather perhaps it is presumptuous of me to lay
claim to cathood. I have only walked such a little way. I am an elderly
kitten, say, walking by itself.”
“But if all suffragettes were like you, it would certainly be an
argument against the franchise. For what would become of England?”
“God forbid that all suffragettes should be like me. I am a fanatic, a
rather silly thing to be.”
“I know what you are waiting for,” said the gardener. “Heaven! you want
so much beside the Vote, and you’ll never get what you want this side of
heaven.”
“God forbid that I should want heaven,” said the suffragette. “Heaven is
not made for women. Why, the very archangels are men.”
“Why won’t you have me? We could get married to-morrow. Why not?”
“Because I am too busy. Because there is a superfluity of women, and as
I am not a real woman—only an idea—I’d better sit out. Because I am
conceited and couldn’t bear my pride to have a fall—at your expense.
Because you don’t know me and I don’t know you. Because it’s better to
live alone with an ideal than coupled with a fact. Now I’m sick of
talking about myself, it makes me feel sugary, as though I’d been
swallowing golden syrup neat.”
“But before you retire into your militancy, tell me,” said the gardener,
“do you think you will ever recognise this bond between us?”
“There is no bond between us.”
“There is love between us.”
“I’m sorry, but it’s not mutual.”
“Love is an automatically mutual thing.”
“Then I’m afraid that proves that whatever may be between us is not
love. Here is Park View.”
“Damn Park View!”
Words are supposed to be a woman’s luxury, but it always seems to me
that men put a more touching faith in argument than ever women did. I
believe the gardener thought that if Park View had been five miles
farther on, he might have made a woman of the suffragette.
“And what do you expect me to do now?” he asked pathetically.
“Get busy,” advised the suffragette, “somewhere else. Dear little
gardener, remember that this road has been trodden before. Being young
is a devastating time, anyway. It always comforts me to think that there
are crowds before and behind me, and that even a cow has had a delirious
calfhood. After all, the past is such a little thing, one can drown it
in a drop. And the future is so big.”
“That’s what I complain of—the size of the future.”
“Oh, no, don’t. Size is space and space is growth. Good gracious, what a
prig I am becoming!”
“For God’s sake, come and fill up a little corner of my big future,
then. You little thing, I could hold you in my hand.... And you can hold
me with no hand at all, but only with your heart.”
“Good-bye.”
“But why? Why?”
She was climbing the steep drive. She never looked round. She always
looked up.
With excellent intentions the suffragette had, I think, succeeded in
killing her heart. She was so heartless that even the hole where her
heart should have been was a very shallow one. Some rudimentary emotion
turned in her breast as she walked up the drive, and if she could have
had the gardener as a friend, she would have turned even then and
tendered him the friendly mailed fist of the independent woman. But if
one is a fanatic, one cannot also be a lover. She suffered from the cold
humility that sometimes attacks women. Every morning she occupied three
minutes in the thankless task of pinning her hair into a shape
conformable with convention’s barest requirements, and was then
confronted with her own thin short face, white—but not white like a
flower as the face of a beloved woman should be; her small eyes,
grey—but not grey like the sea; her straight and drooping hair, made out
of the ashes of the flame that burns in real women’s hair; her thin
pressed lips, her hard set chin, the little defiant wrinkles over her
brows.... It was impossible for her to believe that such a thing could
be indispensable to any eyes. Her attitude towards the paradox was
always sceptical, and the idea that there is nothing a woman can offer
as a substitute for such a small gift as herself was beyond her. The
little ordinary fiery things of youth had been shorn out of her life,
she had been crushed by the responsibility of being a woman and a
devotee.
No man would believe that such a woman exists. The pathetic vanity of
man would never be convinced that any woman could prefer her own
independence to his kisses.
By the time the suffragette had reached the front door of Park View, the
interview with the gardener was but a pulse beating at the back of her
mind.
Miss Brown, looking as nearly dishevelled as a persistently Real Lady
could possibly look, was standing in the hall, ankle-deep in her own
prostrate property. Trunks yawned on every side, highly respectable
dresses, like limp ghosts of Miss Brown herself, embellished every
chair.
“And I haven’t even begun on Albert’s books yet.”
“The more of Albert’s books we leave behind the better,” replied the
suffragette. “I have got him _Treasure Island_ to read on the boat, and
he might take that one on Chemistry for Sundays.”
“I’m sure I don’t know how you manage Albert,” said Miss Brown. “I could
never even get him to read the Bible. It really looks as if Providence
had sent you to us at this crisis.”
“Providence would never have chosen a militant suffragette.”
“Well, but really one wouldn’t notice your opinions,” said Miss Brown in
an encouraging voice.
“What about Scottie?” asked the suffragette. “Has anybody thought what
is going to happen to him?”
“I haven’t thought of any details,” answered Miss Brown. “The doctor’s
orders were so sudden, they altogether upset me. I suppose Scottie can
be left with John.”
“I hope he won’t,” said the suffragette. “I caught John using Scottie as
a target yesterday. He scored two bull’s-eyes before I got there.”
“I can’t think what to do with him. There is nobody but Mr. Wise, and he
already has a fierce bulldog. Have you any ideas?”
“Yes, one. I have a sort of friend on the Island. If I left Scottie with
him, he would act as a brake in the pursuit, because of the difficulties
of quarantine.”
“I don’t quite follow your meaning,” said Miss Brown, not unnaturally.
“I didn’t know you had a gentleman friend on the Island.”
“I haven’t. But I’m sure he will be kind to Scottie.”
Very late that night, when Courtesy, Mrs. Rust, the gardener, and an
unknown young man picked up at the club by the gardener, were playing
Bridge in the verandah, a very young boy with a very fat dog appeared,
asking for Mr. Gardener. The boy was too well educated to be afraid of
duppies. The solid Scottie, too, was felt to be a sound defence against
the supernatural.
“What is this?” asked the gardener, who had assumed the melancholy pose
of the Rejected One, and had unconsciously acquired a sad sweet smile to
correspond. Even on his death-bed the gardener will pose as a dying man.
The young boy put a note into his hand, and dragged Scottie from the
shadow where he had modestly seated himself.
“By Jove,” said the unknown young man, who happened to be Mr. Wise.
“It’s Scottie, the Park View dog.”
The gardener literally burst the envelope open. The enclosure said:
“Dear Gardener—Will you please keep Scottie until I ask you for him
again.—Your fairly sincere suffragette.”
The note went round the Bridge Table.
“I have always wondered,” said Mrs. Rust, “whether politics were really
good for women. Now I am sure that they have an unhinging tendency. What
does it mean?”
“It means that they are going on an expedition,” said Courtesy. “They
want the dog looked after for a day or two.”
“Why, but Park View is a regular palace in Greyville,” said Mr. Wise.
“There are three servants in it, all competent to look after Scottie for
a day or two.”
“I shall have to do what she says,” said the gardener. “The
suffragette’s only fault is that she leaves almost too much to the
imagination.”
The boy had vanished.
“Better go round and ask for an explanation,” said Courtesy.
“He must play out these doubled lilies,” said Mrs. Rust.
“It must be nearly twelve,” said Mr. Wise. “The cocks have been crowing
for an hour.”
The Island cock proclaims the night rather than the day. Not even a cock
can feel much enthusiasm for such a tyrant as the Trinity Island sun.
“I can’t go now,” said the gardener.
But next morning at breakfast he said, “I daren’t go now.” He had hardly
slept at all, and looked white. The light of the Seeker had gone out of
his eyes, there had been no wish in him for a wild walk in the early
sun. He was not even posing. He had been pathetically late for
breakfast, and Mrs. Rust and the lady novelist had disappeared to read
the _English Review_ and the _Lady’s Pictorial_ respectively on the
front verandah.
“Why daren’t you?” asked Courtesy.
“Oh, Courtesy—she’s beaten me. She’s left me without hope.”
Courtesy took several mouthfuls of porridge before she replied, “You’re
young yet, gardener. And she isn’t so extra unique, after all. If you
like, I’ll go round and ask for an explanation of the dog.”
“You don’t know the way,” said the gardener tragically.
It was lucky that Mr. Wise at that moment arrived in his buggy to invite
Courtesy and Mrs. Rust (if she wasn’t too tired) for a drive. The buggy
was a single one, and held two only, so there was a transparency about
his motives which did him credit. Courtesy never even passed on the
invitation to Mrs. Rust, and the owner of the vehicle failed to repeat
it.
Armed with her inevitable box of sweets, Courtesy set forth on her
romance.
“Ripping woods,” she said, as the sun winked through the delicate lace
of the forest.
“Ripping,” agreed Mr. Wise. “But full of ticks.”
Courtesy suffered that beautiful shock that attacks a woman when she
first realises that the man by her side is an uncommon person, and that
he holds the same view about herself. She offered him a chocolate cream.
They went to Park View by the longest way possible, but I think the
nearest approach to romance that they reached was when Courtesy said,
“Oh, Lor’, I am enjoying myself!”
And Mr. Wise replied, “So am I. I hope you’ll come again.”
When they reached Park View they were neither of them observant enough
to notice the forsaken look of the house.
“I’ll just go and tackle that funny little suffragette,” said Courtesy.
“I won’t be half a mo.”
She looked back and smiled at him as she climbed the drive.
“Dey all gone, missis,” said John, who was sitting in the hall, reading
the letters out of the waste-paper basket.
“Gone? Where to?”
“Gone to Lunnon Town to see a doctah man, please, missis.”
“Union Town, you mean.”
“No, please thank you, missis. Gone lars’ night to catch a big
steamboat.”
“How many of them went?”
“Missis Brown, and Mars’ Albert, an’ de visitor-missis.”
“Do you know their address? Where are you forwarding their letters to?”
John laughed shrilly at this joke.
“Carn’t say, please, missis. Post-missis wouldn’t send me de letters,
now de fambly gone.”
The Island is the home of elusive information.
“What’s the matter with the woman, anyway?” said Courtesy, as she
remounted the buggy. “I never can understand a woman that doesn’t know
her vocation.”
“What is her vocation?” asked Mr. Wise.
“Ou, I don’t know,” giggled Courtesy.
“I think all women ought to marry,” said Mr. Wise. “Somehow it keeps
them softer.”
“It wouldn’t make a hard woman soft,” said Courtesy. “Only all the soft
women do marry.”
“Do you consider——”
“Ou, Lor’, this is a killing conversation!” interrupted the lady. “Let’s
talk about something else.”
“All right. That’s a very pretty dress you’ve got on.”
They found the gardener sitting on tenterhooks on the verandah, pulling
Scottie’s ears.
“What did she say?”
“She didn’t. She’s gone to London.”
“I hope they’ll take care of Westminster Abbey,” said Mrs. Rust.
The gardener said nothing.
By this time the suffragette was putting romance behind her by means of
a little boat limping across a heavy sea. Compared to the _Caribbeania_,
this boat was like my suffragette compared with Mr. Shakespeare’s
Desdemona. There was rust on the little boat’s metal, and her paint
still bore memories of London smuts. The purser was occasionally to be
seen in his shirt sleeves, and the Captain had a button off his coat.
The priest was on board, returning to his flock, overflowing with
material for sermons. By mutual consent he and the suffragette ignored
each other. He made an attempt to approach Albert, with his special
children’s manner, but that cultured youth quickly silenced him. So he
occupied himself in trying to save the soul of the second officer, a
docile youth, of humble and virtuous tendency.
Within two days the little boat reached the Isthmus which has lately
been converted into one of the wonders of the world.
“My poor Albert,” said the suffragette. “I’m afraid the doctor says you
mustn’t go to see the Canal. It’s so dusty. And you know such a lot
about it, don’t you? It is disappointing.”
“I dow quite edough about it,” replied Albert. “I have do wish whatever
to see it. I dow every detail of its codstructiod.”
“That’s all right, then. The doctor says when it’s cool after dark, you
may walk as far as the gardens behind the quay, and listen to the band.”
“I do dot wish to hear the badd. I wish you ad Ah-Bargaret to go away
for the whole day, ad let the youggest stewardess cob ad sit with be.
She is a charbig persod, ad it would be very good for you to see the
Cadal.”
In Albert’s eyes the halo of the suffragette was to some extent
evaporating. Her attitude towards science alienated him in his capacity
as an educated man, although as a child in pain he still clung to her.
And she had that morning offended him by buying him a bottle of sweets
from the barber’s shop.
“I really thigk you sobetibes forget I ab do logger a baby,” he
observed, and forthwith began to lay great stress on the charm of the
youngest stewardess.
Miss Brown was delighted at the fall of her nephew’s latest idol.
“You’d better come away,” she said. “Let’s go and see the Canal. If you
stay with Albert when he is displeased, you get on his nerves.”
So they landed on the quay of one of the two terrible towns that guard
the entrances of the Canal. They paid a great price and manned a train
that cost humanity a very great price indeed to create. That train is
built of dead men, the embankment on which it runs has largely peopled
purgatory, the very sleepers might as well be coffins, yet the train
moves with the same callous rhythm as the train from Surbiton to
Waterloo. In it you may see the calm inheritors of the fatal past sit
upon spread handkerchiefs upon the smutty seats, and stick their tickets
in their hats that the passing of the conductor may not disturb their
train of thought; and all as if there were no ghosts to keep them
company. Only outside the windows you can see the haunted land, white
water enveloping a dead forest, ashen trees suffering slow drowning,
tall grey birds standing amid floating desolation, and the Canal, a
strip of successful tragedy, creeping between its treacherous red banks.
The train leaves the Canal for a while, and returns to find it in a
different mood. The First Lock is the crown of that great endeavour. I
am assured that much more genius has been spent on the Cuts than on the
Locks, but to you and me, ignorantly seeking copy, the First Lock
triumphantly dominating the weary water-way, seems like the seal of
success, as if Man had built this stupendous thing as a barrier between
him and failure.
When you see the Lock you feel like an ant seen through the wrong end of
a telescope. The suffragette, as she stood on the iron way that goes
along the top edge of one of the gates, had to think of all the biggest
things she had ever imagined to keep herself from dwindling out of
existence. Even Women’s Rights grew small in the light of this man-made
immensity. She was standing on the highest gate, and she could look
across a perspective of three empty cube-worlds, at the white Canal and
the white sea beyond it.
“Really,” she said, “there is very little to choose between God and
Man.”
“Good gracious me, what a thing to say!” said Miss Brown, bridling. “God
could knock all this down with one stroke.”
“He couldn’t knock down the spirit that would make man build it up
again. Why do we pray to a Creator, if we can ourselves create?”
“I think you had better come out of the sun,” said Miss Brown coldly. “I
am feeling a little sick myself.”
But on their way across the gate back to the white paving that borders
the Lock, they found their way blocked by the priest, who was advancing
in the opposite direction.
It is impossible for a stout Miss Brown and a stout priest to pass each
other on this route. Two suffragettes might have passed, but fortunately
for the Isthmus there was only one present.
“I will retire,” said the priest. “Place aux dames, yerce, yerce.”
“Oh, how good of you!” said Miss Brown, bridling. “I am sorry to put you
to such inconvenience.”
With a jocular reference or two to goods trains at a shunting station
the priest retired from the dilemma. But when they had all reached the
safety of the broad paving again he seemed to have shed his desire to
cross the gate. He was by himself, which he detested; there were
countless morals to be humorously drawn from the Canal, and nobody to
point them out to.
“This is a marvel of workmanship, is it not?” he said to Miss Brown,
pointedly excluding the suffragette.
Miss Brown agreed, and asked whether he had felt pretty well on the
voyage so far. Thus the Canal introduced them, and when the acquaintance
was safely formed, Miss Brown strove to introduce the suffragette.
“Yerce, yerce,” said the priest hurriedly. “We have met before. An
introduction is unnecessary.”
Fortunately for the suffragette she saw a dog at a little distance, and
hurried to speak to it. The dog is blessedly cosmopolitan. Wherever you
may meet him he speaks your home tongue to you, and his eyes are the
eyes of a friend in a strange land.
The suffragette and the dog walked along the side of the Lock some
twenty yards behind their elders and betters, and the suffragette
watched her character falling in shreds between them. Some people like
safe hunting, and there is no prey so defenceless as prey that is not
there. The priest’s conscience had been for some time accumulating
reasons why the modest Miss Brown should be warned of the true character
of her immodest companion.
The suffragette allowed them half an hour to finish the destruction, and
joined them at the train, when the dog reluctantly remembered another
engagement.
The party returned to the town in dead silence. At the station the
priest left them, with promises to come and read to Albert. The
suffragette and Miss Brown made their way across the gardens to the
quay. Under a great palm, Miss Brown stopped tragically, and spoke to
her companion for the first time since leaving the Lock.
“I trusted you,” she said, rather dramatically, though, of course, she
was too ladylike for melodrama. “I gave you my hospitality, I succoured
you when you needed help (this was an echo of the priest), and all the
while you deceived me, you took advantage of my kindness.”
“Certainly you were all that to me,” said the suffragette mildly, “and
certainly I am very grateful for all your kindness. But I don’t remember
deceiving you.”
“You are an immoral woman,” said Miss Brown, with a great effort, “and
you never told me.”
“It is hardly expected that I should have told you that. Partly because
it would have been silly, and partly because it would have been quite
untrue.”
“No one could dislike gossip more than I do,” said Miss Brown, who loved
it. “But a priest is a priest, and this one is such a truly nice man, so
good-hearted, never said a word yesterday when the steward upset the
soup into his lap. Why did you never tell me that you travelled from
England in company with a man who was not your husband?”
Now the suffragette, though she was distrustful of the reasoning of men,
seldom failed to see the point of view of a woman, even though that
woman was an anti. She specialised in feminism, and in her eyes to be a
woman was in itself a good argument.
“Of course I ought to have told you, Miss Brown,” she said in a warmer
voice than was usual with her. “As a matter of fact it never occurred to
me that the thing was worth telling, but that, I admit, is no excuse. I
do see that I have been accepting your kindness under false pretences.
It is perhaps useless to say I am sorry, and worse than useless to tell
you that I would rather die than be married, and that I would rather be
hanged than live unmarried with a man. Still I admit I allowed all the
fools on the _Caribbeania_ to think I was also such a fool as to be
married. I will not bother you again, Miss Brown, I will keep out of
your way as much as possible on the boat. It’s only a fortnight.”
Miss Brown was mollified, and when she spoke again it was like the angel
Gabriel sympathising with the difficulties of a beetle. “Of course if
you are penitent,” she said, “I should like to help you to retrace as
far as possible the false step you have taken. I believe there are
Homes.... But perhaps you had better not come near Albert.”
The little boat was indulging in a two days’ rest at the Isthmus. It is
a problem worthy of the superwoman to avoid a fellow-passenger on a
small boat in port. The bearable space on board becomes limited to
inches. The side nearest the quay affords nothing but coal-dust to
breathe, the other side allows a small percentage of air to dilute the
coal-dust. There is no scope for choice.