Albert. Chess with Miss Brown is a most satisfactory game, a crescendo
of “Checks” leading to a triumphant “Mate” in a delightfully short time.
So the suffragette went on shore to listen to the band.
The Isthmus band is as gaudy in attire as it is sombre in complexion,
and it plays to a stratum of society as striking to the eye as any in
the world. The Isthmus is the centre of nigger fashion. Here, under the
glare and the flare of a hot night in the season, you may see the effect
of a layer of civilisation on an aboriginal worship of colour. Crimson,
gold, and silver are the prevailing motifs. As to the coiffure of the
ladies, for every plait to be found on a Trinity Island head there are
half a dozen on the Isthmus. There is something uniquely wicked in the
appearance of rouge and powder on a mahogany ground. The look of vice
which the Parisian or London lady strives to attain by means of a
shopful of cosmetics can be acquired by the lady-nigger with one dab of
the flour-dredger. Once more I pause to ask when we may expect the
decree that we must further conceal our incurable virtue by means of a
complexion dyed copper colour.
There was a moon, and there were stars standing aloof in the sky; and
there were many lights about the garden. There were shrill brass voices
everywhere, and the band was playing that tune of resigned
sentimentality, “My Old Kentucky Home.”
The suffragette felt slightly drunk. She had had a day of emotions, and
it was an unusual and intoxicating experience for her to find her
emotions escaping from the iron bound cask in which she kept them. She
felt totally irresponsible, and when the priest came along, looking as
conceited as the moon, and as sentimentally benign as the stars, she
discovered a lunatic longing to tear the hat from his head and stamp
upon it, to make him look a fool, to prick his pride; not because of any
personal enmity—or so she thought—but because he seemed eternally on the
side of sanity and of yesterday, and barred the path of young and mad
modernity. She approached him.
The priest suddenly perceived in front of him a soul dangerously in need
of salvation.
“My dear young lady, I have been seeking an opportunity for a quiet chat
with you, yerce, yerce. Whatever you may think of me, I assure you that
I am not the hard and inhuman man you think me. I should be only too
thankful to be of service to you. Let us sit on that quiet seat, away
from the crowd.”
“It is good of you to risk contamination,” said the suffragette.
“My calling leads me among the publicans and sinners,” said the priest.
“It is not my business to divide the sheep from the goats.”
“Not your business, but your pleasure,” suggested the suffragette.
The priest stiffened.
“I wish you had not hardened your heart against my help,” he said.
“Believe me, I have every sympathy with a young and unprotected woman in
your position. I think sometimes life seems hard on the weaker sex,
yerce, yerce.”
“It is a great honour to be a woman,” said the suffragette. “Your God
certainly turns his back on the individual, but he is very just to the
mass. The day of women is just dawning.”
“There may be something in what you say,” observed the priest, feeling
that she was somehow erasing all that he had meant to say. “I am sure we
shall all be glad to see Woman come into her own. But....”
“Men may possess the past, but women have the future,” continued the
suffragette, who was certainly very much excited. “We have suddenly
found what you have lost—the courage of our convictions. The art of
being a fanatic seems to me to be the pivot of progress; but men have
lost, and women have caught that blessed disease.”
“I do not see how all this applies to the matter in hand,” said the
priest. “Unless you are trying to convey to me, by way of an excuse, the
craving which I am told possesses most women of your persuasion—the
craving for fame, the morbid wish to be talked about.”
“I did not hope to convey anything at all to you. And certainly not
fame, for there is no such thing. I have seen pigeons sitting on the
heads of statues of great men in London, and I have seen little critics
sitting on their fame. This is a world of isolated people, and there can
be no fame where there is no mutual understanding.”
“You are oddly pessimistic, and you are also wilfully evading the point.
When I saw you just now, I hoped that you had repented of your sin and
needed my help.”
“I have committed no sin that would appeal to you,” said the
suffragette. “But that is, of course, beside the point. What you want is
that I should repent of being myself, and become a sort of inferior
female you.”
“Indeed you have come to hasty and mistaken conclusions about my
intentions,” said the priest, whose principal virtue was perseverance.
“Regarding your political opinions, I have every sympathy with your
cause, though none for your methods. There is something so very coarse
about militancy.”
“Have you ever tried denying a creature the food it needs? I think you
would find that even a white mouse would be coarse if you starved it.”
“You may be right. My sister is a member of the Church League for
Women’s Suffrage. Perhaps you also belong to that sisterhood?”
“No,” she answered. “I belong to the Shrieking Sisterhood.”
“It seems useless for me to try and help you in this mood,” sighed the
priest. “I can only pray that I may be shown the way to your heart....”
“I have none,” she said.
In a garden not five hundred miles away from the garden in which she sat
was the Fact which she had Forgotten, set in a silver light among the
silver trees. The gardener stood among the pale grape-fruit trees, with
his head back in his usual conceited way, with his hands in his pockets
and his feet in the wet grass.
“This is nonsense,” he thought.
“She is only half human.”
“Love for a thing only half human is only half love.”
“You can’t build a world out of words, as she tries to do.”
“In a thing like love, there is fact and there is theory. Theory is only
falsehood disguised as fact.”
“She is not a bit pretty.”
“I believe she would rather make an enemy than make a friend.”
“Something has gone wrong with the woman of to-day. She has left the man
behind, but she has not gone forward.”
“What have I been about to allow such a woman to disturb me? I came to
this island a king, and I have made myself a slave.”
“It is youth that has burnt me. I am done with youth. It is fine to have
reached age in theory, and yet in practice still to have one’s life
ahead. My youth has been a fire in my path, and she has stamped it out.”
The moon explored the spangled sky. The fireless interwove with the pale
purring noises of the night. The mad still shadows of the palms blotted
the grass.
The gardener went into the verandah firmly posed as He Who has Passed
through Fire, and has emerged, cured of the silly disease of youth, into
a pale silver light.
For the gardener made his theories, while the suffragette’s theories
made her.
The gardener was awakened next morning by the loud noise of Scottie
chasing lizards across the room. Scottie was a bristly Northerner, and
never became really used to the conditions of tropical life. To this day
he labours under the delusion that lizards are only bald or naked mice,
that have deceitfully changed their smell and their taste.
The gardener thought that he awoke perfectly light-hearted. He did not
recognise the curious thing that throbbed in the back of his
consciousness as his heart.
He whistled in his bath. He whistled as he came out on to the verandah
for breakfast.
Courtesy had risen for early breakfast by mistake.
“Stopped brooding?” she asked. “Brave boy.”
“Two and two is such a poor formation after all,” said the gardener.
“One and one is much more comfortable.”
Courtesy giggled. “There are times,” she said, “when two and two is
ripping. Mr. Wise is coming up to lunch.”
“He came up to lunch yesterday. And he’s coming up to tea to-morrow.”
“Yesterday and to-morrow are not to-day,” said Courtesy, that practical
girl.
The gardener had not time to ponder, for Mrs. Rust then appeared. Her
complexion was even more of a contrast to her hair than usual.
“I had a letter last night,” she said. “I didn’t tell you at once,
because it’s such a vulgar habit to blurt out news. I don’t know whether
I have mentioned my son Samuel to you?”
“You have,” said Courtesy.
“So have I,” added the gardener.
“His house has played him false—I knew it would. One of the ceilings
gave way—on to Samuel. Him and his house—he always was a fool. I believe
he thought the Almighty built his house for him.”
“Yes, but what happened to Samuel?”
“I told you—the ceiling fell on him.”
“Yes, but what is the result?”
“Oh, the rest of the house is still standing. It was only one of the
ceilings. He put the billiard table upstairs, and probably had his
rafters made of bamboo.”
“Yes, but I mean what was the result as far as Samuel was concerned?”
“He was concussion. There have been one or two people staying in the
house since he started the atrocious practice of advertising, and they
had him taken to a hospital. My letter is from the matron.”
“Poor Mrs. Rust,” said Courtesy, “you must be terribly worried. I
suppose you’ll be wantin’ to get home by the next boat.”
“Stuff and nonsense,” snapped the mother. “Haven’t you noticed by now
that I have iron nerves. Next boat—indeed.”
“But I should have thought——” began Courtesy, and the gardener kicked
her under the table.
“There is only one perfectly obvious thing to do,” said the gardener,
“and that is wait till the next mail, a fortnight hence. Knowing Mrs.
Rust as I do, Courtesy, I am sure she will follow this obvious course.”
“Obvious course—indeed,” said Mrs. Rust, much relieved. “Stuff and
nonsense. I shall do exactly as I please, whether it’s obvious or not.
Suppose I decide to go home by Wednesday’s boat, what then, young man?”
The gardener shook his head. “You won’t, I know,” he said. “You are too
reasonable.”
“Reason be blowed,” said Mrs. Rust with spirit. “You don’t know me very
well, young man, if you think I’m like all the other old cats, to be
persuaded by that sort of argument.”
The gardener was now an expert at saving Mrs. Rust from herself.
Although she entangled herself habitually in contradictions, her real
mind was not subtle enough to be well hidden, and to guide her action
into the path of her desire was a matter that only required a little
delicacy. The gardener, being a gardener, was always ready with tactful
guidance and unseen support in such matters. In this case, he would have
been surprised if you had told him that his secret desire pointed the
same way as Mrs. Rust’s. He thought he had killed desire. But he was
tired of the Island, and he had by that mail received a quarterly
instalment of his income.
“Courtesy,” said Mrs. Rust, “we sail for home next Wednesday.
Unreasonable—indeed. And none the worse for that.”
“We have engaged the car for a week from Friday,” said Courtesy. “Mr.
Wise is lunching with us on Thursday. And the hotel insists on a week’s
notice.”
“I am paying you two hundred a year,” said Mrs. Rust brutally, “to save
me from these vulgar details.”
“Oh, Lor’,” said Courtesy.
“But what about Scottie?” asked the gardener.
“Scottie’s your affair, not mine. I’m not paying you £200 a year to
follow me about.”
The gardener is a very difficult person to snub.
“Scottie and I are coming gratis.”
And Mrs. Rust said, “Good.”
But the little boat, with the suffragette on board of her, fled across
the Atlantic, as if aware of the projected pursuit of the great mail
steamer.
The suffragette, a morose unit on a desert island of her own making,
stood separated from the world by a gulf of gossip. She used to sit on
the poop, where nobody else would sit, with the wind in her hair and the
sun in her eyes, building theories.
There are some people who can never see a little cloud of fantasy float
across the horizon of their dreams without building a heavy castle in
the air upon it, and bringing it to earth. Whenever the suffragette
thought of the gardener, she broke the thought with a theory. It is sad
to be burdened with a brain that must always track illusion to
disillusionment. She had one consolation, one persistent and glorious
contradiction, one shining truth in a welter of self-questioning:—“I’m
alone—I’m alone—I’m alone....”
It was not until they had passed the Azores that a voice from the outer
world spoke to her. They had reached those islands late one moonlit
night. The little square houses, climbing up the hill-side in orderly
ranks, looked like silver bricks in a castle of dreams. There was a
white fringe of breaking waves threaded between the black sea and the
black land. From the boats that hurried between the shore and the
steamer, little lamps swung and thin voices cut the darkness. Thundering
silence seemed to invade the emptiness left by the ceasing of the
propeller. The ceaseless loom that always sang behind the turmoil of the
suffragette’s consciousness spun the moon into a quiet melody. The still
lap of the sea against the ship’s stern struck the ear like a word never
spoken before. You could hear the gods creating new things. You could
hear the tread of the stars across the sky.
“I am sorry to disturb you,” said Miss Brown; “it’s Albert. I knew
something would come of his going to the fancy-dress dance as Galileo,
with such a thin tunic on; but he is so wilful. And now he has a high
temperature, and a worse pain in his side than ever. He is crying for
you.”
It was a strange sensation for the suffragette, after all these days of
loneliness, to be cried for. Tears, like all things that belong to
women, appealed to her beyond words.
She found Albert beating on the wall of his cabin. When he cried—it
hurt. When he breathed—it hurt. When he moved—it hurt. And yet he had to
cry and pant and struggle. There was something in the suffragette’s
plain and ordinary face that acted as an antidote to Albert’s hectic
personality. She was a poor nurse; her only experience of the sick-room
had been from her own sick-bed. But she had a cold hand, an imagination
which she only allowed to escape at a crisis, and nerves very difficult
to excite. All that night, while the ship climbed the steep seas of the
Bay, she and the doctor kept something that was very big from invading
the little cabin. The battle was, of course, a losing one. There is
something almost funny in the futility of fighting Heaven on an issue
like this.
I said there should be no death-bed scenes in this book, so I will only
add that after much battling Albert managed at last to get to sleep, and
he died before he woke.
The suffragette was there, but she was not needed. She went away and
cried because no one would ever cry for her again.
She marconied for Miss Brown’s brother to meet the bereaved aunt at
Southampton. And when the boat reached home, she carried her
mustard-coloured portmanteau up the gangway, and, by disappearing,
closed the incident.
In this wonderful age we do our disappearing by machinery. Fairy
godmothers prefer Rolls-Royce cars to broomsticks, the pirate employs a
submarine instead of a gallant three-decker, the black sheep of the
piece, instead of donning a mask and confining the rest of his career to
Maidenhead Thicket, books his passage to a Transatlantic sheepfold on a
thirty-knot liner.
The suffragette disappeared by the London train. By travelling third,
she hoped to escape the majority of her fellow-passengers, and it was
not until the train began to leave the station that she identified a
hitherto unnoticed person opposite to her as the priest.
The priest was always overcome by a feeling of virtue when he travelled
third.
“So our modesty is mutual,” he said jovially to the suffragette. “Yerce,
yerce, in England I travel third on principle. My parish, you know, is
in a poor part of London, and I think a shepherd should as far as
possible share the circumstances of his flock.”
The suffragette hovered for a moment over a very crude flower of
repartee dealing with cattle-trucks, but discarded the idea. She was
always cautious, when she allowed herself time for caution. Her
principle in conversation was, “When in doubt—don’t.” But being a
militant suffragette, she was seldom in doubt.
The priest was aggrieved with the suffragette, partly because he felt
obliged to speak to her. He would have preferred to ignore her, but she
had behaved too well during the last few days. She had tried as hard to
save a life as ever he had tried to save a soul, and had failed with
equal dignity. Inconsistency annoyed him very much. You must be one of
two things, a sheep or a goat, preferably the latter until the priest
himself had had time to lead you to the fold. For a confessed goat
suddenly to don wool without any help from him looked very much like
deliberate prevarication. He did not now know how to classify the
suffragette, and not knowing how to do a thing in which he had
specialised was naturally exasperating.
“You were asking for my advice about the problem of your future,” he
said, leaning confidentially towards her. “I have been thinking much
about you, and I believe I have solved the problem.”
I need hardly say that the suffragette never asked for advice. When
circumstances obliged her to follow the advisable course, she hid her
docility like a sin.
“My future always looks after itself, thank you,” she said in a polite
voice, “and so does my past. It’s old enough.”
The priest stiffened for a moment, but when on the track of a goat he
was hard to check. Besides, the suffragette’s voice was so low and calm
that her words seemed like a mistake, not to be taken seriously.
“My idea is that you should join in the glorious campaign against
poverty and sin in the slums,” he continued. “I assure you that peace
lies that way. My sister once had a love affair with a freethinker; she
lost a great deal of weight at the time, and became almost hysterical.
But she followed my advice, and now runs several social clubs in
connection with my Church in the Brown Borough, North London, where the
poor may buy cocoa and cake and listen to discourses by earnest
Christian workers.”
“And what does she weigh now?” asked the suffragette, after a pause.
“She is a splendid example of a Christian woman,” said the priest, “a
woman of unwavering faith, indefatigable in charitable works.”
“I think I shall come down to your parish as an antidote,” said the
suffragette, “the only sort of Anti I ever could tolerate.”
Certainly my suffragette is not worthy to be the heroine of a book. I
must apologise for presenting a nature so undiluted by any of the
qualities that go to make good fiction. A pun, I admit, is the last
straw, but it is unfortunately a straw occasionally clutched at by
erring humanity, though rarely admitted by the novelist.
“I should not advise you to choose the Brown Borough for the scene of
your endeavour,” said the priest hurriedly. “There is little scope for
workers unconnected with a church there. I had in my mind for you the
neighbourhood of Southwark, or Walworth, South London. Much more
suitable, yerce, yerce. The Brown Borough is very unhealthy for those
unaccustomed to London slums.”
“Yet your sister gained weight and lost hysteria there,” said the
suffragette maliciously. “I myself might be said to have room for
improvement on both these points.”
“I strongly advise you to choose another parish,” said the priest,
bitterly repenting of his zeal. “So much excellent work has been done in
the Brown Borough that the majority of the people ought by now to be on
the way to find salvation, both in body and soul.”
“That’s why I propose to come as an antidote,” said the suffragette.
The conversation closed itself. They opened the _Spectator_ and _Votes
for Women_ simultaneously.
London provided the sort of weather it reserves for those who return
from sun-blessed lands. It was a day with rain in the past and rain in
the future, but never rain in the present. The sort of day that makes
you feel glad you thought of bringing your umbrella, and then sorry to
find you left it in the last bus. The streets looked like wet slates
splashed with tears.
The suffragette kept a lonely flat not far from Covent Garden,
apparently with the object of ensuring herself the right to exercise a
vote when she should have procured that luxury. For she very seldom put
the flat to the ordinary uses of flats. It contained a table and two
chairs, as a provision against the unlikely event of its owner’s
succumbing to social weaknesses. It also contained a bed. Curtains and
carpets, and any cooking arrangement more elaborate than a gas-ring, are
not included in the Theory of the Hair Shirt, the motto of which is, “I
can very well do without.”
The suffragette deposited the mustard-coloured portmanteau at this
Spartan abode, and went to report herself to her Society. She was not a
famous suffragette. If I told you her name, you would not raise your
eyebrows and laugh facetiously and say, “Oh—_that_ maniac....” She was
nominally one of the rank and file, although, being rebellious even
against co-rebels, she seldom acted under orders.
There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of workers in the world, the
people who do all the work, and the people who think they do all the
work. The latter class is generally the busiest, the former never has
time to be busy.
The Chief Militant Suffragette, who believed that she held feminism in
the hollow of her hand, was a born leader of women. She was familiar
with the knack of wringing sacrifices from other people. She was a
little lady in a minor key, pale and plaintive, with short hair, like
spun sand. She dressed as nearly as possible like a man, and affected an
eyeglass. She probably thought that in doing this she sacrificed enough
for the cause of women. She had safely found a husband before she cut
her hair. I suppose she had sent more women to prison than any one
magistrate in London, but she had never been to prison herself.
The cause of the Suffrage, while attracting the finest women in the
country, also attracts those who consider themselves to be the finest.
It has an equal fascination for those who can work but can never lead
and for those who can lead but never work.
“I have written to you three times,” said the Chief M.S. pathetically to
the suffragette. “I do think you might have answered.”
“So do I,” admitted the suffragette, “only that I have been abroad. What
did you write to me about?”
“Abroad?” said the Chief M.S., and raised her eyebrows. She had none
really, but she raised the place where they should have been. “Abroad?
Enjoying yourself at such a time as this?”
“What do you mean?” asked the suffragette. “What has happened? Have we
got the Vote?”
The eyeglass of the Chief M.S. fell out with annoyance. “Of course not,”
she said, “but it’s the great massed procession and deputation
to-morrow, and I wanted you to help with the North London section.”
The suffragette loathed processions. She loathed working or walking with
a herd. She would rather have blown up Westminster Abbey than stewarded
at a meeting. A less honest woman would have flattered herself that
these are the signs of a great and lonely mind, but the suffragette knew
them as the signs of vanity. And to cure vanity is, of course, the
business of a hair shirt.
“When have I got to be there? And where?” she asked.
In the eyes of the Chief M.S. punctuality in other people was the ideal
virtue. The moment she named to her assistants was always an hour before
the correct time, and two hours before the one she chose for her own
appearance.