HONORIA AND HER FRIENDS
The story of Honoria Fraser was something like this: partly
guesswork, I admit. Although I know her well I can only put her past
together by deductions based on a few admitted facts, one or two
letters and occasional unfinished sentences, interrupted by
people coming in. Is it not _always_ thus with our friends and
acquaintances? I long to know all about them from their birth
(including date and place of birth and parentage) onwards; what the
father's profession was and why on earth he married the mother
(after I saw the daguerreotype portrait), and how they became
possessed of so much money, and why she went back to live with _her_
mother between the birth of her second child and the near advent of
her third. But in how very few cases do we know their whole story,
do we even care to know more than is sufficient for our purpose in
issuing or accepting invitations? There are the Dombeys--the Gorings
as they're now called, who live near us. I've seen the tombstone of
Lucilla Smith in Goring churchyard, but I don't know _for a fact_
that Lord Goring was the father of Lucilla's son (who was killed in
the war). I guess he was, from this and that, from what Mrs. Legg
told me, and what I overheard at the Sterns'. If he wasn't, then he
has only himself to thank for the wrong assumption: I mean, from his
goings-on.
Then again, the Clementses, who live at the Grange. I feel
instinctively they are _nice_ people, but I haven't the least idea
who _she_ was and how _he_ made his money, though from his acreage
and his motors I am entitled to assume he has a large income. She
seems to know a lot about Spain; but I don't feel encouraged to ask
her: "Was your father in the wine trade? Is _that_ why you know
Xeres so well?" Clements himself has in his study an enlarged
photograph of a handsome woman with a kind of mourning wreath round
the frame--beautifully carved. Is it the portrait of a former wife?
Or of a sister who committed suicide? Or was it merely bought in
Venice for the sake of the carving? Perhaps I shall know some
day--if it matters. In a moment of expansion during the Railway
Strike, Mrs. Clements will say: "_That_ was poor Walter's first. She
died of acute dyspepsia, poor thing, on their marriage tour, and was
buried at Venice. Don't ever allude to it because he feels it so
dreadfully." And my curiosity will have been rewarded for its long
and patient restraint. Clements' little finger on his left hand is
mutilated. I have never asked why--a lawn-mowing machine? Or a bite
from some passionate mistress in a buried past? I note silently that
he disapproves of palmistry--
But about Honoria Fraser, to whom I was introduced by Mr. George
Bernard Shaw twenty years ago: She was born in 1872, as _Who's Who_
will tell you; also that she was the daughter and eldest child of a
famous physician (Sir Meldrum Fraser) who wrought some marvellous
cures in the 'sixties, 'seventies and 'eighties, chiefly by dieting
and psycho-therapy. (He got his knighthood in the first jubilee year
for reducing to reasonable proportions the figure of good-hearted,
thoroughly kindly, and much loved Princess Mary of Oxford.)
He--Honoria's father--was married to a beautiful woman, a relation
of Bessie Rayner Parkes, with inherited advanced views on the Rights
and Position of Woman. Lady Fraser was, indeed, an early type of
Suffragist and also wrote some poetry which was far from bad. They
had two children: Honoria, born, as I say, in 1872; and John (John
Stuart Mill Fraser was his full name--too great a burden to be
borne) four years later than Honoria, who was devoted to him,
idolized him, as did his mother and father. Honoria went to Bedford
College and Newnham; John to one of the two most famous of our
public schools (I need not be more precise), with Cambridge in view
afterwards.
But in the case of John a tragedy occurred. He had risen to be head
of the school; statesmen with little affectation applauded him on
speech days. He had been brilliant as a batsman, was a champion
swimmer, and _facile princeps_ in the ineptitudes of the classics;
and showed a dazzling originality in other studies scarcely within
the school curriculum. Further he was growing out of boy gawkiness
into a handsome youth of an Apolline mould, when, on the morning of
his eighteenth birthday, he was found dead in his bed, with a bottle
of cyanide of potassium on the bed-table to explain why.
All else was wrapt in mystery ... at any rate it was a mystery I
have no wish to lay bare. The death and the inquest verdict,
"Suicide while of unsound mind, due to overstudy," broke his
father's heart and his mother's: in the metaphorical meaning of
course, because the heart is an unemotional pump and it is the brain
and the nerve centres that suffer from our emotions. Sir Meldrum
Fraser died a year after his son. He left a fortune of eighty
thousand pounds. Half of this went at once to Honoria and the other
half to the life-use of Lady Fraser with a reversion to her
daughter.
Honoria after her father's death left Cambridge and moved her mother
from Harley Street to Queen Anne's Mansions so that with her
shattered nerves and loss of interest in life she might have no
household worries, or at any rate nothing worse than remonstrating
with the still-room maids on the twice-boiled water brought in for
the making of tea; or with the culinary department over the
monotonous character of the savouries or the tepid ice creams which
dissolved so rapidly into fruit-juice when they were served after a
house-dinner.[1] Honoria herself, mistress of a clear two thousand
pounds a year, and more in prospect, carried out plans formed while
still at Newnham after her brother's death. She, like Vivien Warren,
her three-years-younger friend and college-mate, was a great
mathematician--a thing I never could be and a status I am incapable
of understanding; consequently one I view at first with the deepest
respect. I am quite astonished when I meet a male or female
mathematician and find they require food as I do, are less quick at
adding up bridge scores, lose rather than win at Goodwood, and write
down the "down" train instead of the "up" in their memorabilia. But
there it is. They have only to apply sines and co-sines, tangents
and logarithms to a stock exchange quotation for me to grovel before
their superior wisdom and consult them at every turn in life.
[Footnote 1: This, of course, was twenty, years ago.--H.H.J.]
Honoria had resolved to turn her great acquirements in Algebra and
the Higher Mathematics to practical purposes. Being the ignoramus
that I am--in this direction--I cannot say how it was to be done;
but both she and Vivie had grasped the possibilities which lay
before exceptionally well-educated women on the Stock Exchange, in
the Provision markets, in the Law, in Insurance calculations, and
generally in steering other and weaker women through the
difficulties and pitfalls of our age; when in nine cases out of
thirteen (Honoria worked out the ratio) women of large or moderate
means have only dishonest male proficients to guide them.
Moreover Honoria's purpose was two-fold. She wished to help women in
their business affairs, but she also wanted to find careers for
women. She, like Vivien Warren, was a nascent suffragist--perhaps a
born suffragist, a reasoned one; because the ferment had been in her
mother, and her grandmother was a friend of Lydia Becker and a
cousin of Mrs. Belloc. John's death had been a horrible numbing
shock to Honoria, and she felt hardly in her right mind for three
months afterwards. Then on reflection it left some tarnish on her
family, even if the memory of the dear dead boy, the too brilliant
boy, softened from the poignancy of utter disappointment into a
tender sorrow and an infinite pity and forgiveness.
But the tragedy turned her thoughts from marriage to some mission of
well-doing. She determined to devote that proportion of her
inheritance which would have been John's share to this end: the
liberation and redemption of women.
She was no "anti-man," like Vivie. She liked men, if truth were
told, a tiny wee bit more than women. But she wished in the moods
that followed her brother's death in 1894 to be a mother by
adoption, a refuge for the fallen, the bewildered, the unstrung. She
helped young men back into the path of respectability and
wage-earning as well as young women. She was even, when opportunity
offered, a matchmaker.
Being heiress eventually to £4,000 a year (a large income in pre-war
days) and of attractive appearance, she had no lack of suitors, even
though she thought modern dancing inane, and had little skill at
ball-games. I have indicated her appearance by some few phrases
already; but to enable you to visualize her more definitely I might
be more precise. She was a tall woman rather than large built, like
the young Juno when first wooed by Jove. Where she departed from the
Junonian type she turned towards Venus rather than Minerva; in spite
of being a mathematician. You meet with her sisters in physical
beauty among the Americans of Pennsylvania, where, to a stock mainly
Anglo-Saxon, is added a delicious strain of Gallic race; or you see
her again among the Cape Dutch women who have had French Huguenot
great grandparents. It is perhaps rather impertinent continuing
this analysis of her charm, seeing that she lives and flourishes
more than ever, twenty years after the opening of my story; not very
different in outward appearance at 48, as Lady Armstrong--for of
course, as you guess already, she married Major--afterwards Sir
Petworth--Armstrong--than she was at twenty-eight, the partner,
friend and helper of Vivien Warren.
Being in comfortable circumstances, highly educated, handsome,
attractive, with a mezzo-soprano voice of rare beauty and great
skill as a piano-forte accompanyist, she had not only suitors who
took her rejection without bitterness, but hosts of friends. She
knew all the nice London people of her day: Lady Feenix, who in some
ways resembled her, Diana Dombey, who did not _quite_ approve of
her, being a little uncertain yet about welcoming the New Woman, all
the Ritchies, married and unmarried, Lady Brownlow, the Duchess of
Bedford (Adeline), the Michael Fosters, most of the Stracheys (she
liked the ones I liked), the Hubert Parrys, the Ripons (how she
admired Lady Ripon, as who did not!), Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton, Miss
Lena Ashwell, the Bernard Shaws, the Wilfred Meynells, the H.G.
Wellses, the Sidney Webbs; and--leaving uninstanced a number of
other delightful, warm-blooded, pleasant-voiced, natural-mannered
people--the Rossiters.
Or at least, Michael Rossiter. For although you could tolerate for
his sake Mrs. Rossiter, and even find her a source of quiet
amusement, you could hardly say you liked her--not in the way you
could say it of most of the men and women I have specified. Michael
Rossiter, who comes into this story, ought really if there were a
discriminating wide-awake, up-to-date Providence--which there is
not--to have met Honoria when she was twenty. (At nineteen such a
woman is still immature; and moreover until she was twenty, Honoria
had not mastered the Binomial Theorem.) Had he married her at that
period he would himself have been about twenty-seven which is quite
soon enough for a great man of science to marry and procreate
geniuses. But as a matter of fact, when he came down to Cambridge
in--? 1892--to deliver a course of Vacation lectures on embryology,
he was already two years married to Linda Bennet, an heiress, the
daughter and niece (her parents died when she was young and she
lived with an uncle and aunt) of very rich manufacturers at Leeds.
So, though his eye, quick to discern beauty, and his brain tentacles
ready to detect intelligence combined with a lovely nature, soon
singled out Honoria Fraser, amongst a host of less attractive
girl-graduates, he had no more thought of falling in love with her
than with a princess of the blood-royal. He might, long since,
within a month of his marriage have found out his Linda to be a
pretty little simpleton with a brain incapable of taking in any more
than it had learnt at a Scarborough finishing school; but he was too
instinctive a gentleman to indulge in any flirtation, any deviation
whatever from mental or physical monogamy. For he remembered always
that it was his wife's money which had enabled him to pursue his
great researches without the heart-breaking delays, limitations and
insufficiencies involved in Government or Royal Society grants; and
that Linda had not only endowed him with all her worldly goods--all
but those he had insisted in putting into settlement--but that she
had given him all her heart and confidence as well.
Still, he liked Honoria. She was eager to learn much else beyond the
hard-grained muses of the square and cube; she was the daughter of a
prosperous and boldly experimental physician, whose wife was a
champion of women's rights. So he pressed Honoria to come with her
mother and make the acquaintance of himself and Linda in Portland
Place.
Why was Michael Rossiter wedded to Linda Bennet when he was no more
than twenty-five, and she just past her coming of age? Because fresh
from Edinburgh and Cambridge and with a reputation for unusual
intuition in Biology and Chemistry he had come to be Science master
at a great College in the North, and thus meeting Linda at the
Philosophical Institute of Leeds had caused her to fall in love with
him whilst he lectured on the Cainozoic fauna of Yorkshire. He was
himself a Northumbrian of borderland stock: something of the Dane
and Angle, the Pict and Briton with a dash of the Gypsy folk: a
blend which makes the Northumbrian people so much more productive of
manly beauty, intellectual vivacity, bold originality than the
slow-witted, bulky, crafty Saxons of Yorkshire or the under-sized,
rugged-featured Britons of Lancashire.
Linda fell in love all in one evening with his fiery eyes, black
beard, the Northumbrian burr of his pronunciation, and the daring of
his utterances, though she could scarcely grasp one of his
hypotheses. Her uncle and aunt being narrowly pietistic she was
bored to death with the Old Testament, and Rossiter's scarcely
concealed contempt for the Mosaic story of creation captured her
intellect; while the physical attraction she felt was that which the
tall, handsome, resolute brunet has for the blue-eyed fluffy little
blonde. She openly made love to him over the tea and coffee served
at the "soirée" which followed the lecture. Her slow-witted guardian
had no objection to offer; and there were not wanting go-betweens to
urge on Rossiter with stories of her wealth and the expanding value
of her financial interests. He wanted to marry; he was touched by
her ill-concealed passion, found her pretty and appealingly
childlike. So, after a short wooing, he married her and her five
thousand pounds a year, and settled down in Park Crescent, Portland
Place, so as to be near the Zoo and Tudell's dissecting rooms, to
have the Royal Botanic gardens within three minutes' walk, and the
opportunity of turning a large studio in the rear of his house into
a well-equipped chemical and dissecting laboratory. One of his close
pursuits at that time was the analysis of the Thyroid gland and its
functions, its over or under development in British statesmen,
dramatic authors and East End immigrants.