THE CONFLICT OF THE NIGHT
Her brain was a steam-wheel throughout the night; everything that could
be thought of was tossed, nothing grasped.
The unfriendliness of the friends who sought to retain her recurred. For
look--to fly could not be interpreted as a flight. It was but a stepping
aside, a disdain of defending herself, and a wrapping herself in her
dignity. Women would be with her. She called on the noblest of them to
justify the course she chose, and they did, in an almost audible murmur.
And O the rich reward. A black archway-gate swung open to the glittering
fields of freedom.
Emma was not of the chorus. Emma meditated as an invalid. How often had
Emma bewailed to her that the most, grievous burden of her malady was her
fatal tendency to brood sickly upon human complications! She could not
see the blessedness of the prospect of freedom to a woman abominably
yoked. What if a miserable woman were dragged through mire to reach it!
Married, the mire was her portion, whatever she might do. That man--but
pass him!
And that other--the dear, the kind, careless, high-hearted old friend.
He could honestly protest his guiltlessness, and would smilingly leave
the case to go its ways. Of this she was sure, that her decision and her
pleasure would be his. They were tied to the stake. She had already
tasted some of the mortal agony. Did it matter whether the flames
consumed her?
Reflecting on the interview with Redworth, though she had performed her
part in it placidly, her skin burned. It was the beginning of tortures
if she stayed in England.
By staying to defend herself she forfeited her attitude of dignity and
lost all chance of her reward. And name the sort of world it is, dear
friends, for which we are to sacrifice our one hope of freedom, that we
may preserve our fair fame in it!
Diana cried aloud, 'My freedom!' feeling as a butterfly flown out of a
box to stretches of sunny earth beneath spacious heavens. Her bitter
marriage, joyless in all its chapters, indefensible where the man was
right as well as where insensately wrong, had been imprisonment. She
excused him down to his last madness, if only the bonds were broken.
Here, too, in this very house of her happiness with her father, she had
bound herself to the man voluntarily, quite inexplicably. Voluntarily,
as we say. But there must be a spell upon us at times. Upon young women
there certainly is.
The wild brain of Diana, armed by her later enlightenment as to the laws
of life and nature, dashed in revolt at the laws of the world when she
thought of the forces, natural and social, urging young women to marry
and be bound to the end.
It should be a spotless world which is thus ruthless.
But were the world impeccable it would behave more generously.
The world is ruthless, dear friends, because the world is hypocrite!
The world cannot afford to be magnanimous, or even just.
Her dissensions with her husband, their differences of opinion, and puny
wranglings, hoistings of two standards, reconciliations for the sake of
decency, breaches of the truce, and his detested meanness, the man behind
the mask; and glimpses of herself too, the half-known, half-suspected,
developing creature claiming to be Diana, and unlike her dreamed Diana,
deformed by marriage, irritable, acerb, rebellious, constantly
justifiable against him, but not in her own mind, and therefore accusing
him of the double crime of provoking her and perverting her--these were
the troops defiling through her head while she did battle with the
hypocrite world.
One painful sting was caused by the feeling that she could have loved--
whom? An ideal. Had he, the imagined but unvisioned, been her yoke-
fellow, would she now lie raising caged-beast cries in execration of the
yoke? She would not now be seeing herself as hare, serpent, tigress!
The hypothesis was reviewed in negatives: she had barely a sense of
softness, just a single little heave of the bosom, quivering upward and
leadenly sinking, when she glanced at a married Diana heartily mated.
The regrets of the youthful for a life sailing away under medical
sentence of death in the sad eyes of relatives resemble it. She could
have loved. Good-bye to that!
A woman's brutallest tussle with the world was upon her. She was in the
arena of the savage claws, flung there by the man who of all others
should have protected her from them. And what had she done to deserve
it? She listened to the advocate pleading her case; she primed him to
admit the charges, to say the worst, in contempt of legal prudence, and
thereby expose her transparent honesty. The very things awakening a mad
suspicion proved her innocence. But was she this utterly simple person?
Oh, no! She was the Diana of the pride in her power of fencing with
evil--by no means of the order of those ninny young women who realize the
popular conception of the purely innocent. She had fenced and kept her
guard. Of this it was her angry glory to have the knowledge. But she
had been compelled to fence. Such are men in the world of facts, that
when a woman steps out of her domestic tangle to assert, because it is a
tangle, her rights to partial independence, they sight her for their
prey, or at least they complacently suppose her accessible. Wretched at
home, a woman ought to bury herself in her wretchedness, else may she be
assured that not the cleverest, wariest guard will cover her character.
Against the husband her cause was triumphant. Against herself she
decided not to plead it, for this reason, that the preceding Court, which
was the public and only positive one, had entirely and justly exonerated
her. But the holding of her hand by the friend half a minute too long
for friendship, and the over-friendliness of looks, letters, frequency of
visits, would speak within her. She had a darting view of her husband's
estimation of them in his present mood. She quenched it; they were
trifles, things that women of the world have to combat. The revelation
to a fair-minded young woman of the majority of men being naught other
than men, and some of the friendliest of men betraying confidence under
the excuse of temptation, is one of the shocks to simplicity which leave
her the alternative of misanthropy or philosophy. Diana had not the
heart to hate her kind, so she resigned herself to pardon, and to the
recognition of the state of duel between the sexes-active enough in her
sphere of society. The circle hummed with it; many lived for it. Could
she pretend to ignore it? Her personal experience might have instigated
a less clear and less intrepid nature to take advantage of the
opportunity for playing the popular innocent, who runs about with
astonished eyes to find herself in so hunting a world, and wins general
compassion, if not shelter in unsuspected and unlicenced places. There
is perpetually the inducement to act the hypocrite before the hypocrite
world, unless a woman submits to be the humbly knitting housewife,
unquestioningly worshipful of her lord; for the world is ever gracious to
an hypocrisy that pays homage to the mask of virtue by copying it; the
world is hostile to the face of an innocence not conventionally simpering
and quite surprised; the world prefers decorum to honesty. 'Let me be
myself, whatever the martyrdom!' she cried, in that phase of young
sensation when, to the blooming woman; the putting on of a mask appears
to wither her and reduce her to the show she parades. Yet, in common
with her sisterhood, she owned she had worn a sort of mask; the world
demands it of them as the price of their station. That she had never
worn it consentingly, was the plea for now casting it off altogether,
showing herself as she was, accepting martyrdom, becoming the first
martyr of the modern woman's cause--a grand position! and one imaginable
to an excited mind in the dark, which does not conjure a critical humour,
as light does, to correct the feverish sublimity. She was, then, this
martyr, a woman capable of telling the world she knew it, and of,
confessing that she had behaved in disdain of its rigider rules,
according to her own ideas of her immunities. O brave!
But was she holding the position by flight? It involved the challenge
of consequences, not an evasion of them.
She moaned; her mental steam-wheel stopped; fatigue brought sleep.
She had sensationally led her rebellious wits to The Crossways,
distilling much poison from thoughts on the way; and there, for the
luxury of a still seeming indecision, she sank into oblivion.