The years that followed--till, like some shipwrecked swimmer to whom
returning light reveals the land, she felt new life and hopes come back
to her--always remained in her memory vague, confused; a jumble of
events, thoughts, feelings, without sequence or connection.
She had gone down to Liverpool, intending to persuade her father to leave
the control of the works to Arthur, and to come and live with her in
London; but had left without broaching the subject. There were nights
when she would trapse the streets till she would almost fall exhausted,
rather than face the solitude awaiting her in her own rooms. But so also
there were moods when, like some stricken animal, her instinct was to
shun all living things. At such times his presence, for all his loving
patience, would have been as a knife in her wound. Besides, he would
always be there, when escape from herself for a while became an absolute
necessity. More and more she had come to regard him as her comforter.
Not from anything he ever said or did. Rather, it seemed to her, because
that with him she felt no need of words.
The works, since Arthur had shared the management, had gradually been
regaining their position; and he had urged her to let him increase her
allowance.
"It will give you greater freedom," he had suggested with fine assumption
of propounding a mere business proposition; "enabling you to choose your
work entirely for its own sake. I have always wanted to take a hand in
helping things on. It will come to just the same, your doing it for me."
She had suppressed a smile, and had accepted. "Thanks, Dad," she had
answered. "It will be nice, having you as my backer."
Her admiration of the independent woman had undergone some modification
since she had come in contact with her. Woman was intended to be
dependent upon man. It was the part appointed to him in the social
scheme. Woman had hers, no less important. Earning her own living did
not improve her. It was one of the drawbacks of civilization that so
many had to do it of necessity. It developed her on the wrong
lines--against her nature. This cry of the unsexed: that woman must
always be the paid servant instead of the helper of man--paid for being
mother, paid for being wife! Why not carry it to its logical conclusion,
and insist that she should be paid for her embraces? That she should
share in man's labour, in his hopes, that was the true comradeship. What
mattered it, who held the purse-strings!
Her room was always kept ready for her. Often she would lie there,
watching the moonlight creep across the floor; and a curious feeling
would come to her of being something wandering, incomplete. She would
see as through a mist the passionate, restless child with the rebellious
eyes to whom the room had once belonged; and later the strangely self-
possessed girl with that impalpable veil of mystery around her who would
stand with folded hands, there by the window, seeming always to be
listening. And she, too, had passed away. The tears would come into her
eyes, and she would stretch out yearning arms towards their shadowy
forms. But they would only turn upon her eyes that saw not, and would
fade away.
In the day-time, when Arthur and her father were at the works, she would
move through the high, square, stiffly-furnished rooms, or about the
great formal garden, with its ordered walks and level lawns. And as with
knowledge we come to love some old, stern face our childish eyes had
thought forbidding, and would not have it changed, there came to her with
the years a growing fondness for the old, plain brick-built house.
Generations of Allways had lived and died there: men and women somewhat
narrow, unsympathetic, a little hard of understanding; but at least
earnest, sincere, seeking to do their duty in their solid, unimaginative
way. Perhaps there were other ways besides those of speech and pen.
Perhaps one did better, keeping to one's own people; the very qualities
that separated us from them being intended for their need. What mattered
the colours, so that one followed the flag? Somewhere, all roads would
meet.
Arthur had to be in London generally once or twice a month, and it came
to be accepted that he should always call upon her and "take her out."
She had lost the self-sufficiency that had made roaming about London by
herself a pleasurable adventure; and a newly-born fear of what people
were saying and thinking about her made her shy even of the few friends
she still clung to, so that his visits grew to be of the nature of
childish treats to which she found herself looking forward--counting the
days. Also, she came to be dependent upon him for the keeping alight
within her of that little kindly fire of self-conceit at which we warm
our hands in wintry days. It is not good that a young woman should
remain for long a stranger to her mirror--above her frocks, indifferent
to the angle of her hat. She had met the women superior to feminine
vanities. Handsome enough, some of them must once have been; now sunk in
slovenliness, uncleanliness, in disrespect to womanhood. It would not be
fair to him. The worshipper has his rights. The goddess must remember
always that she is a goddess--must pull herself together and behave as
such, appearing upon her pedestal becomingly attired; seeing to it that
in all things she is at her best; not allowing private grief to render
her neglectful of this duty.
She had not told him of the Phillips episode. But she felt instinctively
that he knew. It was always a little mysterious to her, his perception
in matters pertaining to herself.
"I want your love," she said to him one day. "It helps me. I used to
think it was selfish of me to take it, knowing I could never return
it--not that love. But I no longer feel that now. Your love seems to me
a fountain from which I can drink without hurting you."
"I should love to be with you always," he answered, "if you wished it.
You won't forget your promise?"
She remembered it then. "No," she answered with a smile. "I shall keep
watch. Perhaps I shall be worthy of it by that time."
She had lost her faith in journalism as a drum for the rousing of the
people against wrong. Its beat had led too often to the trickster's
booth, to the cheap-jack's rostrum. It had lost its rallying power. The
popular Press had made the newspaper a byword for falsehood. Even its
supporters, while reading it because it pandered to their passions,
tickled their vices, and flattered their ignorance, despised and
disbelieved it. Here and there, an honest journal advocated a reform,
pleaded for the sweeping away of an injustice. The public shrugged its
shoulders. Another newspaper stunt! A bid for popularity, for
notoriety: with its consequent financial kudos.
She still continued to write for Greyson, but felt she was labouring for
the doomed. Lord Sutcliffe had died suddenly and his holding in the
_Evening Gazette_ had passed to his nephew, a gentleman more interested
in big game shooting than in politics. Greyson's support of Phillips had
brought him within the net of Carleton's operations, and negotiations for
purchase had already been commenced. She knew that, sooner or later,
Greyson would be offered the alternative of either changing his opinions
or of going. And she knew that he would go. Her work for Mrs. Denton
was less likely to be interfered with. It appealed only to the few, and
aimed at informing and explaining rather than directly converting. Useful
enough work in its way, no doubt; but to put heart into it seemed to
require longer views than is given to the eyes of youth.
Besides, her pen was no longer able to absorb her attention, to keep her
mind from wandering. The solitude of her desk gave her the feeling of a
prison. Her body made perpetual claims upon her, as though it were some
restless, fretful child, dragging her out into the streets without
knowing where it wanted to go, discontented with everything it did: then
hurrying her back to fling itself upon a chair, weary, but still
dissatisfied.
If only she could do something. She was sick of thinking.
These physical activities into which women were throwing themselves!
Where one used one's body as well as one's brain--hastened to
appointments; gathered round noisy tables; met fellow human beings,
argued with them, walked with them, laughing and talking; forced one's
way through crowds; cheered, shouted; stood up on platforms before a sea
of faces; roused applause, filling and emptying one's lungs; met
interruptions with swift flash of wit or anger, faced opposition,
danger--felt one's blood surging through one's veins, felt one's nerves
quivering with excitement; felt the delirious thrill of passion; felt the
mad joy of the loosened animal.
She threw herself into the suffrage movement. It satisfied her for a
while. She had the rare gift of public speaking, and enjoyed her
triumphs. She was temperate, reasonable; persuasive rather than
aggressive; feeling her audience as she went, never losing touch with
them. She had the magnetism that comes of sympathy. Medical students
who came intending to tell her to go home and mind the baby, remained to
wonder if man really was the undoubted sovereign of the world, born to
look upon woman as his willing subject; to wonder whether under some
unwritten whispered law it might not be the other way about. Perhaps she
had the right--with or without the baby--to move about the kingdom,
express her wishes for its care and management. Possibly his doubts may
not have been brought about solely by the force and logic of her
arguments. Possibly the voice of Nature is not altogether out of place
in discussions upon Humanity's affairs.
She wanted votes for women. But she wanted them clean--won without
dishonour. These "monkey tricks"--this apish fury and impatience!
Suppose it did hasten by a few months, more or less, the coming of the
inevitable. Suppose, by unlawful methods, one could succeed in dragging
a reform a little prematurely from the womb of time, did not one endanger
the child's health? Of what value was woman's influence on public
affairs going to be, if she was to boast that she had won the right to
exercise it by unscrupulousness and brutality?
They were to be found at every corner: the reformers who could not reform
themselves. The believers in universal brotherhood who hated half the
people. The denouncers of tyranny demanding lamp-posts for their
opponents. The bloodthirsty preachers of peace. The moralists who had
persuaded themselves that every wrong was justified provided one were
fighting for the right. The deaf shouters for justice. The excellent
intentioned men and women labouring for reforms that could only be hoped
for when greed and prejudice had yielded place to reason, and who sought
to bring about their ends by appeals to passion and self-interest.
And the insincere, the self-seekers, the self-advertisers! Those who
were in the business for even coarser profit! The lime-light lovers who
would always say and do the clever, the unexpected thing rather than the
useful and the helpful thing: to whom paradox was more than principle.
Ought there not to be a school for reformers, a training college where
could be inculcated self-examination, patience, temperance, subordination
to duty; with lectures on the fundamental laws, within which all progress
must be accomplished, outside which lay confusion and explosions; with
lectures on history, showing how improvements had been brought about and
how failure had been invited, thus avoiding much waste of reforming zeal;
with lectures on the properties and tendencies of human nature,
forbidding the attempt to treat it as a sum in rule of three?
There were the others. The men and women not in the lime-light. The
lone, scattered men and women who saw no flag but Pity's ragged skirt;
who heard no drum but the world's low cry of pain; who fought with feeble
hands against the wrong around them; who with aching heart and troubled
eyes laboured to make kinder the little space about them. The great army
of the nameless reformers uncheered, unparagraphed, unhonoured. The
unknown sowers of the seed. Would the reapers of the harvest remember
them?
Beyond giving up her visits to the house, she had made no attempt to
avoid meeting Phillips; and at public functions and at mutual friends
they sometimes found themselves near to one another. It surprised her
that she could see him, talk to him, and even be alone with him without
its troubling her. He seemed to belong to a part of her that lay dead
and buried--something belonging to her that she had thrust away with her
own hands: that she knew would never come back to her.
She was still interested in his work and keen to help him. It was going
to be a stiff fight. He himself, in spite of Carleton's opposition, had
been returned with an increased majority; but the Party as a whole had
suffered loss, especially in the counties. The struggle centred round
the agricultural labourer. If he could be won over the Government would
go ahead with Phillips's scheme. Otherwise there was danger of its being
shelved. The difficulty was the old problem of how to get at the men of
the scattered villages, the lonely cottages. The only papers that they
ever saw were those, chiefly of the Carleton group, that the farmers and
the gentry took care should come within their reach; that were handed to
them at the end of their day's work as a kindly gift; given to the school
children to take home with them; supplied in ample numbers to all the
little inns and public-houses. In all these, Phillips was held up as
their arch enemy, his proposal explained as a device to lower their
wages, decrease their chances of employment, and rob them of the produce
of their gardens and allotments. No arguments were used. A daily stream
of abuse, misrepresentation and deliberate lies, set forth under flaming
headlines, served their simple purpose. The one weekly paper that had
got itself established among them, that their fathers had always taken,
that dimly they had come to look upon as their one friend, Carleton had
at last succeeded in purchasing. When that, too, pictured Phillips's
plan as a diabolical intent to take from them even the little that they
had, and give it to the loafing socialist and the bloated foreigner, no
room for doubt was left to them.
He had organized volunteer cycle companies of speakers from the towns,
young working-men and women and students, to go out on summer evenings
and hold meetings on the village greens. They were winning their way.
But it was slow work. And Carleton was countering their efforts by a
hired opposition that followed them from place to place, and whose
interruptions were made use of to represent the whole campaign as a
fiasco.
"He's clever," laughed Phillips. "I'd enjoy the fight, if I'd only
myself to think of, and life wasn't so short."
The laugh died away and a shadow fell upon his face.
"If I could get a few of the big landlords to come in on my side," he
continued, "it would make all the difference in the world. They're
sensible men, some of them; and the whole thing could be carried out
without injury to any legitimate interest. I could make them see that,
if I could only get them quietly into a corner."
"But they're frightened of me," he added, with a shrug of his broad
shoulders, "and I don't seem to know how to tackle them."
Those drawing-rooms? Might not something of the sort be possible? Not,
perhaps, the sumptuous salon of her imagination, thronged with the fair
and famous, suitably attired. Something, perhaps, more homely, more
immediately attainable. Some of the women dressed, perhaps, a little
dowdily; not all of them young and beautiful. The men wise, perhaps,
rather than persistently witty; a few of them prosy, maybe a trifle
ponderous; but solid and influential. Mrs. Denton's great empty house in
Gower Street? A central situation and near to the tube. Lords and
ladies had once ruffled there; trod a measure on its spacious floors;
filled its echoing stone hall with their greetings and their partings.
The gaping sconces, where their link-boys had extinguished their torches,
still capped its grim iron railings.
Seated in the great, sombre library, Joan hazarded the suggestion. Mrs.
Denton might almost have been waiting for it. It would be quite easy. A
little opening of long fastened windows; a lighting of chill grates; a
little mending of moth-eaten curtains, a sweeping away of long-gathered
dust and cobwebs.
Mrs. Denton knew just the right people. They might be induced to bring
their sons and daughters--it might be their grandchildren, youth being
there to welcome them. For Joan, of course, would play her part.
The lonely woman touched her lightly on the hand. There shot a pleading
look from the old stern eyes.
"You will have to imagine yourself my daughter," she said. "You are
taller, but the colouring was the same. You won't mind, will you?"
The right people did come: Mrs. Denton being a personage that a landed
gentry, rendered jumpy by the perpetual explosion of new ideas under
their very feet, and casting about eagerly for friends, could not afford
to snub. A kindly, simple folk, quite intelligent, some of them, as
Phillips had surmised. Mrs. Denton made no mystery of why she had
invited them. Why should all questions be left to the politicians and
the journalists? Why should not the people interested take a hand; meet
and talk over these little matters with quiet voices and attentive ears,
amid surroundings where the unwritten law would restrain ladies and
gentlemen from addressing other ladies and gentlemen as blood-suckers or
anarchists, as grinders of the faces of the poor or as oily-tongued
rogues; arguments not really conducive to mutual understanding and the
bridging over of differences. The latest Russian dancer, the last new
musical revue, the marvellous things that can happen at golf, the curious
hands that one picks up at bridge, the eternal fox, the sacred bird!
Excellent material for nine-tenths of our conversation. But the
remaining tenth? Would it be such excruciatingly bad form for us to be
intelligent, occasionally; say, on one or two Fridays during the season?
Mrs. Denton wrapped it up tactfully; but that was her daring suggestion.
It took them aback at first. There were people who did this sort of
thing. People of no class, who called themselves names and took up
things. But for people of social standing to talk about serious
subjects--except, perhaps, in bed to one's wife! It sounded so
un-English.
With the elders it was sense of duty that prevailed. That, at all
events, was English. The country must be saved. To their sons and
daughters it was the originality, the novelty that gradually appealed.
Mrs. Denton's Fridays became a new sensation. It came to be the chic and
proper thing to appear at them in shades of mauve or purple. A pushing
little woman in Hanover Street designed the "Denton" bodice, with hanging
sleeves and square-cut neck. The younger men inclined towards a coat
shaped to the waist with a roll collar.
Joan sighed. It looked as if the word had been passed round to treat the
whole thing as a joke. Mrs. Denton took a different view.
"Nothing better could have happened," she was of opinion. "It means that
their hearts are in it."
The stone hall was still vibrating to the voices of the last departed
guests. Joan was seated on a footstool before the fire in front of Mrs.
Denton's chair.
"It's the thing that gives me greatest hope," she continued. "The
childishness of men and women. It means that the world is still young,
still teachable."
"But they're so slow at their lessons," grumbled Joan. "One repeats it
and repeats it; and then, when one feels that surely now at least one has
drummed it into their heads, one finds they have forgotten all that one
has ever said."
"Not always forgotten," answered Mrs. Denton; "mislaid, it may be, for
the moment. An Indian student, the son of an old Rajah, called on me a
little while ago. He was going back to organize a system of education
among his people. 'My father heard you speak when you were over in
India,' he told me. 'He has always been thinking about it.' Thirty
years ago it must have been, that I undertook that mission to India. I
had always looked back upon it as one of my many failures."
"But why leave it to his son," argued Joan. "Why couldn't the old man
have set about it himself, instead of wasting thirty precious years?"
"I should have preferred it, myself," agreed Mrs. Denton. "I remember
when I was a very little girl my mother longing for a tree upon the lawn
underneath which she could sit. I found an acorn and planted it just in
the right spot. I thought I would surprise her. I happened to be in the
neighbourhood last summer, and I walked over. There was such a nice old
lady sitting under it, knitting stockings. So you see it wasn't wasted."
"I wouldn't mind the waiting," answered Joan, "if it were not for the
sorrow and the suffering that I see all round me. I want to get rid of
it right away, now. I could be patient for myself, but not for others."
The little old lady straightened herself. There came a hardening of the
thin, firm mouth.
"And those that have gone before?" she demanded. "Those that have won
the ground from where we are fighting. Had they no need of patience? Was
the cry never wrung from their lips: 'How long, oh Lord, how long?' Is
it for us to lay aside the sword that they bequeath us because we cannot
hope any more than they to see the far-off victory? Fifty years I have
fought, and what, a few years hence, will my closing eyes still see but
the banners of the foe still waving, fresh armies pouring to his
standard?"
She flung back her head and the grim mouth broke into a smile.
"But I've won," she said. "I'm dying further forward. I've helped
advance the line."
She put out her hands and drew Joan to her.
"Let me think of you," she said, "as taking my place, pushing the
outposts a little further on."
Joan did not meet Hilda again till the child had grown into a
woman--practically speaking. She had always been years older than her
age. It was at a reception given in the Foreign Office. Joan's dress
had been trodden on and torn. She had struggled out of the crowd into an
empty room, and was examining the damage somewhat ruefully, when she
heard a voice behind her, proffering help. It was a hard, cold voice,
that yet sounded familiar, and she turned.
There was no forgetting those deep, burning eyes, though the face had
changed. The thin red lips still remained its one touch of colour; but
the unhealthy whiteness of the skin had given place to a delicate pallor;
and the features that had been indistinct had shaped themselves in fine,
firm lines. It was a beautiful, arresting face, marred only by the
sullen callousness of the dark, clouded eyes.
Joan was glad of the assistance. Hilda produced pins.
"I always come prepared to these scrimmages," she explained. "I've got
some Hazeline in my bag. They haven't kicked you, have they?"
"No," laughed Joan. "At least, I don't think so."
"They do sometimes," answered Hilda, "if you happen to be in the way,
near the feeding troughs. If they'd only put all the refreshments into
one room, one could avoid it. But they will scatter them about so that
one never knows for certain whether one is in the danger zone or not. I
hate a mob."
"Why do you come?" asked Joan.
"Oh, I!" answered the girl. "I go everywhere where there's a chance of
picking up a swell husband. They've got to come to these shows, they
can't help themselves. One never knows what incident may give one one's
opportunity."
Joan shot a glance. The girl was evidently serious.
"You think it would prove a useful alliance?" she suggested.
"It would help, undoubtedly," the girl answered. "I don't see any other
way of getting hold of them."
Joan seated herself on one of the chairs ranged round the walls, and drew
the girl down beside her. Through the closed door, the mingled voices of
the Foreign Secretary's guests sounded curiously like the buzzing of
flies.
"It's quite easy," said Joan, "with your beauty. Especially if you're
not going to be particular. But isn't there danger of your devotion to
your father leading you too far? A marriage founded on a lie--no matter
for what purpose!--mustn't it degrade a woman--smirch her soul for all
time? We have a right to give up the things that belong to ourselves,
but not the things that belong to God: our truth, our sincerity, our
cleanliness of mind and body; the things that He may one day want of us.
It led you into evil once before. Don't think I'm judging you. I was no
better than you. I argued just as you must have done. Something stopped
me just in time. That was the only difference between us."
The girl turned her dark eyes full upon Joan. "What did stop you?" she
demanded.
"Does it matter what we call it?" answered Joan. "It was a voice."
"It told me to do it," answered the girl.
"Did no other voice speak to you?" asked Joan.
"Yes," answered the girl. "The voice of weakness."
There came a fierce anger into the dark eyes. "Why did you listen to
it?" she demanded. "All would have been easy if you hadn't."
"You mean," answered Joan quietly, "that if I had let your mother die and
had married your father, that he and I would have loved each other to the
end; that I should have helped him and encouraged him in all things, so
that his success would have been certain. Is that the argument?"
"Didn't you love him?" asked the girl, staring. "Wouldn't you have
helped him?"
"I can't tell," answered Joan. "I should have meant to. Many men and
women have loved, and have meant to help each other all their lives; and
with the years have drifted asunder; coming even to be against one
another. We change and our thoughts change; slight differences of
temperament grow into barriers between us; unguessed antagonisms widen
into gulfs. Accidents come into our lives. A friend was telling me the
other day of a woman who practically proposed to and married a musical
genius, purely and solely to be of use to him. She earned quite a big
income, drawing fashions; and her idea was to relieve him of the
necessity of doing pot-boilers for a living, so that he might devote his
whole time to his real work. And a few weeks after they were married she
ran the point of a lead pencil through her eye and it set up inflammation
of her brain. And now all the poor fellow has to think of is how to make
enough to pay for her keep at a private lunatic asylum. I don't mean to
be flippant. It's the very absurdity of it all that makes the mystery of
life--that renders it so hopeless for us to attempt to find our way
through it by our own judgment. It is like the ants making all their
clever, laborious plans, knowing nothing of chickens and the gardener's
spade. That is why we have to cling to the life we can order for
ourselves--the life within us. Truth, Justice, Pity. They are the
strong things, the eternal things, the things we've got to sacrifice
ourselves for--serve with our bodies and our souls.
"Don't think me a prig," she pleaded. "I'm talking as if I knew all
about it. I don't really. I grope in the dark; and now and then--at
least so it seems to me--I catch a glint of light. We are powerless in
ourselves. It is only God working through us that enables us to be of
any use. All we can do is to keep ourselves kind and clean and free from
self, waiting for Him to come to us."
The girl rose. "I must be getting back," she said. "Dad will be
wondering where I've got to."
She paused with the door in her hand, and a faint smile played round the
thin red lips.
"Tell me," she said. "What is God?"
"A Labourer, together with man, according to Saint Paul," Joan answered.
The girl turned and went. Joan watched her as she descended the great
staircase. She moved with a curious, gliding motion, pausing at times
for the people to make way for her.