“Dear Miss Carfax,—I have three dress-circles for a matinée of ‘The Lost Daughter’ on Saturday afternoon. Jane is coming up from Croydon. Will you honour me by joining us? We might have a little lunch at Frascati’s before the theatre. I shall be proud if you accept, and I want you to meet Jane.“Very sincerely yours,“John Parfit.”
“Dear Miss Carfax,—I have three dress-circles for a matinée of ‘The Lost Daughter’ on Saturday afternoon. Jane is coming up from Croydon. Will you honour me by joining us? We might have a little lunch at Frascati’s before the theatre. I shall be proud if you accept, and I want you to meet Jane.
“Very sincerely yours,
“John Parfit.”
She did accept, glad to escape from herself for an afternoon, and refusing to ask herself any serious questions. Mr. Parfit was in great spirits. Eve discovered “Sister Jane” to be a stout, blonde, good-humoured woman with an infinite capacity for feeling domestic affection. She studied Eve with feminine interest, and meeting her brother’s eyes, smiled at him from time to time with motherly approval.
The play was a British Public play, sentimentally sexual, yet guardedly inoffensive. Eve enjoyed it. She found that John Parfit had to use his handkerchief, and that he became thick in the throat. She did not like him any the less for being capable of emotion. It seemed to be part of his personality.
Afterwards they had tea together, and Mr. Parfit’s benevolence became tinged with affectionate playfulness. He made jokes, teased his sister, and tried to make Eve enter into a guessing competition as to which fancy cakes each would choose.
She appreciated his discretion when he put her in a taxi, gave the driver four shillings, and packed her off to Bosnia Road. He himself was going to see Jane off at Charing Cross. Also, he and Jane had something to discuss.
“Well, old thing, how does she strike you?”
“I’m a cautious soul, John, but I’m a woman, and we’re quick about other women. She’s the right stuff, even if she’s clever, and a little proud. It doesn’t do a girl any harm to have a little pride. Fine eyes, too, and good style.”
“I knew you’d think that.”
“Did you now? What do you know about women, you great big baby?”
CHAPTER XXX
MORE EXPERIENCES
January and February passed, and Eve’s capital dwindled steadily, with no very obvious prospect of her being able to replenish it. She sold three more small pictures, and had one or two dress designs accepted by a woman’s journal, but these fragments of good fortune were more than counterbalanced by a piece of knavish luck. One wet day, just as it was getting dusk, she had her vanity-bag snatched from her. It contained five pounds that she had drawn from the bank about half an hour before. She never had another glimpse of the bag or of the thief. Her balance had been reduced now to sixteen pounds, and all that she had foreseen in her panic moods seemed likely to be fulfilled.
Her diet became a diet of milk and buns, tea, stale eggs, and bread and butter. She spent nothing on dress, and wore her shoes long after they should have gone to the cobbler. She planned to do most of her own washing at home, drying it in front of her sitting-room fire, and putting up with the moist, steamy smell and her landlady’s contemptuous face. Mrs. Buss’s affability was beginning to wear very thin, for it was a surface virtue at its best. Poverty does not always inspire that human pity that we read of in sentimental stories. Primitive peoples have a horror of sickness and death, and civilisation has developed in many of us a similar horror of tragic poverty. It is to be found both in people who have struggled, and in those who have never had to struggle, and Mrs. Buss belonged to the former class. To her, poverty was a sour smell that associated itself with early and bitter memories. It brought back old qualms of mean dread and envy. She had learnt to look on poverty as a pest, and anyone who was contaminated with it became a source of offence. She recognised all the symptoms in Eve’s pathetic little economies, and straightway she began to wish her out of the house.
Eve noticed that Mrs. Buss’s voice became a grumbling murmur when she heard her talking to her son. Intuition attached a personal meaning to these discontented reverberations, and intuition was not at fault.
“I haven’t slaved all my life to let rooms to people who can’t pay! I know how the wind blows! She’s getting that mean, meat once a week, and a scuttle of coal made to last two days! Next thing’ll be that she’ll be getting ill.”
Albert was not interested, and his mother’s grumblings bored him.
“Why don’t you turn her out?”
“I shall have to wait till she’s short with her week’s money. And then, you may have to wait a month or two before you can get another let. It’s a noosance and a shame.”
Eve began to answer the advertisements in one or two daily papers, and to spend a few shillings in advertising on her own account. The results were not encouraging. It seemed to be a meaner world than she had imagined it to be, for people wanted to buy her body and soul for less than was paid to an ordinary cook. In fact, a servant girl was an autocrat, a gentlewoman a slave. She rebelled. She refused to be sweated—refused it with passion.
She advertised herself as willing to give painting lessons, but nothing came of it, save that one of her advertisements happened to catch Mr. Parfit’s eyes. Sister Jane had called, and her brother had taken Eve twice to a theatre, and once to a concert. He dared to question her solicitously about the ways and means of life.
“How are you getting along, you know? Don’t mind me, I’m only everybody’s uncle.”
She did not tell him the worst.
“I can’t quite get the thing I want.”
“How many people are doing what they want to?”
“Not many.”
“One in a hundred. I wanted to be a farmer, and I’m stuck on a stool. We grumble and grouse, but we have to put on the harness. Life’s like that!”
She was looking thin and ill, and he had noticed it.
“Wait a bit. Seems to me I shall have to play the inquiring father. You’re not playing the milk and bun game, are you?”
“Sometimes.”
He looked indignant, yet sympathetic.
“That’s just what you women do, mess up your digestions with jam and tea and cake. A doctor told me once that he had seen dozens of girls on the edge of scurvy. You must feed properly.”
“I get all I want.”
His kindly, emotional nature burst into flame.
“Now, Miss Carfax, you’ve just got to tell me if you’re wanting any sympathy, sympathy of the solid sort, I mean. Don’t stand on ceremony. I’m a man before I’m a ceremony.”
She found herself flushing.
“Thank you so much. I understand. I will tell you if I ever want to be helped.”
“Promise.”
“Yes.”
“That’s a dear, good girl.”
Mrs. Buss’s prophetic pessimism was justified by the event. Raw weather, leaky shoes and poor food may have helped in the overthrow, but early in March Eve caught influenzal pneumonia. The whole house was overturned. A trained nurse followed the doctor, and the nurse had to be provided with a bed, Mr. Albert Buss being reduced to sleeping on a sitting-room sofa. His mother’s grumbling now found a more ready echo in him. What was the use of making oneself uncomfortable for the benefit of a nurse who was plain and past thirty, and not worth meeting on the stairs?
Mrs. Buss grumbled at the extra housework and the additional cooking.
“Just my luck. Didn’t I say she’d get ill? She’ll have to pay me more a week for doing for the nurse and having my house turned upside down.”
But for the time being Eve was beyond the world of worries, lost in the phantasies of fever, dazed by day, and delirious at night. She was bad, very bad, and even the bored and harassed middle-class doctor allowed that she was in danger, and might need a second nurse. But at the end of the second week the disease died out of her, and she became sane and cool once more, content to lie there in a state of infinite languor, to think of nothing, and do nothing but breathe and eat and sleep.
She found flowers on the table beside her bed. John Parfit had sent them. He had discovered that she was seriously ill, and he had been calling twice a day to inquire. Every evening a bunch of flowers, roses, violets, or carnations, was brought up to her, John Parfit leaving them at Bosnia Road on his way home from the City.
Eve would lie and look at the flowers without realising all that they implied. Illness is often very merciful to those who have cares and worries. It dulls the consciousness, and brooking no rival, absorbs the sufferer into a daze of drowsiness and dreams. The body, in its feverish reaction to neutralise the poison of disease, is busy within itself, and the mind is drugged and left to sleep.
As her normal self returned to her, Eve began to cast her eyes upon the life that had been broken off so abruptly, and she discovered, to her surprise, that the things that had worried her no longer seemed to matter. She felt numb, lethargic, too tired to react to worries. She knew now that she had not been far from death, and the great shadow still lay near to her, blotting out all the lesser shadows, so that they were lost in it.
All the additional expense that she was incurring, the presence of the nurse, John Parfit’s flowers, Mrs. Buss’s grumbling voice, all these phenomena seemed outside the circle of reality. She recognised them, without reacting to them. So benumbed was she that the idea of spending so much money did not frighten her.
She managed to write a cheque, and the nurse cashed it for her when she went for her daily walk.
Mrs. Buss’s accounts were asked for and sent up, and Eve did not feel one qualm of distress when she glanced at the figures and understood that her landlady was penalising her mercilessly for being ill. She paid Mrs. Buss, and turned her attention to the doctor.
“You won’t mind my mentioning it, but I shall be very grateful if you will let me know what I owe you.”
He was a thin man, with a head like an ostrich’s, and a jerky, harassed manner. Struggle was written deep all over his face and person. His wife inked out the shiny places on his black coat, and he walked everywhere, and did not keep a carriage.
“That’s all right, that’s all right!”
“But I am serious. You see, with a limited income, one likes to meet things as they come.”
“Oh, well, if it will please you. But I haven’t quite finished with you yet.”
“I know. But you won’t forget?”
Poor devil! He was not in a position to forget anyone who owed him money.
The nurse went, having swallowed up six guineas. The doctor’s bill came in soon after Eve had moved downstairs to her sitting-room. It amounted to about three pounds, and Eve paid it by cheque. Another weekly bill from Mrs. Buss confronted her, running the doctor’s account to a close finish. Eve realised, after scribbling a few figures, that she was left with about four pounds to her credit.
She was astonished at her own apathy. This horror that would have sent a chill through her a month ago, now filled her with a kind of languid and cynical amusement. The inertia of her illness was still upon her, dulling the more sensitive edge of her consciousness.
A week after she had come downstairs she went out for her first walk. It was not altogether a wise proceeding, especially when its psychological effects showed themselves. She walked as far as Highbury Corner, felt the outermost ripples of the London mill-pond, and promptly awoke.
That night she had a relapse and was feverish, but it was no longer a restful, drowsy fever, but a burning and anxious torment. Life, the struggling, fitful, mean, contriving life was back in her blood, with all its dreads intensified and exaggerated. She felt the need of desperate endeavour, and was unable to stir in her own cause. It was like a dream in which some horror approaches, and one is unable to run away.
She was another week in bed, but she did not send for the doctor. And at the end of the week she met Mrs. Buss’s last bill. It left her with three shillings and fourpence in cash.
In seven days she would be in debt to her landlady, to the red-faced, grumbling woman whose insolent dissatisfaction was already showing itself.
Well, how was she to get the money? What was she to do?
There was the sign of the Three Balls. She had a few rings and trinkets and her mother’s jewellery, such as it was. Also, she could dispose of the studio.
Lastly, there was John Parfit—John Parfit, who was still sending her flowers. She had had a note from him. He wanted to be allowed to come and see her.
CHAPTER XXXI
THE BOURGEOIS PLAYS THE GENTLEMAN
The Saturday on which John Parfit came to see Eve was one of those premature spring days that makes one listen for the singing of birds. The little front garden was full of sunlight, and a few crocuses streaked the brown earth under the window. The Bourgeois arrived with a great bunch of daffodils, their succulent stems wrapped in blue tissue paper.
“Well, how are you now? How are you? Brought you a few flowers!”
He was shy with the shyness of a big, good-natured creature who was slow to adapt himself to strange surroundings. A feminine atmosphere had always rendered John Parfit nervous and inarticulate. He could talk like a politician in an office or a railway carriage, but thrust him into a drawing-room with a few women, and he became voiceless and futile.
“Well, how are we?”
He put his top-hat on the table, and stood the flowers in it as though it were a vase.
“But your poor hat!”
“Why, what’s the matter?”
“They are such sappy things. I must thank you for all the flowers. They helped me to get well.”
He removed the daffodils, and wandered round the room till he found an empty pot that agreed to rid him of them.
“Don’t you bother—don’t you get up! I’ll settle them all right.”
He came back to the fire, rubbing his hands and smiling. The smile died a sudden death when he dared to take his first good look at Eve, and with it much of his self-consciousness seemed to vanish. He sat down rather abruptly, staring.
“I say, you have had a bad time!”
“I’m afraid I have.”
She looked thin, and ill, and shadowy, and plain, and her eyes were the eyes of one who was worried. A tremulous something about her mouth, the droop of her neck, the light on her hair, stirred in John Parfit an inarticulate compassion. The man in him was challenged, appealed to, touched.
“I say, you’ve been bad, you know!”
“But I’m getting better.”
“You’re—you’re so white and thin!”
He spoke in an awed voice, his glance fixed on one of her hands that rested on the arm of her chair.
“I wanted to have a talk, you know. But I shall tire you.”
“No.”
She heard him draw a big breath.
“Look here, I’m a fool at expressing myself, but you’ve been having a bad time. I mean, as to the money. Beastly thing money. I’ve guessed that. Seems impertinent of me, but, by George! well, I can’t help it. It’s upset me, seeing you like this. It’s made me start saying something I didn’t mean to mention.”
He was out of breath, and sat watching her for one dumb, inarticulate moment, his hands clenched between his knees.
“Look here, you may think me a fool, but I tell you one thing, I can’t stand the thought of a girl like you having to scrape and scramble. I can’t stand it. And I shouldn’t have had the cheek, but for feeling like this. I’ll just blurt it out. I’ve been thinking of it for weeks. Look here, let me take care of you—for life, I mean. I’m not a bad sort, and I don’t think I shall be a selfish beast of a husband. There’s nothing I won’t do to make you happy.”
He sat on the edge of the chair, his hands still clenched between his knees. As for Eve, she was distressed, touched, and perhaps humbled. She told herself suddenly that she had not faced this man fairly, that she had not foreseen what she ought to have foreseen. The room felt close and hot.
“I say, I haven’t offended you? It mayn’t seem quite sporting, talking like this, when you’ve been ill, but, by George! I couldn’t help it.”
She said very gently:
“How could I be offended? Don’t you know that you are doing me a very great honour?”
“Oh, I say, do you mean it?”
“Of course.”
Eve saw a hand come out tentatively and then recede, and in a flash she understood what the possible nearness of this man meant to her. She shivered, and knew that in the intimate physical sense he would be hopelessly repellent. She could not help it, even though he had touched her spiritually, and made her feel that there were elements of fineness in him that were worthy of any woman’s trust.
He had been silent for some seconds, and his emotions could not be stopped now that they were discovering expression.
“Look here, I’m forty-six, and I’m going bald, but I’m a bit of a boy still. I was made to be married, but somehow I didn’t. I’ve done pretty well in business. I’ve saved about seven thousand pounds, and I’m making nine hundred a year. You ought to know. I’m ready to do anything. We could take a jolly little house out somewhere—Richmond, or Hampstead, say, the new garden place. And I don’t know why we shouldn’t keep a little motor, or a trap. Of course, I’m telling you this, because you ought to know. I’m running on ahead rather, but it’s of no consequence. I only want you to know what’s what.”
He was out of breath again, and she sat and stared at the fire. His rush of words had confused her. It was like being overwhelmed with food and water after one had been dying of hunger and thirst and fear in a desert. His essential and half pathetic sincerity went to her heart, nor could she help her gratitude going out to him. Not for a moment did she think of him as a fat, commonplace sentimentalist, a middle-aged fool who fell over his own feet when he tried to make love. He was more than a good creature. He was a man who had a right to self-expression.
She rallied her will-power.
“I don’t know what to say to you. I suppose I am feeling very weak.”
He rushed into self-accusation.
“There, I’ve been a selfish beast. I oughtn’t to have come and upset you like this. But I couldn’t help telling you.”
“I know. It hasn’t hurt me. But you have offered me such a big thing, that I am trying to realise it all. I don’t think I’m made for marriage.”
“Oh, don’t say that! I know I’m a blundering idiot!”
“No, no, it is not you! It is marriage.”
“You don’t believe in marriage?”
“Not that. I mean, for myself. I don’t think I could make you understand why.”
He looked puzzled and distressed.
“It’s my fault. I couldn’t do the thing delicately. I’m clumsy.”
“No, no. I have told you that it is not that.”
“Well, you think it over. Supposing we leave it till you get stronger?”
“But you are offering everything and I nothing.”
“Nonsense! Besides, I don’t believe in marrying a woman with money. I’d rather have the business on my own back. Of course, I should settle two or three thousand on you, you know, so that you would have a little income for pin-money. I think that’s only fair to a woman.”
She coloured and felt guilty.
“I think you are more generous than fair. Don’t say any more. I’ll—I’ll think it over.”
He got up and seized his hat.
“That’s it—that’s it. You think it over! I’m not one of those fellows who thinks that a woman is going to rush at him directly he says come. It means a lot to a woman, a dickens of a lot. And you’re not quite yourself yet, are you? It’s awfully good of you to have listened.”
He reached for her hand, bent over it with cumbrous courtesy, and covered up a sudden silence by getting out of the room as quickly as he could.
When John Parfit had gone, Eve lay back in her chair with a feeling of intense languor. All the strength and independence seemed to melt out of her, and she lay like a tired child on the knees of circumstance.
And then it was that she was tempted—tempted in this moment of weariness, by the knowledge that a way of escape lay so very near. She had been offered a protected life, food, shelter, a generous allowance, love, leisure, all that the orthodox woman is supposed to desire. He was kind, understanding in his way, reliable, a man whose common sense was to be trusted, and he would take her away from this paltry scramble, pilot her out of the crowd, and give her an affection that would last. Her intuition recognised the admirable husband in him. This middle-class man had a rich vein of sentiment running through his nature, and he was not too clever or too critical to tire.
Dusk began to fall, and the fire was burning low. It was the hour for memories, and into the dusk of that little suburban room, glided a subtle sense of other presences, and she found herself thinking of Canterton and the child. If she were to have a child like Lynette. But it could not be Lynette—it could not be his child, the child of that one man. She sat up, shocked and challenged. What was she about to do? Sell herself. Promise to give something that it was not in her power to give. Deceive a man who most honestly loved her. It would be prostitution. There was only one man living to whom she could have granted complete physical comradeship. She was not made to be touched by other hands.
She rose and lit the gas, and sat down at the table to write a letter. She would tell John Parfit the truth; put the shame of temptation out of her way.
It was not a long letter, but it came straight from her heart. No man could be offended by it—hurt by it. It was human, honourable, a tribute to the man to whom it was written.
When she had addressed and stamped it, she rang the bell for Mrs. Buss.
“I should be very much obliged if you could have this posted for me.”
Mrs. Buss was affable, having smelt matrimony and safe money.
“Certainly, miss. I’ll send Albert down to the pillar-box. Excuse me saying it; but you do look pounds better. You’ve got quite a colour.”
And she went out, simpering.
CHAPTER XXXII
EVE DETERMINES TO LEAVE BOSNIA ROAD
After she had written to John Parfit, Eve kept the promise she had made to Kate Duveen, but qualified her confession by an optimism that took the sting out of the truths that she had to tell. She made light of the Massinger affair, even though she had some bitter things to say about Miss Champion. “One learns to expect certain savageries from the ordinary sort of man, but it shocks one when a woman makes you bear all the responsibility, so that she may not offend a patron. That was the really sordid part of the experience.” She hinted vaguely that someone wanted to marry her, but that she had no intention of marrying. She made light of her illness, and wrote of her financial experiences with cynical gaiety. “My landlady’s face is a barometer that registers the state of my weather. Of late, the mercury has been low. Another woman whom I can manage to pity! Do not think that I am in a parlous and desperate state. I want to go through these experiences. They give one a sense of proportion, and teach one the value of occasional recklessness. We are not half reckless enough, we moderns. We are educated to be too careful. In future, I may contemplate adventures.”
It is probable that John Parfit’s proposal and its psychological effects on her rallied her pride, for she threw off the lethargy of convalescence, and turned anew to meet necessity. John Parfit had answered her letter by return, and he had succeeded in fully living up to his ideal of what was “sport.” “Playing the game,”—that is the phrase that embodies the religion of many such a man as John Parfit.
“Nothing could have made me admire you more than the straight way you have written. Nothing like the truth. It may be bitter, but it’s good physic. Well, I shall be here. Think it over. It’s the afterwards in marriage that counts, not the courting, and I’d do my best to make the afterwards what it should be.“You’ll let me see you sometimes, won’t you? I shan’t bother you. I’m not a conceited ass, and I’ll wait and take my chance.”
“Nothing could have made me admire you more than the straight way you have written. Nothing like the truth. It may be bitter, but it’s good physic. Well, I shall be here. Think it over. It’s the afterwards in marriage that counts, not the courting, and I’d do my best to make the afterwards what it should be.
“You’ll let me see you sometimes, won’t you? I shan’t bother you. I’m not a conceited ass, and I’ll wait and take my chance.”
March winds and more sunshine were in evidence, and the weather had a drier and more energetic temper. Eve started out on expeditions. She took two rings, a gold watch, and a coral necklace to a pawnshop in Holloway, and raised three pounds on the transaction. It amused her, tucking the pawn-ticket away in her purse. These last refuges are supposed to have a touch of the melodramatic, but she discovered that expectation had been harder to bear than the reality, and that just as one is disappointed by some eagerly longed for event, so the disaster that one dreads turns out to be a very quiet experience, relieved perhaps by elements of humour.
She paid Mrs. Buss’s weekly bill, and studied the woman’s recovered affability with cynical tolerance. Mrs. Buss still believed her to be on the way towards matrimony, and somehow a woman who is about to be married gains importance, possibly because other women wonder what she will make of that best and most problematical of states.
It is easy to raise money on some article of value, but it is a much harder matter to persuade people to offer money in return for the activities that we call work. Eve went the round of the agencies without discovering anything that could be classed above the level of cheap labour. There seemed to be no demand for artistic ability. At least, she did not chance upon the demand if it happened to exist. Her possibilities seemed to be limited to such posts as lady help or companion, posts that she had banned as the uttermost deeps of slavery. A factory worker was far more free. She could still contemplate sinking some of her pride, and starting life as a shop-girl, a servant, or a waitress.
At one agency the manageress, whose lack of patience made her tell the brusque truth on occasions, went so far as to suggest that Eve might take a place as parlourmaid in a big house. She had a smart figure and a good appearance. Some people were dispensing with menservants, and were putting their maids into uniform and making them take the place of butler and footman. The position of such a servant was preferable to the lot of a lady-help. Wouldn’t Eve think it over?
Eve said she would. She agreed with the manageress in thinking that there were gleams of independence in such a life, especially when one had gained a character and experience, learnt to look after silver and to know about wines.
None the less, she was discouraged and rebellious, and on her way home after one of these expeditions, she fell in with John Parfit. It was the man of six-and-forty who blushed, not Eve. She had to help him over the stile of his self-consciousness.
“Yes, I am ever so much better. Won’t you walk a little way with me? I’ve had tea, and I thought of having a stroll round the Fields.”
He put himself at her side with laborious politeness, and because of his shyness he could do nothing more graceful than blurt out questions.
“Got what you want yet?”
“No, not yet.”
He frowned to himself.
“Not worrying, are you?”
“I’m learning not to worry. Nothing is as bad as it seems.”
He looked at her curiously, puzzled, and troubled on her account.
“It’s a matter of temperament. Perhaps you are not one of the worrying sort.”
“But I am. One finds that one can learn not to worry about the things that just concern self. The thing that does worry us is the thought that we may make other people suffer any loss.”
He said bluntly, “Bills?”
Eve laughed.
“In brief, bills. But I am perfectly solvent, and I could get work to-morrow if I chose to take it.”
“But you don’t. It’s pride.”
“Yes, pride.”
He walked on beside her in his solid, broad-footed way, staring straight ahead, and keeping silent for fully half a minute.
Then he said abruptly:
“It hasn’t made any difference, you know.”
It was her turn to feel embarrassed.
“But you understood——”
“Yes, I understood all right. But I want to say just this, I respect you all the more for having been straight with me, and if you’ll let me have a waiting chance, I’ll make the best of it. I won’t bother you. I’ve got a sense of proportion. I’m not the sort of man a woman would get sentimental over in a hurry.”
Her eyes glimmered.
“You are one of the best men I have ever met. In a city of cads, it is good to find a man who has a sense of honour.”
He went very red, and seemed to choke something back.
“I shan’t forget that in a hurry. But look here, put the other thing aside, and let’s just think of ourselves as jolly good friends. Now, I want you to let me do some of the rough and tumble for you. I’m used to it. One gets a business skin.”
“I am not going to bother you.”
“Bosh! And if you happen to want—well, you know what, any of the beastly stuff we pay our bills with——”
She began to show her distress.
“Don’t, please. I know how generously you mean it all, but I’m so made that I can’t bear to be helped, even by you. Just now my pride is raw, and I want to go alone through some of these experiences. You may think it eccentric.”
He stared hard at nothing in particular.
“I don’t know. I suppose it’s in the air. Women are changing.”
“No, don’t believe that. It’s only some of the circumstances of life that are changing, and we are altering some of our methods. That’s what life is teaching me. That’s why I want to go on alone. I shall learn so much more.”
“I should have thought that most people would fight shy of learning in such a school.”
“Yes, and that is why most of us remain so narrow and selfish and prejudiced. We refuse to touch realities, and we won’t understand. I want to understand.”
He walked on, expanding his chest, and looking as though he were smothering a stout impulse to protest.
“All right; I see. Anyway, I shall be round the corner. You won’t forget that, will you?”
“No, for you have helped me already.”
“Have I?”
“Of course. It always helps to be able to believe in someone.”
Three days later Eve rang for Mrs. Buss and had an interview with the woman. She was amused to find that she herself had hardened perceptibly, and that she could lock her sentiments away when the question was a question of cash.
Her frankness astonished Mrs. Buss.
“I want to explain something to you. I mean to stay here for another three weeks, but I have no more money.”
The landlady gaped, not knowing whether this was humour or mere barefaced self-confidence.
“You’re going to be married, then?”
“No.”
“You say you haven’t any money, and you expect me——”
“There is the studio.”
“A shed like that’s no use to me.”
“It cost me about twenty-five pounds, with the stove and fittings, and it is only a few months old. It is made to take to pieces. Shall I sell it, or will you? I was thinking that it might be worth your while.”
Mrs. Buss discovered glimmerings of reason. An incipient, sly smile glided round her mouth.
“Oh, I see! You think I could drive a better bargain?”
“I do.”
The middle-class nature was flattered.
“You’ll be owing me about four pounds ten. And we might get twelve or thirteen pounds for the studio.”
It was studio now, not shed.
“Yes. I shall pay your bill, and give you a fifteen per cent. commission on the sale. Do you know anyone who might buy it?”
“I’m not so sure, miss, that I don’t.”
Mrs. Buss’s eyes were so well opened that she put on her bonnet, went round to a local builder’s, and, telling him a few harmless fibs, persuaded him to buy the studio and its stove for thirteen pounds ten. The builder confessed, directly they had completed the bargain, that the studio was the very thing a customer of his wanted. He said he would look round next day and see the building, and that if he found it all right, he would hand over the money. He came, saw, and found nothing to grumble at, and before the day was out he had resold the studio for twenty pounds, stating blandly that it had originally cost thirty-five pounds, and that it was almost new, and that the gentleman had got a bargain.
Mrs. Buss brought the money to Eve, one five pound note, eight sovereigns, and ten shillings in silver, and Eve handed over four pounds, and the commission.
“We can settle for any odds and ends when I go.”
“Thank you, miss. I may say you have treated me very fairly, miss. And would you mind if I put up a card in the window?”
“No.”
“You see, it’s part of my living. If one loses a week or two, it’s serious.”
“Of course.”
So a card with “Apartments” printed on it went up in Eve’s window, helping her to realise that the term of her sojourn in Bosnia Road was drawing to a close.
CHAPTER XXXIII
WOMAN’S WAR
It was during these last weeks at Bosnia Road that Eve became fully conscious of that spirit of revolt that is one of the dominating features of contemporary life, for she was experiencing in her own person the thoughts and tendencies of a great movement, suffering its discontents, feeling its hopes and passions.
When she tried to analyse these tendencies in herself, she was confronted with the disharmonies of her life, disharmonies that reacted all the more keenly on a generous and impulsive nature. She was necessary to nobody, not even to the man who had thought that it would be pleasant to marry her, for she knew that in a month he would be as contented as ever with his old bachelor life. She had no personal corner, no sacred place full of the subtle and pleasant presence of the individual “I.” She had none of the simple and primitive responsibilities that provide many women with a natural and organic satisfaction.
A new class had arisen, the class of the unattached working women, and she was sharing the experiences of thousands. It was a sense of defencelessness that angered her. She had no weapon. She could only retaliate upon society by shutting her mouth and holding her head a little higher. Her individuality was threatened. She was denied the chance of living a life of self-expression, and was told with casual cynicism that she must do such work as society chose to offer her, or starve.
Of course, there were the chances of escape, the little, secret, fatal doorways that men were willing to leave open. Some women availed themselves of these opportunities, nor was Eve so prejudiced as to imagine that all women were martyrs and less hot blooded than the men. She had had the same doors opened to her. She might have become a mistress, or have married a man who was physically distasteful to her, and she understood now why many women were so bitter against anything that was male. It was not man, but the sex spirit, and all its meaner predilections.
Ninety-nine men out of a hundred concerned themselves with nothing but a woman’s face and figure. They reacted to physical impressions, and Eve realised the utter naturalness of it all. The working woman had got outside the old conventions. She was trying to do unsexual things, and to talk an unsexual language to men who had not changed. It was like muddling up business and sentiment, and created an impossible position, so long as the male nature continued to react in the way it did. Sexual solicitation or plain indifference, these were the two extreme fates that bounded the life of the working woman.
Eve told herself that there were exceptions, but that society, in the mass, moved along these lines. She had listened to Kate Duveen—Kate Duveen, who was a fanatic, and who had made it her business to look into the conditions under which working women lived. The shop-girl, the servant, the waitress, the clerk, the typist, the chorus-girl, the street-walker; always they held in their hands the bribe that men desired, that bribe so fatal to the woman when once it had been given. Eve began to understand the spirit of revolt by the disgust that was stirred in her own heart. This huge sexual machine. This terrible, primitive groundwork upon which all the shades of civilisation were tagged like threads of coloured silk. There was some resemblance here between the reaction of certain women against sex, and the reaction of the early Christians against the utter physical smell of the Roman civilisation. To live, one must be born again. One must triumph over the senses. One must refuse to treat with men on the old physical understanding. They are the cries of extremists, and yet of an extremity that hopes to triumph by urging a passionate and protesting celibacy. A million odd women in the United Kingdom, over-setting the sex balance, and clamouring, many of them, that they will not be weighed in the old sexual scale.
Eve caught the spirit of rebellion, divorced as she was from any comradeship with men. It is so much easier to quarrel with the hypothetical antagonists whom one meets in the world of one’s own brain. Bring two prejudiced humans together, get them to talk like reasonable beings, and each may have some chance of discovering that the other is not the beast that he or she had imagined. It is when masses of people segregate and refuse to mix that war becomes more than probable.
Insensibly, yet very surely, Eve began to imbibe this feeling of antagonism. It made her take sides, even when she happened to read the account of some law case in the paper. And this tacit antagonism abetted her in her refusal to accept the cheap labour that society, “male society,” she called it, chose to offer her. It behoved women to stand out against male exploitation, even if they had to suffer for the moment. Yet her revolt was still an individual revolt. She had not joined herself to the crowd. She wanted to complete her personal experiences before associating herself with the great mass of discontent, and she meant to go through to the end—to touch all the realities. Perhaps she was a little feverish in her sincerity. She had been ill. She had been badly fed. She had been worried, and she was in a mood that demanded that specious sort of realism that is to the truth what a statue is to the living body.
Her last morning at Bosnia Road turned out to be warm and sunny. She was ready to smile at contrasts, and to draw them with a positive and perverse wilfulness. Breakfast was just like other breakfasts, only different. The brown teapot with the chip out of its lid stood there, familiar yet ironical. The marmalade dish, with its pinky roses and silver-plated handle that was wearing green, reminded her that it would meet her eyes no more. The patchwork tea-cosy was like a fat and sentimental old lady who was always exclaiming, “Oh, dear, what a wicked world it is!” Even the egg-cup, with its smudgy blue pattern, had a ridiculous individuality of its own. Eve felt a little emotional and more than a little morbid, and ready to laugh at herself because a teapot and an egg-cup made her moralise.
She had packed all her belongings, paid Mrs. Buss, and ordered a “growler” to call at half-past ten. The cabman was punctual. He came into the narrow hall, rubbing his boots on the doormat, a cheerful ancient, a bolster of clothes, and looking to be in perpetual proximity to breathlessness and perspiration. He laid his old top-hat on the floor beside the staircase, and went up to struggle with Eve’s boxes.
Mrs. Buss had let Eve’s rooms, and had nothing to complain of. For the time being her attention was concentrated on seeing that the cabman did not knock the paint off the banisters.
“Do be careful now!”
A red-faced man was descending under the shadow of a big black trunk.
“All right, mum. Don’t you worry, mum!”
He breathed hard and diffused a scent of the stable.
“Them chaps as builds ’ouses don’t think of the luggidge and foornitoore. ’Old up, there!”
A corner of the trunk jarred against the wall and left a gash in the paper. Mrs. Buss made a clucking sound with her tongue.
“There, didn’t I say!”
“Did I touch anythink?”
“Now, mind the hat-stand! And the front door was painted three months ago.”
“Don’t you worry, mum. It ain’t the first time luggidge and me ’as gone out walkin’ together!”
Mrs. Buss turned to Eve who was standing in the sitting-room doorway.
“That’s just the British working-man to a T. He earns his living by doing one thing all his life, and he does it badly. My poor husband found that out before he died. I do hope I’ve made you feel comfortable and homely? I always try to do my best.”
“I’m sure you do.”
She was glad when the loading up business was over, and she was driving away between the dull little houses.
Eve had written to book a room at a cheap hotel in Bloomsbury, an hotel that had been brought into being by the knocking together of three straight-faced, dark-bricked old houses. She drove first to the hotel, left a light trunk and a handbag there, and then ordered the cabman to go on to Charing Cross where she left the rest of her luggage in the keeping of the railway company.
A sudden sense of freedom came over her when she walked out of the station enclosure, after paying and tipping the driver of the growler, who was surprised at the amount of the tip. She had been delivered from suburbia, and her escape from Bosnia Road made her the more conscious of the largeness and the stimulating complexity of life. She felt a new exhilaration, and a sense of adventure that glimpsed more spacious happenings. It was more like the mood that is ascribed to the young man who rides out alone, tossing an audacious sword.
Eve decided to treat herself to a good lunch for once, and she walked to Kate Duveen’s Italian restaurant in Soho, and amplified and capped the meal with a half bottle of claret, coffee, and a liqueur. She guessed that she had plenty of Aerated Bread shop meals before her. After lunch she took a motor-bus to the Marble Arch, wandered into the park, and down to the Serpentine, and discovering an empty seat, took the opportunity of reviewing her finances. She found that she had five pounds sixteen shillings and fivepence left. The Bloomsbury hotel charged four and sixpence for bed and breakfast, and she would be able to stay there for some three weeks, if she had the rest of her meals at tea-shops and cheap restaurants.
Eve sat there for an hour, watching the glimmer of the water and the moving figures, growing more and more conscious of the vast, subdued murmur that drifted to her from beyond the bare trees. Neither the pitch nor the volume of the sound varied, though it was pierced now and again by the near note of a motor horn. The murmur went on and on, grinding out its under-chant that was made up of the rumbling of wheels, the plodding of hoofs, the hooting of horns, the rattle and pant of machinery, the voices of men and women. This green space seemed a spot of silence in the thick of a whirl of throbbing, quivering movement. She had always hated London traffic, but to-day it had something to say to her.
The sun shone, the spring was in, and it was warm there, sitting on the seat. The water blinked, sparrows chirped, waterfowl uttered their cries, children played, daffodils were in bloom. Eve felt herself moving suddenly to a fuller consciousness of modern life. Her brain seemed to pulsate with it, to glow with a new understanding.
Conquest! She could understand the feverish and half savage passion for conquest that seized many men. To climb above the crowd, to get money, to assert one’s individuality, brutally perhaps, but at all costs and against all comers. People got trampled on, trodden under. It was a stampede, and the stronger and the more selfish animals survived. Yet society had some sort of legal conscience. It had to make some show of clearing up its rubbish and its wreckage. The pity of it was that there was so much “afterthought,” when “forethought” might have saved so much disease and disaster.
She pictured to herself all those women and girls working over yonder, the seamstresses and milliners, the clerks, typists, shop-girls, waitresses, factory hands,filles de joie—what a voiceless, helpless crowd it seemed. Was the clamour for the vote a mere catch cry, one of those specious demagogic phrases that pretended to offer so much and would effect so little? Was it not the blind, passionate cry of a mass of humanity that desired utterance and yearned for self-expression? Could anything be altered, or was life just a huge, fateful phenomenon that went its inevitable way, despite all the talk and the fussy little human figures? She wondered. How were things going to be bettered? How were the sex spirit and the commercial spirit going to be chastened and subdued?