CHAPTER XXXIV
EVE PURSUES EXPERIENCE
During the next two weeks Eve’s moods fluctuated between compassionate altruism and bitter and half laughing scorn. Life was so tremendous, so pathetic, so strenuous, so absurd. For the time being she was a watcher of other people’s activities, and she spent much of her time tramping here, there and everywhere, interested in everything because of her new prejudices. She was glad to get out of the hotel, since it was full of a certain type of American tourists—tall, sallow women who talked in loud, harsh voices, chiefly about food and the digestion of food, where they had been, and what they had paid for things. The American man was a new type to Eve—a mongrel still in the making. The type puzzled and repelled her with its broad features, and curious brown eyes generally seen behind rimless glasses. Sometimes she sat and watched them and listened, and fancied she caught a note of hysterical egoism. Their laughter was not like an Englishman’s laughter. It burst out suddenly and rather fatuously, betraying, despite all the jaw setting and grim hunching of shoulders, a lack of the deeper restraints. They were always talking, always squaring themselves up against the rest of the world, with a neurotic self-consciousness that realised that it was still only half civilised. They suggested to Eve people who had set out to absorb culture in a single generation, and had failed most grotesquely. She kept an open mind as to the men, but she disliked the women wholeheartedly. They were studies in black and white, and crude, harsh studies, with no softness of outline.
One Sunday she walked to Hyde Park and saw some of the suffragist speakers pelted with turf by a rowdily hostile crowd. The occasion proved to be critical, so far as some of her tendencies were concerned. Militancy had not appealed to her. There was too much of the “drunk and disorderly” about it, too much spiteful screaming. It suggested a reversion to savage, back-street methods, and Eve’s pride had refused to indulge in futile and wholly undignified exhibitions of violence. There were better ways of protesting than by kicking policemen’s shins, breaking windows, and sneaking about at midnight setting fire to houses. Yet when she saw these women pelted, hooted at, and threatened, the spirit of partisanship fired up at the challenge.
She was on the outskirts of the crowd, and perhaps her pale and intent face attracted attention. At all events, she found a lout, who looked like a young shop-assistant, standing close beside her, and staring in her face.
“Votes for women!”
His ironical shout was an accusation, and his eyes were the eyes of a bully. And of a sudden Eve understood what it meant for a woman to have to stand up and face the coarse male element in the crowd, all the young cads who were out for horseplay. She was conscious of physical fear; a shrinking from the bestial thoughtlessness of a mob that did things that any single man would have been ashamed to do.
The fellow was still staring at her.
“Now, then, ‘Votes for Women!’ Own up!”
He jogged her with his elbow, and she kept a scornful profile towards him, though trembling inwardly.
Someone interposed.
“You there, leave the young lady alone! She’s only listening like you and me.”
The aggressor turned with a snarl, but found himself up against a particularly big workman dressed in his Sunday clothes.
“You’re an old woman yourself.”
“Go home and sell stockings over the counter, and leave decent people alone.”
Eve thanked the man with a look, and turned out of the crowd. The workman followed her.
“’Scuse me, miss, I’ll walk to the gates with you. There are too many of these young blackguard fools about.”
“Thank you very much.”
“I’ve got a lot of sympathy with the women, but seems to me some of ’em are on the wrong road.”
She looked at him interestedly. He was big and fresh coloured and quiet, and reminded her in his coarser way of James Canterton.
“You think so?”
“It don’t do to lose your temper, even in a game, and that’s what some of the women are doing. We’re reasonable sort of creatures, and it’s no use going back to the old boot and claw business.”
“What they say is that they have tried reasoning, and that men would not listen.”
He laughed.
“That’s rot! Excuse me, miss. You’ve got to give reason a chance, and a pretty long chance. Do you think we working men won what we’ve got in three months? You have to go on shoving and shoving, and in the end, if you’ve got common sense on your side, you push the public through. You can’t expect things turned all topsy-turvy in ten minutes, because a few women get up on carts and scream. They ought to know better.”
“They say it is the only thing that’s left.”
His blue eyes twinkled.
“Not a bit of it, miss. The men were coming round. We’re better chaps, better husbands and fathers than we were a hundred years ago. You know, miss, a man ain’t averse to a decent amount of pleasant persuasion. It don’t do to nag him, or he may tell you to go to blazes. Well, I wish you good afternoon.”
They had reached the gates, and he touched the brim of his hard hat, smiling down at her with shrewd kindness.
“I’m very grateful to you.”
He coloured up, and his smile broadened, and Eve walked away down Oxford Street, doing some pregnant thinking.
The man had reminded her of Canterton. What was Canterton’s attitude towards this movement, and what was her attitude to Canterton now that she had touched more of the realities of life? When she came to analyse her feelings she found that Canterton did not appear to exist for her in the present. Fernhill and its atmosphere had become prehistoric. It had removed into the Golden Age, above and beyond criticism, and she did not include it in this world of struggling prejudices and aspirations. And yet, when she let herself think of Canterton and Lynette, she felt less sure of the sex antagonism that she was encouraging with scourge and prayer. Canterton seemed to stand in the pathway of her advance, looking down at her with eyes that smiled, eyes that were without mockery. Moreover, something that he had once said to her kept opposing itself to her arbitrary and enthusiastic pessimism. She could remember him stating his views, and she could remember disagreeing with him.
He had said, “People are very much happier than you imagine. Sentimentalists have always made too much of the woe of the world. There is a sort of thing I call organic happiness, the active physical happiness of the animal that is reasonably healthy. Of course we grumble, but don’t make the mistake of taking grumbling for the cries of discontented misery. I believe that most of the miserable people are over-sensed, under-bodied neurotics. They lack animal vitality. I think I can speak from experience, since I have mixed a good deal with working people. In the mass they are happy, much happier, perhaps, than we are. Perhaps because they don’t eat too much, and so think dyspeptically.”
That saying of Canterton’s, “People are much happier than you imagine” haunted Eve’s consciousness, walked at her side, and would not suffer itself to be forgotten. She had moments when she suspected that he had spoken a great truth. He had told her once to read Walt Whitman, but of what use was that great, barbaric, joyous person to her in her wilful viewing of sociological problems? It was a statement that she could test by her own observations, this assertion that the majority of people are happy. The clerks and shopmen who lunched in the tea-shops talked hard, laughed, and made a cheerful noise. If she went to the docks or Covent Garden Market, or watched labourers at work in the streets, she seemed to strike a stolid yet jocose cheerfulness that massed itself against her rather pessimistic view of life. The evening crowds in the streets were cheerful, and these, she supposed, were the people who slaved in shops. The factory girls out for the dinner hour were merry souls. If she went into one of the parks on Sunday, she could not exactly convince herself that she was watching a miserable people released for one day from the sordid and hopeless slavery of toil.
The mass of people did appear to be happy. And Eve was absurdly angry, with some of the prophet’s anger, who would rather have seen a city perish than that God should make him appear a fool. Her convictions rallied themselves to meet the challenge of this apparent fact. She contended that this happiness was a specious, surface happiness. One had but to get below the surface, to penetrate behind the mere scenic effects of civilisation to discover the real sorrows. What of the slums? She had seen them with her own eyes. What of the hospitals, the asylums, the prisons, the workhouses, the sweating dens, even the sordid little suburbs! She was in a temper to pile Pelion on Ossa in her desire to storm and overturn this serene Olympian assumption that mankind in the mass was happy.
In walking along Southampton Row into Kingsway, she passed on most days a cheerful, ruddy-faced young woman who sold copies ofVotes for Women. This young woman was prettily plain, but good to look at in a clean and comely and sturdy way. Eve glanced at her each day with the eyes of a friend. The figure became personal, familiar, prophetic. She had marked down this young woman who sold papers as a Providence to whom she might ultimately appeal.
It seemed to her a curious necessity that she should be driven to try and prove that people were unhappy, and that most men acted basely in their sexual relationships towards women. This last conviction did not need much proving.
Being in a mood that demanded fanatical thoroughness, Eve played with the ultimate baseness of man, and made herself a candle to the night-flying moths. She repeated the experience twice—once in Regent Street, and once in Leicester Square. Nothing but fanaticism could have made such an experiment possible, and have enabled her to outface her scorn and her disgust. Several men spoke to her, and she dallied with each one for a few seconds before letting him feel her scorn.
She spent the last night of her stay in the Bloomsbury hotel sitting in the lounge and listening to three raucous American women who were talking over their travels. They had been to Algiers, Egypt, Italy, the South of France, and of course to Paris. The dominant talker, who had gorgeous yellow hair, not according to Nature, and whose hands were always moving restlessly and showing off their rings, seemed to remember and to identify the various places she had visited by some particular sort of food that she had eaten! “Siena, Siena. Wasn’t that the place, Mina, where we had ravioli?”
“Did you go to Ré’s at Monte Carlo? It’s an experience to have eaten at Ré’s.” “I shan’t forget the Nile. The Arab boy made some bad coffee, and I was sick in the stomach.” They went on to describe their various hagglings with hotel-keepers, cabmen, and shop-people, and the yellow-haired lady who wore “nippers” on a very thin-bridged, sharp-pointed nose, had an exhilarating tale to tell of how she had stood out against a Paris taxi-driver over a matter of ten cents. Eve had always heard such lavish tales of American extravagance, that she was surprised to discover in these women the worst sort of meanness, the meanness that contrives to be generous on a few ostentatious occasions by beating all the lesser people’s profits down to vanishing point. She wondered whether these American women with their hard eyes, selfish mouths, and short-fingered, ill-formed, grasping hands were typical of this new hybrid race.
It amused her to contrast her own situation with theirs. When to-morrow’s bill was paid, and her box taken to Charing Cross station, she calculated that she would have about twelve pence left in her purse. And she was going to test another aspect of life on those twelve pennies. It would not be ravioli, or luncheon at Ré’s.
Eve packed up her box next morning, paid her bill, and drove off to Charing Cross, where she left her box in the cloak-room. She had exactly elevenpence left in her purse, and it was her most serious intention to make these eleven pennies last her for the best part of two days. One thing that she had lost, without noticing it, was her sense of humour. Fanaticism cannot laugh. Had Simeon Stylites glimpsed but for a moment the comic side of his existence, he would have come down off that pillar like a cat off a burning roof.
The day turned out to be a very tiring one for her, and Eve found out how abominably uncomfortable London can be when one has no room of one’s own to go to, and no particular business to do. She just drifted about till she was tired, and then the problem was to find something upon which to sit. She spent the latter part of the morning in the gardens below Charing Cross Station, and then it began to rain. Lunch cost her threepence—half a scone and butter, and a glass of milk. She dawdled over it, but rain was still falling when she came out again into the street. A station waiting-room appeared to be her only refuge, for it was a sixpenny day at the National Gallery, and as she sat for two hours on a bench, wondering whether the weather was going to make the experiment she contemplated a highly realistic and unpleasant test of what a wet night was like when spent on one of the Embankment seats.
The weather cleared about four o’clock, and Eve went across to a tea-shop, and spent another threepence on a cup of tea and a slice of cake. She had made a point of making the most of her last breakfast at the hotel, but she began to feel abominably hungry, with a hunger that revolted against cake. After tea she walked to Hyde Park, sat there till within half an hour of dusk, and then wandered back down Oxford Street, growing hungrier and hungrier. It was a very provoking sign of health, but if one part of her clamoured for food, her body, as a whole, protested that it was tired. The sight of a restaurant made her loiter, and she paused once or twice in front of some confectionery shop, and looked at the cakes in the window. But sweet stuffs did not tempt her. They are the mere playthings of people who are well fed. She found that she had a most primitive desire for good roast meat, beef for preference, swimming in brown gravy, and she accepted her appetite quite solemnly as a phenomenon that threw an illuminating light upon the problems of existence.
Exploring a shabbier neighbourhood she discovered a cheap cook-shop with a steaming window and a good advertising smell. There was a bill of fare stuck up in the window, and she calculated that she could spend another three pennies. Sausages and mashed potatoes were to be had for that sum, and in five minutes she was sitting at a wooden table covered with a dirty cloth, and helping herself to mustard out of a cracked glass pot.
It was quite a carnal experience, and she came out refreshed and much more cheerful, telling herself with naive seriousness that she was splitting life up into its elements. Food appeared to be a very important problem, and hunger a lust whose strength is unknown save to the very few, yet she was so near to her real self that she was on the edge of laughter. Then it occurred to her that she was not doing the thing thoroughly, that she had lapsed, that she ought to have started the night hungry.
There was more time to be wasted, and she strolled down Shaftesbury Avenue and round Piccadilly Circus into Regent Street. The pavements were fairly crowded, and the multitude of lights made her feel less lonely. She loitered along, looking into shop windows, and she had amused herself in this way for about ten minutes before she became aware of another face that kept appearing near to hers. She saw it reflected in four successive windows, the face of an old man, spruce yet senile, the little moustache carefully trimmed, a faint red patch on either cheek. The eyes were turned to one side, and seemed to be watching something. She did not realise at first that that something was herself.
“How are you to-night, dear?”
Eve stared straight through the window for some seconds, and then turned and faced him. He was like Death valeted to perfection, and turned out with all his senility polished to the last finger nail. His lower eyelids were baggy, and innumerable little veins showed in the skin that looked tightly stretched over his nose and cheekbones. He smiled at her, the fingers of one hand picking at the lapel of his coat.
“I am glad to see you looking so nice, dear. Supposing we have a little dinner?”
“I beg your pardon. I think you must be rather short-sighted!”
She thought as she walked away, “Supposing I had been a different sort of woman, and supposing I had been hungry!”
She made direct for the river after this experience, and, turning down Charing Cross and under the railway bridge, saw the long sweep of the darkness between the fringes of yellow lights. There were very few people about, and a raw draught seemed to come up the river. She crossed to the Embankment and walked along, glancing over the parapet at the vaguely agitated and glimmering surface below. The huge shadow of the bridge seemed to take the river at one leap. The lapping of the water was cold, and suggestively restless.
Then she turned her attention to the seats. They seemed to be full, packed from rail to rail with indistinct figures that were huddled close together. All these figures were mute and motionless. Once she saw a flutter of white where someone was picking broken food out of a piece of newspaper. And once she heard a figure speaking in a monotonous grumbling voice that kept the same level.
Was she too late even for such a refuge? She walked on and at last discovered a seat where a gap showed between a man’s felt hat and a woman’s bonnet. Eve paused rather dubiously, shrinking from thrusting herself into that vacant space. She shrank from touching these sodden greasy things that had drifted like refuse into some sluggish backwater.
Then a quiver of pity and of shame overcame her. She went and thrust herself into the vacant place. The whole seat seemed to wriggle and squirm. The man next to her heaved and woke up with a gulp. Eve discovered at once that his breath was not ambrosial.
She felt a hand tugging at something. It belonged to the old woman next to her.
“’Ere, you’re sitting on it!”
“I beg your pardon.”
She felt something flat withdrawn. It was a bloater wrapped up in a bit of paper, but the woman did not explain. She tucked the thing away behind her and relapsed. The whole seat resettled itself. No one said anything. Eve heard nothing but the sound of breathing, and the noise made by the passing of an occasional motor, cab, or train.
CHAPTER XXXV
THE SUFFRAGETTE
The night spent on the Embankment seat was less tragic than squalidly uncomfortable. Wedged in there between those hopeless other figures, Eve had to resist a nauseating sense of their physical uncleanness, and to overcome instincts that were in wholesome revolt. Her ears and nostrils did not spare her. There was a smell of stale alcohol, a smell of fish, a smell of sour and dirty clothes. Moreover, the man who sat on her right kept rolling his head on to her shoulder, his dirty felt hat rubbing her ear and cheek. She edged him off rather roughly, and he woke up and swore.
“What the —— are you shovin’ for?”
After that she did not attempt to wake him again, turning her face as far away as possible when his slobbery, stertorous mouth puffed against her shoulders.
As for the seat—well, it was her first experience of sitting all night in one position, on a sort of unpadded reality. Her back ached, her neck ached, her legs ached. She was afraid of waking the man beside her, and the very fact that she dared not move was a horror in itself. She felt intolerably stiff, and her feet and hands were cold. She found herself wondering what would happen if she were to develop a desire to sneeze. Etiquette forbade one to sneeze in such crowded quarters. She would wake her neighbour and get sworn at.
Then the tragic absurdity of the whole thing struck her. It was absurd, but it was horrible. She felt an utter loathing of the creatures on each side of her, and her loathing raised in her an accusing anger. Who was responsible? She asked the question irritably, only to discover that in answering it she was attacked by a disturbing suspicion that she herself, every thinking creature, was responsible for such an absurdity as this. Physical disgust proved stronger than pity. She reminded herself that animals were better cared for. There were stables, cowsheds, clean fields, where beasts could shelter under trees and hedges. Worn-out horses and diseased cattle were put out of the way. Why were not debauched human cattle got rid of cleanly upon the same scientific plan, for they were lower and far more horrible than the beasts of the field.
She was surprised that this should be what one such night seemed destined to teach her. These people were better dead. She could feel no pity at all for the beast who snored on her shoulder. She could not consent to justify his becoming what he was. Ill luck, fate, a bad heritage, these were mere empty phrases. She only knew that she felt contaminated, that she loathed these wretched, greasy creatures with an almost vindictive loathing. Her skin felt all of a creep, shrinking from their uncleanness.
As to her visions of a regenerated civilisation, her theoretical compassions, what had become of them? Was she not discovering that even her ideals were personal, selective, prejudiced? These people were beyond pity. That was her impression. She found herself driven to utter the cry, “For God’s sake let us clean up the world before we begin to build up fresh ideas. This rubbish ought to be put out of the way, burnt, or buried. What is the use of being sentimental about it?” Pity held aloof. She had a new understanding of Death, and saw him as the great Cleanser, the Furnaceman who threw all the unclean things into his destructor. What fools men were to try and cheat Death of his wholesome due. The children ought to be saved, the really valuable lives fought for; but this gutter stuff ought to be cleaned up and got rid of in grim and decent silence.
Eve never expected to sleep, but she slept for two hours, and woke up just before dawn.
It was not a comfortable awakening. She felt cold and stiff, and her body ached, and with the return of consciousness came that wholesome horror of her neighbours, a horror that had taught her more than all the sociological essays she could have read in a lifetime. The man’s head was on her shoulder. He still spluttered and blew in his sleep.
Eve decided to sit it out; to go through to the bitter end. Moreover, she was curious to see the faces of these people by daylight. A strange stillness prevailed; there was no wind, and the river was running noiselessly. Once or twice the sound of regular footsteps approached, and the figure of a policeman loomed up and passed.
A thin light began to spread, and the whole scene about her became a study in grey. The sky was overcast, canopied with ashen clouds that were ribbed here and there with lines of amethyst and white. The city seemed to rise out of a gloomy and mysterious haze, dim, sad, and unreal. The massive buildings looked like vague grey cliffs. The spires were blurred lines, leaden coloured and unglittering. There had been a sprinkling of rain while she had slept, for the pavements were wet and her clothes damp to the touch. She shivered. It was so cold, and still, and dreary.
The stillness had been only a relative stillness, for there were plenty of sounds to be distinguished. A line of vans rumbled over one of the bridges, a train steamed into Charing Cross. She heard motor horns hooting in the scattered distance, and she was struck by the conceit that this was the dawn song of the birds of the city.
The light became hard and cold, and she wondered when her neighbours would wake. A passing policeman looked at her curiously, seemed inclined to stop, but walked on.
Turning her head she found she could see the face of the man next to her. His old black bowler hat had fallen off and lay on the pavement. Eve studied him, fascinated by her own disgust, and by his sottish ugliness. His skin was red, blotched, and pitted like an orange, black hair a quarter of an inch long bristled over his jowl and upper lip. His eyelids and nose were unmentionable. He wore no collar, and as he lounged there she could see a great red flabby lower lip jutting out like the lip of a jug. His black hair was greasy. He was wearing an old frock coat, whose lapels were all frayed and smeary, as though he were in the habit of holding himself up by them.
Eve turned away with qualms of disgust, and glanced at the old woman. Her face, as she slept, had an expression of absurd astonishment, the eyebrows raised, the mouth open. Her face looked like tallow in a dirty, wrinkled bladder. She had two moles on one cheek, out of which grey hairs grew. Her bonnet had fallen back, and her open mouth showed a few rotten black teeth.
A man at the end of the seat was the first to wake. He sat up, yawned, and blew his nose on his fingers. Then the sot next to Eve stirred. He stretched his legs, rolled his head to one side, and, being still half asleep, began to swear filthily in a thick, grumbling voice. Suddenly he sat up, turned, and stared into Eve’s face. His red brown eyes were angry and injected, the sullen, lascivious eyes of a sot.
“Good mornin’!”
She caught the twinge of insolent raillery in his voice. Even his brutishness was surprised by the appearance of his neighbour, and he had a reputation for humour. Eve looked away.
He made facetious remarks, half directed to her, half to the world at large.
“Didn’t know I was in such —— genteel company. Never had no luck. Suppose I’ve had m’ head on your shoulder all night and didn’t know it. Didn’t kiss me, did you, while I was sleeping like an innocent babe?”
Another face peered round at her, grinning. Then the old woman woke up, snuffled, and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand.
“Bin rainin’, of course?”
Eve said that she thought it had. The old woman’s eyes seemed to be purblind, and without curiosity. A sudden anxiety stole over her face. She felt behind her, drew out the bit of newspaper, opened it, and disclosed the fish.
She smelt it, and then began to eat, picking it to pieces with her fingers.
The red-faced man reached for his hat and put it on with a sullen rakishness. He was looking at Eve out of the corners of his eyes. Being a drunkard, he was ugly-tempered in the morning, and the young woman had given him the cold shoulder.
“Stuck up bit of goods. Looks like the lady. Been up to it, have yer? I know all about that. Governess, eh? Some old josser of a husband and a screechin’ wife, and out yer go into the street!”
She was more struck by the vindictive, threatening way he spoke than by the vile things he said. Her impressions of the night grew more vivid and more pitiless. Something hardened in her. She felt cold and contemptuous, and quite capable of facing this human animal.
“Be quiet, please!”
She turned and looked at him steadily, and his dirty eyelids flickered.
“Mayn’t I speak, blast yer?”
“If you speak to me as you are speaking, I will stop the next constable and give you in charge.”
“Goo’ lord! What the hell are you doin’ here, may I ask?”
She kept her eyes on him.
“I came here just for an experience, because I felt sorry for people, and wanted to see what a night here was like. I have learnt a good deal.”
“Ah!”
Something fell out of his face. It relaxed, his lower lip drooping.
“You’ve learnt somethin’.”
She felt pitiless, nauseated.
“I have. I hope before long that we shall have the sense to put people like you in a lethal chamber. You would be better dead, you know.”
Eve got up and walked away, knowing that in the future there would be certain creatures whom she could not pity—creatures whom she would look at with the eyes of Nature, eyes that condemn without pity. She wondered whether the amateurs who indulged in sentimental eugenics had ever spent a night sitting on a seat next to a degenerate sot. She doubted it. The reality would upset the digestion of the strongest sentimentalist.
She felt so stiff and cold that she started to walk briskly in the direction of Westminster. A light, drizzling rain began to fall, making the city and the river look even dirtier and uglier, though there is a fascination about London’s courtesan ugliness that makes soft Arcadian prettiness seem inane and unprovocative. Nor does bad weather matter so much in a city, which is a consideration in this wet little island.
Eve had not walked far before she discovered that she was hungry. No shops would be open yet, but in allowing some whim to take her across Westminster Bridge she happened on an itinerant coffee-stall at the corner of a side street. Her last two pennies went in a cup of coffee and two massive slabs of bread and butter. The keeper of the stall, a man with a very shiny and freshly shaved chin and cynical blue eyes, studied her rather doubtfully, as did a tram-driver and two workmen who came up for breakfast. Eve noticed that the men were watching her, behind their silence. Her presence there at such an hour was an abnormal phenomenon that caused them furiously to think.
She heard them recover their voices directly she had moved away.
“Bet you she’s been up to something. ’Eard of any fires down your way, Jack?”
“No. Think she’s one of them dirty militant sneaks?”
“I wouldn’t mind bettin’ you that’s what she is. Dirty, low-down game they’re playing. I’ve a good mind to follow her up, and tip a copper the wink.”
But the speaker remained to talk and to drink another cup of mahogany-coloured tea.
“That’s just it. These suffragette women ain’t got no notion of sport. Suppose they belong to the sort as scratches and throws lamps.”
The coffee-stall keeper interjected a question.
“What about the chaps who burnt ricks and haystacks before the Reform Bill, and the chaps who smashed machines when they first put ’em into factories?”
“Well, they burnt and broke, but they did it like men.”
“Women ain’t in the same situation.”
“Ain’t they? They can make ’emselves ’eard. Do yer think my ol’ woman goes about the ’ouse like a bleatin’ lamb? Garn, these militants are made all wrong inside. Fine sort of cause you’ve got when yer go sneakin’ about at three in the mornin’, settin’ empty ’ouses alight. That’s ’eroic, ain’t it?”
These men had set Eve down as a militant, and they had come precious near the truth.
She was on the edge of militancy, impelled towards strenuous rebellion by an exasperated sense of the injustice meted out to women, and by brooding upon the things she herself had experienced. It was a generous impulse in the main, mingling some bitterness with much enthusiasm, and moving with such impetuosity that it smothered any sound thinking. For the moment she was abnormal. She had half starved herself, and during weeks of loneliness she had encouraged herself to quarrel with society. She did not see the pathetic absurdity of all this spiritual kicking and screaming, being more than inclined to regard it as splendid protest than as an outburst of hysteria, a fit of tantrums more suited to an ill-balanced and uneducated servant girl.
A shrill voice carries. The frenzied few have delayed so often the very reforms that they have advocated. And there is a sort of hysterical enthusiasm that tricks the younger and more generous spirits, and acting like crude alcoholic drink, stirs up a so-called religious revival or some such orgy of purblind egoism as this phenomenon of militancy. The emotions make the brain drunk, and the power of sound reasoning is lost. The fools, the fanatics, the self-advertisers, the notoriety hunters, and the genuine idealists get huddled into one exclamatory, pitiable mob. And it is one of the tragic facts of life that the soul of a mob is the soul of its lowest and basest members. All the finer, subtler sensitive restraints are lost. A man of mind may find himself shouting demagogic cries next to some half drunken coal-heaver.
Now Eve Carfax was on the edge of militancy, and it was a debatable point with her whether she should begin her campaign that day. Necessity advised something of the kind, seeing that her purse was empty. Yet she could not quite convince a sensitive and individualistic pride that the breaking of a shop window or a scuffle with the police would be an adequate and suitable protest.
She walked about for an hour in the neighbourhood of Trafalgar Square, trying to escape from a treacherous self-consciousness that refused to suffer the adventure to be treated as an impersonal affair. The few people whom she passed stared rather hard, and so persistently, that she stopped to examine herself in a shop window. A dark green blind and the plate glass made an admirable mirror. It showed her her hair straggling most disgracefully, and the feminine part of her was shocked.
Her appearance mattered. She did not realise the significance of the little thrill of shame that had flashed through her when she had looked at herself in the shop window; and even when she made her way to St. James’s Park and found an empty seat she deceived herself into believing that she had come there to think things out, and not to tidy her hair, with the help of the little mirror and the comb she carried in her vanity bag. Moreover she felt that she had been chilled on that Embankment seat, and a cold in the head is not heroic. She had her protest to make. The whole day loomed over her, big with possibilities. It made her feel very small and lonely, and cold and insecure.
Hazily, and with a vague audacity that had now deserted her, she had assured herself that she would strike her blow when the hour came; but now that she was face to face with the necessity she found that she was afraid. Even her scorn of her own fear could not whip her into action. Her more sensitive and spiritual self shrank from the crude publicity of the ordeal. If she did the thing she had contemplated doing, she knew that she would be hustled and roughly handled. She saw herself with torn clothes and tumbled hair. The police would rescue and arrest her. She would be charged, convicted, and sent to prison.
She did not fear pain, but she did fear the inevitable and vulgar scuffle, the rough male hands, the humiliation of being at the mercy of a crowd. Something prouder than her pride of purpose rose up and refused to prostitute itself in such a scrimmage. She knew how some of these women had been handled, and as she sat there in the hush of the early morning she puzzled over the psychological state of those who had dared to outrage public opinion. Either they were supreme enthusiasts or women with the souls of fishwives, or drunk with zeal, like those most offensive of zealots, the early Christians, who scolded, spat, and raved until they had exasperated some Roman magistrate into presenting them with martyrdom. She discovered that she had not that sort of courage or effrontery. The hot, physical smell of the ordeal disgusted her.
Yet Nature was to decide the question for her, and the first interposition of that beneficent tyrant began to manifest itself as soon as the stimulating effect of the hot coffee had worn off. Eve felt chilly, an indefinable restlessness and a feeling of malaise stole over her. She left the seat in the park, and walking briskly to warm herself, came into Pall Mall by way of Buckingham Gate. The rush of the day was beginning. She had been conscious of the deepening roar of the traffic while she had been sitting over yonder, and now it perplexed her, pressed upon her with a savage challenge.
She had thought to throw the straw of herself into this torrent of strenuous materialism. For the moment she was very near to laughter, near twitting herself with an accusation of egregious egoism. Yet it was the ego—the intimate, inward I—that was in the ascendant. The hurrying figures that passed her on the pavement made her recoil into her impressionable individualism. She felt like a hyper-sensitive child, shy of being stared at or of being spoken to. The hurry and the noise bothered her. Her head began to ache. Her will power flagged. She was feverish.
Eve walked and walked. There seemed nothing for her to do in this feverish city, but to walk and to go on walking. A significant languor took possession of her. She was conscious of feeling very tired, not merely with physical tiredness, but with an utter weariness of spirit. Her mind refused to go on working. It refused to face any responsibility, to consider any enterprise.
It surprised her that she did not grow hungry. On the contrary, the sight of food in a window nauseated her. Her head ached more, and her lips felt dry. Flushes of heat went over her, alternating with tremors of cold. Her body felt limp. Her legs did not seem to be there, even though she went on walking aimlessly along the pavements. The faces of the people whom she passed began to appear grotesque and sinister. Nothing seemed very real. Even the sound of the traffic came from a long way off. By twelve o’clock she was just an underfed young woman with a temperature, a young woman who should have been in bed.
Eve never quite knew how the idea came to her. She just found it there quite suddenly, filling the whole lumen of her consciousness. She would go and speak to the rosy-faced suffragette who sold papers at the corner of Southampton Row. She did not realise that she had surrendered, or that Nature might be playing with her as a wise mother plays with a child.
Eve was quite innocently confident that the young woman would be there. The neatly dressed, compact figure seemed to enlarge itself, and to dominate the very city. Eve went up Shaftesbury Avenue, and along New Oxford Street. She was nearly run over at one crossing. A taxi driver had to jam on his brakes. She did not notice his angry, expostulatory glare.
“Now then, miss, wake up!”
It was the male voice, the voice of organised society. “Wake up; move along in the proper groove, or stand and be run over!” The words passed over and beyond her. It was a feverish dream walk to the corner of Southampton Row. Then she found herself talking to the young woman who sold papers.
“I meant to do something. I’m not strong enough. I have been out all night on the Embankment.”
She was conscious of a strong presence near her; of a pleasant practical voice speaking.
“Why, you’re ill! Have you had anything to eat?”
“Some coffee and bread and butter at half-past five. I have been walking about.”
“Good gracious! You’re feverish! Let me feel.”
She gripped a hot hand.
“Thought so. Have you any money?”
To Eve money presented itself as something that was yellow and detestable. It was part of the heat in her brain.
“No. I spent the last of it this morning. I want to explain——”
The paper-seller put a hand under Eve’s arm.
“Look here, you’ll faint if you stay out here much longer. I’ll take you to friends. Of course, you are one of us?”
“I have been trying to earn a living, and to keep my pride.”
“A thing that men generally manage to make impossible!”
They had to wait for some traffic to pass, and to Eve the street seemed full of vague glare and confusion. She was aware of a firm grip on her arm, and of the nearness of something that was comforting and protective. She wanted to sink down into some soft, soothing substance, to drink unlimited cold water, and not to be bothered.
The body had decided it. There was to be no spasm of physical protest. Nature had determined that Eve should go to bed.
CHAPTER XXXVI
PALLAS
Not even her intimates knew the nature of the humiliations and the sufferings that had created Mrs. Falconer’s attitude towards man.
She was a tall and rather silent woman, fair-haired, grey-eyed, with a face that was young in outline and old in its white reserve. There was nothing slipshod or casual about her. She dressed with discrimination, yet even in the wearing of her clothes she suggested the putting on of armour, the linking up of chain mail. Someone had nicknamed her “Pallas.” She moved finely, stood still finely, and spoke in a level, full-toned voice that had a peculiar knack of dominating the conversation without effort and without self-consciousness. People turned and looked at her directly she entered a room.
Yet Mrs. Falconer did not play to her public. It was not the case of a superlatively clever woman conducting an ambitious campaign. There was something behind her cold serenity, a silent forcefulness, a superior vitality that made people turn to her, watch her, listen to what she said. She suggested the instinctive thought, “This woman has suffered; this woman knows; she is implacable; can keep a secret.” And all of us are a little afraid of the silent people who can keep secrets, who watch us, who listen while we babble, and who, with one swift sentence, send an arrow straight to the heart of things while we have been shooting all over the target.
Sentimentalists might have said that Mrs. Falconer was a splendid white rose without any perfume. Whether the emotions had been killed in her, whether she had ever possessed them, or whether she concealed them jealously, was a matter of conjecture. She was well off, had a house near Hyde Park and a cottage in Sussex. She was more than a mere clever, highly cultured woman of the world. Weininger would have said that she was male. The name of Pallas suited her.
Eve Carfax had lain in bed for a week in a little room on the third floor of Mrs. Falconer’s house, and during that week she had been content to lie there without asking herself any questions. The woman doctor who attended her was a lanky good fellow, who wore pince-nez and had freckles all over her face. Eve did not do much talking. She smiled, took what she was given, slept a great deal, being aware of an emptiness within her that had to be filled up. She had fallen among friends, and that was sufficient.
The window of her room faced south, and since the weather was sunny, and the walls were papered a soft pink, she felt herself in a pleasant and delicate atmosphere. She took a liking to Dr. Alice Keck. The freckled woman had been a cheeky, snub-nosed flapper on long stilts of legs, and her essential impudence had lingered on, and mellowed into a breezy optimism. She had the figure of a boy, and talked like a pseudo-cynical man of forty.
“You want turning out to grass for a month, then all the kick will come back. You have done enough experimenting on your own. I tried it once, and I didn’t like it!”
“When can I see Mrs. Falconer?”
Mrs. Falconer’s name seemed to instil sudden seriousness into Dr. Alice Keck.
“Oh, in a day or two!”
“I haven’t seen her yet, and I want to thank her.”
“Take my advice, and don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, it is not in her line—the emotions! You’d feel foolish, as though you had taken a box of matches to set light to the North Pole.”
“That sounds rather discouraging.”
“Rot! Wait and see. They call her Pallas, you know. If you begin hanging emotions on Kate Falconer you’ll end up by thinking you are shoving tinsel and beads on a fine statue. I’ll tell her you want to see her. I think she wants to see you.”
Eve’s vitality was returning, and one of the first evidences of its return showed itself in a curiosity concerning this woman who had befriended her. All the little delicate refinements of life had been given her—flowers, books, early tea served in dainty china, a bottle of scent had even been placed on the table beside her bed. These things had seemed feminine and suggestive. The room had a warmth of atmosphere that did not seem to belong to the house of a woman who would not care to be thanked.
But from the very first moment that Eve saw Kate Falconer in the flesh, she understood the aptness of Alice Keck’s similes. Eve was unusually intuitive. She felt an abnormal presence near her, something that piqued her interest.
“I am glad that you are so much better.”
She came and sat down beside the bed, and Eve could see her profile against the window. A warm, evening light was pouring in, but Pallas’s white face and grey dress were not warmed by it. There was nothing diaphanous or flamboyant about her; neither was she reactive or absorbent. The poise was complete; the whole world on one side, this woman on the other.
She made Eve feel self-conscious.
“I am much better, thanks to all your kindness.”
“It was the obvious thing to do.”
“I cannot quite look at it like that.”
It struck her as absurd that this woman should speak of doing what was obvious. Eve’s intuition did not hail her as an obvious person, though it was possible that Mrs. Falconer’s cold brilliancy made what seemed complex to most people, obvious to her. There was a moment’s constraint, Eve feeling herself at a disadvantage.
“I thought you might like to talk.”
“I ought to explain things a little.”
“You are under no obligation to explain anything. We women must help one another. It is part of the new compact.”
“Against men?”
“Against male dominance.”
“I should like to tell you some of my experiences!”
“I should like to hear them!”
Eve found it difficult to begin. She doubted whether this woman could distinguish the subtle emotional colour shades, but in this she was mistaken. She soon discovered that Mrs. Falconer was as experienced as a sympathetic Romish priest, yet the older woman seemed to look at life objectively, and to read all its permutations and combinations as a mathematician may be able to read music at sight.
“You have just worked out all the old conclusions, but there is nothing like working out a thing for oneself. It is like touching, seeing, tasting. I suppose it has made you one of the so-called fanatics?”
“I want things altered!”
“To what extent?”
“I want the divorce law made equal, and I want divorce made easier. I want commercial equality. I want it understood that an unmarried woman who has a child shall not be made to carry all the supposed disgrace!”
Mrs. Falconer turned in her chair. Her face was in the shadow, and Eve could not see her eyes very plainly, but she felt that she was being looked at by a woman who regarded her views as rather crude.
“I should like you to try and think in the future, not only in the present.”
“I have tried that, but it all seems so chaotic.”
“I suppose you know that there are certain life groups where the feminine element is dominant?”
“You mean spiders and bees?”
“Exactly! It is my particular belief that woman had her period of dominance and lost it. It has been a male world, so far as humanity is concerned, for a good many thousand years. And what has European man given us? Factories, mechanics, and the commercial age. I think we can do better than that.”
“You mean that we must make woman the dominant force?”
“Isn’t that obvious?”
It was obvious, splendidly obvious, when one had the thorough audacity to regard it in that light.
“But how——”
“By segregating the sexes, massing ourselves against the men, by refusing them everything that they desire as men. We shall use the political machinery as well. Man is the active principle, woman more passive, but passivity must win if it remains obdurate. Why have women always surrendered or sold themselves? Haven’t we that in us which gives us the right to rule?”
“Motherhood?”
“Yes, motherhood! We are the true creators.”
“But men——”
“The best of them shall serve.”
“And how can you be sure of persuading all women to mass themselves into one sisterhood?”
“That is just the problem we have to deal with. It will be solved so soon as the ordinary woman is taught to think woman’s thought.”
Eve lay mute, thinking. It was very easy to theorise on these lines, but what about human nature? Could one count, even in the distant future, on the ordered solidarity of a whole sex? Would every woman be above her own impulses, above the lure of the emotions? It seemed to Eve that Mrs. Falconer who talked of developments as being obvious, was overlooking the most obvious of opponents—Nature.
“But do you think that men will ever accept such a state of things?”
“Of course they would resist.”
“It would mean a sex war. They are stronger than we are!”
“No, not stronger! Besides, methods of violence, if we come to them, can be used now by women as well as by men. The trigger and the fuse are different from the club. I don’t count on such crude methods. We are in the majority. We shall just wear men out. We can bear more pain than they can.”
“But what an immense revolution!”
“Yet it has happened. We see it in insect life, don’t we? How did it come about?”
“I don’t know.”
“But it is there, a fact.”
“Yes. All the same, when I had finished reading a book on the ways of bees, I thought that they were detestable little beasts.”
“Because they killed off the useless males, and let the queen assassinate her rivals. We are not bees. We shall do better than that.”
Her level, full-toned voice had never varied, and she talked with perfect and assured serenity of turning society upside down. She was a fanatic with ideas and a subnormal temperature. She believed what she foresaw. It was like one of the Fates deigning to be conversational in a drawing-room.
She rose, and, walking to the window, looked down into the street.
“Do you think that women would have perpetrated London? It took man to do that. I must not tire you. Have you everything you want?”
“Thank you, everything.”
“I will come up and see you again to-morrow.”
Eve had plenty of leisure for meditation, and Mrs. Falconer’s theories gave her abundant material for thought. Rest in bed, with good food, and pleasant refinements round her had restored her normal poise, and she found that there was far less edge to her enthusiasm. She was a little shocked by the discovery. The disharmonies of the life that she had been studying had not changed, and she was troubled by this discovery that she did not react as she had reacted two weeks ago. When we are young we are distressed by the subtle transfigurations that overtake our ideals. We hatch so many eggs that persist in giving us ducklings instead of chickens. We imagine that we shall always admire the same things, believe the same beliefs, follow out the strenuous beginnings. When changes come, subtle, physical changes, perhaps, we are astonished at ourselves. So it was with Eve when she discovered that her enthusiasm had passed from a white heat to a dull and more comfortable glow. Accusing herself of inconstancy, lack of sustained purpose, did not explain the change in the least. She tried to convince herself that it was mere sloth, the result of a comfortable bed and good food.
In a day or two she found herself driven to explain a second surprising fact, a growing hostility towards Mrs. Falconer. It was not a dislike that could be reasoned with and suppressed, but a good, vigorous, temperamental hatred as natural and as self-assertive as hunger, thirst, or passion. It seemed to Eve abominable that she should be developing such an attitude towards this woman, who had shown her nothing but kindness, but this irresponsible antipathy of hers seemed to have leapt up out of some elemental underworld where intellect counted as nothing.
Mrs. Falconer came up daily to talk to her as to a fellow fanatic, and her temperament roused in Eve an instinctive sense of resistance. She found herself accusing her hostess to herself of intolerance and vindictiveness. It was like listening to a hell-fire sermon preached against the male sex, a denunciation that was subtilised with all the cleverness of a mind that had played with all the scientific theories of the day. Mrs. Falconer was a vitalist. She hated the mechanical school with fine consistency, and clasped hands with Bergson and Hans Driesch. Yet she disagreed with some of her fellow mystics in believing that women possessed more of the “élan vital” than man. Therefore, woman was the dominant force of the future, and it behoved her to assert her power.
Eve found herself on tip-toe to contradict Mrs. Falconer, just as one is tempted to jump up and contradict the dogmatist who talks down at us from the pulpit. She tried to argue one or two things out, but soon realised that this woman was far too clever for her, far too well armed. Mrs. Falconer had masked batteries everywhere. She had reserves of knowledge that Eve had no chance of meeting. And yet, though she could not meet her arguments, Eve had an intense conviction that Mrs. Falconer’s ideals were hopelessly wrong. There was la revanche behind it all. Her head could not confute the theorist, but her heart did. Human nature would not be cajoled.
She had an idea that Mrs. Falconer was a very busy woman. The house seemed full of voices, and of the sound of coming and going, but Eve did not discover how busy her hostess was till Dr. Alice Keck let her go downstairs. There were two big rooms on the second floor fitted up like offices, with a dozen women at work in them. Letters were being written, directories consulted, lists of names made out, statistics compiled, money received and disbursed. People came and went, brought and received information. There was no laughter. Everyone was in grim earnest.
Eve saw Mrs. Falconer’s personality translated into action. This rich woman’s house was a nerve centre of the new movement, and Mrs. Falconer’s presence suggested one of those subtle ferments that are supposed to stimulate the complex processes of life. She did nothing herself. She was a presence. People came to her when they needed the flick of her advice. She co-ordinated everything.
Eve was introduced to all these girls and women, and was given a table to herself with several sheets of foolscap and a file of papers. Mrs. Falconer came and stood by her, and explained the work she wanted her to do.
“There is nothing like attacking people with facts. They penetrate the British skull! We are collecting all these cases, and making a register of them. We shall publish them in a cheap form, and have them sent all over the country.”
“You want all these papers fair copied?”
“Yes. They are in the rough, just as they were sent in to us. You will find that they are numbered.”
Eve discovered that she had before her a series of reports dealing with well-authenticated cases of women who had been basely treated by men. Some of them were written on ordinary letter paper, others on foolscap, and not a few on the backs of circulars and bills. Nor was the batch that had been given her the first that had been handled. Each case was numbered, and Eve’s batch began at 293.
There was a sordid and pathetic similarity about them all.
“M—— W——, typist, 31, orphan. Engaged to be married to a clerk. The man borrowed her savings, got her into trouble, and then refused to marry her. Girl went into Queen Charlotte’s hospital. Baby born dead. The mother developed puerperal fever, but recovered. She was unable to get work for some time, and went into domestic service. Her health broke down. She is now in a workhouse infirmary.”
“V—— L——. A particularly cruel case that ended in suicide. She had spent a little sum of money that had been left her, on educating herself. Obtained a very good post as secretary. Her employer took her with him to Paris, pretending that as she could speak French she would be very useful to him in certain business transactions. Drugs were used. Five months later the girl committed suicide in London by throwing herself under a Tube train.”
All day, and for several days, Eve worked at these pathetic records, till she felt nauseated and depressed. It was a ghastly indictment drawn up against man, and yet it did not have the effect on her that Mrs. Falconer had expected. It did not drive her farther towards fanaticism. On the contrary, she was overcome by a feeling of helplessness and of questioning compassion. It was all so pitiable and yet so inevitable as things were, and through all the misery and the suffering she was brought to see that the whole blame could not be credited to the man. It was the system more than the individual.
A function that is natural and clean enough in itself has been fouled by the pruderies of priests and pedants. Sex has been disguised with all manner of hypocrisies and make-believes. Society pretends that certain things do not happen, and when Nature insists upon their happening, Society retaliates upon the woman by calling her foul names and making her an outcast. The men themselves are driven by the system to all those wretched meannesses, treacheries, deceptions. And the worst of it all is that Society tries to keep the truth boxed up in a cellar. English good form prides itself with a smirk on not talking about such things, and on playing the ostrich with its head under a pew cushion. Nature is not treated fairly and squarely. We are immorally moral in our conventions. Until we decide to look at sex cleanly and wholesomely, stripping ourselves of all mediæval nastiness and cowardly smuggery, we shall remain what we are, furtive polygamists, ashamed of our own bodies, and absurdly calling our own children the creatures of sin.
The work depressed Eve. Her fellow workers were hardly more enlivening. They belonged to a distinct type, the neutral type that cannot be appealed to either as man or woman. Meals were served at a long table in one of the lower rooms, and Eve noticed that her neighbours did not in the least care what they ate. They got through a meal as quickly as possible, talking hard all the time. Now Eve did care about what she ate, and whether it was delicately served. She had the palate of a healthy young woman, and it mattered to her whether she had ragged mutton and rice pudding every day, or was piqued by something with a flavour.
She was carnal. She told herself so flatly one afternoon as she went up to her bedroom, and the charge produced a thrill of natural laughter. She had a sudden wild desire to run out and play, to be greedy as a healthy child is greedy, to tumble hay in a hay field, to take off her clothes and bathe in the sea. The natural vitality in her turned suddenly from all this sour, quarrelsome, pessimistical campaigning and demanded life—the life of feeling and seeing.
The house oppressed her, so she put on her hat and escaped, and made her way into the park. May was in, green May, with lush grass and opening leaves. The sun shone. There was sparkle in the air. One thought of wood nymphs dancing on forest lawns while fauns piped and jigged, and the great god Pan delighted himself with wine and honey. It was only a London park, but it was the nearest thing to Nature that Eve could find. Her heart expanded suddenly. An irrational, tremulous joyousness came over her. She wanted to sing, to weep, to throw herself down and bury her face in the cool green grass. The country in May! She had a swift and passionate desire for the country, for green glooms and quiet waters and meadows dusted with gold. To get out of this loathsome complication of tragedies, to breathe smokeless air, to think of things other than suicides, prostitutions, treacheries, the buying and selling of souls.
She felt like a child before a holiday, and then she thought of Lynette. What a vision of wholesomeness and of joy! It was like cool water bubbling out of the earth, like a swallow gliding, a thrush singing at dawn. She could not bear to think of wasting all the spring in London. She must escape somehow, escape to a healthier outlook, to cooler thinking.
When she went back Mrs. Falconer sent for her. Eve wondered afterwards whether it was a coincidence or not that Mrs. Falconer should have said what she did that day.
“You have not been looking well. You want a change!”
“I almost think I do.”
“You don’t like me. It is a pity.”
Eve was taken by surprise.
“Don’t like you?”
“It is quite obvious to me, but it does not make any difference. I knew it, almost from the first. A matter of temperament. I understand some things better than you suspect. You want action, more warmth of movement. This statistical work disgusts you. I can give you your opportunity.”
Eve remained mute. It was useless to protest in the presence of such a woman.
“Two of our missionaries are going to tour in Sussex and Surrey. I think you might join them. I wonder if you are strong enough.”
“Oh, yes!”
“You see, they tramp most of the way, and speak in the villages, and small towns. Sometimes they are treated rather roughly.”
Eve beheld the green country within the clasp of her arms, and was ready to accept anything.
“Yes, I’ll go. I should love to go. I’m strong, and I’m not afraid. I think I want action.”
“Yes, you are not made for dealing with harsh facts. They disgust you too much, and weaken you. It is all temperament. You are one of those who must spend themselves, obtain self-expression.”
“I wonder how you know that?”
“My dear, I was a woman before I became a thinker.”