Two hundred years hence, possibly less.
Eugenia,Prime Minister, is sitting at her writing table in her library. She is a tall, fine looking woman of thirty, rather untidy and worn in appearance.
Eugenia[to herself, taking up a paper]. There is no doubt that we must carry through this bill or the future of the country will be jeopardized.
Henry[outside]. May I come in?
Eugenia.Do come in, dearest.
Henry[a tall, athletic man of thirty, faultlessly dressed, a contrast to her dusty untidiness]. I thought I could see the procession best from here. [Goes to windows and opens them.] It is in sight now. They are coming down the wind at a great pace.
Eugenia[slightly bored]. What procession?
Henry.Why the Men’s Reinfranchisement League, of course. You know, Eugenia, you promised to interview a deputation of them at 5 o’clock, and they determined to have a mass meeting first.
Eugenia.So they did. I had forgotten. I wish they would not pester me so. Really, the government has other things to attend to than Male Suffrage at times like this.
[The procession sails past the windows in planes decked with the orange and white colours of the league. The occupants preserve a dead silence, salutingEugeniagravely as they pass. From the streets far below rises a confused hubbub of men’s voices shouting “Votes for men!”
Henry.How stately the clergy look, Eugenia! Why, there are the two Archbishops in their robes heading the whole procession, and look at the bevy of Bishops in their lawn sleeves in the great Pullman air car behind. What splendid men. And here come the clergy in their academic gowns by the hundred, in open trucks.
Eugenia.I must say it is admirably organised, and no brawling.
Henry.Why should they brawl? I believe you are disappointed that they don’t. They are all saluting you, Eugenia, as they pass. They won’t take any notice of me, of course, because it is known I am the President of the Anti-Suffrage League. The doctors are passing now. How magnificent they look in their robes! What numbers of them! It makes me proud I am a man. And now come the lawyers in crowds in their wigs and gowns.
Eugenia.Every profession seems to be represented, but of course I am well aware that it is not the real wish of the men of England to obtain the vote. The suffragists must do something to convince me that the bulk of England’s thoughtful and intelligent men are not opposed to it before I move in the matter.
Henry.I often wonder what would convince you, Eugenia, or what they could do that they have not done. These must be the authors and artists and journalists, and quite a number of women with them. Do you notice that? Look, that is Hobson the poet, and Bagg the millionaire novelist, each in their own Swallow planes. How they dart along. I should like to have a Swallow, Eugenia. And are all those great lumbering tumbrils of men journalists?
Eugenia.No doubt.
Henry.It is very impressive. I wish they did not pass so fast, but the wind is high. Here come all the trades with the Lord Mayor of London in front! What hordes and hordes of them! The procession is at least a mile long. And I suppose those are miners and agricultural labourers, last of all, trying to keep up in those old Wilbur Wrights and Zeppelins. I did not know there were any left except in museums.
[The procession passes out of sight.Eugeniasighs.
Henry.Demonstrations like this make a man think, Eugenia. I really can’t see, though you often tell me I do, why men should not have votes. They used to have them. You yourself say that there is no real inequality between the sexes. The more I think of it the more I feel I ought to retire from being President of the Anti-Suffrage League. And all the men on it are old enough to be my father. The young men are nearly all in the opposite camp. I sometimes wish I was there too.
Eugenia.Henry!
Henry.Now don’t, Eugenia, make any mistake. I abhor the “brawling brotherhood” as much as you do. I was quite ashamed for my sex when I saw that bellowing brute riveted to the balcony of your plane the other day, shouting “Votes for men.”
Eugenia[coldly]. That sort of conduct puts back the cause of men’s reinfranchisement by fifty years. It shows how unsuited the sex is to be trusted with the vote. Imagine that sort of hysterical screaming in the House itself.
Henry.But ought the cause to be judged by the folly of a few howling dervishes? Sometimes it really seems, Eugenia, as if women were determined to regard the brawling brotherhood as if it represented the men who seek for the vote. And yet the sad part is that these brawlers have done more in two years to advance the cause than their more orderlybrothers have achieved in twenty. For years past I have heard quiet suffragists say that all their efforts have been like knocking in a padded room. They can’t make themselves heard. Women smiled and said the moment was not opportune. The press gave garbled accounts of their sayings and doings.
Eugenia.Your simile is unfortunate. No one wants to emancipate the only persons who are confined in padded rooms.
Henry.Not if they are unjustly confined?
Eugenia[with immense patience]. Dear Henry, must we really go over this old ground again? Men used to have votes as we all know. In the earliest days of all, of course, both men and women had them. The ancient records prove that beyond question, and that women presented themselves with men at the hustings. Then women were practically disfranchised, and for hundreds of years men ruled alone, though it was not until near the reign of Victoria the First that by the interpolation of the word “male” before “persons” in the Reform Act of 1832 women were legally disfranchised. Men were disfranchised almost as suddenly in the reign of Man-hating Mary the Second of blessed memory.
Henry.I know, I know, but....
Eugenia[whose oratorical instincts are not exhausted by her public life]. You must remember I would have you all—I mean I would haveyou, Henry, remember that men were only disfranchised after the general election of 2009. It was the wish of the country. We must bow to that.
Henry.You mean it was the wish of the women of the country, who were a million stronger numerically than men.
Eugenia.It was the wish of the majority, including many thousands of enlightened men, my grandfather among them, who saw the danger to their country involved in continued male suffrage. After all, Henry, it was men who were guilty of the disaster of adult suffrage. Women never asked for it—they were deeply opposed to it. They only demanded the suffrage on the same terms that men had it in Edward the Seventh’s time. Adult suffrage was the last important enactment of men, and one which ought to prove to you, considering the incalculable harm it did, that men, in spite of their admirable qualities, are not sufficiently far-sighted to be trusted with a vote. Adult suffrage lost us India. It all but lost us our Colonies, for the corner-men and wastrels and unemployed who momentarily became our rulers saw no use for them. The only good result of adult suffrage was that women, by the happy chance of their numerical majority, and with the help of Mary the Man-hater, were able to combine, to outvote the men and so to seize the reins and abolish it.
Henry.And abolish us too.
Eugenia.It was an extraordinarycoup d’état, the one good result of the disaster of adult suffrage. It was a bloodless revolution, but the most amazing in the annals of history. And it saved the country.
Henry.I do not deny it. But you can’t get away from the fact that men did give women the vote originally. And now men have lost it themselves. Why should not women give it back to men—I mean, of course, only to those who have the same qualifications as to property as women voters have? After all it was by reason of our physical force that we were entitled to rule, at least men always said so. Over and over again they said so in the House, and that women can’t be soldiers and sailors and special constables as we can. And our physical force remains the greater to this day.
Eugenia.We do everything to encourage it.
Henry.Without us, Eugenia, you would have no army, no navy, no miners. We do the work of the world. We guard and police the nation, and yet we are not entitled to a hearing.
Eugenia.Your ignorance of the force that rules the world is assumed for rhetorical purposes.
Henry.I suppose you will say brain ought to rule. Well, some of us are just as able as some of you. Look at our great electricians, our shipbuilders, our inventors, our astronomers, our poets, nearly all are men. Shakespeare was a man.
Eugenia[sententiously]. There was a day, and a very short day it was, when it was said that brain ought to rule. Brain did make the attempt, but it could no more rule this planet than brute force could continue to do so. You know, and I know, and every schoolgirl knows, that what rules the birth-rate rules the world.
Henry[for whom this sentiment has evidently the horrid familiarity of the senna of his childhood]. It used not to be so.
Eugenia.It is so now. It is no use arguing; it is merely hysteria to combat the basic fact that the sex which controls the birth-rate must by nature rule the nation which it creates. This is not a question with which law can deal, for nature has decided it.
[Henrypreserves a paralysed silence.
Eugenia[with benignant dignity]. I am all for the equality of the sexes within certain limits, the limits imposed by nature. But the long and the short of it is, to put it bluntly, no man, my dear Henry, can give birth to a child, and until he can he will be ineligible by the laws of nature, not by any woman-made edict, to govern, and the less he talks about it the better. Sensible men and older men know that and hold their tongues, and women respect their silence. Man has his sphere, and a very important and useful sphere in life it is. The defence of the nation isentrusted to him. Where should we be without our trusty soldiers and sailors, and, as you have just reminded me, our admirable police force? Where physical strength comes in men are paramount. When I think of all the work men are doing in the world I assure you, Henry, my respect and admiration for them knows no bounds. But if they step outside their own sphere of labour, then—
Henry.But if only you would look into the old records, as I have been doing, you would see that Lord Curzon and Lord James and Lord Cromer, and many others employed these same arguments in order to withhold the suffrage from women.
Eugenia.I dare say.
Henry.And there is another thing which does not seem to me to be fair. Men are so ridiculed if they are suffragists.Punchinellaalways draws them as obese disappointed old bachelors, and there are many earnest young married men among the ranks of the suffragists. Look at the procession which has just passed. Our best men were in it. And to look atPunchinellaor to listen to the speeches in the House you would think that the men who want the vote are mostly repulsive old bachelors stung by the neglect of women. Why only last week the member for Maidenhead, Mrs. Colthorpe it was got up and said that if only this “brawling brotherhood” of single gentlemen, who had missed domestic bliss,could find wives they would not trouble their heads about reinfranchisement.
Eugenia.There is no doubt there is an element of sex resentment in the movement, dear Henry. That is why I have always congratulated myself on the fact that, you, as my husband, were opposed to it.
Henry.Personally I can’t imagine now that women have the upper hand why they don’t keep up their number numerically. It is their only safeguard against our one day regaining the vote. It was their numerical majority plus adult suffrage which suddenly put them in the position to disfranchise men. And yet women are allowing their number to decline and decline until really for all practical purposes there seems to be about two men to every woman.
Eugenia.The laws of nature render our position infinitely stronger than that of men ever was. We mounted by the ladder of adult suffrage, but we kicked it down immediately afterwards. It will never be revived. Men had no tremors about the large surplusage of women as long as they were without votes. Why should we have any now about the surplusage of men?
Henry.Then there is another point. You talk so much about the importance of the physique of the race, and I agree with all my heart. But there are so few women to marrynowadays, and women show such a marked disinclination towards marriage till their youth is quite over, that half the men I know can’t get wives at all. And those who do, have almost no power of selection left to them, and are forced to put up with ill-developed, sickly, peevish, or ugly women past their first bloom rather than remain unmarried and childless.
Eugenia.The subject is under consideration at this moment, but when the position was reversed in Edward the Seventh’s time, and there were not enough men to go round, women were in the same plight, and men said nothingthenabout the deterioration of the race. They did not even make drunkards’ marriages a penal offence. Drunkards and drug-takers, and men dried up by nicotine constantly married and had children in those days.
Henry.I can’t think the situation was as difficult for women as it is now for men. I was at Oxford last week, and do you know that during the last forty years only five per cent. of the male Dons and Professors have been able to find mates. Women won’t look at them.
Eugenia.In the nineteenth century, when first women went to Universities and became highly educated, only four per cent. of them afterwards married, and then to schoolmasters.
Henry.And I assure you the amount ofhysteria and quarrelling among the older Dons is lamentable.
Eugenia.I appointed a committee which reported to me on the subject last year, and I gathered that the present Dons are not more hysterical than they were in Victorian days, when they forfeited their fellowships on marriage. You must remember, Henry, that from the earliest times men and women have always hated anything “blue” in the opposite sex. Female blue stockings were seldom attractive to men in bygone days. And nowadays women are naturally inclined to marry young men, and healthy and athletic men, rather than sedentary old male blue stockings. It is most fortunate for the race that is is so.
Henry[with a sigh]. Well, all the “blue” women can marry nowadays.
Eugenia.Yes, thank heaven,allwomen can marry nowadays. What women must have endured in the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth century makes me shudder. For if they did not marry they were never spared the ridicule or the contemptuous compassion of men. It seems incredible, looking back, to realise that large families of daughters were kept idle and unhappy at home, after their youth was over, not allowed to take up any profession, only to be turned callously adrift in their middle age at their father’s death, with a pittance on which they couldbarely live. And yet these things were done by educated and kindly men who professed to care for the interests of women, and were personally fond of their daughters. Over and over again in the biographies of notable women of the Victorian and Edward the Seventh’s time one comes across instances of the way in which men of the country-squire type kept their daughters at home uneducated till they were beyond the age when they could take up a profession, and then left them to poverty. They did not even insure their lives for each child as we do now. Surely, Henry, it is obvious that women have done one thing admirably. The large reduction which they have effected in their own numbers has almost eliminated the superfluous, incompetent, unhappy women who found it so difficult to obtain a livelihood a hundred years ago, and has replaced them by an extra million competent, educated, fairly contented men who are all necessary to the State, who are encouraged, almost forced into various professions.
Henry.Not contented, Eugenia.
Eugenia.More contented, because actively employed, than if they were wandering aimlessly in the country lanes of their fathers’ estates as thousands of intelligent uneducated women were doing a hundred years ago, kept ferociously at home by the will of the parent who held the purse-strings.
Henry.I rather wish I had lived in those goodold times, when the lanes were full of pretty women.
Eugenia.But you, at any rate, Henry, had a large choice. I was much afraid at one time that you would never ask me.
Henry.Ah! But then I was a great heir, and all heirs have a wide choice. Not that I had any choice at all. I had the good luck to be accepted by the only woman I ever cared a pin about, and the only one I was sure was disinterested.
Eugenia.Dearest!
Henry[tentatively]. And yet our marriage falls short of an ideal one, my Eugenia.
Eugenia[apologetically]. Dear Henry, I know it does, but as soon as I cease to be Prime Minister I will do my duty to the country, and, what I think much more of, by you. What is a home without children? Besides, I must set an example. When you came in I was framing a bill to meet the alarming decline of the birth-rate. Unless something is done the nation will become extinct. The results of this tendency among women to marry later and later are disastrous.
Henry.And what is your bill, Eugenia?
Eugenia.That every healthy married woman or female celibate over twenty-five and under forty, members of the government excepted, must do her duty to the State by bringing into the world—
Henry.Celibate! Bringing into the world! Eugenia! and I thought the sanctity of marriage and home life were among your deepest convictions. Just think how you have upheld them to—men.
Eugenia.Patriotism must come first. By bringing into the world three children, a girl and two boys. If her income is insufficient to rear them, the State will take charge of them. One extra boy is needed to supply the wastage of accidents in practical work, and in case of war. I shall stand or fall by this bill, for unless the women of England can be aroused to do their duty—unless there is general conscription to motherhood, as in Germany, England will certainly become a second-class power.
Henry.Perhaps when there are two men to every woman we shall be strong enough to force women to do justice to us.
Eugenia.Men never did justice to us when they had the upper hand.
Henry.They did not. And I think the truth lies there. Those who have the upper hand cannot be just to those who are in their power. They don’t intend to be unfair, but they seem unable to give their attention to the rights of those who cannot enforce them. Men were unintentionally unjust to women for hundreds of years. They kept them down. Now women are unjust to us. Yes, Eugenia, you are. You keep us down. It seems to be aninevitable part of therôleof “top dog,” and perhaps it is no use discussing it. If you don’t want your plane, would you mind if I borrow it? I promised to meet Carlyon at four above the Florence Nightingale column in Anne Hyde’s park, and it is nearly four now.
Eugenia.Good-bye, Henry. Do take my plane. And I trust there will be no more doubt in your dear head as to your Presidency of the Anti-Suffrage League.
Henry.None. I realise these wrigglings of the under dog are unseemly, and only disturb the equanimity and good-will of the “top dog.” Good-bye, Eugenia.
Thefirst time I saw Essie was a few weeks before her marriage with my brother Ted. I knew beforehand that she would certainly be very pretty for the simple reason that Ted would never have been attracted by a plain woman. For him plain women did not exist, except as cooks, governesses, caretakers and charwomen.
Ted is the best fellow in the world, and when he brought her to see me I instantly realised why he had chosen her; but I found myself wondering why she had chosen him—she was charming, lovely, shy, very young and diffident, and with the serenest temperament I have ever seen. She was evidently fond of him, and grateful to him. Later on I learned—from her, never from him—the distress and anxiety from which he had released her and her mother. There was a disreputable brother, and other entanglements, and complicated money difficulties.
Ted simply swooped down, and rescued her, and ordered her to marry him, which she did.
“She is a cut above me, Essie is,” he used to say rubbing his hands, and looking at her with joyfulpride. It was true. Essie looked among us like a race horse among cart horses. She belonged, not by birth, but by breeding to a higher social plane than that on which we Hopkinses had our boisterous being. I was resentfully on the alert to detect the least sign of arrogance on her part. I expected it. But gradually the sleepless suspicion of the great middle class to which Ted and I belonged was lulled to rest. I had to own to myself that Essie was a simple, humble, and rather timid creature.
I went to stay with them a few months after their marriage in their new home in Kensington. Ted was outrageously happy, and she seemed well content, amused by him, rather in the same way that a child is amused by a large dog.
He had actually suggested before he met Essie that I should keep house for him, but I told him I preferred to call my soul my own. Essie apparently did not want to call anything her own. She let him have his way in everything, and it was a benevolent and sensible way, but it had evidently never struck him that she might have tastes and wishes even if she did not put them forward. He was absolutely autocratic, and without imagination.
Before they had been married a month he had prevailed on her to wear woollen stockings instead of silk ones, because he always wore woollen socks himself.
He chose the wallpapers of the house without any reference to her, though of course she accompanied him everywhere. He chose the chintzes for the drawing-room, and the curtains, and very good useful materials they were, not ugly, but of a garish cheerfulness. Indeed, he furnished the whole house without a qualm, and made it absolutely conventional. It is strange how very conventional people press towards the mark, how they struggle to be conventional, when it is only necessary to drift to become so.
Ted exerted himself, and Essie laughed, and said she liked what he liked. If she had not been so very pretty her self-effacement would have seemed rather insipid, but somehow she was not insipid. She liked to see him happy in his own prosaic efficient inartistic way, and I don’t think she had it in her power to oppose him if she had wanted to, or indeed anyone. She was by nature yielding, a quality which men like Ted always find adorable.
I remember an American once watching Ted disporting himself on the balcony, pushing aside all Essie’s tubs of flowering tulips to make room for a dreadful striped hammock.
“The thing I can’t understand about you English women,” said the visitor to Essie, “is why you treat your men as if they were household pets.”
“What an excellent description of an English husband,” said Essie.“That is just what he is.”
“What’s that? What’s that?” said Ted, rushing in from the balcony, but as he never waited for an answer Essie seldom troubled to give him one.
Perhaps I should never have known Essie if I had not fallen ill in her house. Ted and she were kindness itself, but as I slowly climbed the hill of convalescence I saw less of him and more of her. He was constantly away, transacting business in various places, and I must own a blessed calm fell upon the house when the front door slammed, and he was creating a lucrative turmoil elsewhere. The weather was hot, and we sat out evening after evening in the square garden. Gradually, very gradually, a suspicion had arisen in my mind that there was another Essie whose existence Ted and I had so far never guessed. I saw that she did—perhaps by instinct—what wise women sometimes do of set purpose. She gave to others what they wanted from her, not necessarily the best she had to give. Ted had received from her exactly what he hoped and desired, and—he was happy.
The evening came when I made a sudden demand on her sympathy. In the quiet darkness of the square garden I told her of a certain agonising experience of my own which in one year had pushed me from youth into middle age, and had turned me not to stone, but into a rolling stone.
“I imagined it was something of that kind that was the matter with you,” she said in her gentle rather toneless voice.
“You guessed it,” I said amazed. I had thought I was a closed book to the whole world. “You never spoke of your idea to Ted?”
“Never. Why should I?”
There was a long silence.
The noise of Kensington High Street reached us like the growl of some tired animal. An owl came across from Holland Park and alighted in a tree near us.
“You should have married him,” said Essie at last.
“Married him!” I exclaimed, “but you don’t understand.” And I went over the whole dreadful story again—at full length. Love affairs are never condensed. If they are told at all they are recounted in full.
“I don’t see that any of those things matter,” she said when I had finished, or rather when I paused.
“Where is he now?”
“In Turkistan, I believe.”
“Why not go to Turkistan?” She spoke as if it were just round the corner.
“Turkistan!”
“Well, it’s somewhere on the map, I suppose. What does it matter where it is.”
“And perhaps when I got there I might find he had set up a harem of Turkistan women.”
“You might.”
“Or that he had long since left for America.”
“Just so.”
“Or that he did not want me.”
“All these things are possible.”
The owl began to call through the dusk, and, not far away, somewhere in the square a gentle lady owl’s voice answered him.
“There are things,” said Essie, “which one can measure, and it is easy to know how to act about them, and whether it is worth while to act at all. Most things one can measure, but there are in life just a few things, a very few, which one cannot measure, or put a value on, or pay a certain price for, and no more, because they are on a plane where foot-rules and weighing machines and money do not exist. Love is one of these things. When we begin to weigh how much we will give to love, what we are willing to sacrifice for it, we are trying to drag it down to a mercantile basis and to lay it on the table of the money changers on which things are bought and sold, and bartered and equivalent value given.”
“You think I don’t love him,” I said, cut to the quick.
“I am sure,” said Essie, “that you don’t love him yet, but I think you are on the road. Who was it who said
‘The ways of love are harderThan thoroughfares of stones.’
Whoever it was, he knew what he was talking about. You have found the thoroughfare stony, and you rebel and are angry, very angry, and desert your fellow traveller. He, poor man, did not make the road. I expect he is just as angry and foot-sore as you are.”
“He was a year ago. I don’t know what he is now. It is a year since he wrote.”
Essie knitted in silence.
At last I said desperately:
“I have told you everything. Do you think it’s possible he still cares for me?”
Essie waited a long minute before answering.
“I don’t know,” she said, and then added, “but I think you will presently go to Turkistan and find out.”
Reader, I went to Turkistan, and was married there, and lived there and in Anatolia for many happy years. But that is another story. I did not start on that voyage of discovery till several months after that conversation. I had battered myself to pieces against the prison bars of my misery, and health ruthlessly driven away was slow to return.
As I lived with Ted and Essie I became aware that he was becoming enormously successful in money matters. There were mysterious expeditions, buyings and sellings of properties, which necessitated sudden journeys. Immense transactions passed through his competent hands, andpresently the possibility of a country house was spoken of. He talked mysteriously of a wonderful old manor house in Essex, which he had come upon entirely by chance, which would presently come into the market, and which might be acquired much below its value, so anxious was the owner—a foreign bigwig—to part with it at once.
Ted prosed away about this house from teatime till bedtime. Essie listened dutifully, but it was I who asked all the questions.
Ted hurried away next morning, not to return for several days, one of which he hoped to spend in Essex.
“You don’t seem much interested about the country house,” I said at tea time. I was slightly irritated by the indifference which seemed to enwrap Essie’s whole existence.
“Don’t you care about it? It must be beautiful from Ted’s account.”
“If he likes it I shall like it.”
“What a model wife you are. Have you no wishes of your own, no tastes of your own, Essie?”
She looked at me with tranquil eyes.
“I think Ted is happy,” she said, “and I am so glad the children are both exactly like him.”
“Yes, but—”
“There is nobutin my case. Ted rescued me from an evil entanglement and eased my mother’s life. And he set his kind heart on marrying me. I told him I could not give him much, but he didnot mind. I don’t think men like Ted understand that there is anything more that—that might be given; which makes a very wonderful happiness when itisgiven. Our marriage was on the buying and selling plane. We each put out our wares. I saw very well that he would be impossible—for me at least—to live with unless I gave way to him entirely. Dear Ted is a benevolent tyrant. He would become a bully if he were opposed, and bullies are generally miserable. I don’t oppose him. I think he is content with his bargain, and as fond of me as a man can be of a lay figure. My impression is that he regards me as a model wife.”
“He does, he does. He is absolutely, blissfully happy.”
“He would be just as happy with another woman,” said Essie, “if she were almost inanimate. It was a comfort to me to remember that when I nearly died three years ago.”
“Yes, Ted is all right,” I said, “but how about you? I used to think you were absolutely characterless, and humdrum, but I know better now. Don’t you—miss anything?”
“No,” said Essie, “nothing. You see,” she added tranquilly with the faintest spice of malice, “I lead a double life.”
I gasped, staring at her open-mouthed, horror-stricken. She ignored my crass imbecility, and went on quietly:
“I don’t know when it began, but I suppose when I was about five years old. I found my way to the enchanted forest, and I went there in my dreams every night.”
“In your dreams!” I stuttered, enormously reassured, and idiotically hoping that she had not noticed my hideous lapse.
“In my dreams. I had an unhappy childhood, but I never was unhappy any more after I learned the way through the forest. Directly I fell asleep I saw the track among the tree trunks, and then after a few minutes I reached the wonderful glade and the lake, and the little islands. One of the islands had a temple on it. I fed the swans upon the lake. I twined garlands of flowers. I climbed the trees, and looked into the nests. I swung from tree to tree, and I swam from island to island. I made a little pipe out of a reed from the lake, and blew music out of it. And the rabbits peeped out of their holes to listen, and the squirrels came hand by hand along the boughs, and the great kites with their golden eyes came whirling down. Even the little moles came up out of the ground to listen.”
I gazed at her, astonished.
“I did not wear any clothes,” said Essie,“and I used to lie on the moss in the sun. It is delicious to lie on moss, warm moss in the sun. Once when I was a small child I asked my governess when those happy days would come back when we should wear no clothes, and she told me I was very naughty. I never spoke to her of the dream forest again. She did not understand any more than you did the first moment. I think the natural instinct of the British mind if it does not understand is to look about for a lurking impropriety. I saw other children sometimes, but never close at hand. They went to the temple singing, garlanded and gay, but when I tried to join them I passed through them. They never took any notice of me.”
“Were you a ghost?”
“I think not. I imagine I am an old old soul who has often been in this world before, and by some strange accident I have torn a corner of the veil that hides our past lives from us, and in my dreams I became once more a child as I had really been once, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, perhaps in Greece or Italy.”
“And do you still have that dream every night?”
“Not for many years past. I lost my way to the forest for several years, until I was again in great trouble. That was when—then one night when I had cried myself to sleep I saw the same track through the thicket, and I found the forest again. Oh! how I rejoiced! And in the middle of the forest was a garden and a wonderful old house, standing on a terrace. And there was nolake any more. It was a different place altogether, in England no doubt. And the house door was open. It was a low arched door with a coat of arms carved in stone over it. And I went in. And as I entered all care left me, and I was happy again, as I was among the islands in the lake. I can’t tell you why I was so happy. I have sometimes asked myself, but it is a question I can’t answer. It seemed my real home. I have gone back there every night since I was seventeen, and I know the house by heart. There is only one room I shrink from, though it is one of the most beautiful in the house. It is a small octagonal panelled room leading out of the banqueting hall where the minstrels gallery is. It looks on to the bowling green, and one large picture hangs in it, over the carved mantelpiece. A Vandyck I think it must be. It is a portrait of a cavalier with long curls holding his plumed hat in his hand.”
“Did you meet people in the house?”
“No, not at first, not for several years, but I did not miss them. I did not want companionship; I felt that I was with friends, and that was enough. I wanted the repose, and the beauty and the peace which I always found there. I steeped myself in peace, and brought it back with me to help me through the day. The night was never long enough for me. And I always came back, rested, and refreshed, and content, oh! so deeply content. I am a very lucky person, Beatrice.”
“It explains you at last,” I said. “You have always been to me an enigma, during the five years I have known you.”
“The explanation was too simple for you.”
“Do you call it simple? I don’t. I should hardly be able to believe it if it were not you who had told me. And the house was always empty? You never saw anyone there?”
“It was never empty, but I could not see the people who lived in it. I could see nothing clearly, and I had no desire to pry or search. I was often conscious of someone near me, who loved me and whom I loved. And I could hear music sometimes, and sweet voices singing, but I could never find the room where the music was. But then I did not try to find it. Sometimes when I looked out of the windows I could see a dim figure walking up and down the terrace, but not often.”
“Was it a man or a woman?”
“A man.”
“And you never went out to the bowling green and spoke to him?”
“I never thought of such a thing. I never even saw his face till—till that Christmas I was so ill with pneumonia. Then I fled to the house, and for the first time I could find no rest in it. And I went into the octagonal room, and sat down near the window and leaned my foreheadagainst the glass. My head was burning hot, and the glass was hot too. Everything was hot. And there was a great dreadful noise of music. And suddenly it seemed as if I went deeper into the life of the house, where the light was clearer. It was as if a thin veil were withdrawn from everything. And the heat and the pain were withdrawn with the veil. And I was light and cool, and at ease once more. And the music was like a rippling brook. Andhecame into the room. I saw him quite clearly at last. And oh! Beatrice, he was the cavalier of the picture, dressed in blue satin with a sword. And he stood before me with his plumed hat in his hand.
“And as I looked at him a gentle current infinitely strong seemed to take me. I floated like a leaf upon it. I think, Beatrice, it was the current of death. I felt it was bearing me nearer and nearer to him and to my real life, and leaving further and further behind my absurd little huddled life here in Kensington, which alwayshasseemed rather like a station waitingroom.
“We neither of us spoke, but we understood each other, and we loved each other. We had long loved each other. I saw that. And presently he knelt down at my feet and kissed my hands. Doesn’t that sound commonplace, like a cheap novelette? but it wasn’t. It wasn’t ... and then as we looked at each other the gentle sustaining current seemed to fail beneath me. Istruggled, but it was no use. It ebbed slowly away from me, leaving me stranded on an aching shore alone, in the dark, where I could not breathe or move. And I heard our doctor say, “she is going.” But I wasn’t going. I had nearly, nearly gone, and I was coming back. And then there was a great turmoil round me, and I came back in agony into my own room and my own bed, and found the doctor and nurse beside me giving me oxygen, and poor Ted as white as a sheet standing at the foot of the bed.... They forced me to—to stay. I had to take up life again.”
And for the first time in all the years I had known her Essie was shaken with sudden weeping.
“That was three years ago,” she said brokenly.
For a time we sat in silence hand in hand.
“And do you still go back there?”
“Every night.”
“And you meet him?”
“Yes and no. I am sometimes aware of his presence, but I never see him clearly as I did that once. I think at that moment I was able to see him because I was so near death that I was very close to those on the other side of death. My spirit had almost freed itself from the body, so I became visible to him and he to me. I have studied the pictures of Charles the First’s time, and his dress was exactly of that date, almost the same as that well-known picture—I think it isCharles the First—of a man with his hand on his hip, standing beside a white horse. Do you think it is wrong of me to have a ghostly lover, who must have lived nearly three hundred years ago?”
“Not wrong, but strange. It is a little like “The Brushwood Boy,” and “Peter Ibbetson,” and Stella Benson’s “This is the end.” I suppose we have all been on this earth before, but the cup of Lethe is well mixed for most of us, and we have no memory of previous lives. But you have not drunk the cup to the dregs, and somehow you have made a hole in the curtain of oblivion in two places. Through one of those holes you saw one of your many childhoods, probably in Greece, a couple of thousand years ago. Through the other hole you saw, in comparatively modern times your early womanhood. Perhaps you married your beautiful cavalier with the curls.”
“No,” said Essie with decision, “I have never been married to him, or lived in his house. It is my home, but I have never lived there. I know nothing about him except that we love each other, and that some day we shall really meet, not in a dream.”
“In the Elysian fields?”
“Yes, in the Elysian fields.”
At this moment the front door slammed, and Ted banged up the stairs, and rushed in. If I had not known him I should have said he was drunk.
He was wildly excited, he was crimson. Hecareered round the room waving his arms, and then plumped on to the sofa, and stretched out his short legs in front of him.
“I’ve bought it. I’ve got it,” he shouted. “Do you hear? I’ve bought it dirt cheap. The young ass is in such a hurry, and he’s apparently so wealthy he doesn’t care. And two hundred acres of timber with it. Such timber. Such walnut, and chestnut and oak. The timber alone is worth the money, I’ve got it. It’s mine.”
“The house in Essex?”
“Kenstone Manor, in Essex. It’s a nailer. It’s a—a—an old world residence. It has no central heating, no bathrooms, no electric light, obsolete drainage and the floors are giving way. I shall have to put in everything, but I shall do it without spending a penny. I shall do it by the timber, and it’s nine miles from a station, that’s partly why no one wanted it. But the railroad is coming. No one knows that yet except a few of us, but it will be there in five years, with a station on the property. Then I shall sell all the land within easy reach of the station in small building lots for villas. I shall make a pile.”
Ted’s round eyes became solemn. He was gazing into the future, leaning forward, a stout hand on each stout knee.
“Teddy shall go to Eton,” he said,“and I shall put him in the Guards.”
A week later Ted took us down by motor to see Kenstone. It was too far for us to return the same day, so he engaged rooms for us in the village inn. His “buyer” was to meet him, and advise him as to what part of the contents of the house he should offer to take over by private treaty before the sale.
On a gleaming day in late September we sped along the lovely Essex lanes, between the pale harvested fields.
“There’s the forest,” shouted Ted, leaning back from his seat in front, and pointing to a long ridge of trees which seemed to stretch to the low horizon beyond the open fields.
“When we’re over the bridge we’re on the—the property,” yelled Ted.
We lurched over the bridge, and presently the forest came along the water’s edge to meet us, and we turned sharply through an open gateway into a private road.
Such trees I had never seen. They stood in stately groups of birch and oak and pine with broad glades of grass and yellowing bracken between them.
“Ancient deer park once,” shouted Ted. “Shall be again.”
Essie paid little attention to him. We had made a very early start, and she was tired. She leaned back in the car with half closed eyes.
The trees retreated on each side of the road, and the wonderful old house came suddenly into sight, standing above its long terrace with its stone balustrade.
Ted gave a sort of yelp.
“Oh Essie!” I cried. “Look—look! It’s perfect.”
She gazed languidly for a moment, and then she sat up suddenly, and her face changed. She stared wildly at the house, and put out her hands as if to ward it off.
The car sped up to the arched doorway, with its coat of arms cut in grey stone, and Ted leaped out and rushed up the low steps to the bell.
“Not here! Not here!” gasped Essie, clinging to the car. “I can’t live here.” She was trembling violently.
“Dear Essie,” I said amazed, “we can’t remain in the car. Pull yourself together, and even if you don’t like the place don’t hurt Ted’s feelings by showing it.”
She looked at me like one dazed, and inured to obedience got out, and we followed Ted into the house. We found ourselves in a large square hall. She groaned and leaned against the wall.
“I can’t bear it,” she whispered to me. “It’s no use, I can’t bear it.”
“A glass of water, quick,” I said to Ted, who turned beaming to us expecting a chorus of admiration.“Essie is overtired.”
“What is the matter?” I said to her as he hurried away. “What’s wrong with this exquisite place?”
“It’s the house I come to at night,” she said brokenly. “The dream house. I knew it directly I saw it. Look! There’s the minstrels’ gallery.”
I could only stare at her amazed.
Kind Ted hurried back, splashing an overfull tumbler of water as he came, on the polished oak floor.
She sipped a little, but her hands shook so much that I had to hold the glass for her.
“Cheero, old girl,” said Ted, patting her cheek, but Essie did not cheero.
“The lady ought to lie down,” said the old woman who had opened the door to us. “There’s a sofy in the morning-room.”
I supported Essie into an octagonal room leading out of the great hall, and laid her on a spacious divan of dim red damask.
“Leave her alone with me for a bit,” I said to Ted. “She is overwrought. We made a very early start.”
“I seem to have gone blind,” she whispered when Ted had departed. “Everything is black.”
“You turned faint. You will be all right in a few minutes.”
“Shall I? Would you mind telling me, Beatrice, is there—is there a picture over the fireplace?”
“Yes.”
“What kind of picture?”
“It is a life-size portrait of a young cavalier with curls, in blue satin, holding his hat in his hand.”
“I knew it,” she groaned.
There was a long silence.
“I can’t bear it,” she said. “You may say that is silly, Beatrice, but all the same I can’t. My life will break in two. If Ted lives here—I shall have nowhere to go.”
“I don’t think it silly, dear, but I don’t understand This is your old home where you lived nearly three hundred years ago, and to which you have so often come back in your dreams. Now you are coming back to it as your home once more. It seems to me a beautiful and romantic thing to have happened, and after the first surprise surely it must seem the same to you. You have always been so happy here.”
“I can see a little now,” she said. “Where is the glass of water?”
She sat up and drank a little, and then dabbed some of the water on her forehead.
“I’m all right now,” she said, pushing back her wet hair.
“Don’t move. Rest a little; you have had a shock.”
She did not seem to hear me. She rose slowly to her feet, and stood in front of the picture.
“Yes,” she said to the cavalier. “It’s you, only not quite you either. You are not really as handsome as that you know, and you have a firmer mouth and darker brows.”
The cavalier smiled at her from the wall: a somewhat insipid supercilious face I thought, but a wonderful portrait.
The old caretaker came back.
“The gentleman said you’d be the better for something to eat,” she said, “and that you would take it in the hall.”
Through the open door I saw the chauffeur unstrapping the baskets from Fortnum and Mason.
“Whose portrait is that?” said Essie.
“Henry Vavasour Kenstone,” said the old woman in a parrot voice. “Equerry to our martyred King, by Vandyck. You will observe the jewelled sword and the gloves sewed with pearls. The sword and the gloves are preserved in the banqueting ’all in a glass case.”
Essie turned away from the picture, and sat down feebly by the window.
The clinking of plates, and Ted’s cheerful voice reached us, and the drawing of a cork.
“Our Mr. Rupert, the present owner, favours the picture,” said the woman proudly in her natural voice, “and when he come of age three years ago last Christmas there was a grand fancy ball and ’e was dressed exackerly to match thepicture, with a curled wig and all. And ’e wore the actual sword, and the very gloves, at least ’e ’eld ’em in ’is ’and. They was too stiff to put on. ’E did look a picture. And ’is mother being Spanish ’ad a lace shawl on ’er ’ead, a duchess she was in ’er own right, and she might a been a queen to look at her. I watched the dancing from the gallery, me having been nurse in the family, and a beautiful sight it was.”
Essie’s dark eyes were fixed intently on the garrulous old servant.
“Three years ago last Christmas,” she said sharply. “Are you sure of that?”
“And wouldn’t I be sure that took ’im from the month ma’am, but ’e don’t look so like the picture when ’e ain’t dressed to match, and without the yaller wig,” and she wandered out of the room, evidently more interested in the luncheon preparations than in us.
Ted hurried in. When was he not in a hurry?
“Luncheon, luncheon,” he said. “Don’t wait for me, Essie. Rather too long a drive for my little woman. Give her a glass of port, Beatrice. I have to see Rodwell about the roof. Shan’t be half a mo. He’s got to catch his train. Mr. Kenstone, the Duke, I mean, will be here in ten minutes. If he turns up before I’m back give him a snack. They’ve sent enough for ten.”
We did not go in to luncheon.
Essie sank down on the divan. I sat down by her, and put my arms round her. She leaned her head against my shoulder.
“You heard what that woman said,” she whispered. “You see he did not live hundreds of years ago as I thought. The dress deceived me. He’s alive now. He’s twenty-four.”
My heart ached for her, but I could find no word to comfort her in her mysterious trouble.
As we looked out together through the narrow latticed windows the lines came into my mind: