It was a quarter past five on a fine morning, early in July. On the stroke of the quarter Captain Frank Drayton's motor-car, after exceeding the speed limit along the forlorn highway of the Caledonian Road, drew up outside the main entrance of Holloway Gaol. Captain Frank Drayton was alone in his motor-car.
He had the street all to himself till twenty past five, when he was joined by another motorist, also conspicuously alone in his car. Drayton tried hard to look as if the other man were not there.
The other man tried even harder to look as if he were not there himself. He was the first to be aware of the absurdity of their competitive pretences. He looked at his watch and spoke.
"I hope they'll be punctual with those doors. I was up at four o'clock."
"I," said Drayton, "was up at three."
"I'm waiting for my wife," said the other man.
"I amnot," said Drayton, and felt that he had scored.
The other man's smile allowed him the point he made.
"Yes, but my wife happens to be Lady Victoria Threlfall."
The other man laughed as if he had made by far the better joke.
Drayton recognized Mr. Augustin Threlfall, that Cabinet Minister made notorious by his encounters with the Women's Franchise Union. Last year Miss Maud Blackadder had stalked him in the Green Park and lamed him by a blow from her hunting-crop. This year his wife, Lady Victoria Threlfall, had headed the June raid on the House of Commons.
And here he was at twenty minutes past five in the morning waiting to take her out of prison.
And here was Drayton, waiting for Dorothea, who was not his wife yet.
"Anyhow," said the Cabinet Minister, "we've done them out of their Procession."
"What Procession?"
All that Drayton knew about it was that, late last night, a friend he had in the Home Office had telephoned to him that the hour of Miss Dorothea Harrison's release would be five-thirty, not six-thirty as the papers had it.
"The Procession," said the Cabinet Minister, "that was to have met 'em at six-thirty. A Car of Victory for Mrs. Blathwaite, and a bodyguard of thirteen young women on thirteen white horses. The girl who smashed my knee-cap is to be Joan of Arc and ride at the head of 'em. In armour. Fact. There's to be a banquet for 'em at the Imperial at nine. We can't stopthat. And they'll process down the Embankment and down Pall Mall and Piccadilly at eleven; but they won't process here. We've let 'em out an hour too soon."
A policeman came from the prison-yard. He blew a whistle. Four taxi-cabs crept round the corner furtively, driven by visibly hilarious chauffeurs.
"The triumphant procession from Holloway," said the Cabinet Minister, "is you and me, sir, and those taxi-cabs."
On the other side of the gates a woman laughed. The released prisoners were coming down the prison-yard.
The Cabinet Minister cranked up his engine with an unctuous glee. He was boyishly happy because he and the Home Secretary had done them out of the Car of Victory and the thirteen white horses.
The prison-gates opened. The Cabinet Minister and Drayton raised their caps.
The leaders, Mrs. Blathwaite and Angela Blathwaite and Mrs. Palmerston-Swete came first. Then Lady Victoria Threlfall. Then Dorothea. Then sixteen other women.
Drayton did not look at them. He did not see what happened when the Cabinet Minister met his wife. He did not see the sixteen other women. He saw nothing but Dorothea walking by herself.
She had no hat on. Her clothes were as the great raid had left them, a month ago. Her serge coat was torn at the breast pocket, the three-cornered flap hung, showing the white lining. Another three-cornered flap hung from her right knee. She carried her small, hawk-like head alert and high. Her face had the incomparable bloom of youth. Her eyes shone. They and her face showed no memory of the prison-cell, the plank-bed, and the prison walls; they showed no sense of Drayton's decency in coming to meet her, no sense of anything at all but of the queerness, the greatness and the glory of the world--of him, perhaps, as a part of it. She stepped into the car as if they had met by appointment for a run into the country. "I shan't hurt your car. I'm quite clean, though you mightn't think it. The cells were all right this time."
He disapproved of her, yet he adored her.
"Dorothy," he said, "do you want to go to that banquet?"
"No, but I've got to. I must go through with it. I swore I'd do the thing completely or not at all."
"It isn't till nine. We've three whole hours before we need start."
"What are you going to do with me?"
"I'm going to take you home first. Then I suppose I shall have to drive you down to that beastly banquet."
"That won't take three and a half hours. It's a heavenly morning. Can't we do something with it?"
"What would you like to do?"
"I'd like to stop at the nearest coffee-stall. I'm hungry. Then--Are you frightfully sleepy?"
"Me? Oh, Lord, no."
"Then let's go off somewhere into the country." They went.
They pulled up in a green lane near Totteridge to finish the buns they had brought with them from the coffee-stall.
"Did you ever smell anything like this lane? Did you ever eat anything like these buns? Did you ever drink anything like that divine coffee? If epicures had any imagination they'd go out and obstruct policemen and get put in prison for the sake of the sensations they'd have afterwards."
"That reminds me," he said, "that I want to talk to you. No--but seriously."
"I don't mind how seriously you talk if I may go on eating."
"That's what I brought the buns for. So that I mayn't be interrupted. First of all I want to tell you that you haven't taken me in. Other people may be impressed with this Holloway business, but not me. I'm not moved, or touched, or even interested."
"Still," she murmured, "you did get up at three o'clock in the morning."
"If you think I got up at three o'clock in the morning to show my sympathy, you're mistaken."
"Sympathy? I don't need your sympathy. It was worth it, Frank. There isn't anything on earth like coming out of prison. Unless it is going in."
"That won't work, Dorothy, when I know why you went in. It wasn't to prove your principles. Your principles were against that sort of thing. It wasn't to get votes for women. You know as well as I do that you'll never get them that way. It wasn't to annoy Mr. Asquith. You knew Mr. Asquith wouldn't care a hang. It was to annoy me."
"I wonder," she said dreamily, "if I shalleverbe able to stop eating."
"You can't take me in. I know too much about it. You said you were going to keep out of rows. You weren't going on that deputation because it meant a row. You went because I asked you not to go."
"I did; and I should go again tomorrow for the same reason."
"But it isn't a reason. It's not as if I'd asked you to go against your conscience. Your conscience hadn't anything to do with it."
"Oh, hadn't it! I went because you'd no right to ask me not to."
"If I'd had the right you'd have gone just the same."
"What do you mean by the right?"
"You know perfectly well what I mean."
"Of course I do. You mean, and you meant that if I'd married you you'd have had the right, not just to ask me not to, but to prevent me. That was what I was out against. I'd be out against it tomorrow and the next day, and for as long as you keep up that attitude."
"And yet--you said you loved me."
"So I did. So I do. But I'm out against that too."
"Good Lord, against what?"
"Against your exploiting my love for your purposes."
"My poor dear child, what do you suppose I wanted?"
She had reached the uttermost limit of absurdity, and in that moment she became to him helpless and pathetic.
"I knew there was going to be the most infernal row and I wanted to keep you out of it. Look here, you'd have thought me a rotter if I hadn't, wouldn't you?
"Of course you would. And there's another thing. You weren't straight about it. You never told me you were going."
"I never told you I wasn't."
"I don't care, Dorothy; you weren't straight. You ought to have told me."
"How could I tell you when I knew you'd only go trying to stop me and getting yourself arrested."
"Not me. They wouldn't have touched me."
"How was I to know that? If they had I should have dished you. And I'd have stayed away rather than do that. I didn't tell Michael or Nicky or Father for the same reason."
"You'd have stayed at home rather than have dished me? Do you really mean that?"
"Of course I mean it. And I meant it. It's you," she said, "who don't care."
"How do you make that out?"
He really wanted to know. He really wanted, if it were possible, to understand her.
"I make it out this way. Here have I been through the adventure and the experience of my life. I was in the thick of the big raid; I was four weeks shut up in a prison cell; and you don't care; you're not interested. You never said to yourself, 'Dorothy was in the big raid, I wonder what happened to her?' or 'Dorothy's in prison, I wonder how she's feeling?' You didn't care; you weren't interested.
"If it had happened to you, I couldn't have thought of anything else, I couldn't have got it out of my head. I should have been wondering all the time what you were feeling; I couldn't have rested till I knew. It would have been as if I was in prison myself. And now, when I've come out, all you think of is how you can rag and score off me."
She was sitting beside him on the green bank of the lane. Her hands were clasped round her knees. One knickerbockered knee protruded through the three-cornered rent in her skirt; she stared across the road, a long, straight stare that took no heed of what she saw, the grey road, and the green bank on the other side, topped by its hedge of trees.
Her voice sounded quiet in the quiet lane; it had no accent of self-pity or reproach. It was as if she were making statements that had no emotional significance whatever.
She did not mean to hurt him, yet every word cut where he was sorest.
"I wanted to tell you about it. I counted the days, the minutes till I could tell you; but you wouldn't listen. You don't want to hear."
"I won't listen if it's about women's suffrage. And I don't want to hear if it's anything awful about you."
"It is about me, but it isn't awful.
"That's what I want to tell you.
"But, first of all--about the raid. I didn't mean to be in it at all, as it happens. I meant to go with the deputation because you told me not to. You're right about that. But I meant to turn back as soon as the police stopped us, because I hate rows with the police, and because I don't believe in them, and because I told Angela Blathwaite I wasn't going in with her crowd any way. You see, she called me a coward before a lot of people and said I funked it. So I did. But I should have been a bigger coward if I'd gone against my own will, just because of what she said. That's how she collars heaps of women. They adore her and they're afraid of her. Sometimes they lie and tell her they're going in when their moment comes, knowing perfectly well that they're not going in at all. I don't adore her, and I'm not afraid of her, and I didn't lie.
"So I went at the tail of the deputation where I could slip out when the row began. I swear I didn't mean to be in it. I funked it far too much. I didn't mind the police and I didn't mind the crowd. But I funked being with the women. When I saw their faces. You world have funked it.
"And anyhow I don't like doing things in a beastly body. Ugh!
"And then they began moving.
"The police tried to stop them. And the crowd tried. The crowd began jeering at them. And still they moved. And the mounted police horses got excited, and danced about and reared a bit, and the crowd was in a funk then and barged into the women. That was rather awful.
"I could have got away then if I'd chosen. There was a man close to me all the time who kept making spaces for me and telling me to slip through. I was just going to when a woman fell. Somewhere in the front of the deputation where the police were getting nasty.
"Then I had to stay. I had to go on with them. I swear I wasn't excited or carried away in the least. Two women near me were yelling at the police. I hated them. But I felt I'd be an utter brute if I left them and got off safe. You see, it was an ugly crowd, and things were beginning to be jolly dangerous, and I'd funked it badly. Only the first minute. It went--the funk I mean--when I saw the woman go down. She fell sort of slanting through the crowd, and it was horrible. I couldn't have left them then any more than I could have left children in a burning house.
"I thought of you."
"You thought of me?"
"Yes. I thought of you--how you'd have hated it. But I didn't care. I was sort of boosted up above caring. The funk had all gone and I was absolutely happy. Not insanely happy like some of the other women, but quietly, comfily happy.
"After all, I didn't do anything youneedhave minded."
"Whatdidyou do?" he said.
"I just went on and stood still and refused to go back. I stuck my hands in my pockets so that I shouldn't let out at a policeman or anything (I knew you wouldn't likethat). I may have pushed a bit now and then with my shoulders and my elbows; I can't remember. But I didn't make one sound. I was perfectly lady-like and perfectly dignified."
"I suppose youknowyou haven't got a hat on?"
"It didn'tcomeoff. Itookit off and threw it to the crowd when the row began. It doesn't matter about your hair coming down if you haven't got a hat on, but if your hair's down and your hat's bashed in and all crooked you look a perfect idiot.
"It wasn't a bad fight, you know, twenty-one women to I don't know how many policemen, and the front ones got right into the doorway of St. Stephen's. That was where they copped me.
"But that, isn't the end of it.
"The fight was only the first part of the adventure. The wonderful thing was what happened afterwards. In prison.
"I didn't think I'd reallylikeprison. That was another thing I funked. I'd heard such awful things about it, about the dirt, you know. And there wasn't any dirt in my cell, anyhow. And after the crowds of women, after the meetings and the speeches, the endless talking and the boredom, that cell was like heaven.
"Thank God, it's always solitary confinement. The Government doesn't know that if they want to make prison a deterrent they'll shut us up together. You won't give the Home Secretary the tip, will you?
"But that isn't what I wanted to tell you about.
"It was something bigger, something tremendous. You'll not believe this part of it, but I was absolutely happy in that cell. It was a sort of deep-down unexcited happiness. I'm not a bit religious, but Iknowhow the nuns feel in their cells when they've given up everything and shut themselves up with God. The cell was like a convent cell, you know, as narrow as that bit of shadow there is, and it had nice white-washed walls, and a planked-bed in the corner, and a window high, high up. There ought to have been a crucifix on the wall above the plank-bed, but there wasn't a crucifix. There was only a shiny black Bible on the chair.
"Really Frank, if you're to be shut up for a month with just one book, it had better be the Bible. Isaiah's ripping. I can remember heaps of it: 'in the habitation of jackals, where they lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes. And an highway shall be there ... the redeemed shall walk there: and the ransomed of the Lord shall return with singing into Zion' ... 'They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; they shall walk, and not faint.' I used to read like anything; and I thought of things. They sort of came to me.
"That's what I wanted to tell you about. The things that came to me were so much bigger than the thing I went in for. I could see all along we weren't going to get it that way. And I knew weweregoing to get it some other way. I don't in the least know how, but it'll be some big, tremendous way that'll make all this fighting and fussing seem the rottenest game. That was one of the things I used to think about."
"Then," he said, "you've given it up? You're corning out of it?"
She looked at him keenly. "Are those still your conditions?"
He hesitated one second before he answered firmly. "Yes, those are still my conditions. You still won't agree to them?"
"I still won't agree. It's no use talking about it. You don't believe in freedom. We're incompatible. We don't stand for the same ideals."
"Oh, Lord, whatdoesthat matter?"
"It matters most awfully."
"I should have thought," said Drayton, "it would have mattered more if I'd had revolting manners or an impediment in my speech or something."
"It wouldn't,really."
"Well, you seem to have thought about a lot of things. Did you ever once think about me, Dorothy?"
"Yes, I did. Have you ever read the Psalms? There's a jolly one that begins: 'Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war and my fingers to fight.' I used to think of you when I read that. I thought of you a lot.
"That's what I was coming to. It was the queerest thing of all. Everything seemed ended when I went to prison. I knew you wouldn't care for me after what I'd done--you must really listen to this, Frank--I knew you couldn't and wouldn't marry me; and it somehow didn't matter. What I'd got hold of was bigger than that. I knew that all this Women's Suffrage business was only a part of it, a small, ridiculous part.
"I sort of saw the redeemed of the Lord. They were men, as well as women, Frank. And they were all free. They were all free because they were redeemed. And the funny thing was that you were part of it. You were mixed up in the whole queer, tremendous business. Everything was ended. And everything was begun; so that I knew you understood even when you didn't understand. It was really as if I'd got you tight, somehow; and I knew you couldn't go, even when you'd gone."
"And yet you don't see that it's a crime to force me to go."
"I see that it would be a worse crime to force you to stay if you mean going.
"What time is it?"
"A quarter to eight."
"And I've got to go home and have a bath. Whatever you do, don't make me late for that infernal banquet. Youaregoing to drive me there?"
"I'm going to drive you there, but I'm not going in with you."
"Poor darling! Did I ask you to go in?"
He drove her back to her father's house. She came out of it burnished and beautiful, dressed in clean white linen, with the broad red, white and blue tricolour of the Women's Franchise Union slanting across her breast.
He drove her to the Banquet of the Prisoners, to the Imperial Hotel, Kingsway. They went in silence; for their hearts ached too much for speaking. But in Dorothy's heart, above the aching, there was that queer exaltation that had sustained her in prison.
He left her at the entrance of the hotel, where Michael and Nicholas waited to receive her.
Michael and Nicholas went in with her to the Banquet. They hated it, but they went in.
Veronica was with them. She too wore a white frock, with red, white and blue ribbons.
"Drayton's a bit of a rotter," Michael said, "not to see you through."
"How can he when he feels like that about it?"
"As if we didn't feel!"
Three hundred and thirty women and twenty men waited in the Banquet Hall to receive the prisoners.
The high galleries were festooned with the red, white and blue of the Women's Franchise Union, and hung with flags and blazoned banners. The silk standards and the emblems of the Women's Suffrage Leagues and Societies, supported by their tall poles, stood ranged along three walls. They covered the sham porphyry with gorgeous and heroic colours, purple and blue, sky-blue and sapphire blue and royal blue, black, white and gold, vivid green, pure gold, pure white, dead-black, orange and scarlet and magenta.
From the high table under the windows streamed seven dependent tables decorated with nosegays of red, white and blue flowers. In the centre of the high table three arm-chairs, draped with the tricolour, were set like three thrones for the three leaders. They were flanked by nine other chairs on the right and nine on the left for the eighteen other prisoners.
There was a slight rustling sound at the side door leading to the high table. It was followed by a thicker and more prolonged sound of rustling as the three hundred and fifty turned in their places.
The twenty-one prisoners came in.
A great surge of white, spotted with red and blue, heaved itself up in the hall to meet them as the three hundred and fifty rose to their feet.
And from the three hundred and fifty there went up a strange, a savage and a piercing collective sound, where a clear tinkling as of glass or thin metal, and a tearing as of silk, and a crying as of children and of small, slender-throated animals were held together by ringing, vibrating, overtopping tones as of violins playing in the treble. And now a woman's voice started off on its own note and tore the delicate tissue of this sound with a solitary scream; and now a man's voice filled up a pause in the shrill hurrahing with a solitary boom.
To Dorothea, in her triumphal seat at Angela Blathwaite's right hand, to Michael and Nicholas and Veronica in their places among the crowd, that collective sound was frightful.
From her high place Dorothea could see Michael and Nicholas, one on each side of Veronica, just below her. At the same table, facing them, she saw her three aunts, Louie, Emmeline and Edith.
It was from Emmeline that those lacerating screams arose.
The breakfast and the speeches of the prisoners were over. The crowd was on its feet again, and the prisoners had risen in their high places.
Out of the three hundred and seventy-one, two hundred and seventy-nine women and seven men were singing the Marching Song of the Militant Women.
Shoulder to shoulder, breast to breast,Our army moves from east to west.Follow on! Follow on!With flag and sword from south and north,The sounding, shining hosts go forth.Follow on! Follow on!Do you not bear our marching feet,From door to door, from street to street?Follow on! Follow on!
Dorothea was fascinated and horrified by the singing, swaying, excited crowd.
Her three aunts fascinated her. They were all singing at the top of their voices. Aunt Louie stood up straight and rigid. She sang from the back of her throat, through a mouth not quite sufficiently open; she sang with a grim, heroic determination to sing, whatever it might cost her and other people.
Aunt Edie sang inaudibly, her thin shallow voice, doing its utmost, was overpowered by the collective song. Aunt Emmeline sang shrill and loud; her body rocked slightly to the rhythm of a fantastic march. With one large, long hand raised she beat the measure of the music. Her head was thrown back; and on her face there was a look of ecstasy, of a holy rapture, exalted, half savage, not quite sane.
Dorothea was fascinated and horrified by Aunt Emmeline.
The singing had threatened her when it began; so that she felt again her old terror of the collective soul. Its massed emotion threatened her. She longed for her white-washed prison-cell, for its hardness, its nakedness, its quiet, its visionary peace. She tried to remember. Her soul, in its danger, tried to get back there. But the soul of the crowd in the hail below her swelled and heaved itself towards her, drawn by the Vortex. She felt the rushing of the whirlwind; it sucked at her breath: the Vortex was drawing her, too; the powerful, abominable thing almost got her. The sight of Emmeline saved her.
She might have been singing and swaying too, carried away in the same awful ecstasy, if she had not seen Emmeline. By looking at Emmeline she saved her soul; it stood firm again; she was clear and hard and sane.
She could look away from Emmeline now. She saw her brothers, Michael and Nicholas. Michael's soul was the prey of its terror of the herd-soul. The shrill voices, fine as whipcord and sharp as needles, tortured him. Michael looked beautiful in his martyrdom. His fair, handsome face was set clear and hard. His yellow hair, with its hard edges, fitted his head like a cap of solid, polished metal. Weariness and disgust made a sort of cloud over his light green eyes. When Nicky looked at him Nicky's face twitched and twinkled. But he hated it almost as much as Michael hated it.
She thought of Michael and Nicholas. They hated it, and yet they stuck it out. They wouldn't go back on her. She and Lady Victoria Threlfall were to march on foot before the Car of Victory from Blackfriars Bridge along the Embankment, through Trafalgar Square and Pall Mall and Piccadilly to Hyde Park Corner. And Michael and Nicholas would march beside them to hold up the poles of the standard which, after all, they were not strong enough to carry.
She thought of Drayton who had not stuck it out. And at the same time she thought of the things that had come to her in her prison cell. She had told him the most real thing that had ever happened to her, and he had not listened. He had not cared. Michael would have listened. Michael would have cared intensely.
She thought, "'I am not come to bring peace, but a sword.'" The sword was between her and her lover.
She had given him up. She had chosen, not between him and the Vortex, but between him and her vision which was more than either of them or than all this.
She looked at Rosalind and Maud Blackadder who sang violently in the hall below her. She had chosen freedom. She had given up her lover. She wondered whether Rosalind or the Blackadder girl could have done as much, supposing they had had a choice?
Then she looked at Veronica.
Veronica was standing between Michael and Nicholas. She was slender and beautiful and pure, like some sacrificial virgin. Presently she would be marching in the Procession. She would carry a thin, tall pole, with a round olive wreath on the top of it, and a white dove sitting in the ring of the olive wreath. And she would look as if she was not in the Procession but in another place.
When Dorothea looked at her she was lifted up above the insane ecstasy and the tumult of the herd-soul. Her soul and the soul of Veronica went alone in utter freedom.
Follow on! Follow on!For Faith's our spear and Hope's our sword,And Love's our mighty battle-lord.Follow on! Follow on!And Justice is our flag unfurled,The flaming flag that sweeps the world.Follow on! Follow on!And "Freedom!" is our battle-cry;For Freedom we will fight and die.Follow on! Follow on!
The Procession was over a mile long.
It stretched all along the Embankment from Blackfriar's Bridge to Westminster. The Car of Victory, covered with the tricolour, and the Bodyguard on thirteen white horses were drawn up beside Cleopatra's Needle and the Sphinxes.
Before the Car of Victory, from the western Sphinx to Northumberland Avenue, were the long regiments of the Unions and Societies and Leagues, of the trades and the professions and the arts, carrying their banners, the purple and the blue, the black, white and gold, the green, the orange and the scarlet and magenta.
Behind the Car of Victory came the eighteen prisoners with Lady Victoria Threlfall and Dorothea at their head, under the immense tricolour standard that Michael and Nicholas carried for them. Behind the prisoners, closing the Procession, was a double line of young girls dressed in white with tricolour ribbons, each carrying a pole with the olive wreath and dove, symbolizing, with the obviousness of extreme innocence, the peace that follows victory. They were led by Veronica.
She did not know that she had been chosen to lead them because of her youth and her processional, hieratic beauty; she thought that the Union had bestowed this honour on her because she belonged to Dorothea.
From her place at the head of the Procession she could see the big red, white and blue standard held high above Dorothea and Lady Victoria Threlfall. She knew how they would look; Lady Victoria, white and tense, would go like a saint and a martyr, in exaltation, hardly knowing where she was, or what she did; and Dorothea would go in pride, and in disdain for the proceedings in which her honour forced her to take part; she would have an awful knowledge of what she was doing and of where she was; she would drink every drop of the dreadful cup she had poured out for herself, hating it.
Last night Veronica had thought that she too would hate it; she thought that she would rather die than march in the Procession. But she did not hate it or her part in it. The thing was too beautiful and too big to hate, and her part in it was too little.
She was not afraid of the Procession or of the soul of the Procession. She was not afraid of the thick crowd on the pavements, pressing closer and closer, pushed back continually by the police. Her soul was by itself. Like Dorothea's soul it went apart from the soul of the crowd and the soul of the Procession; only it was not proud; it was simply happy.
The band had not yet begun to play; but already she heard the music sounding in her brain; her feet felt the rhythm of the march.
Somewhere on in front the policemen made gestures of release, and the whole Procession began to move. It marched to an unheard music, to the rhythm that was in Veronica's brain.
They went through what were once streets between walls of houses, and were now broad lanes between thick walls of people. The visible aspect of things was slightly changed, slightly distorted. The houses stood farther back behind the walls of people; they were hung with people; a swarm of people clung like bees to the house walls.
All these people were fixed where they stood or hung. In a still and stationary world the Procession was the only thing that moved.
She had a vague, far-off perception that the crowd was friendly.
A mounted policeman rode at her side. When they halted at the cross-streets he looked down at Veronica with an amused and benign expression. She had a vague, far-off perception that the policeman was friendly. Everything seemed to her vague and far off.
Only now and then it struck her as odd that a revolutionary Procession should be allowed to fill the streets of a great capital, and that a body of the same police that arrested the insurgents should go with it to protect them, to clear their triumphal way before them, holding up the entire traffic of great thoroughfares that their bands and their banners and their regiments should go through. She said to herself "What a country! It couldn't happen in Germany; it couldn't happen in France, or anywhere in Europe or America. It could only happen in England."
Now they were going up St. James's Street towards Piccadilly. The band was playing the Marseillaise.
And with the first beat of the drum Veronica's soul came down from its place, and took part in the Procession. As long as they played the Marseillaise she felt that she could march with the Procession to the ends of the world; she could march into battle to the Marseillaise; she could fight to that music and die.
The women behind her were singing under their breath. They sang the words of the Women's Marseillaise.
And Veronica, marching in front of them by herself, sang another song. She sang the Marseillaise of Heine and of Schumann.
"'Daun reitet mein Kaiser wohl über mein Grab,Viel' Schwerter klirren und blitzen;Dann steig' ich gewaffnet hervor aus mein Grab,--Den Kaiser, den Kaiser zu schützen!'"
The front of the Procession lifted as it went up Tyburn Hill.
Veronica could not see Michael and Nicholas, but she knew that they were there. She knew it by the unusual steadiness of the standard that they carried. Far away westwards, in the middle and front of the Procession, the purple and the blue, the gold and white, the green, the scarlet and orange and magenta standards rocked and staggered; they bent forwards; they were flung backwards as the west wind took them. But the red, white and blue standard that Michael and Nicholas carried went before her, steady and straight and high.
And Veronica followed, carrying her thin, tall pole with the olive wreath on the top of it, and the white dove sitting in the ring of the wreath. She went with the music of Schumann and Heine sounding in her soul.
Another year passed.
Frances was afraid for Michael now. Michael was being drawn in. Because of his strange thoughts he was the one of all her children who had most hidden himself from her; who would perhaps hide himself from her to the very end.
Nicholas had settled down. He had left the Morss Company and gone into his father's business for a while, to see whether he could stand it. John was going into the business too when he left Oxford. John was even looking forward to his partnership in what he called "the Pater's old tree-game." He said, "You wait till I get my hand well in. Won't we make it rip!"
John was safe. You could depend on him to keep out of trouble. He had no genius for adventure. He would never strike out for himself any strange or dangerous line. He had settled down at Cheltenham; he had settled down at Oxford.
And Dorothea had settled down.
The Women's Franchise Union was now in the full whirl of its revolution. Under the inspiring leadership of the Blathwaites it ran riot up and down the country. It smashed windows; it hurled stone ginger-beer bottles into the motor cars of Cabinet Ministers; it poured treacle into pillar-boxes; it invaded the House of Commons by the water-way, in barges, from which women, armed with megaphones, demanded the vote from infamous legislators drinking tea on the Terrace; it went up in balloons and showered down propaganda on the City; now and then, just to show what violence it could accomplish if it liked, it burned down a house or two in a pure and consecrated ecstasy of Feminism. It was bringing to perfection its last great tactical manoeuvre, the massed raid followed by the hunger-strike in prison. And it was considering seriously the very painful but possible necessity of interfering with British sport--say the Eton and Harrow Match at Lord's--in some drastic and terrifying way that would bring the men of England to their senses.
And Dorothea's soul had swung away from the sweep of the whirlwind. It would never suck her in. She worked now in the office of the Social Reform Union, and wrote reconstructive articles forThe New Commonwealthon Economics and the Marriage Laws.
Frances was not afraid for her daughter. She knew that the revolution was all in Dorothea's brain.
When she said that Michael was being drawn in she meant that he was being drawn into the vortex of revolutionary Art. And since Frances confused this movement with the movements of Phyllis Desmond she judged it to be terrible. She understood from Michael that it wastheVortex, the only one that really mattered, and the only one that would ever do anything.
And Michael was not only in it, he was in it with Lawrence Stephen.
Though Frances knew now that Lawrence Stephen had plans for Michael, she did not realize that they depended much more on Michael himself than on him. Stephen had said that if Michael was good enough he meant to help him. If his poems amounted to anything he would publish them in hisReview. If any book of Michael's poems amounted to anything he would give a whole article to that book in hisReview. If Michael's prose should ever amount to anything he would give him regular work on theReview.
In nineteen-thirteen Michael Harrison was the most promising of the revolutionary young men who surrounded Lawrence Stephen, and his poems were beginning to appear, one after another, in theGreen Review. He had brought out a volume of his experiments in the spring of that year; they were better than those that Réveillaud had approved of two years ago; and Lawrence Stephen had praised them in theGreen Review.
Lawrence Stephen was the only editor "out of Ireland," as he said, who would have had the courage either to publish them or to praise them.
And when Frances realized Michael's dependence on Lawrence Stephen she was afraid.
"You wouldn't be, my dear, if you knew Larry," Vera said.
For Frances still refused to recognize the man who had taken Ferdinand Cameron's place.
Lawrence Stephen was one of those Nationalist Irishmen who love Ireland with a passion that satisfies neither the lover nor the beloved. It was a pure and holy passion, a passion so entirely of the spirit as to be compatible with permanent bodily absence from its object. Stephen's body had lived at ease in England (a country that he declared his spirit hated) ever since he had been old enough to choose a habitation for himself.
He justified his predilection on three grounds: Ireland had been taken from him; Ireland had been so ruined and raped by the Scotch and the English that nothing but the soul of Ireland was left for Irishmen to love. He could work and fight for Ireland better in London than in Dublin. And again, the Irishman in England can make havoc in his turn; he can harry the English, he can spite, and irritate and triumph and get his own back in a thousand ways. Living in England he would be a thorn in England's side.
And all this meant that there was no place in Ireland for a man of his talents and his temperament. His enemies called him an opportunist: but he was a opportunist gone wrong, abandoned to an obstinate idealism, one of those damned and solitary souls that only the north of Ireland produces in perfection. For the Protestantism of Ulster breeds rebels like no other rebels on earth, rebels as strong and obstinate and canny as itself. Before he was twenty-one Stephen had revolted against the material comfort and the spiritual tyranny of his father's house.
He was the great-grandson of an immigrant Lancashire cotton spinner settled in Belfast. His western Irish blood was steeled with this mixture, and braced and embittered with the Scottish blood of Antrim where his people married.
Therefore, if he had chosen one career and stuck to it he would have been formidable. But one career alone did not suffice for his inexhaustible energies. As a fisher of opportunities he drew with too wide a net and in too many waters. He had tried parliamentary politics and failed because no party trusted him, least of all his own. And yet few men were more trustworthy. He turned his back on the House of Commons and took to journalism. As a journalistic politician he ran Nationalism for Ireland and Socialism for England. Neither Nationalists nor Socialists believed in him; yet few men were more worthy of belief. In literature he had distinguished himself as a poet, a playwright, a novelist and an essayist. He did everything so well that he was supposed not to do anything quite well enough. Because of his politics other men of letters suspected his artistic sincerity; yet few artists were more sincere. His very distinction was unsatisfying. Without any of the qualities that make even a minor statesman, he was so far contaminated by politics as to be spoiled for the highest purposes of art; yet there was no sense in which he had achieved popularity.
Everywhere he went he was an alien and suspected. Do what he would, he fell between two countries and two courses. Ireland had cast him out and England would none of him. He hated Catholicism and Protestantism alike, and Protestants and Catholics alike disowned him. To every Church and every sect he was a free thinker, destitute of all religion. Yet few men were more religious. His enemies called him a turner and a twister; yet on any one of his lines no man ever steered a straighter course.
A capacity for turning and twisting might have saved him. It would at any rate have made him more intelligible. As it was, he presented to two countries the disconcerting spectacle of a many-sided object moving with violence in a dead straight line. He moved so fast that to a stationary on-looker he was gone before one angle of him had been apprehended. It was for other people to turn and twist if any one of them was to get a complete all-round view of the amazing man.
But taken all round he passed for a man of hard wit and suspicious brilliance.
And he belonged to no generation. In nineteen-thirteen he was not yet forty, too old to count among the young men, and yet too young for men of his own age. So that in all Ireland and all England you could not have found a lonelier man.
The same queer doom pursued him in the most private and sacred relations of his life. To all intents and purposes he was married to Vera Harrison and yet he was not married. He was neither bound nor free.
All this had made him sorrowful and bitter.
And to add to his sorrowfulness and bitterness he had something of the Celt's spiritual abhorrence of the flesh; and though he loved Vera, after his manner, there were moments when Vera's capacity for everlasting passion left him tired and bored and cold.
All his lifehispassions had been at the service of ideas. All his life he had looked for some great experience, some great satisfaction and consummation; and he had not found it.
In nineteen-thirteen, with half his life behind him, the opportunist was still waiting for his supreme opportunity.
Meanwhile his enemies said of him that he snatched.
But he did not snatch. The eyes of his idealism were fixed too steadily on a visionary future. He merely tried, with a bored and weary gesture, to waylay the passing moment while he waited. He had put his political failure behind him and said, "I will be judged as an artist or not at all." They judged him accordingly and their judgment was wrong.
There was not the least resemblance between Lawrence Stephen as he was in himself and Lawrence Stephen as he appeared to the generation just behind him. To conservatives he passed for the leader of the revolution in contemporary art, and yet the revolution in contemporary art was happening without him. He was not the primal energy in the movement of the Vortex. In nineteen-thirteen his primal energies were spent, and he was trusting to the movement of the Vortex to carry him a little farther than he could have gone by his own impetus. He was attracted to the young men of the Vortex because they were not of the generation that had rejected him, and because he hoped thus to prolong indefinitely his own youth. They were attracted to him because of his solitary distinction, his comparative poverty, and his unpopularity. A prosperous, well-established Stephen would have revolted them. He gave the revolutionaries the shelter of hisReview, the support of his name, and the benefit of his bored and wearied criticism. They brought him in return a certain homage founded on his admirable appreciation of their merits and tempered by their sense of his dealings with the past they abominated.
"Stephen is a bigot," said young Morton Ellis; "he believes in Swinburne."
Stephen smiled at him in bored and weary tolerance.
He believed in too many things for his peace of mind. He knew that the young men distrusted him because of his beliefs, and because of his dealings with the past; because he refused to destroy the old gods when he made place for the new.
Young Morton Ellis lay stretched out at his ease on the couch in Stephen's study.
He blinked and twitched as he looked up at his host with half irritated, half affable affection.
The young men came and went at their ease in and out of that house in St. John's Wood which Lawrence Stephen shared with Vera Harrison. They were at home there. Their books stood in his bookcase; they laid their manuscripts on his writing table and left them there; they claimed his empty spaces for the hanging of their pictures yet unsold.
Every Friday evening they met together in the long, low room at the top of the house, and they talked.
Every Friday evening Michael left his father's house to meet them there, and to listen and to talk.
To-night, round and about Morton Ellis, the young poet, were Austen Mitchell, the young painter, and Paul Monier-Owen, the young sculptor, and George Wadham, the last and youngest of Morton Ellis's disciples.
Lawrence Stephen stood among them like an austere guest in some rendezvous of violent youth, or like the priest of some romantic religion that he has blasphemed yet not quite abjured. He was lean and dark and shaven; his black hair hung forward in two masses, smooth and straight and square; he had sorrowful, bitter eyes, and a bitter, sorrowful mouth, the long Irish upper lip fine and hard drawn, while the lower lip quivered incongruously, pouted and protested and recanted, was sceptical and sensitive and tender. His short, high nose had wide yet fastidious nostrils.
It was at this figure that Morton Ellis continued to gaze with affability and irritation. It was this figure that Vera's eyes followed with anxious, restless passion, as if she felt that at any moment he might escape her, might be off, God knew where.
Lawrence Stephen was ill at ease in that house and in the presence of his mistress and his friends.
"I believe in the past," he said, "because I believe in the future. I want continuity. Therefore I believe in Swinburne; and I believe in Browning and in Tennyson and Wordsworth; I believe in Keats and Shelley and in Milton. But I do not believe, any more than you do, in their imitators. I believe in destroying their imitators. I do not believe in destroying them."
"You can't destroy their imitators unless you destroy them. They breed the disgusting parasites. Their memories harbour them like a stinking suit of old clothes. They must be scrapped and burned if we're to get rid of the stink. Art has got to be made young and new and clean. There isn't any disinfectant that'll do the trick. So long as old masters are kow-towed to as masters people will go on imitating them. When a poet ceases to be a poet and becomes a centre of corruption, he must go."
Michael said, "How aboutuswhen people imitate us? Have we got to go?"
Morton Ellis looked at him and blinked. "No," he said. "No. We haven't got to go."
"I don't see how you get out of it."
"I get out of it by doing things that can't be imitated."
There was a silence in which everybody thought of Mr. George Wadham. It made Mr. Wadham so uncomfortable that he had to break it.
"I say, how about Shakespeare?" he said.
"Nobody, so far,hasimitated Shakespeare, any more than they havesucceededin imitating me."
There was another silence while everybody thought of Morton Ellis as the imitator of every poetic form under the sun except the forms adopted by his contemporaries.
"That's all very well, Ellis," said Stephen, "but you aren't the Holy Ghost coming down out of heaven. We can trace your sources."
"My dear Stephen, I never said I was the Holy Ghost. Nobody ever does come down out of heaven. Youcantrace my sources, thank God, because they're clean. I haven't gone into every stream that swine like--and--and--and--and--" (he named five contemporary distinctions) "have made filthy with their paddling."
He went on. "The very damnable question that you've raised, Harrison, is absurd. You believe in the revolution. Well then, supposing the revolution's coming--you needn't suppose it, because it's come. Wearethe revolution--the revolution means that we've made a clean sweep of the past. In the future no artist will want to imitate anybody. No artist will be allowed to exist unless he's prepared to be buried alive or burned alive rather than corrupt the younger generation with the processes and the products of his own beastly dissolution.
"That's why violence is right.
"'O Violenza, sorgi, balena in questo cieloSanguigno, stupra le albe,irrompi come incendio nei vesperi,fa di tutto il sereno una tempesta,fa di tutta la vita una bataglia,fa con tutte le anime un odio solo!'
"There's no special holiness in violence. Violence is right because it's necessary."
"You mean it's necessary because it's right."
Austen Mitchell spoke. He was a sallow youth with a broad, flat-featured, British face, but he had achieved an appearance of great strangeness and distinction by letting his hay-coloured hair grow long and cultivating two beards instead of one.
"Violence," he continued, "is not a means; it's an end! Energy must be got for its own sake, if you want to generate more energy instead of standing still. The difference between Pastism and Futurism is the difference between statics and dynamics. Futurist art is simply art that has gone on, that, has left off being static and become dynamic. It expresses movement. Owen will tell you better than I can why it expresses movement."
A light darted from the corner of the room where Paul Monier-Owen had curled himself up. His eyes flashed like the eyes of a young wild animal roused in its lair.
Paul Monier-Owen was dark and soft and supple. At a little distance he had the clumsy grace and velvet innocence of a black panther, half cub, half grown. The tips of his ears, the corners of his prominent eyes, his eyebrows and his long nostrils tilted slightly upwards and backwards. Under his slender, mournful nose his restless smile showed the white teeth of a young animal.
Above this primitive, savage base of features that responded incessantly to any childish provocation, the intelligence of Monier-Owen watched in his calm and beautiful forehead and in his eyes.
He said, "It expresses movement, because it presents objects directly as cutting across many planes. To do this you have to break up objects into the lines and masses that compose them, and project those lines and masses into space on any curve, at any angle, according to the planes you mean them to cross, otherwise the movements you mean them to express. The more planes intersected the more movement you get. By decomposing figures you compose movements. By decomposing groups of figures you compose groups of movement. Nothing but a cinema can represent objects as intact and as at the same time moving; and even the cinema only does this by a series of decompositions so minute as to escape the eye.
"You want to draw a battle-piece or the traffic at Hyde Park Corner. It can't be done unless you break up your objects as Mitchell breaks them up. You want to carve figures in the round, wrestling or dancing. It can't be done unless you dislocate their lines and masses as I dislocate them, so as to throw them all at once into those planes that the intact body could only have traversed one after another in a given time.
"By taking time into account as well as space we produce rhythm.
"I know what you're going to say, Stephen. The Dancing Faun and the Frieze of the Parthenon express movements. But they do nothing of the sort. They express movements arrested at a certain point. They are supposed to represent nature, but they do not even do that, because arrested motion is a contradiction in terms, and because the point of arrest is an artificial and arbitrary thing.
"Your medium limits you. You have to choose between the intact body which is stationary and the broken and projected bodies which are in movement. That is why we destroy or suppress symmetry in the figure and in design. Because symmetry is perfect balance which is immobility. If I wanted to present perfect rest I should do it by an absolute symmetry."
"And there's more in it than that," said Austen Mitchell. "We're out against the damnable affectations of naturalism and humanism. If I draw a perfect likeness of a fat, pink woman I've got a fat, pink woman and nothing else but a fat pink woman. And a fat, pink woman is a work of Nature, not a work of art. And I'm lying. I'm presenting as a reality what is only an appearance. The better the likeness the bigger the lie. But movement and rhythm are realities, not appearances. When I present rhythm and movement I've done something. I've made reality appear."
He went on to unfold a scheme for restoring vigour to the exhausted language by destroying its articulations. These he declared to be purely arbitrary, therefore fatal to the development of a spontaneous and individual style. By breaking up the rigid ties of syntax, you do more than create new forms of prose moving in perfect freedom, you deliver the creative spirit itself from the abominable contact with dead ideas. Association, fixed and eternalized by the structure of the language, is the tyranny that keeps down the live idea.
"We've got to restore the innocence of memory, as Gauguin restored the innocence of the eye."
Michael noticed that the talk was not always sustained at this constructive level. And to-night, towards twelve o'clock, it dropped and broke in a welter of vituperation. It was, first, a frenzied assault on the Old Masters, a storming of immortal strongholds, a tearing and scattering of the wing feathers of archangels; then, from this high adventure it sank to a perfunctory skirmishing among living eminences over forty, judged, by reason of their age, to be too contemptible for an attack in force. It rallied again to a bombing and blasting of minute ineptitudes, the slaughter of "swine like ---- and ---- and ---- and ---- and ----"; and ended in a furious pursuit of a volatile young poet, Edward Rivers, who had escaped by sheer levity from the tug of the Vortex, and was setting up a small swirl of his own.
Michael was with the revolutionaries heart and soul; he believed in Morton Ellis and Austen Mitchell and Monier-Owen even more than he believed in Lawrence Stephen, and almost as much as he believed in Jules Réveillaud. They stood for all the realities and all the ideas and all the accomplishments to which he himself was devoted. He had no sort of qualms about the wholesale slaughter of the inefficient.
But to-night, as he listened to these voices, he felt again his old horror of the collective soul. The voices spoke with a terrible unanimity. The vortex--theVortex--was like the little vortex of school. The young men, Ellis and Mitchell and Monier-Owen belonged to a herd like the school-herd, hunting together, crying together, saying the same thing. Their very revolt against the Old Masters was a collective and not an individual revolt. Their chase was hottest when their quarry was one of the pack who had broken through and got away. They hated the fugitive, solitary private soul.
And yet it was only as private souls that Ellis and Mitchell and Monier-Owen counted. Each by himself did good things; each, if he had the courage to break loose and go by himself, might do a great thing some day. Even George Wadham might do something if he could get away from Ellis and the rest. Edward Rivers had had courage.
Michael thought: "It's Rivers now. It'll be my turn next" But he had a great longing to break loose and get away.
He thought: "I don't know where they're all going to end. They think they're beginning something tremendous; but I can't see what's to come of it. And I don't see how they can go on like that for ever. I can't see what's coming. Yet something must come.Theycan't be the end."
He thought: "Their movement is only a small swirl in an immense Vortex. It may suck them all down. But it will clear the air. They will have helped to clear it."
He thought of himself going on, free from the whirl of the Vortex, and of his work as enduring; standing clear and hard in the clean air.