IIHAPPINESSHuman lack of power in moderating and checking the emotions I call servitude. For a man who is submissive to his emotions is not in power over himself, but in the hands of fortune to such an extent that he is often constrained, although he may see what is better for him, to follow what is worse.—SPINOZA’SEthics.CATHLEENlived in Bloomsbury with a friend of hers, a Miss Cleethorpe, who managed a hostel for young women, clerks, schoolmistresses, shop girls. René took her there after their long conversation in Kensington Gardens, and then, feeling the impossibility of going back to Mitcham Mews, went up to Kentish Town to see his friend the sandy-haired railway porter. He had visited him once before, about a year ago, and could think of no one else with whom he might take refuge. The little man was delighted to see him:“It’s the sleeper!” he cried. “Lord! I’ve often wondered if you’d go off again, and when you told me you were in the taxi-driving, I said to myself: ‘Well, that’ll keep him awake.’”Yes. He would be glad to let him have a bed. Wanting to sleep, eh? He often felt like that himself:day after day, day after day, working, and the suburban traffic growing so fast that they couldn’t put on enough trains, and the station morning and evening was like Bedlam.“London,” he said, “is not what it was when I first came to it. I used to know all the regular gentlemen. But now—well, I tell you, they don’t have a nod for anyone. A bee-line for the city in the morning, and a bee-line for home in the evening. It makes you feel small, it does.”René sympathized with him. His days also had been devoted to impersonal service, and he had known the humiliation of it.Now his only desire was to see Cathleen again. To taste once more the vigor and keen energy with which her presence filled him. The thought of her was not enough. It roused a flood of emotion too strong for his unpracticed control. He warmed to the idea of her beauty. When he was with her her beauty was axiomatic, food for rejoicing without disturbance, a mere accident, one to be thankful for, yet no more than a light bidding to the thrilling pursuit of her elusiveness.He had arranged to see her the next day in the evening. She worked as secretary in an Art School and was not free until after five. He spent the day in happy brooding over the coming delight of seeing her, and preparing with boyish dandyism for it. He had his hair cut and his chin shaved (he had grown a mustache), and he bought a clean shirt and collar. In a book shop he saw the anthology from which they hadread together and could not resist going in and buying it. He was ashamed of himself when he had done that, and hid it away among the railway porter’s rather strange collection of books—More’sUtopia,The Master Christian,Marcus Aurelius,some books of Edward Carpenter’s,Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,andArsène Lupin.Cathleen received him in her little bed-sitting-room at the top of the big grim house, which smelled of food, ink, and washing. She had made her den very pretty, and he recognized a picture he had given her long ago, and one or two trinkets that her mother had had in her boudoir in Scotland. The walls were of plain brown paper, and there were gay-colored stuffs by the windows and on the sofa.She took in his spruceness at a glance, was pleased by it, and laughed.“I must give you a buttonhole,” she said, “as I used to do. You look so wonderfully the same.”René trembled as she came to him and pinned a flower in his coat.“Sit down,” she said. “I think we can talk better here.”René sat awkwardly on the sofa, she by the fire, which she stirred with the poker.“Well,” she said, “I feel rather a beast. I couldn’t help flirting with you a little yesterday. That’s got to stop.”“Were you—flirting?”“I was.”“I thought you were glad to see me—as glad as I was to see you.”“I was glad. I’d been having a foolishly miserable time. Living in this house is rather terrible with nothing but women, unmarried women. You don’t know. They come here young, many of them from the country. Then they go out to work in the day and come in in the evening. They haven’t enough money to pay for amusements. They’re too respectable to look for fun in the streets. They hardly dare have a man-friend, the others are so jealous, so rigid, so uncomprehending.”René said:“I had a feeling that my presence here was an offense.”Cathleen laughed:“That’s why I asked you. I thought it would do them good to see you. It did me so much good. I think I was getting infected by it. Lotta, my friend, escapes into the country now and then. She has a cottage. I go too sometimes, but her consolations are not mine. She has a garden and makes jams and fruit-wines. I want something more than that. I don’t want to console myself until I have to. If I were going to do that I might just as well have stayed with my mother. On the other hand, I don’t want to flirt with you, my friend. It wouldn’t be fair to you.”“What do you want, then?”“I want to be able to assume that we love each other. We can be frank then. It sounds uncomfortably intellectual, I know, but that will be less disastrous thanbeing uncomfortably emotional. You used to think about these things. You made me think. You haven’t stopped?”“No. No. But I have such a longing for simplicity. I don’t know why there is all this fuss made about love.”“Because people will exploit the first excitement of it. Blake said:He who catches a joy as it fliesLives in eternity’s sunrise.”“I don’t know about that,” said René. “All I know is that I don’t want to let you go.”“But you may have to. We had a wonderful thing yesterday. We may not be able to rise to it again.”“I don’t care about that. I wantyou.”“Only because we had that moment yesterday.”“I don’t know why it is.”“But I know and I care, and I want to keep the memory of it. I don’t mind it’s being darkened by circumstances, if it must be, but I do mind it’s being spoiled by our own weakness. Men are always girding at women for caring about nothing but love. They may gird fairly when we are untrue to love and let men belittle it with their impatience and arrogance. I ought not to say that to you, because you have tried, and I have done nothing but argue with myself.”“I think you have found something which I have not even begun to see.”“And argued about it.”“I don’t see what else you could do.”Cathleen thrust silently at the fire and said savagely:“Oh! don’t you? I thought I was going to be so free with my two hundred pounds. Free, to do what? Walk in suffrage processions, break windows, insult policemen. I was free to do what I liked, but I liked nothing very much. I was too fastidious and could not take what came. Things did come. They lacked this or that necessary for my satisfaction. When my money was gone I had to creep into shelter away from the freedom I did not know how to use, and ask for work to keep myself alive, just like the girls and women in this house, who keep themselves alive for nothing, so far as I can see, except the pleasure of being tired and bored and malicious. I was in a bad way, René, when I met you. I used to go to Rachel, who is the only one of the family who will have anything to do with me, and sometimes I envied her in her stupid, unhappy comfort. She doesn’t get on with her husband, but she has a nice house and two children who alternately infuriate and amuse her. That was impossible for me. I’d hate it, just living with a man to keep a household together. But then even now I’ve hated the alternative I had arrived at, this being huddled away with a lot of useless women. Working women! A genteel occupation to support a genteel existence. The selfishness of it! People like to pretend that motherhood solves everything for a woman. It may give occupation to a dependent woman, but why should it destroy her selfishness any more than another physical fact? If she insists on it too much,it cannot do anything but accentuate her selfishness. Women can be just as greedy about motherhood as about eating or drinking or love, and they can just as easily spoil it with overindulgence. Don’t look so unhappy, René. I’m not arguing with you. I’ve had to think so much, and for months I haven’t had a soul to talk to like this. Even Lotta has her world so shaped and trim (she’s efficient, you see) that all my doubts and wonderings are just an annoyance to her, though no one could be kinder. I don’t know what I should have done without her. It was such a comfort to find a woman working really well, without insisting that hers is the only way of living, and doing good without wanting to be thankful for it. She made me patient. When you have decided what you do not wish to do, you are apt to think anything different must be better. You’re not sorry you made the ordinary career impossible for yourself?”“Sorry?” said René, puzzled. “It was never a thing to be sorry about or glad about. It just happened and I felt better. And now I have met you and everything is changed again. I didn’t go to my home last night.”“No?”“I went to an old friend of mine who lives happily and contentedly. I wanted to see happiness and contentment. Somehow you had made me sure of myself, and I felt that everything was changed. But the change was in myself. In nearly everybody I have been more conscious of the things they lack than of the things they have. I had been bolstering myself upwith contempt—for myself as well as everything else. It was that or being sorry for myself. Always a struggle. I can’t see it clearly yet: like righting without weapons and without a cause. I had no desire to live irregularly and uncomfortably or to come in conflict with accepted opinion as to conduct. But I don’t see why opinion should be antagonistic to a man’s private affairs. I wasn’t antagonistic. I was only doing confusedly what I felt very clearly and had always felt to be right. I feel certain now that I ought to have done so long before. I’d like to explain that to all sorts of people, except that honestly I can’t take much interest in it. I had a vague sickening feeling that the end of the world had come, but that was only because I could not see an inch before me. The end of the world did not come, neither for me nor for—her. It seems stupid to be explaining all this to you. I know you will not think I am excusing myself, because I am sure you accept me as I am——”“Theoretically,” said Cathleen, looking up at him with a quick smile. “You see, I have lived on theory, not my own, either; Lotta’s. And I don’t know whether my theory can hold out against your practice, any more than my sentimental girlish fictions could. You upset them, you know, and you are just as disconcerting as ever. Shall you go on with your work?”“I can’t think of anything else I should like so well.”“And that girl?”“That’s what we have both been thinking about all the time.”“Yes.”Cathleen rose and walked over to the window and looked out. She stood then for so long that René followed her and laid his hand on her shoulder. The window gave on to a row of back gardens with a few trees, black and bare. Opposite was a lighted window through which could be seen four girls sewing—stitch, stitch, stitch.“I have often watched them,” said Cathleen, “and wondered what might be in their lives. Desire? Religion? Love? What is it makes it possible for them to work so mechanically and so happily.”“Fun,” said René. “They want fun, spiced with the risk of having to pay for it.”“Is she like that?”“She was. But there is something more.”“There would be,” said Cathleen. “She couldn’t love you without being moved out of herself and the habits of her class. That is why I am sorry for her. Are you going back to her?”“Not yet.”“I think you ought to write to her.”“I was waiting until I had seen you again, and made quite sure——“And you are sure now?”“I feel now that we shall always be together, gazing out on the world.”“And finding it so wonderful.”They were silent then, and in each for other wasthe same song of life and love, a music passing thought and understanding. So they remained for a time that was no time, hardly conscious of their bodies whose slight contact gave them strength for flight. Easily they ranged back in spirit to their youth, and caught up its sweetness and melody.They were broken in upon by Miss Cleethorpe, a pale, gray-haired lady whose eyes smiled kindly amusement at their helplessness. Bringing help to the helpless and forcing them to help themselves was the whole practice of her life. Lovers, dogs, indigent young women, were the material in which she worked.She was presented to René, and gave him a grip of the hand that startled him with its vigor. Turning to Cathleen, she said:“The girls have sent up a deputation to me to say you have had a man in your room for the last two hours, that it is against the rules, and that it is not quite proper. Ten minutes they could have overlooked. I said that Mr. Fourmy was a very old friend, and that I knew all about it, but they insisted that I must come and chaperone you, and here I am. Speaks well for my authority, doesn’t it?”René was so distressed at the thought of the young women contemning Cathleen that he was almost speechless. He muttered that he must go.“You mustn’t go,” said Lotta, “before I have thanked you for what you have done for Cathleen. She came home last night looking perfectly radiant—and look at her now.” (She had turned up the lights.)Cathleen was standing with her hands lightly clasped in front of her, her head thrown back, her lips parted, and in her eyes a golden tenderness. She smiled and shook her head slowly, and came to her friend and kissed her. Lotta put her arms round her and hugged her.“You two poor sillies,” she said, “what a heavy burden you have shouldered.”René grinned:“I don’t feel the weight of it,” he said.Lotta gazed full at him. He met her eyes, searching him.“Are you going back to your stables?” she asked.“I want two more days of this.”“Would you like to take it down to the country? There’s a west wind blowing over my hills, and winter is coming in.”Like children, René and Cathleen gazed at each other in surprised delight.
Human lack of power in moderating and checking the emotions I call servitude. For a man who is submissive to his emotions is not in power over himself, but in the hands of fortune to such an extent that he is often constrained, although he may see what is better for him, to follow what is worse.
—SPINOZA’SEthics.
CATHLEENlived in Bloomsbury with a friend of hers, a Miss Cleethorpe, who managed a hostel for young women, clerks, schoolmistresses, shop girls. René took her there after their long conversation in Kensington Gardens, and then, feeling the impossibility of going back to Mitcham Mews, went up to Kentish Town to see his friend the sandy-haired railway porter. He had visited him once before, about a year ago, and could think of no one else with whom he might take refuge. The little man was delighted to see him:
“It’s the sleeper!” he cried. “Lord! I’ve often wondered if you’d go off again, and when you told me you were in the taxi-driving, I said to myself: ‘Well, that’ll keep him awake.’”
Yes. He would be glad to let him have a bed. Wanting to sleep, eh? He often felt like that himself:day after day, day after day, working, and the suburban traffic growing so fast that they couldn’t put on enough trains, and the station morning and evening was like Bedlam.
“London,” he said, “is not what it was when I first came to it. I used to know all the regular gentlemen. But now—well, I tell you, they don’t have a nod for anyone. A bee-line for the city in the morning, and a bee-line for home in the evening. It makes you feel small, it does.”
René sympathized with him. His days also had been devoted to impersonal service, and he had known the humiliation of it.
Now his only desire was to see Cathleen again. To taste once more the vigor and keen energy with which her presence filled him. The thought of her was not enough. It roused a flood of emotion too strong for his unpracticed control. He warmed to the idea of her beauty. When he was with her her beauty was axiomatic, food for rejoicing without disturbance, a mere accident, one to be thankful for, yet no more than a light bidding to the thrilling pursuit of her elusiveness.
He had arranged to see her the next day in the evening. She worked as secretary in an Art School and was not free until after five. He spent the day in happy brooding over the coming delight of seeing her, and preparing with boyish dandyism for it. He had his hair cut and his chin shaved (he had grown a mustache), and he bought a clean shirt and collar. In a book shop he saw the anthology from which they hadread together and could not resist going in and buying it. He was ashamed of himself when he had done that, and hid it away among the railway porter’s rather strange collection of books—More’sUtopia,The Master Christian,Marcus Aurelius,some books of Edward Carpenter’s,Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,andArsène Lupin.
Cathleen received him in her little bed-sitting-room at the top of the big grim house, which smelled of food, ink, and washing. She had made her den very pretty, and he recognized a picture he had given her long ago, and one or two trinkets that her mother had had in her boudoir in Scotland. The walls were of plain brown paper, and there were gay-colored stuffs by the windows and on the sofa.
She took in his spruceness at a glance, was pleased by it, and laughed.
“I must give you a buttonhole,” she said, “as I used to do. You look so wonderfully the same.”
René trembled as she came to him and pinned a flower in his coat.
“Sit down,” she said. “I think we can talk better here.”
René sat awkwardly on the sofa, she by the fire, which she stirred with the poker.
“Well,” she said, “I feel rather a beast. I couldn’t help flirting with you a little yesterday. That’s got to stop.”
“Were you—flirting?”
“I was.”
“I thought you were glad to see me—as glad as I was to see you.”
“I was glad. I’d been having a foolishly miserable time. Living in this house is rather terrible with nothing but women, unmarried women. You don’t know. They come here young, many of them from the country. Then they go out to work in the day and come in in the evening. They haven’t enough money to pay for amusements. They’re too respectable to look for fun in the streets. They hardly dare have a man-friend, the others are so jealous, so rigid, so uncomprehending.”
René said:
“I had a feeling that my presence here was an offense.”
Cathleen laughed:
“That’s why I asked you. I thought it would do them good to see you. It did me so much good. I think I was getting infected by it. Lotta, my friend, escapes into the country now and then. She has a cottage. I go too sometimes, but her consolations are not mine. She has a garden and makes jams and fruit-wines. I want something more than that. I don’t want to console myself until I have to. If I were going to do that I might just as well have stayed with my mother. On the other hand, I don’t want to flirt with you, my friend. It wouldn’t be fair to you.”
“What do you want, then?”
“I want to be able to assume that we love each other. We can be frank then. It sounds uncomfortably intellectual, I know, but that will be less disastrous thanbeing uncomfortably emotional. You used to think about these things. You made me think. You haven’t stopped?”
“No. No. But I have such a longing for simplicity. I don’t know why there is all this fuss made about love.”
“Because people will exploit the first excitement of it. Blake said:
He who catches a joy as it fliesLives in eternity’s sunrise.”
He who catches a joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.”
“I don’t know about that,” said René. “All I know is that I don’t want to let you go.”
“But you may have to. We had a wonderful thing yesterday. We may not be able to rise to it again.”
“I don’t care about that. I wantyou.”
“Only because we had that moment yesterday.”
“I don’t know why it is.”
“But I know and I care, and I want to keep the memory of it. I don’t mind it’s being darkened by circumstances, if it must be, but I do mind it’s being spoiled by our own weakness. Men are always girding at women for caring about nothing but love. They may gird fairly when we are untrue to love and let men belittle it with their impatience and arrogance. I ought not to say that to you, because you have tried, and I have done nothing but argue with myself.”
“I think you have found something which I have not even begun to see.”
“And argued about it.”
“I don’t see what else you could do.”
Cathleen thrust silently at the fire and said savagely:
“Oh! don’t you? I thought I was going to be so free with my two hundred pounds. Free, to do what? Walk in suffrage processions, break windows, insult policemen. I was free to do what I liked, but I liked nothing very much. I was too fastidious and could not take what came. Things did come. They lacked this or that necessary for my satisfaction. When my money was gone I had to creep into shelter away from the freedom I did not know how to use, and ask for work to keep myself alive, just like the girls and women in this house, who keep themselves alive for nothing, so far as I can see, except the pleasure of being tired and bored and malicious. I was in a bad way, René, when I met you. I used to go to Rachel, who is the only one of the family who will have anything to do with me, and sometimes I envied her in her stupid, unhappy comfort. She doesn’t get on with her husband, but she has a nice house and two children who alternately infuriate and amuse her. That was impossible for me. I’d hate it, just living with a man to keep a household together. But then even now I’ve hated the alternative I had arrived at, this being huddled away with a lot of useless women. Working women! A genteel occupation to support a genteel existence. The selfishness of it! People like to pretend that motherhood solves everything for a woman. It may give occupation to a dependent woman, but why should it destroy her selfishness any more than another physical fact? If she insists on it too much,it cannot do anything but accentuate her selfishness. Women can be just as greedy about motherhood as about eating or drinking or love, and they can just as easily spoil it with overindulgence. Don’t look so unhappy, René. I’m not arguing with you. I’ve had to think so much, and for months I haven’t had a soul to talk to like this. Even Lotta has her world so shaped and trim (she’s efficient, you see) that all my doubts and wonderings are just an annoyance to her, though no one could be kinder. I don’t know what I should have done without her. It was such a comfort to find a woman working really well, without insisting that hers is the only way of living, and doing good without wanting to be thankful for it. She made me patient. When you have decided what you do not wish to do, you are apt to think anything different must be better. You’re not sorry you made the ordinary career impossible for yourself?”
“Sorry?” said René, puzzled. “It was never a thing to be sorry about or glad about. It just happened and I felt better. And now I have met you and everything is changed again. I didn’t go to my home last night.”
“No?”
“I went to an old friend of mine who lives happily and contentedly. I wanted to see happiness and contentment. Somehow you had made me sure of myself, and I felt that everything was changed. But the change was in myself. In nearly everybody I have been more conscious of the things they lack than of the things they have. I had been bolstering myself upwith contempt—for myself as well as everything else. It was that or being sorry for myself. Always a struggle. I can’t see it clearly yet: like righting without weapons and without a cause. I had no desire to live irregularly and uncomfortably or to come in conflict with accepted opinion as to conduct. But I don’t see why opinion should be antagonistic to a man’s private affairs. I wasn’t antagonistic. I was only doing confusedly what I felt very clearly and had always felt to be right. I feel certain now that I ought to have done so long before. I’d like to explain that to all sorts of people, except that honestly I can’t take much interest in it. I had a vague sickening feeling that the end of the world had come, but that was only because I could not see an inch before me. The end of the world did not come, neither for me nor for—her. It seems stupid to be explaining all this to you. I know you will not think I am excusing myself, because I am sure you accept me as I am——”
“Theoretically,” said Cathleen, looking up at him with a quick smile. “You see, I have lived on theory, not my own, either; Lotta’s. And I don’t know whether my theory can hold out against your practice, any more than my sentimental girlish fictions could. You upset them, you know, and you are just as disconcerting as ever. Shall you go on with your work?”
“I can’t think of anything else I should like so well.”
“And that girl?”
“That’s what we have both been thinking about all the time.”
“Yes.”
Cathleen rose and walked over to the window and looked out. She stood then for so long that René followed her and laid his hand on her shoulder. The window gave on to a row of back gardens with a few trees, black and bare. Opposite was a lighted window through which could be seen four girls sewing—stitch, stitch, stitch.
“I have often watched them,” said Cathleen, “and wondered what might be in their lives. Desire? Religion? Love? What is it makes it possible for them to work so mechanically and so happily.”
“Fun,” said René. “They want fun, spiced with the risk of having to pay for it.”
“Is she like that?”
“She was. But there is something more.”
“There would be,” said Cathleen. “She couldn’t love you without being moved out of herself and the habits of her class. That is why I am sorry for her. Are you going back to her?”
“Not yet.”
“I think you ought to write to her.”
“I was waiting until I had seen you again, and made quite sure——
“And you are sure now?”
“I feel now that we shall always be together, gazing out on the world.”
“And finding it so wonderful.”
They were silent then, and in each for other wasthe same song of life and love, a music passing thought and understanding. So they remained for a time that was no time, hardly conscious of their bodies whose slight contact gave them strength for flight. Easily they ranged back in spirit to their youth, and caught up its sweetness and melody.
They were broken in upon by Miss Cleethorpe, a pale, gray-haired lady whose eyes smiled kindly amusement at their helplessness. Bringing help to the helpless and forcing them to help themselves was the whole practice of her life. Lovers, dogs, indigent young women, were the material in which she worked.
She was presented to René, and gave him a grip of the hand that startled him with its vigor. Turning to Cathleen, she said:
“The girls have sent up a deputation to me to say you have had a man in your room for the last two hours, that it is against the rules, and that it is not quite proper. Ten minutes they could have overlooked. I said that Mr. Fourmy was a very old friend, and that I knew all about it, but they insisted that I must come and chaperone you, and here I am. Speaks well for my authority, doesn’t it?”
René was so distressed at the thought of the young women contemning Cathleen that he was almost speechless. He muttered that he must go.
“You mustn’t go,” said Lotta, “before I have thanked you for what you have done for Cathleen. She came home last night looking perfectly radiant—and look at her now.” (She had turned up the lights.)
Cathleen was standing with her hands lightly clasped in front of her, her head thrown back, her lips parted, and in her eyes a golden tenderness. She smiled and shook her head slowly, and came to her friend and kissed her. Lotta put her arms round her and hugged her.
“You two poor sillies,” she said, “what a heavy burden you have shouldered.”
René grinned:
“I don’t feel the weight of it,” he said.
Lotta gazed full at him. He met her eyes, searching him.
“Are you going back to your stables?” she asked.
“I want two more days of this.”
“Would you like to take it down to the country? There’s a west wind blowing over my hills, and winter is coming in.”
Like children, René and Cathleen gazed at each other in surprised delight.