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Title: The type-writer girl
Author: Olive Pratt Rayner
Release date: May 12, 2026 [eBook #78662]
Language: English
Original publication: London: C. Arthur Pearson Limited, 1897
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78662
Credits: Iona Vaughan, Pat McCoy & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at https://www.pgdpcanada.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TYPE-WRITER GIRL ***
[Cover Illustration]
THE
TYPE-WRITER GIRL
BY
OLIVE PRATT RAYNER
LONDON
C. ARTHUR PEARSON LIMITED
HENRIETTA STREET W.C.
1897
TO
THEODORE RAYNER
AND
OLIVER WENDELL PRATT,
A WIFE’S HOMAGE,
A SISTER’S LOVE.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. —INTRODUCES A LATTER-DAY HEROINE 9
II. —THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE 18
III. —ENVIRONMENT WINS 29
IV. —THE CHOICE OF A PATRON 41
V. —VIVE L’ANARCHIE! 47
VI. —THE INNER BROTHERHOOD 60
VII. —A MUTINOUS MUTINEER 68
VIII. —CALLED “OF ACCIDENTS” 83
IX. —I PLAY CARMEN 95
X. —SIC ME SERVAVIT APOLLO! 104
XI. —A SAIL ON THE HORIZON 114
XII. —A CAVALIER MAKES ADVANCES 131
XIII. —CONCERNING ROMEO 137
XIV. —“NOW BARABBAS WAS A PUBLISHER” 145
XV. —FRESH LIGHT ON ROMEO 155
XVI. —I TRY LITERATURE 165
XVII. —A DRAWN BATTLE 176
XVIII. —AN AUTUMN HOLIDAY 194
XIX. —“O ROMEO, ROMEO!” 203
XX. —“WHEREFORE ART THOU ROMEO?” 223
XXI. —ENVOY PLENIPOTENTIARY 242
XXII. —I CLING TO THE RIGGING 253
NEW 3s. 6d. BOOKS.
(TO APPEAR SHORTLY.)
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=The Skipper’s Wooing.=
By W. W. JACOBS.
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=John of Strathbourne.=
By R. D. CHETWODE.
THE TYPE-WRITER GIRL.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCES A LATTER-DAY HEROINE.
I was twenty-two, and without employment.
I would not say by this that I was without occupation. In the world in
which we live, set with daisies and kingfishers and undeciphered faces
of men and women, I doubt I could be at a loss for something to occupy
me. A swallow’s back, as he turns in the sunshine, is so full of
meaning. If you dwell in the country, you need but pin on a hat and slip
out into a meadow, and there, in some bight of the hedgerow, you shall
see spring buds untwisting, sulphur butterflies coquetting; hear
nightingales sing as they sang to Keats, and streamlets make madrigal as
they wimpled for Marlowe. Nay, even here in London, where life is rarer,
how can I cruise down the Strand without encountering strange
barks—mysterious argosies that attract and intrigue me? That living
stream is so marvellous! Whence come they, these shadows, and whither do
they go?—innumerable, silent, each wrapped in his own thought, yet each
real to himself as I to my heart. To me, they are shooting stars,
phantoms that flash athwart the orbit of my life one second, and then
vanish. But to themselves they are the centre of a world—of _the_
world; and I am but one of the meteors that dart across their horizon.
I cannot choose but wonder who each is, and why he is here. For one
after another I invent a story. It may not be the true story, but at
least it amuses me. Every morning I see them stream in from the Unknown,
by the early trains, and disperse like sparks that twinkle on the thin
soot of the chimney-back—men with small black bags, bound for
mysterious offices. What happens in those offices I have no idea: they
may lend money, or buy shares, or promote Christian knowledge. I only
know I see them come in the morning and flit again at night, sometimes
the same figures, recognisably identical. They rush back, absorbed, to
catch the train to the Unknown, as they rushed up from it earlier. So,
day after day, the tide sets and ebbs; while I stand on the shore of the
vast sea of London like a child that watches. And Commissioner Lin
guards me.
I have always been grateful to Mr. Samuel Butler for his eccentric
theory that a woman wrote the Odyssey. I do not say that I agree with
him; if I did, I am not aware that any critic would attach the least
importance to my opinion. But it is a soothing theory for us latter-day
women. Without thinking it true, I love to believe it. The Odyssey, you
will grant, is the epic of the imagination. It is the epic of mystery.
In the Iliad, which is the epic of fact, everything is clear-cut,
distinct, commonplace. I do not conceive that a woman could have written
the Iliad. Its theme would fail to interest her. That hard handplay of
battle counts for nought to our sex. Clang of bronze sword on ringing
shield rouses no echo in our heart or brain. It is a masculine poem. How
practical it is, how cold, how everyday, how mannish! Considering its
august age, how little it gleams with the glamour of antiquity! Ulysses
in the Iliad is just a shifty politician, an adroit public speaker.
Achilles is just a petulant, ill-disciplined young warrior—I have met
him in London, fresh home from the Transvaal. The whole mighty saga is a
saga of men’s ideas, so sharp is it in its outlines, so historical, so
definite. But the Odyssey!
Yes, I read in it clearly the fine hand of a woman. It has the
vagueness, the elusiveness, the melting, hazy charm of feminine craft.
It thrills with mystery; and woman is the mystic. Look at its glorious
dimness. You descry its geography in veiled outline only, as one beholds
the Paps of Jura on a day of sea-fog through swaying sheets of white
cloud from a fisherman’s boat on the Bay of Oban. It is a Celtic
dreamland. From morning to night, in that enchanted poem, on and on we
sail, past uncertain isles or dubious blue headlands, begirt with
fantastic forms, and in perils of the sea more awesome than the real.
Architects have reconstructed Priam’s palace, I believe, from the
description in the Iliad. That is man’s way of describing. But who could
reconstruct, from the rapt words of the Odyssey, Circe’s island or the
gardens of Alcinous? Peering and prying Schliemann found in the
battle-epic a whole plan of the Troad; or, at least, read one into it:
fancy even imagining you could construct a chart of the Mediterranean to
show the homeward maze of the much-travelled wanderer from Ilion to
Ithaca! The bare idea would indicate a misconception of the Odyssey. For
those are the seas and islands that never were; they live but in the
ghost-geography of poets and women.
As arguments, indeed, the proofs adduced seem to me preposterous. It is
nonsense to say that in the Odyssey the chief _rôle_ is played by women.
Do women’s books deal exclusively, or even mainly, with their own sex?
Is not the Titan man, the strong, sardonic, woman-quelling hero, a
recognised commonplace of women’s fancy? I do not believe an Ithacan
lady wrote the Odyssey _because_ of the relative importance of Penelope
and Nausicaa. Surely even a man might have set Penelope at her web, or
Nausicaa at her tennis. In that I see nothing occult or esoterically
feminine. Men must be aware that every Circe has the power of turning
men into swine. They ought to know; they have seen it done daily. No,
those are not the reasons that weigh with me. It is the wonder, the
magic, the purple mystery, of the Odyssey that tells to my mind in
favour of its female authorship. And though I know Mr. Samuel Butler’s
theory is not true, I thank God I am woman enough none the less to
embrace it.
But what has all this to do with my story—the story I am setting out in
my own fashion to tell you? A great deal; and besides, unless you let me
tell it in my own wayward way, I can never get through with it. In that
respect also I hold myself true woman. And this is the connection. “If
only we could have lived in those days!” people say. I answer, “You
_are_ living in them.” It is not the days, not the places, not the
things that change, but we who see them otherwise. Consider, the
Mediterranean is the same sea to-day as when the Ithacan lady who wrote
the Odyssey looked out upon its blue zones to behold it peopled with
strange forms and wizard shadows. For that nameless Sappho, that
prehistoric Charlotte Brontë, that inchoate Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
the Ionian main swarmed alive with Gorgons and Harpies as Loch Fyne with
herrings. Sirens sang on every rock to lure the seaman; promontories
glowed red at set of sun with the forges of the Cyclops. You may steam
down the prosaic Adriatic to-day in an Austrian Lloyd steamer—a
fearsome Behemoth, bellowing, snorting, flame-breathing—and identify
those charmed shores of Hellenic fancy, as laid down, with soundings, in
the Admiralty surveys. But that is your blindness. Scylla and Charybdis
are there as of old: ’tis you who turn them into the Straits of Messina.
Polyphemus still haunts his seaward cave: ’tis you who transform him
into a custom-house officer. Adventures are to the adventurous. Go
through the world in search of Calypso, and you will surely find her. Be
modern, and you will find only Willesden Junction. That may suffice for
you. I live in “those days,” as all lovers of the mystical have always
lived in them.
And I will go forth into the world in search of adventures. They are
sure to come to me; for faith moves mountains. In every age, when the
Princess Cleodolind is sent out from the city as a prey for the dragon,
some youthful St. George, in celestial armour, rides by in the nick of
time, on his snow-white steed, and draws his trusty blade, and fights
for her, and rescues her from the loathly thing. Else what were the use
of faith and of poetry? In every age we fashion the story anew in our
passing manner, dressing it up in our own clothes, and fitting it to our
particular modes and morals. But ’tis the same to the end through all
disguises. The Greeks told it as the tale of Perseus and Andromeda; they
made their hero purely Greek, a triumphant young son of immortal Zeus,
who rescues a beautiful princess, with fair nude limbs like Parian
marble, from the devouring sea-monster. Mediæval Italy made the sign of
the cross, turned the son of Danaë into a Christian martyr, and clad the
beautiful nude maiden in clinging silk robes, as it would fain have clad
Melian Aphrodite herself when it converted her image into a crowned
Madonna. The Renaissance came, and Cellini unclothed her again, in his
revived paganism, to set her polished bronze limbs, where every eye
might see and stare, in the Piazza at Florence. Our modern novelists
dress her up afresh in the princess robe of the day (sage green or
crushed strawberry), and turn her loose on that slimy old dragon the
world, till Prince Charming comes by, as a baronet in a tennis suit, to
lay at her feet ten thousand a year and the title of My Lady. But ’tis
the old tale still, and who lists to tell it may trick it out once more
in his own heart’s fashion. For though there be nothing new under the
sun, the old wonder is there, as marvellous as ever, if you choose to
marvel at it. Each spring brings it back, a perpetual miracle.
So I set forth into the world, a Princess Cleodolind of the nineteenth
century, ready to face the dragons that, as I well know, abound in it,
and full of faith in the St. George who will come to rescue me. I mean
to sail away on my Odyssey, unabashed, touching at such shores as may
chance to beckon, yet hopeful of reaching at last the realms of
Alcinous.
From all which you may guess that I am a Girton girl.
CHAPTER II.
THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE.
You may guess it, I say; for it is no part of my plan to tell you. Being
a woman, I throw out this hint to pique your curiosity.
Let us return to the point that I was twenty-two, and had no employment.
Commissioner Lin and I were alone and friendless.
Four months earlier I had suffered a great loss. How great a loss I am
not careful to assure you. It is far from my desire to make capital out
of my inmost heart. I cannot spin phrases about my dead father. But by
this time the first fierce numbness of my sorrow had worn away; I was no
longer a stone; I was beginning to smile, and to feel the sunshine. A
certain quicksilver light-heartedness in the veins of my race helps to
conceal a background of feeling. Besides, I had my livelihood to earn.
That is a great resource. The need for bread served to edge out my
grief. My first four months had been assured me beforehand in the
Settlement; for we paid in advance, half-yearly, our Warden being a
prudent soul who disliked bad debts, and preferred the safe side. But
when the four months of my deepest mourning were over, it was absolutely
necessary for me to find employment.
How it all came about I need not inform you: the bank that broke, the
electric light that failed: I was told the details in terms so crabbed
that if I tried to repeat them I could but show my ignorance.
It was not hard for me to be poor; for in the Settlement we lived as the
other East-Enders live, and I had learned from my match-girls how to be
hungry and merry. But my poverty hitherto had been that of the amateur;
I had now to learn professional indigence. When I shook hands with
Sister Phyllis and Sister Agatha at the door of the guild, leaving
Commissioner Lin in their charge for the moment, and went forth into the
world to earn my living, I had six and elevenpence as available assets.
I was a capitalist in my way. That formed my capital.
“Under these circumstances,” I said to myself, “the first thing for a
prudent girl to do is to look out for lunch; the second thing is to look
out for a situation.”
I do not pretend to prevision; on the contrary, I was born to take no
heed for the morrow. I belong to the tribe of the grasshopper, not that
of the ant. But I had been so deeply impressed by Sister Phyllis’s
exhortations during my last four months in the guild that I had taken
pains to learn shorthand and type-writing. I did not then know that
every girl in London can write shorthand, and that type-writing as an
accomplishment is as diffused as the piano; else I might have turned my
hand to some honest trade instead, such as millinery or cake-making.
However, a type-writer I was, and a type-writer I must remain. So I set
forth on my Odyssey by walking down the phantom-haunted channel of the
Strand, and cast anchor for my first halt in an aërated bread shop.
Luxury, we are told, demoralises this age, and (while I remain a
type-writer) I am absolute to set my face against it. But a cup of
coffee and a slice of seed-cake (not too luxuriously sweetened) lay well
within the compass of my capital. I am a poor arithmetician, but I
arrive by finger-lore at the net result that fourpence from six and
elevenpence leaves six and seven. I took up an evening paper, which some
recklessly extravagant customer had bequeathed to his successors, and my
eye scanned the advertisements. Hands that waved a signal seemed to
catch my glance. “A sail on the horizon!” I cried to myself. And this is
what I read—
“Shorthand and Type-writer wanted (female). Legal work.—Apply Flor and
Fingelman, 27B, Southampton Row.”
I felt myself already on the road to fortune. A glance at the date: it
was to-day’s paper! In matters of business, promptitude is everything. I
would be the first to apply. I tossed off my hot coffee with unbecoming
haste, and, deeply impressed with the fact that in this age the struggle
for existence has become one of the rights of woman, I hurried with all
speed to Flor and Fingelman’s.
I was a Shorthand and Type-writer (female); and I was fully prepared to
be as legal as they desired of me.
I do not say that “female” is a poetical description. I have never heard
it applied to Heloise or to Ophelia—not even by the grave-digger;
though Touchstone, to be sure, uses it once of Audrey. But the
nineteenth century has a chivalry all its own, which I scruple to
depreciate. If it speaks of us as females, it has given us the bicycle,
and it almost admits that we are as fit for the franchise as the
forty-shilling lodger. It puts us a little lower than the navvies. I
call that magnanimity.
I had made haste to run up Charing Cross Road, and when I reached
Southampton Row, impressed by the importance of the Struggle for
Existence, I believe I was absolute winner in the race against time for
the position of Shorthand and Type-writer (female).
Up two pair of stairs, where a notice led, I entered the Outer Office.
Its keynote was fustiness. Three clerks (male), in seedy black coats,
the eldest with hair the colour of a fox’s, went on chaffing one another
for two minutes after I closed the door, with ostentatious
unconsciousness of my insignificant presence.
No doubt they inferred that I was a candidate for the post of Shorthand
and Type-writer (female), and they treated me as such persons may look
to be treated. Their talk turned upon that noble animal, the horse.
They spoke also of the turf; by which I understood them to allude, not
so much to the greensward of the downs, as to the imperceptible moral
turf of Fleet Street. The two younger were indeterminate young men, with
straight black hair, and features modelled on an oyster’s. As they
appeared to be loftily unaware of my intrusion, I signified my presence
by coughing slightly. It was the apologetic cough that stands for “I beg
your pardon, but will you kindly attend to me?” They did not permit even
the cough, however, to hurry them unduly. The youngest of the three, a
pulpy youth, adjusted his cuffs, and completed some deep remarks upon
two-year-old form before he turned to stare at me. I suppose he was kind
enough to be satisfied with my personal appearance, for after a while he
wheeled round on his high stool, and broke out with the chivalry of his
age and class, “Well, what’s your business?”
My voice trembled a little, but I mustered up courage and spoke. “I have
called about your advertisement for a Shorthand and Type-writer
(female).”
He eyed me up and down. I am slender, and, I will venture to say, if not
pretty, at least interesting-looking.
“How many words a minute?” he asked after a long pause.
I stretched truth as far as its elasticity would permit. “One
ninety-seven,” I answered with an affectation of the precisest accuracy.
To say “Two hundred” were commonplace.
The pulpy youth ran his eyes over me as if I were a horse for sale. I
was conscious of my little black dress and hat; conscious also of a
fiery patch in the centre of my cheek; but if you struggle for life you
must expect these episodes. “That’s good enough,” he said slowly, with a
side-glance at his fellow-clerks. I had a painful suspicion that the
words were intended rather for them than for me, and that they bore
reference more to my face and figure than to my real or imagined pace
per minute.
The eldest clerk, with the foxy head, wheeled round, and took his turn
to stare. He had hairy hands and large goggle eyes.
“Got your own machine?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“What sort?”
“A Barlock.”
“That’ll do,” he said, eyeing the rest. And again I detected an
undercurrent of double meaning. He seemed to be expressing modified
satisfaction at my outer personality.
They questioned me for some minutes with equal grace and charm. Then the
eldest rose slowly. “I’ll tell the governor,” he murmured, and
disappeared through a dingy door marked in large letters “Mr.
Fingelman.”
In a short time he came back and beckoned me mysteriously. I followed
him, trembling. He waved his hairy hand towards me as if to show me off
to the man at the table. I felt disagreeably like Esther in the presence
of Ahasuerus—a fat and oily Ahasuerus of fifty. “This is the young
person,” he said, by way of introduction.
Ahasuerus—otherwise Mr. Fingelman—inspected me in turn. I quailed
before his glance; he was a commissioner for oaths, and wore large round
spectacles. “Had experience?” he asked at last. In person he was rotund
and obviously wealthy, though ’twas a third-rate solicitor’s.
“A little,” I replied. I had made up my mind to say “Lots” beforehand;
but when it came to the pinch, the ingrained bad habit of speaking the
truth reasserted itself partially.
Ahasuerus stared. “What name?” he asked, after a long stony gaze.
I stammered out “Juliet Appleton.”
“Age?”
“Twenty-two.”
He perused me up and down with his small pig’s eyes, as if he were
buying a horse, scrutinising my face, my figure, my hands, my feet. I
felt like a Circassian in an Arab slave-market. I thought he would next
proceed to examine my teeth. But he did not. Having satisfied himself as
to externals, he went on to put me through my paces.
“Sit down there,” he said, pointing to a seat. “Have you pen and
note-book?” I produced my stylograph.
He grunted approbation, and dictated for a few minutes a short
business-letter. Then he waved me to the type-writer. “Transcribe,” he
said curtly. I sat down and transcribed.
The chief clerk meanwhile stood by, with his hairy hands crossed in a
curved attitude of ostentatious servility, which contrasted strangely
with his Outer Office manner. When I had finished, he peered at my work,
nodded, and handed it over to Ahasuerus. Ahasuerus ran his eye up and
down, grunting again. “She’ll do?” he said interrogatively.
The chief clerk signed _yes_.
“She’s the first we’ve seen,” Ahasuerus interposed, with caution in his
tone.
“Saves trouble,” said the chief clerk. I was aware with a rush of hot
blood that the chief clerk approved of me, and that to his lordly
approbation (as of the Sultan’s Vizier) I owed my appointment.
The Oriental monarch waved his pen towards the door. “Very well,” he
answered. “Settle terms with her outside. You know what I give. Bother
me no more with it.” And wheeling round his swivel-chair, he buried
himself in his writing.
The terms the Vizier proposed were not wholly superior to the dreams of
avarice; but they were a modest starvation; and after my East-End
experiences, I looked for no more. I accepted them without demur, and
went forth into Southampton Row an engaged type-writer.
I have a mercurial temperament. My spirits rise and fall as if they were
consols. This success exalted me. I walked down Charing Cross Road (by
no means, as a rule, an exhilarating thoroughfare) in the seventh
heaven. I had justified myself before the impartial tribunal of
political economy. I could earn my own bread—butter doubtful. In the
Struggle for Life I had obtained a footing. This magnificent post of
Shorthand and Type-writer (female) had been thrown open by advertisement
to public competition. In that competition I had won the day. My energy,
my promptitude, the rapid resolution with which I had gulped down my
coffee, burnt my tongue, and rushed off to Southampton Row, had secured
for me the prize of a modest starvation. I had proved myself fittest by
the mere fact of survival. Matthew Arnold had taught me, indeed, with
much sweet reasonableness, that there was not any proper reason for my
existing; but I like to exist. The sole remaining question was, Could I
adapt myself to my environment? If so, I had fulfilled the whole gospel
of Darwinism.
CHAPTER III.
ENVIRONMENT WINS.
It was a wrench to tear myself away from my old men and women in the
Isle of Dogs, for I truly loved them. The operation left a scar that was
slow to heal. I felt I did them good: my visits cheered them, unlike the
curate’s; my whimsical talk broke the monotony of old age and the
East-End. But doing good is a luxury, and I was now face to face with
the strict necessity of earning my livelihood. Yet hope lies still at
the bottom of Pandora’s box. Though I had but six and sevenpence in the
world, and starvation wages, I started blithely to my work at Flor and
Fingelman’s.
I had found a room meanwhile to which my purse consented. The normal
difficulties of lodging-hunting had been aggravated in my case by the
need for finding a house where I should not be separated from
Commissioner Lin; which made a back-yard a necessity: but I succeeded in
surmounting them. Commissioner Lin, I may say, to allay your fears, is
my mongrel Chinese bull-pup. Like Ulysses, I have a dog; he is ugly, but
_a beauty_, and, oh, such a dear! I may starve, but the Commissioner
shares my last crust.
Geographically, my post was in the Outer Office. Early each morning I
went in to the inner recess of Shushan the palace to receive Ahasuerus’s
instructions, and to take down from his royal lips my shorthand notes,
which I afterwards expanded on the type-writer in the anteroom.
Ahasuerus was graciously pleased to like me. I found favour, also, in
the eyes of the Grand Vizier; he was good enough to say my work was
intelligent. I had doubts in my own mind as to the Vizier’s competence
to form an opinion on this head; but was he not a man—a vote-wielding
citizen, empowered to take his share (vicariously) in the counsels of
the nation? and was not I but a Shorthand and Type-writer (female)? I
bowed to the wisdom of the superior sex, and answered with a modest
blush that I rejoiced to have earned his approval.
The morning and afternoon were taken up in expanding letters and copying
drafts of documents. Their style was execrable. The principal verb
adroitly concealed itself: the principal adjective was usually
“aforesaid.” Now, regarded as an epithet, I find “aforesaid” colourless.
Its monotony bored me. I suggested to Ahasuerus that his prose might be
enriched by a greater variety of graphic adjectives such as
“amethystine,” “prismatic,” “opalescent,” “empyrean,” or even
“colossal;” but he stared at me coldly, and replied in a curt voice that
legal phraseology was necessarily limited. The Grand Vizier, also,
cavalierly rejected my mild suggestions for an enlarged vocabulary. He
contended that I should model my composition on _Chitty on Contract_. He
was right, of course; but I found the iteration of “provided always” in
that well of legal English intensely irksome.
The anteroom where I clicked was shared by the Grand Vizier and the two
other clerks. They talked incessantly; I was forced to continue my
transcription without interruption, in spite of their voices. I will
admit that their discourse, as such, by no means distracted me, in
virtue either of its intrinsic attractiveness or of the nature of its
subjects. It circled chiefly round the noble quadruped, with divergences
on Rugby and Association football. I did not gather that the Vizier and
his satellites knew much at first hand about the breed of race-horses,
nor could they have distinguished with ease between a fetlock and a
cannon-bone. They loved sport from afar: they were platonically horsey.
But they were diligent students of a daily journal in the interest of
manly pastimes: and they extracted from its pages many charming
speculations as to the numerical chance of first and second favourites.
They also spoke freely of the ladies of the music-hall. As their tongues
rippled on, with peculiar London variants on the vowels of our native
language, my type-writer continued to go click, click, click, till I was
grateful for its sound as a counter-irritant to their inanity.
That click, click, click became to me like music—if only because it
drowned the details of the Lewes Spring Meeting. I saw in it all a trail
of Ibsenesque atavism. The horse was the sacred beast of the English in
the days of Woden, and, in spite of St. Augustine and John Wesley, his
worship still survives, its festivals attracting thousands of pilgrims
each year to the centres of the cult at Epsom and Newmarket. Devotees
may be known by their badge, a pink paper, which blushes itself, and is
a cause of blushing in others.
Another peculiarity of the Outer Office was its richness in dust—the
dust specific to a solicitor’s premises. I think, in this age of
sanitation, I have kept my head tolerably unprejudiced on the subject of
germs; I do not speak evil of bacteria with the reckless extravagance of
the world at large; I am prepared to live and let live; nor do I deny to
the bacilli of typhoid fever the common right to the struggle for
existence. But the bacilli at Flor and Fingelman’s, I must admit, were
obtrusively aggressive. They carried the war into Africa. They flew
about me visibly whenever I lifted a book; they settled in myriads on my
poor black dress; they invaded my hair, and required to be daily
dislodged by violent hostilities. The three clerks seemed to me to
disregard them altogether; and when I ventured timidly to suggest a
duster, they were almost as horrified as when I proposed to vary the
bald language of a writ by the introduction of a few graceful chromatic
adjectives. Fustiness and mustiness are part of the profession, it
seems; you must no more attempt to sweep the Augean stables than to
carry out that other Herculean task—the simplifying and codification of
the law of England.
For three mornings and three afternoons I endured Flor and Fingelman’s.
It was a question of self _versus_ environment. I am a unit of the
proletariat, and dear Sister Agatha had impressed upon me often, with
her sad, sweet smile, the fundamental truth that beggars must not be
choosers. So I continued to click, click, click, like a machine that I
was, and to listen as little as possible to the calculated odds upon
King Arthur for the Ascot Cup, till I was tired of the subject. On the
fourth day, however, the rebel in my blood awoke. Not for nothing had my
fathers fought at Lexington. I felt I must strike one blow for freedom.
The aforesaid office failed to respond to the needs of the party of the
first part. I went out to lunch, half resolved in the whirligig I call
my mind never to go back again.
It was not the Grand Vizier, with his hairy hands, his goggle eyes, and
his false diamonds; though a certain insolent condescension in the
creature’s manner made me shrink from his presence. It was not the
junior clerks; though the tone of voice with which they addressed me as
“Miss” reminded me of the accent in which I had often heard men of their
type bespeak a defenceless barmaid; while their demeanour varied from
the haughty to the condescending. It was Ahasuerus himself whose
Oriental leer drove me from the office. I felt sure Ahasuerus considered
his manner killing—a three-tailed bashaw, with a natural gift of
captivating Circassians. His smile was the smile that knows itself
irresistible. He had not as yet ventured anything rude to me; but I
scented prospective rudeness in the way he watched me come in and
out—the way he beamed on me benignly, with his small pig’s eyes, as who
should say, “See how bland and how pleasant I am; you must rejoice, mere
female, to have secured the favour of so genial a gentleman, who revels
in semi-detached affluence at Balham.” I fled from his oily face,
assured that the law was not my proper sphere. I would diverge into
paths of more commonplace business.
All this time I had been living upon Capital. If you judge such conduct
imprudent, remember that I could hardly have lived upon its interest. My
six and sevenpence was almost spent. I owed my landlady (at the single
room I had taken) for bread and rent. I had nothing left for my own food
or for Mr. Commissioner. The outlook was serious. Dimly aware of failure
in the Struggle for Life—inability to succeed in Adaptation to the
Environment—I retired for lunch to a little shop close by, whose merits
the Grand Vizier had from the first impressed upon me.
At the table by my side sat two middle-aged men. They were talking
earnestly. I detected at once in the mellow tone of the better-looking
of the two that he was a Cambridge man and a political economist. The
Moral Sciences Tripos has its special aroma. After the rippling
tittle-tattle of the noble quadruped I was glad to listen even to the
voice of economics. I strained my ears. It was pleasant to hear educated
men speak again. And their talk was full of interest.
“You have been to see them?” the first voice said.
“Yes,” the Cambridge man answered. “It is an interesting experiment,
though foredoomed to failure. They say they want to try anarchy in
practice. They have bought ten acres of wild land very cheap; they are
getting it into tillage; and they mean to manage it upon Kropotkine’s
system of intensive culture.”
Intensive culture! I saw at once what that meant. What a capital plan!
Till the land to the utmost, so as to make the largest possible amount
of food or roses come out of it. And anarchists, too! Why, I was born an
anarchist. Never could I endure being ordered about by anyone. After
Flor and Fingelman’s—click, click, click, all day—what a vista of
Eden! I sat a postulant at the gate of that Paradise. Just to go out
into the fields and till them anarchically!
“And have they no organisation?”
“None at all. He told me it was a band of brothers. I asked him by what
rule they worked. He said each man or woman laboured when he or she
chose! If he didn’t feel inclined he left off for that day and sat in
the sun, basking. They cultivate in common; each member of the community
receives food and clothes; and at the end of the week, if any surplus
remain, they divide it between them by way of pocket-money.”
“Then it acts, so far.”
“Yes, apparently. But ’tis new. They look healthy enough, though pallid,
and they are certainly enthusiastic. I asked Rothenburg how he liked it;
he said it was delightful—ten thousand times better than being a tailor
in Paris.”
I could no longer restrain myself. A caprice seized me. I leaned across
the table. “Pardon me,” I said, “but may I venture to ask, as an
anarchist in the grain, where shall I find this Utopia, this Eldorado of
anarchy?”
The Cambridge man smiled.
“Near Horsham,” he answered. “But—excuse curiosity—are you _really_ an
anarchist?”
“I will join them!” I cried, clasping my hands. “I have every
qualification. I am alone in the world, and penniless—splendid material
for anarchy. Such idyllic anarchy, too! Do they receive mere women?”
“I think,” the Cambridge man replied, “they would be charmed to take
you. But remember, they are uncultivated—the raw material of a state,
rough working men and women. Go down and see them by all means. But when
you have inspected their home I venture to hazard a guess that you will
decide it is not meant for ladies.”
“I am young,” I answered; “I have tolerable strength and abundant
energy. Misfortunes are nothing if one takes them in the spirit of
camping out. Hardships cease to be hardships when you talk of them as
roughing it. After all, it is only what we voluntarily do at a picnic up
the river. At least, I will go down and interview your anarchists.”
He scribbled their precise address on the back of an envelope, with a
smile for my enthusiasm. I went home to my solitary room at once, and
sat down to my private and particular Barlock—the same on which I am
inditing these present memoirs—to write out my resignation to Flor and
Fingelman.
“GENTLEMEN,
“WHEREAS I, the undersigned, have worked for three days
and upwards, be the same more or less, to my great discomfort,
in your dingy, stingy, musty, and fusty office; and WHEREAS I
have found the post of Shorthand and Type-writer (female) which
you have deigned to bestow upon me, in the aforesaid office,
highly disagreeable to my mind and brain, owing as well to the
impurity of the air as to the dulness and monotony of the terms
employed in it; and WHEREAS I am now desirous of seeking other
and more congenial employment elsewhere than in the aforesaid
dinginess, stinginess, mustiness, and fustiness, as herein
designated, NOW THEREFORE, This Indenture Witnesseth and know
all men by these presents, that I have made up my mind not to
return to your messuage or tenement this afternoon, nor on any
subsequent date, but to relinquish entirely the aforesaid post
of Shorthand and Type-writer (female) with all and sundry the
emoluments or salaries thereto pertaining, and to say good-bye
to you, the aforesaid Flor and Fingelman, and to your Grand
Vizier and other faithful satellites. In witness whereof I have
hereto set my hand and seal, this twenty-first day of May, in
the year of our Lord, &c., &c.
“JULIET APPLETON.”
I put it into an envelope and dropped it into the post; then I turned
again on my way, a Free Woman.
Free, but penniless.
Hurrah for anarchy! flowery, bowery anarchy, in a careless-ordered
garden, run wild with eglantine! Could a Peri hope to storm that Eden?
CHAPTER IV.
THE CHOICE OF A PATRON.
I prowled along the Strand, in quest of an inspiration. You will readily
conceive that the situation was serious. I had disbursed my last coin
for lunch that morning. True, I had still my bicycle; and by its aid I
might set off to join my unknown brothers, the anarchists, near Horsham.
But my heart smote me, for I had not wherewith to pay my landlady. Had I
worked out my week with Ahasuerus, no doubt I might have settled her
bill, and gone on my way honestly. But I could not leave her in the
lurch; nor, indeed, could I set out without the contents of my modest
portmanteau. My effects must go with me. Thus the position teemed with
difficulties. I had an aunt in London, of course; I suppose not even the
most destitute are ever wholly deprived of the solace of a maiden aunt
in London. Conscience suggested that in such a crisis I ought to consult
her. But fortunately I belong to a generation which has analysed
conscience away. “Go to the aunt,” said Duty. “Stop away,” said
Inclination. And Inclination, as usual, won in a canter—I might almost
say, Inclination walked over. If you doubt that these metaphors are
becoming on a woman’s lips, you must recollect that my style had been
suffering for three days from the enforced proximity of the Grand
Vizier, his satraps, and the noble quadruped.
I _could_ not go to the aunt. She was the average woman of the small
fixed income; prosaic, stagnant, serenely literal; a placid pool that
reflects its surroundings. It was her fixed belief that everything I did
was in equal parts foolish and wicked. No doubt she was right; but her
arguments vexed me. “It is quite impossible for a young lady to do so,”
she said about many actions which I knew from experience to be not only
possible but actual. So I avoided the aunt, and set my face toward the
shop-windows for light and guidance. I found it, of course. Faith is
always rewarded, or I like to think so. At a corner shop, devoted to the
sale of more or less genuine _bric-à-brac_, I saw in the window a
charming little Fra Angelico, almost a replica of a miniature I
remembered to have noted at the Vatican. Whether it was authentic or not
I do not presume to decide; who am I that I should give myself the airs
of a Morelli? But its _naïveté_, its grace, its frank purity of colour,
were obvious at once, even to the eye of a woman. The picture
represented what is called in art the Charity of St. Nicholas. Through
an open door you see into the home of a poor nobleman. ’Tis a dainty
interior, of the age when drab had not wholly ousted the primary hues.
In the background his three starving daughters lie snugly in bed—a trio
of innocent maidens, with pretty blonde heads of infantile
guilelessness, laid on white pillows, between dimity curtains. In the
foreground the nobleman their father is seated, the picture of despair,
in a long vermilion robe and a brown study; without, by a grated window,
the dear young saint himself, in Florentine hose, with a sleeveless
jerkin, stands timidly on tip-toe, in the very act of dropping three
purses of gold as dowries for the maidens through the open casement. The
story is told with the pellucid simplicity of early Tuscan art; no airs
and graces, but just the bare outline of facts which it behoves you to
know;—these girls are poor; their father is at his wits’ end; and
yonder amiable young gentleman, in crimson and puce, has come to their
rescue, like a gallant Christian, with purses of gold very fat and
opulent.
I stood long and looked at it. It was so archly engaging. The clear-cut
outlines, the translucent hues, the sweet old-world directness, the
story-telling faculty, each charmed and beguiled me. “After all,” I said
to myself, “St. Nicholas, not St. George, is the saint for me. My dragon
is poverty. St. George for princesses; St. Nicholas for the poor and
portionless maiden!” I gazed at him long, with affectionate eyes; then I
went on my way towards the National Gallery, strengthened and comforted.
Have you found out the true use of the National Gallery, I wonder? On
three days in the week the British nation throws those stately rooms
open, free, to any woman who chooses to enter them. I use them as my
drawing-room. You get a comfortable chair to sit upon for nothing; you
get pictures to look at; and in winter the gallery is heated by flues,
over which you can stand and warm your feet gratis. I went in on this
critical afternoon of my history, not only for rest, but in search of
St. Nicholas—St. Nicholas of Myra—St. Nicholas of Bari—St. Nicholas,
the giver of dowries to damsels. My dear father had been a lover of
Italian art, and had taught me betimes the legends of the saints,
without which Fra Angelico and Benozzo Gozzoli talk a strange tongue to
you. I was certain now that St. Nicholas, not St. George, was my
predestined patron. He was so good to the poor, and especially to
maidens. In many pictures on those walls I beheld him as of old, in his
bishop’s robes, benign and benevolent, a model of suavity, holding the
three golden balls which typify the three fat purses of gold he threw in
at the window to the starving daughters of the nobleman of Myra. He was
the saint of the oppressed, the enslaved, the suffering. If knighthood
had its St. George, serfdom had its St. Nicholas. I saw him again, with
his three spheres of gold, traced by the hand of Raphael in the Blenheim
Madonna; a courteous old gentleman here, bland and mild, and very sweet
of feature. I saw him in many other less famous pictures, a friend in
need, ever gentle and helpful, the patron of children, of the
distressed, of the storm-tossed. I saw him in many guises, painted for
the most part in what, in default of exact knowledge, I will call a
chasuble, but always as the deliverer. My heart went forth to him. “Holy
Nicholas,” I murmured, “you were my father’s friend; be my friend as
well! Stand by me, and protect me!”
I issued once more into the phantom-crowded Strand. Below, the streaming
street was full of those hurrying, scurrying men with black bags, bound
as ever for the Unknown. But above—I lifted my eyes, and there, clear
against the sky, I beheld—the three golden balls of St. Nicholas.
CHAPTER V.
_VIVE L’ANARCHIE!_
I drew a deep breath. He was the poor man’s saint; his symbol has
descended to the poor man’s banker.
Yet my confidence after all was not all misplaced. St. Nicholas, at a
pinch, would provide my dowry.
It flashed across me at a stroke what those golden balls meant. Never
before had I divined their meaning—their intimate connection with my
newly-chosen patron. I caught at it now clearly. Nicholas, I knew, was
the saint of the people—the saint of the labourer who toils for daily
bread, of the fisherman who struggles with the stormy sea, of the
orphan, of the slave, of the child, the captive, the prisoner, the
unfortunate. No wonder, then, that his golden balls have survived as the
badge of that generous profession which freely lends to all the poor who
leave a pledge behind.
I accepted the omen. Tempest-tossed as I was, my precious type-writer
might save me for the day from the present distresses. I hurried back to
my attic in a street off Soho, packed it up in its case, and carried it
with difficulty in my own small arms to the shrine of St. Nicholas.
My errand, I grant, was new, and repugnant. But necessity, like our
magistrates, knows no law. I will not pretend that I passed those
dubious portals without a flush of shame. Still, I passed them bravely.
“How much?” asked the acolyte.
I was inexperienced in the ritual of the sordid temple. “Three pounds?”
I queried tentatively.
He cut me short with a gesture of contempt. “We could do thirty
shillings.”
“I _paid_ twenty pounds for it,” I murmured.
He shrugged his shoulders. “An error of judgment, I should say. Thirty
shillings. Do you take it?”
I was anxious to escape from the squalid place. Bundles of shabby
clothes in square pigeon-holes daunted me. “I accept,” I said, gasping.
He counted out the money, and handed me a ticket.
I fled, like one followed by a roaring wild beast. No quicker flies the
Arimaspian whom the gryphon pursues. Nor did I pause or halt till I
reached my own bower. Safe back in that stronghold, I bolted and locked
the door, and washed the pollution off me in an orgy of cold water.
Then the dignity of womanhood reasserted itself. I sat back in the one
arm-chair, and reflected. A freak is dear to my soul. I would pay my
weekly bill before starting, carry my knapsack with me, and engage the
room for another week in advance, in case the anarchists should chance
to prove too anarchic for my taste. And after that, who dare call me
imprudent? ’Tis the habit of twenty-two to burn its boats. When it takes
measures for preserving them, you should give it credit for singular
forethought.
I had still my faithful bicycle. I rose betimes next morning, and endued
myself in my cycling costume, which, like all else about me (I trust),
is rational. The Commissioner and I stole silently down the stairs.
Before London was well awake we had left Westminster Bridge behind us in
the haze, and were off on the open road, on our way towards Horsham, two
palmers bent for the Holy Land of Anarchy.
How light and free I felt! When man first set woman on two wheels with a
pair of pedals, did he know, I wonder, that he had rent the veil of the
harem in twain? I doubt it; but so it was. A woman on a bicycle has all
the world before her where to choose; she can go where she will, no man
hindering. I felt it that brisk May morning as I span down the road,
with a Tam o’ Shanter on my head, and my loose hair travelling after me
like a Skye terrier.
“This,” thought I to myself, “is truly my Odyssey. To play at being a
latter-day Ulysses in London, among those crowded streets, is like a
child’s game—too much make-believe. But mounted here on the ship of the
high-road, scudding gaily down hill, or luffing against head-winds on a
steep upward slope, I feel myself the heroine of a modern sea epic. As I
coast by narrow straits of hedge-bordered lane, round some lumbering
cart, I steer with care betwixt headland and whirlpool. Siren inns hang
out signs to beckon me into port; piratical carts, buccaneering drays,
skidding fast down long slopes, strive to crush me as they pass like
living Symplegades. In perils oft, I yet feel the fresh wind in my
teeth, and see the foam of May break over hawthorn promontories. Troy
lies behind; in front of me beckons the peaceful Ithaca of my anarchist
settlement.”
The road, indeed, was a pleasant one. Lying at first among suburban
quarters, pink with blossom at that perfect moment of the year, and
heavy with lilac, it grew greener by degrees as it stretched out to the
rising plain of Surrey and then swelled up slowly into the great breaker
of the chalk downs. That huge wave of land rises in a long curve on the
side towards London, but curls over abruptly by Box Hill and Dorking,
like a billow that has hardened in the act of breaking. My way led me
through a deep gorge that cuts the slope of this ridge at right angles,
beside a wandering stream, as though one stroke of some great magician’s
wand had cleft a way for it through the barrier. The ravine is bordered
to the left by a cliff-like edge, overgrown with juniper bushes. They
call it the Vale of Mickleham. Spring had put on her best frock for my
visit. I rode at a good pace. Commissioner Lin toiled behind, with his
tongue out. Then we broke into the open, where a steeple showed the way,
and through a billowy common, crest after trough alternately, dotted
thick with holly-trees, across the Weald of Sussex. A still, pearly-pale
sky hung over the misty level. Despondent donkeys munched furze-tops and
mused pessimism. Trains dashed under bridges with long streamers of
steam, as I rode over them unabashed—huge monsters of burnished brass,
snorting death from their throats, such as would have terrified the
timid Achæan sailors. But I took no heed of them—I, the braver daughter
of an iron age, trained to disregard dragons of that mechanical sort,
and to fear only those against whom St. Nicholas is potent—I had seen
one but yesterday on Margaritone’s panel. The horses that passed over by
my side reared and quivered at the ungainly monster; but my undaunted
steel palfrey, himself a scion of the iron age, showed no sign of
weakness. Or if he trembled at all, ’twas something wrong in the
gearing.
A mile or two from Horsham I diverged, as directed, down a cross-road to
the left. ’Twas a level lane in champaign country, bordered by a low
hedge of close-clipped maple. The fields were of leaden clay—so much I
saw where they were ploughed—muddy, and all but impassable in wet
weather, to meet which state of morass every cottage was approached by a
small paved causeway of flags, giving a singularly distinctive note to
the district. Many such I passed, each built of pale red brick, each
tiled with mossy tiles, and each approached through a square of front
garden by its town-like pavement. The lanes were a maze, running
aimlessly hither and thither. One after another, as I tried it, led me
back by circumvolutions to a rustic Clapham Junction, the centre of
Nowhere. Judge if I was nonplussed.
At one of the cottages I reined up at last, and, leaning from my saddle,
called out to a boy who was weeding the front patch: “Can you tell me
where I shall find the anarchist settlement?”
The boy looked up, taken aback. It was clear that the rationality of my
dress astonished him. And, indeed, ’tis so rare to be rational in this
world that I was not surprised at his surprise. He stared at me with a
frank provincial stare; I am not sure that he did not design heaving
half a brick at me, in recognition of my originality. But he contented
himself with a few contumelious epithets, which did not hurt me. I flung
him a penny; this softened his heart. He answered, after a pause, “I
guess you mean them furriners.”
The American blood in me was flattered by that “I guess.” Thus my
ancestors must have spoken here in Sussex long ago, before they went
over in the _Mayflower_, to fight in due time at Lexington. It is a
point of honour with all Massachusetts folk to have gone over in the
_Mayflower_. She was a sloop of 180 tons, and must have carried
thousands of steerage passengers. I am not sure about the tonnage, but
there can be no doubt as to the passengers.
“They are probably foreigners,” I replied, coming back to this century.
“At any rate, they are new-comers. And I was told they had settled down
somewhere near Pinfold.”
He waved his hand vaguely towards the quarter of the sunrise, and gave
me directions of complicated topography. But he added, after a moment
for internal reflection, “They bain’t the sort o’ folk for the likes o’
you to visit.”
“Thank you,” I answered, “I am an anarchist myself.” And I spurred on my
mount, round the corner where he directed me.
The day, which was brisk when I started, had become by this time hot and
windless, and the sun beat mercilessly. After various intricate twists
and turns, ill-deciphered from uncertain instructions, I found myself at
last by the side of a pond which formed the one fixed point in my
guide’s geography. He had called it “a horse-pond.” It was a pretty
little pool: tall glossy weeds grew lush by its edge; a grey-leaved
willow drooped into it; Naiads lurked among the broad green disks of the
water-lilies at its farther end. I was glad it was so taking. I accepted
it as an omen of success in my wild-goose chase. From the first I was
not without misgivings of my own wisdom in thus seeking to fraternise
with unknown anarchist brethren. But I knew how often fortune brings in
some boats that are not steered; and I took the beauty of this
“horse-pond” as a foretaste of what I should find in the anarchist
settlement.
An old woman, with sleeves tucked up and the parboiled arms of a
laundress, stood near the door of a new brick cottage hard by. “Can you
tell me,” I called out, “where I can find Rothenburg?”
I omitted the Mr., as my Cambridge friend had warned me that that
harmless prefix acted on your anarchist like the picador’s dart on the
bulls of Andalusia.
“Rottenborough?” the old woman answered, transforming his name, as is
the wont of her class, into something significant in her own language.
“He’s down yonder by the new glass-house.” And she pointed with her hand
towards a deep clay field just behind her cottage.
I dismounted, and led my bicycle gently through the mud. There was no
eglantine. At the far end of the field, under shelter of a hedge which
backed it to the north, I saw a slender, pale-faced young man in a blue
Continental blouse, digging a trench with a pick, to whose use he was
evidently but little accustomed.
“Are you Rothenburg?” I asked, in French.
He looked up and smiled. My costume took his fancy. “I am,” he answered
in the same language, but with a marked Alsatian accent. “What do you
want with me, comrade?”
“I am an anarchist,” I said, simply, rushing straight to the point. “I
wish to join your community.”
He laid down his pick, and came up out of the trench. I could see him
better now—a pallid, anæmic young man, with a high narrow forehead,
watery restless eyes, thin yellow hair, and twitching hands that played
nervously all the time with a shadowy moustache. I judged him at sight
the very type of an eager-hearted ineffectual enthusiast—a man born to
failure as the sparks fly upward.
He looked me over, all surprised. “We are a party of working men,” he
objected, at last; “artisans, sempstresses, labourers. We do not desire
or court the aid of the _bourgeois_.”
Now, I can endure most things, but not to be called a _bourgeoise_. I
coloured a little, I suppose; at any rate, I answered, “I am an
_ouvrière_ myself. I have nothing to do with the _bourgeoisie_. I have
ridden down from London to link my fate with yours. Are you the head of
this colony?”
He flushed somewhat in turn—or rather, faint streaks of pink stole over
that bloodless face. “We have no head,” he answered. “We are
thorough-going anarchists. Equality is our aim. Since when do you belong
to our party?”
“Since I was born,” I retorted, boldly. “I am anarchic by nature.
Wherever there is a government, I am always against it. Let me join your
band—and I promise disobedience.”
He eyed me suspiciously. This confession of faith seemed rather to
disturb than to reassure him. He paused a moment. “How did you hear of
us?”
“Casually, in an eating-house in London, from a Cambridge economist who
had been here to see you. When he spoke of you, I thought to myself,
‘These are the people I want. I recognise my kind. I must go and join
them.’”
“Ha! He was a co-operator. A voluntary co-operator. But he had not the
whole truth. If he sent you here, you may be wrong—you are perhaps a
Marxian?”
I perceived that there was an orthodoxy and a heterodoxy of anarchism;
in which case, of course, I should be on the heterodox side. “You will
find me sound,” I said, seeking to temporise, “in my uncompromisingly
anarchic anarchism of anarchy.” I thought I could hardly be more
mutinous than that. If ’twas rebellion they wanted, I was honestly
prepared to rebel against the rebels.
He drew out a cheap gun-metal watch. “It is dinner-time,” he said,
temporising in return. “The comrades will have assembled. Come up and
discuss. We will see whether they are content to accept you as a
companion.”
I confess I was disappointed. This seemed painfully close to a
legislative assembly—at the very least to a folk-moot or parish
council. Did they mean to decide things by base show of hands? And if
so, wherein did your anarchist differ from the ordinary coercive
governmental authority?
In the Utopia I had framed for myself, every man (or woman) did that
which was right in his own eyes—without prejudice to his equal freedom
to do that which was wrong, if he chanced to be so minded. Here, I saw
just a common joint-stock company—Anarchy, Limited.
CHAPTER VI.
THE INNER BROTHERHOOD.
We assembled in the large room of the first cottage I had seen—a sort
of bare, bald dining-hall, big enough to feed some twenty or thirty
souls, and ugly enough to take away their appetite for ever. Its
architect’s name, I would conjecture, was Jeremiah.
“A new comrade,” Rothenburg said, waving his hand towards me not
ungracefully. “Let us dine first, and consider her afterward.”
This was an awkward introduction. I sat down to eat and drink, painfully
conscious that the eyes of anarchic Europe were upon me. My long
unbroken ride had given me a keen edge for food; still, apart from their
scrutiny, I confess I eat with an undercurrent of disgust. The meat and
bread were wholesome; but I suspected their cleanliness. The napery,
too, was coarse and cried for the laundress. However, if one chooses to
herd with anarchists, one must not be too particular on matters of diet.
I eat a hearty dinner, in spite of my doubts, and even drank some sour
red wine; for they were not English enough yet to relish our beer, of
which I was not sorry.
Replenished by dinner, they drew apart, discussing me in low tones and
in cosmopolitan languages. I fancy I detected the ring both of Czech and
Yiddish—tongues of which I do not profess an intimate knowledge, though
my East-End experiences had given me a distant nodding acquaintance with
either. Most of them were Austrians (assorted) or else subjects of the
Tsar, living here for their health, because they preferred England as a
place of residence to that part of the Russian territory which is called
Siberia. From time to time they appealed to me on some point of my
history—where was I born, of what nationality, why did I wish to join
them? I answered as best I might, though the ordeal was severe. It was
bad enough to stand as Esther before Ahasuerus, but I realised now that
I was set to perform the part of Vashti before a whole court of critical
anarchists.
At last Rothenburg, still fumbling with his moustache, had the happy
thought to ask me my name. When I said “Juliet Appleton” I saw that it
moved them. The fact that I was a Juliet gave food to their fancy. Each
man drew himself up and stroked his chin with the very air of a Romeo.
Even the women smiled—for there were women among them, some four or
five, with pretty curly-haired children. Then they began to instruct me
in the doctrines of their sect. I was sworn to eternal friendship with
all and sundry. The intricate Eleusinian mysteries of anarchy were
explained to me, as catechumen, in Alsatian French and Bohemian German.
I answered in such dialects of either tongue as I had at command. My
profession of faith appeared to give satisfaction, especially when,
prompted by Rothenburg, I renounced Karl Marx and all his ways, and
embraced with fervour the true faith of Bakunin. Who or what Bakunin was
I had not an idea: but I made up in zeal what I lacked in understanding.
It began to dawn on me that sectarianism is of the nature of man, and
that all things tend to fall into my doxy and your doxy.
At last Rothenburg arrived at what he evidently considered a crucial
point in his catechism. “You understand, of course, that you must not
form an idolatrous attachment to any one of the comrades, to the
exclusion of the others?”
I glanced around me at the dozen sorry specimens of the male of my
species there ranged before me, and felt convinced at sight I could
safely engage not to idolise excessively any one among them. And I said
so.
This assurance appeared to give the community boundless satisfaction.
They turned next to my bicycle, which was a nice little machine—the
nicest in England, indeed, like everyone else’s. One or two of them were
kind enough to accept my full membership at once by trying to ride it. I
am tolerably tall for a woman, while the comrades, as I learned to call
them, were for the most part undersized town-bred working men, of the
skimpy order. Thus my machine just fitted them; they did not even
require to shift the pedals. I showed them how to stick on, correcting
the excessive line of grace in their initial curves: this obviously
pleased them, and I think they formed a high idea of the new comrade
herself and more especially of the property she brought into the
Community. They had not an equal opinion of Mr. Commissioner.
So I settled down at once as a full-fledged anarchist.
Figure to yourself a group of naked cottages, with bald slate roofs
untempered by the years—no moss, no house-leeks—dropped down at random
in a sticky clay cabbage-field—and you see our colony.
My first business was to behold where I was to abide. The rotund old
lady whom I had found at the door of the first messuage or tenement took
me round to my cubicle; for they had a nomenclature of their own, suited
to the ways of anarchists. ’Twas in a brand-new building of pale pink
brick—a sort of anæmic brick, which bore the same relation to healthy
red brickiness that Rothenburg’s complexion bore to normal humanity. It
was vastly modern, like the views of its builders; it also betrayed the
same painful lack of æsthetic tendencies. It cried for creepers. In
front of it stretched a patch of utilitarian potato-ground. I would have
preferred hollyhocks. There was no hall or passage: the door opened
abruptly into a small parlour; behind lay three bedrooms of the minutest
dimensions. Mine was tiny. However, I have always inculcated kindness to
animals, and am not conscious of the faintest desire to swing a cat; so
it sufficed very well for me. The bath entailed difficulties, no other
anarchist being a slave to the habit: but a wooden water-tub and economy
of space speedily overcame them. I unpacked my knapsack, put my room to
rights, dusted the window-panes, and sallied forth to see what work the
Community demanded of me.
The Community was ranged outside my cottage door as one man. It seemed
that, unable to resist the combined attractions of the bicycle and a new
comrade, they had decreed a half-holiday by universal suffrage, and were
waiting without to let me teach them the use of the machine. But the
Commissioner, who was an unregenerate monopolist as to private property,
effectually prevented its premature appropriation by a mute white
protest.
I trembled as I saw how many awkward youths desired to ride my precious
cycle. But if you go in for Communism you must expect it to cut both
ways. I had eaten their dinner, they must share my bicycle. For so it is
written in the lawless law of anarchy.
Most of these young men were good fellows in their way—very
simple-hearted anarchists. I do not credit it that they could have blown
up a Tsar, or even dropped a bomb into a suburban letter-box. They
confined themselves to cabbages and passionate denunciation of the
oppressors. But the ringleader in the attempt to borrow my bicycle from
an absent comrade was an exception to the rule. He was a
villainous-looking creature—the Caliban of our island. His name was
Léon. I think he must have been built after designs by Mr. Aubrey
Beardsley. He had rufous hair, a nose without a bridge, and thick
protruding lips. Those lips were a nightmare. I set him down as a
judicious cross between a Swiss _crétin_ and an albino negro. To make
matters worse, like many other repulsive people, he had the habit when
he spoke to you of coming up very close and breathing in your face, so
that his protruding lips almost seemed to touch you. I had an
irresistible impulse to say to him, “Take, oh take those lips away!”
only, I knew if I did he would not understand; or if he understood he
would misunderstand me.
I felt from the outset that I might have trouble with Léon.
That first night, for some time, I was kept awake by a continuous
concert, which sorely puzzled me. It could not be nightingales—the note
was not varied enough; nor was it the Six Great Powers of Europe—the
chorus was far too concordant. It reminded me most of the serenade made
by the small green southern tree-frogs; but here, in Sussex! I lay awake
and racked my brain. Next day solved the mystery. The hollow beyond our
plot of intensive culture was marshy and weedy, it teemed with
natterjacks. I will own that till I came to Pinfold I wist not even that
the natterjack existed. I had rolled him into one with his cousin the
toad. But our only British brother, a leather-dresser from Bermondsey,
and a born naturalist, soon showed me the difference. Ever since I have
met the natterjack in society everywhere. He is the gentleman and the
artist in his own family. Frogs croak, toads purr, but the natterjack
sings. You will admire his clear high note, trilled with a delicate
tremolo.
At last I fell asleep, a very wearied anarchist.
CHAPTER VII.
A MUTINOUS MUTINEER.
I respected Rothenburg; he was a man of ideas. Of course, they were
wrong; but, according to his rush-lights, he acted them out. He seemed
to me to have a shallow brain, in a constant state of feverish
agitation. He was a flamboyant rhetorician, a crisp denunciator. It did
one’s soul good to hear him declaim red-hot against kings, priests, and
the intolerable tyranny of public opinion. The rest were shadows.
Rothenburg by comparison was an intellectual Titan.
Even old Mrs. Pritchard, of the parboiled arms, who lived in the
Community cottage with the bare, bald hall, recognised his superiority.
“That there Rottenborough,” she would say, with her arms akimbo, “why
he’s worth the whole lot of ’em.” She was a study in her way, Mrs.
Pritchard—globular and emotional. Rothenburg’s eloquence filled her
eyes with tears. _Why_ she was an anarchist I failed to perceive. She
seemed as much out of place in that cosmopolite crew as a Free Kirk
elder in a chorus of Mænads. She told me they had “convinced” her. If
so, she must have had a mind singularly open to conviction. I gather
rather that she took to anarchy as she might have taken to Primitive
Methodism, the Salvation Army, or any other variety of dithyrambic
religion. There chanced to be no Shakers or Mormons in the field at the
moment, so Mrs. Pritchard fell back upon the allurements of Communism.
She washed for the comrades, a post, you may guess, which almost
amounted to a lady-like sinecure.
When I joined the Community I did so in dead earnest. You may think I
jest, but I assure you seriously that my first intention was to live and
die in the bosom of anarchy. Even the first sight of the ten acres, with
its fringe of natterjacks and its total lack of eglantine, did not damp
my ardour; nor did the dinner at the outset. I reflected that I had
taught a cookery class at the Guild, and that I could find an outlet for
my energies in radical reform of the Communal kitchen. It certainly
afforded a noble chance for the reformer. Meanwhile I said nothing,
though I eat every meal with an increasing undercurrent of distrust as
to its cleanliness.
At night we gathered in the Community hall and decided the future of
Europe. Within, as without, it had anæmic brick walls, slightly inclined
towards jaundice, and under its roof we listened drearily while
Rothenburg settled the map of the twentieth century in unofficial
harangues. Save for his torrent of eloquence I found the hall
depressing. Our Community shared the common mania of the sectary for
placarding its sentiments. Only here “The Lord is my Shepherd” and “God
Bless our Home” gave place to “_Solidarité de la Race Humaine_,” “No
King, no Laws, no Taxes,” “_Das Land für das Volk_,” “_Ubi bene, ibi
Patria_,” and “Free Thought, Free Affection.” I read these legends over
and over till they palled. In another respect also my comrades resembled
the universal schismatic—their interests were confined to a single
range. They were great on altruism; but one saw their eyes glaze over
the moment one diverged from the beaten path of anarchic platitude.
Rothenburg asked me the first day if I knew anything of gardening.
Anything of gardening! I could have told them at a glance that their
cauliflowers were planted three inches too close, while their views on
spring carrots were absurdly elementary. I had been reared in the
country. But I reflected that, even among anarchists, modesty befits a
woman, and I answered that I hoped so.
They wished to set me at first upon light work in the glass-houses; even
those rough working men, I could see (notable mainly for the whiteness
of their faces and the redness of their politics), paid some homage to
my gentility; though they would have denied it themselves, they were
anxious to spare me as much as possible of manual labour. But I would
have none of that. If I joined their clan at all I must join on equal
terms. I am all for the absolute equation of the sexes. I wished to bear
my part in the burdens of the Community.
So I devoted myself with a single mind to intensive culture. I may be
dense, but after close inspection my impression is that intensive
culture, were it not for its name, might readily be confused with
ordinary gardening.
Rothenburg was working on the foundations of a new glass-house. To avoid
Léon, whose province was potatoes, I took a pick and worked by the
Alsatian’s side. He seldom spoke; when he did he left off delving—his
shallow brain had room but for one occupation at a time. It was curious
to see him pause, push his crush-hat from his brow, wipe his narrow
forehead with his shirt-sleeve, stroke the thin yellow hair, and then
give vent to some deep philosophical speculation, which a child of ten
might have considered profound.
On the second day of my task at the trench a sudden thought struck me.
“Rothenburg,” I said, wielding my pick somewhat viciously, “you have
bought this land; how do you manage to hold it?”
He struck work, as usual, and turned the watery blue eyes upon me.
“We hold it, Juliet,” he said—I was officially known to all the
comrades as Juliet—“we hold it”—he paused as if I were drawing a
tooth—“we hold it by trustees. No other way is possible.”
“The English law compels you?”
“My faith, yes; we cannot own it as a Community.”
“And suppose some comrade were to refuse to work, and yet stick to his
rooms. What could you do to get rid of him?”
That was a problem for Rothenburg. He fondled the thin yellow hair till
I thought it would come out; he fingered the shadowy moustache with that
nervous hand till he made me frightened.
“I imagine,” he said at last, after due deliberation, in a very slow
tone, “we would be compelled to call in . . . . the State . . . . to
eject him.” He uttered that hated word with visible effort.
Appello Cæsarem! I dug my pick into the ground more viciously than ever.
But I said nothing. Coercive practices! I saw I was back with my old
friends Aforesaid and This Indenture Witnesseth.
Yet I will do the anarchists the justice to say that none of them seemed
anxious to afford their pet bugbear, the State, the opportunity of
trying this test case. They toiled hard, and inefficiently. In the sweat
of their brow they did very little. None of them could be called a
specialist in gardening. Rothenburg himself had worked as a lady’s
tailor in Paris, he told me, and had flung up a post of fifty francs a
week—“Not bad wages for a working man,” he observed, preening himself,
with the complacency of a willing martyr—to till the soil with
intensive culture. I believe he was really a good tailor spoiled to make
an indifferent gardener. Still, one could not help respecting his
enthusiasm. When I pressed him further on this head, he admitted with
regret that in the present state of the world only a chosen few—“like
you and me, Juliet”—were fit for anarchy. (I felt half inclined to
retort with the last of the Sandemanians, that I was “no that sure of
Juliet.”) However, he thought it was well to begin the experiment; after
all, one should live up to one’s highest ideal.
I glanced around at the sodden field, the bald brick cottages, and had
doubts in my mind whether they did really fulfil my highest ideal.
I worked hard with the rest. A certain sense of honour made me work my
hardest. _Noblesse oblige_; and precisely in proportion as I saw the
comrades would be content to let me shirk some share of my task out of
regard for my gentility, did I feel it incumbent upon me to do my utmost
possible. I wore my cycling suit in the fields, and laboured like a man.
I am not muscularly strong, but I have been well trained, and I honestly
believe I was the most efficient workman in all that little group of
incompetent town toilers.
In my spare time I set about reforming the kitchen. The vegetarian
dishes I had learned at the Guild delighted the souls of the simple
anarchists. My barley cutlets with tomato sauce were voted “heavenly” in
best lip-licking Teutonic; my vermicelli shape received the praise of
“bravissima” from our Neapolitan Luigi. This skill in cookery much
increased my vogue among the men of the Community; while the women were
not sorry to have their task lightened by a little amateur assistance.
If I have not said much here of the women and children ’tis not for want
of appreciation: they were the salt of the settlement. There was no
nonsense of high principles about them: they had followed their husbands
and fathers and brothers to this outland spot as women will do; and they
would have shouted “Vive l’Empereur” as heartily to-morrow as they
shouted “Vive l’Anarchie” when asked to-day. But they loved to applaud
Rothenburg on the war-path of peace, and would have scalped anyone who
doubted the truth of the shibboleths of fraternity.
With the children I made great friends. Dear rough-and-tumble little
things, they oozed with merriment. My rational dress delighted them: so
did Mr. Commissioner, with his white teeth, as soon as they had got over
the first formalities. He suffered them to pull his tail like a lamb. We
played games together at night, in the intervals of reorganising
European affairs and abolishing the capitalist. We romped like tomboys.
My attempts to tell them “Cinderella” and “The Three Bears,” in bad
German, translated by the more knowing into Czech and Yiddish, were not
a complete success; but neither were they a failure, for at any rate
they resulted in happy laughter. Besides I taught them cat’s-cradle, and
cat’s-cradle at least has escaped the curse of Babel.
Still, rocks lay ahead. My Odyssey was not so quickly to bring me into
port. By the end of the week a cloud took shape: I foresaw storms
brewing.
All the comrades were devoted in equal parts to myself and my bicycle.
In the evenings, when work was done, and we had watered the cabbages, I
gave them lessons in turn on the mysterious monster. From the beginning
it occurred to me that most of them were anxious to entice me away from
the common field towards remoter lanes where occasions for private talk
were more easily obtained. But, mindful of my promise not to form
idolatrous attachments, I resisted the temptations of the polyglot
Fausts who would fain have discoursed to me the words of love in many
uncouth languages. It was my policy to keep close to the cottages and
the other women, backed up by that round mountain of Britannic
matronhood, the guileless Mrs. Pritchard. Besides, in the Commissioner,
I had an efficient bodyguard.
On Saturday came the weekly division of profits. We had done well that
week, having sent consignments of early roses and asparagus to Guildford
and London. We declared a dividend, a splendid communal dividend, at the
rate of four shillings per head for adults, and two shillings for
children. I thought this profit magnificent. But just before the
distribution of cash, Rothenburg strolled up to me, as I was dandling a
mottle-armed anarchist. His fingers twitched on the imperceptible
moustache more tremulously than ever. “Juliet,” he said, briefly, “I
want to speak to you.”
He said it in the voice with which our Principal at College was wont to
summon us to her study for the discipline of exhortation. Free anarchist
though I was, I listened and trembled.
“Well, Rothenburg?” I murmured, laying down the baby.
“The question is, do you mean to remain with us?”
“Why, certainly,” I cried, astonished. “Did we not swear eternal
friendship?”
“But—the comrades complain that you take no notice of them.”
“No notice! Absurd! Why, I have taught them how to bicycle.”
“Yes; but that is not everything. Friends should show friendliness. You
hold them at arm’s length. You keep yourself aloof. You have no
_camaraderie_.”
I looked him hard in the face. He blinked his watery eyes. I knew he was
sincere—a good, honest anarchist; but he expected too much of me.
“Rothenburg,” I said firmly, “I call this coercion.”
“No, no; not coercion; but comrades ought to be sociable.”
“’Tis intolerable!” I exclaimed. “What is anarchy for, if we are each to
be forced into talking to one another against our wills? I have done my
week’s work; I have cooked you good food; I have lent you my bicycle;
and still you complain of me. The Banded Despots”—which was our
technical phrase, to wit, for the British Government—“could not do
worse than that, nor as bad as that either. They do not insist that one
should make oneself agreeable. They are amply satisfied if man pays
man’s taxes.”
He twirled the non-existent moustache till he put a visible point on it.
His fingers twitched painfully. “I only tell you what the comrades are
saying,” he replied, in a deprecatory way. “They find that you do not
behave to them like a sister. In one word, they think that you give
yourself the airs of a superior person. You pose as an _aristo_. They
believed when you came that you would amalgamate freely with us. We want
no women who decline to fraternise.”
This was too much for my temper. I broke into open mutiny. “I shall
resign,” I cried. “You are bringing to bear against me the intolerable
tyranny of public opinion. I shall go back to the freedom and comfort of
the Despots.”
His jaw dropped at this resolve. His eye glanced feelingly sideways
towards the bicycle. For a moment I feared Commissioner Lin would pin
him. “No, no,” he cried. “You must not do that. We all like and respect
you. We wish you to remain. But we wish you to be a sister. Give me time
to consider—to communicate with the comrades.”
“Not one moment,” I answered, hardly liking this turn. “Hand me over my
money, and let me go! I have worked for a week, and the labourer is
worthy at least of his travelling expenses. I return to London.”
He hurried back to the group who hung about the door of the Community
cottage, and spoke to them in low tones. Then he came again as envoy.
“All the comrades say, if you will reconsider your decision, they will
no longer insist upon your altering your demeanour.”
“I will _not_ reconsider it,” I replied, growing really frightened, for
I caught Léon’s eye. “I go at once. Give me my money, and let me return
to the world I came from.”
They debated again. Commissioner Lin watched the case in my interest.
Then one of the others approached. It was Léon—Caliban—the man with
the protruding lips. I had my hand on my bicycle, and was ready to mount
it.
“This machine is ours,” he said calmly, putting his face close to mine.
“Whatever any comrade brings into the Community is common property. We
will give you your dividend and let you go; but this you must leave with
us.”
My blood was up. The old Eve within me was roused. The American eagle in
my heart flapped its wings. I remembered how my fathers had fought at
Lexington (they were quite a property to me). “Sir,” I exclaimed, in my
most commanding voice, “you shall not touch my machine. If you venture
to detain it”—I tried to remember the worst phrases I had learnt at
Flor and Fingelman’s—“I will move for a mandamus to compel you to show
cause why you should escape the penalties of præmunire.” What it all
meant I do not know; but I am sure the effect upon Caliban’s mind was
most salutary. I have ever since had a vastly increased respect for the
law of England.
They conferred again for a few minutes, with one eye on the
Commissioner. Then Rothenburg came forward once more as spokesman. “Will
you try it again for one week?” he asked in a really grieved voice. “We
shall be sorry to lose you.”
“Not for one day!” I answered, a furtive gleam in Commissioner Lin’s eye
lending me courage. “Give me what I have earned, and let me go!” I asked
for it with the greater confidence because I felt sure in my own mind I
had done more effective work in the week than any of them.
They paid me, murmuring. I retired to my cubicle, packed my knapsack in
haste, returned to my machine, and laid my hand on it firmly. But within
I was trembling like an Italian greyhound. Then I jumped into the
saddle, and waved my hand to my sworn brothers, with an affectation of
courage. “Messieurs,” I said—and to call them “messieurs” was to
excommunicate myself, to deny _camaraderie_—“Messieurs, you are a mass
of conventions. I wish you the very good morning. Your rules are too
stringent for me. I cannot away with them. I find myself too individual,
too anarchic for the anarchists!”
Then I waved my hand again, and set my face sternly towards
civilisation, despotism, and the flesh-pots of Egypt.
I was weary of dissent, and longed for the catholic church of humanity.
I must go back to London, and be once more a type-writer.
CHAPTER VIII.
CALLED “OF ACCIDENTS.”
For the first three or four miles I kept on pedalling steadily. I grazed
the corners, not even daring to look back, for I was haunted by a terror
that Léon, with his lips, was on the track behind me. But I heard only
the cries of the anarchist babies, calling to their playmate to come
back in Czech and Yiddish.
When I had escaped from the intricate tangle of Sussex lanes, and found
myself once more on the Queen’s highway of England, under the protecting
ægis of Britannia’s shield (in spite of the blood of the Pilgrim
Fathers), I paused to reflect upon the week’s adventures.
A bicycle in full swing, I maintain, is not an ideal place for calm
reflection. Hence the face of the bicyclist. Moreover, I had started
without due attention to my screws, in my eagerness to escape from my
sworn brothers, the anarchists, into the open air of Banded Despotism.
So I called a halt, and dismounted for a moment to tighten my loose
joints, metaphorically and literally. My knees still trembled under me,
and the wraith of Caliban, panting ever in the rear, still pursed its
thick lips in my face to mock me. I felt like Pliable when he abandoned
Christian at the outset of his pilgrimage, and slank back from the first
slough to the City of Destruction. For, in the background of my heart, I
still loved and admired these simple earnest souls, eager after their
kind to right human wrong, and to attain human perfection. I saw their
comic side; but I saw also that the root of the matter was in them. They
had noble enthusiasms—all save Caliban; he was the serpent in that
ten-acred Eden. When I got under weigh again, at a good easy pace,
beneath rifts of blue through white summer cloud, I began to be aware
that my first fortnight of free life had culminated in two distinct and
acknowledged failures. I had failed to accommodate myself to the
environment at Flor and Fingelman’s; I had failed to accommodate myself
to the public opinion of the anarchists at Pinfold. Environment was
triumphing all along the line. I felt constrained to regard myself as
one of the unfittest, who do _not_ survive, and whom no man pities.
Resolving myself into Committee of Finance, I found I had been acting
with reckless extravagance. Cash in hand amounted to four and
sevenpence—of which sum, four shillings represented my week’s earnings,
and sevenpence my balance from the bounty of St. Nicholas, after
settling for two weeks’ rent in London, with sundry expenses. It
occurred to me now (too late) that I had practically been paying twice
over for lodging—once in London by cash, and once at the Community by
giving my labour in return for a mere box of a cubicle. I felt so proud
of this discovery in economics, however, that I was almost inclined to
condone the error for the sake of its detection. In other ways, also, I
was demonstrably worse off than when I started. I had worn my pretty
brown cycling suit for a week in the stiff clay fields, not to mention
the fact that I had splashed it with mud in the vicarious effort to
rectify the lines of grace in my comrades’ riding; and I had done my
tyres no good on the rough roads of Sussex. Altogether, I was forced to
confess to myself with shame that I returned to London after this
escapade not only a wiser, but a poorer woman.
To crown all, I had no longer the use of my type-writer. The thirty
pieces of silver for which I had betrayed my entire stock-in-trade, the
instrument of production, were spent and lost to me. St. Nicholas had
proved but a broken reed. I had leaned upon him, and he had pierced my
hand. Never again should I trust the hypocritical smile on the face of
that bland and benignant impostor!
I pedalled on at half-speed. Little vocalists, ignorant of the name of
Mendelssohn, carolled songs without words in the sky overhead: but my
heart was heavy.
Yet, after all, I had had my amusement, and bought my experience.
A pheasant screamed; I mistook it for Caliban. Mr. Commissioner looked
up in my face and sympathised.
It was still early afternoon; for Saturday was a half-holiday: we had
struck work at noon, and dined, before proceeding to the division of
profits. June was almost come, and the days were lengthening. I hoped to
reach London long before the hour at which the Banded Despots compel us
to light our red lamps in the public interest.
Yet I was so delighted to have flung off the yoke of anarchy that I
could have fallen on the neck of a Banded Despot, had he appeared at
that moment, were it but in the guise of a Sussex County Constable. The
country smiled: if eglantine be sweet-briar, it bordered the road; if
honeysuckle, it scented the cottage porches.
I rode on and on, glad to be free once more, though sorry to be poor,
and doubtful where I could turn for the next few days’ board and
lodging. The words of the anarchist alphabet, which I had learned from
the one British brother at Pinfold, recurred strongly to my mind—
“F is the freedom that old England brags about;
If you haven’t got a dinner—why—you’re free to go without.”
I felt sure I might soon taste that common privilege secured to all of
us by Magna Charta.
In this mood I coasted recklessly down a slight hill near Holmwood, with
my feet on the rest, and my hands too incautiously removed from the
handle-bar. Behind me lay the Weald; in front rose the trenchant rampart
of the North Downs.
At the foot of the slope was a sudden turn. As I reached the bottom my
hand gripped the brake—too late. I was aware of a Foreign Body, rushing
eagerly round the curve, with flying fair hair; next, of a considerable
impact; then, of myself on the road, sprawling, and the Foreign Body
with the fair hair wringing its hands beside me.
She was a woman, fortunately.
I raised myself with dignity. It is always a good plan, in case of
collision, to take the aggressive first. “You came round that corner
rather fast, considering how sharp it is,” I observed in a coldly
critical tone, whose effect was perhaps rather marred by the fact that
my fingers were torn and bleeding. This was sheer bluff, and I knew it.
“Oh, I beg your pardon!” she cried, clapping her hands to her ears in an
agonised little paroxysm. I saw that she was slight and fair and
evidently frightened: a wisp of a figure, a fluff of amber hair, blue
eyes like April.
“It was a nasty spill,” I went on, growing severer in proportion as I
realised that my antagonist was little inclined to defend herself (which
was a meanness on my part). “You should slow round corners. I hope you
have not hurt yourself.”
She set to cry all at once. “A little,” she answered. “Or rather, a
great deal.”
She was a timid small atomy. I began to regret my hasty sternness, the
more so as I knew I was at least as much to blame as she, for I had run
down the hill without my fingers on the brake, and had trusted to chance
at the turn of the corner. All this too, I admit, with a wheel that had
already been badly buckled.
Happily, Commissioner Lin did not take it into his head to seize her.
I tried to console her. Then I turned to my machine. Which shows that I
am a woman first and a cyclist afterwards; for I notice that your born
cyclist looks first at her wheels, and only proceeds in the second place
to enquire which of her limbs is broken.
When I saw its condition, I recognised at once that my cup was full.
All, all was lost. The front wheel was twisted out of human recognition;
the tyre was punctured; I saw seven-and-sixpence worth of repairs
staring me full in the face before I could fall back upon my base of
operations in London.
I blush to confess it; but I followed her example. Lexington faded away.
I burst into tears, outright, and sank down on the ground by my broken
cycle. I suppose the spill had shattered my nerves. Mr. Commissioner
squatted on his haunches and stared at me.
How long we might have sat there, mingling tears together, it were hard
to say—had not St. George come by, in the nick of time, sword in hand,
to rescue us.
He was not mounted as usual on his milk-white steed, but more
prosaically seated on the box of a dog-cart. Yet what matters that? A
cavalier is a cavalier, be he horseman or gigman. The knights who ride
in all their pride around the frieze of the Parthenon are only knights
in virtue of their possession of the noble quadruped platonically adored
by the Grand Vizier and his satraps. So I knew it was a St. George,
though in place of a lance he had a lancet in his instrument case. To
unimaginative eyes he was the village doctor.
He pulled up his horse by the roadside, and called out to us cheerily:
“Anything wrong? Can I be of use to you?”
“Not for me,” I broke out, fearing he would want to dress my wounds and
be paid for it; “I am not hurt at all. About this lady I do not know.
She cannoned against me, and somebody seems to have fallen.”
St. George dismounted—if one can dismount from a dog-cart—a genial
giant. He looked at my hands, which were torn and bleeding, and
ingrained with sand and dirt from the road. “Excuse me,” he said,
gravely; “this is worse than you think. You have had a nasty wrench.
And, besides, the soil contains——”
“I know all that,” I answered. “The germs of lockjaw. I have gone
through an ambulance course, and helped the trained nurse at an East-End
Settlement. Well, the germs must take their chance. Tetanus microbes
have a right to live like the rest of us, I suppose.”
My manner was perhaps defiant. He smiled, not unkindly, a boundless
Pacific of a smile: his ears alone checked it. “Ha! an anarchist?” he
enquired, glancing back in the direction whence I had come.
“Yes,” I answered. “From Pinfold.”
“Tired of it?”
“Very much so. I am on my way back to London and the Banded Despots.”
He smiled again. “You must let me dress your hand,” he said,
persuasively.
I drew back in alarm. “Oh, no!” I cried, for I had nothing to pay him
with.
“Nonsense,” he went on with kind persistence, divining my thought in the
hot flush that came over me. “This is not a professional matter. A mere
passing courtesy to a lady in distress. Let me drive you to my surgery,
and then on to Holmwood Station. You won’t be able to get those machines
mended so as to return to town to-night. I can pack them both in. And
your friend will come with you.”
There was no resisting the frank kindliness of his big genial smile. He
was broad-shouldered and large-hearted, with a face to match. I
clambered up into the dog-cart, and the fair girl sat behind. How he
annihilated space so as to pack in the bicycles as well I have no idea.
But the age of miracles is _not_ past, nor yet the age of chivalry. St.
George convinced me that both still exist. At a moment of despair, he
revived my waning belief in human nature.
At the surgery, he washed my bleeding hands tenderly, spread an
antiseptic ointment and a cool rag on top, and bound it all up with
womanly solicitude. As a faint protest, I murmured at the end: “How much
am I in your debt?” But he smiled his expansive smile, and repeated,
“Nothing, nothing!” Then he examined the fair girl, who was the exact
counterpart of Michaela in the opera, and pronounced her sound in wind
and limb, though nervously shaken. Michaela wept at learning she was not
hurt; she would have fainted, I think, if he had told her she was
injured.
When our wounds had been assuaged, he drove us down to the station. On
the way, Michaela grew gradually calm enough to communicate her
misfortunes. “I want to get to Leith Hill,” she said. “I was going there
when I was so unlucky as to upset this lady.”
(My heart pricked me, but I refrained from confessing.)
“Leith Hill!” St. George cried, with his hearty great laugh. “Why, you
are five miles out for it! You have taken the wrong road. You were
straight on the way to Horsham when I met you.”
“Oh, I was afraid of that,” Michaela exclaimed, beginning to cry again;
she had a genius for tears that might have been utilised with advantage
for purposes of irrigation. “I—I was cycling with a gentleman.”
“Indeed?” I put in coldly.
“But I—I am engaged to him.”
“Of course,” I answered. Having left anarchy and all its works nine
miles behind me, I affected to believe _no_ young lady could be
bicycling with a man _unless_ he were engaged to her.
“And we kept together as far as Dorking,” Michaela went on; “but there I
stopped to speak to some friends I met by chance in the street, and
my—my escort went round the corner to buy some cigarettes; and when I
hurried on again to catch him up, I could not discover him; and I’m
afraid I must go back alone to London.” She spoke as though London were
in the heart of Africa.
The doctor laughed. “You took quite the wrong turn,” he said. “Or
rather, you kept straight on, when you should have swerved to the right.
That unhappy young man must be seeking you now, on the summit of Leith
Hill, with many qualms of conscience.”
“Do you think so?” Michaela cried, wringing her hands once more. She was
a study in helplessness. I could feel she was rich, brought up in
cotton-wool, and for her sake I was glad of it; for I wondered what she
would do if she should ever find herself face to face with real
misfortune.
CHAPTER IX.
I PLAY CARMEN.
St. George joined tact to his chivalry. When we pulled up at the
station, he handed us both out, unloaded our iron steeds, raised his hat
with an amicable smile, and then, before we had time to thank him,
cracked a merry whip, and drove away hurriedly. My bandaged condition
forbade me even to grasp his hand; he vanished into the past, and was
once more a phantom. I never saw him again. Yet I have always been
grateful to that brief vision of a knight who saved me for one moment
from a passing dragon. If peradventure he happen to read these words,
will he accept my thanks for it?
On the platform, as Chancellor of my own Exchequer, I had time to bring
in my private budget. It showed an obvious deficit. Had I been Leader of
the Opposition, I could have risen with scorn from the front bench, and
subjected it to a scathing—nay, a crushing criticism. In plain words, I
saw that I had not money enough to pay my way back to London, to take a
dog-ticket for the Commissioner, and also to carry my bicycle with me
(zone 50, one shilling.) This collision had proved even more disastrous
to my finances than to my hands. Two courses were now open to me. I must
cloak-room my machine—with little chance of redeeming it—or else
resolve to spend the residue of my days at Holmwood.
The latter alternative being the more original of the two, naturally I
made up my mind to adopt it. I felt so poor and desolate that I looked
for the police to step in and disperse me.
“I won’t go up to town,” I said curtly to Michaela. “I will spend the
night here.” I said “the night” only, instead of “my life,” lest she
should suspect me of exaggeration.
To my vast surprise, this resolution, which I fancied of no importance
to anyone save myself, threw my companion into a tremor of anxiety.
“Then I can’t go either,” she cried, wetting her lips with fear. “If
_you_ stop, _I_ must stop with you, and telegraph up for my father.”
I stared at her in astonishment. “Why so?” I asked at last.
“Why, because—because of this _dreadful_ murder!”
“What murder?” I inquired, reverting instinctively to Léon and his lips.
She stared in turn. “You _must_ have heard of it,” she exclaimed. “It
has been in all the papers.”
I remembered that at Pinfold we had been too much absorbed by the future
of Europe and the affair of the new glass-house ever to trouble our
minds about what chanced to be happening in the mere provincial world of
London. So I assured her I knew naught of it.
She went on to explain to me that a woman had been found killed in a
first-class carriage—stabbed to the heart, and stuffed under the
seat—only three days before.
“I _dare_ not travel alone,” she said, clasping her hands and opening
her blue eyes wide. “Do _please_ come with me.”
This forced me to explain my financial position. My new friend declared
that that did not matter. Might she lend me a sovereign? A sovereign! I
gasped at the idea of such wealth. But I had further to make it clear
that my chance of repaying it was a vanishing quantity.
She listened to my explanation with open-mouthed astonishment. I think
she had never heard of such poverty before—in one of her own
sort—though to me it was commonplace. “But you _must_ let me lend it to
you,” she said, drawing out the daintiest little lizard-skin purse I
have ever seen; “or, rather, you must let me pay you for the harm I have
done to your bicycle, and the difficulty I have brought upon you. That
is only fair. I ought to settle for your ticket up to town, and for the
mending.”
I was compelled to confess. My duplicity had failed. “It was more my
fault than yours,” I faltered out. “I was reckless in my pace. You were
mounting a slight rise, with the wind against you: I was descending, and
had it in my favour. If anybody is to blame, it is I. Pray, pray,
forgive me.”
She insisted in spite of me. “I shall take two first-class tickets.”
My democratic gorge rose. “Never!” I cried firmly. “St. Nicholas
forfend! Not in my palmiest and most unregenerate days did I travel
first-class. If you consent to take two thirds, I will owe you for the
amount. You can give me your address; and whenever I am rich enough I
will repay you all. I have sufficient of my own to buy a ticket for my
dog and bicycle.” It went against the grain with me to receive this
favour from a stranger unseen till to-day; but I recognised that there
was no help for it.
She took the tickets under protest. “Such _dreadful_ people travel
third—drunken soldiers and sailors!”
“Brave defenders of our country!” I answered, remembering my father’s
profession. “It’s _Thank you, Mr. Atkins_, when the band begins to
play.”
The liquid blue eyes stared at me in blank amazement. Rudyard Kipling,
one could see, was a sealed book to her. I think she had doubts of my
perfect sanity. Perhaps you share them.
We arranged for our maimed mounts. I hold it one of the best points of a
bicycle, as compared with the noble animal, that it considerately
refrains from wringing your heart in the matter of sympathy. It has no
nerves. The train panted into the station. We explored an empty
carriage, free from the contamination of soldiers and sailors, drunk or
sober, and started off comfortably.
Michaela took the precaution to peer under the seats beforehand. I am
not sure which of the two she expected to find—a corpse or a murderer.
“This is nice,” she said at last, smiling, and recovering her spirits
for the first time since the collision. “We shall have the carriage to
ourselves all the way to Victoria. I gave the guard half-a-crown. I
_couldn’t_ travel with a man. I should be quite too frightened.”
Some devil entered into me. I am subject to devils. My new acquaintance
was so insipidly fair, so mediævally shrinking, while I am dark and
modern, that I had an irresistible impulse to play Carmen to her
Michaela. “Have you reflected,” I said drily, “that a _woman_ may have
committed that murder?”
It was heartless of me, I admit. My little companion was so timid and
shrinking. But the bolt fell flat. She clasped her hands and looked at
me. “I never thought of that!” she said. “How _dreadfully_ clever you
must be to discover it. Dreadful as well as clever! But I am _sure_ you
are not a murderess.” (She had a trick of emphasising one word in each
sentence.) “You are a _great_ deal too nice. You behaved so sweetly
about the ticket, you know, and the accident! Anyone else in your place
would have pretended it was my fault, and made me pay for the damages.”
“That was only common honesty,” I objected. “Murderers need not be
deficient in common honesty.”
“Oh, but they must be awful people!”
“Murderers are not a class,” said I. “They are you and me, acting under
pressure of powerful impulses.”
She glanced at me, more amazed than frightened. “I _know_ you would not
murder me,” she replied, less alarmed than I might have expected. “You
are so kind, though you are so queer. I feel quite safe in your hands.
With those honest eyes I am certain you would not hurt me.”
I could have crept under the seat, I felt such a brute. I took her two
small hands in my bandaged palms. “You dear little thing!” I exclaimed,
“nobody could ever hurt you!” Then seven other devils entered into me
again, worse than the first ones, and I could not help adding, “Though
if I _wanted_ to murder, this is a unique opportunity. My bleeding
hands, and the evidence about the bicycle accident would suffice to
account for any number of blood-stains. Still, to stuff you under the
seat would be bad taste and vulgar.”
She caught my eye, and laughed. “What a funny girl it is!” she cried.
“You _are_ so comical! But it isn’t the least use your trying to
frighten me. I can see the twinkle in your big black eyes; and I like
you in spite of your trying to be horrid. Do you know, I liked you from
the first moment I saw you.”
’Twas impossible not to be taken by such charming childishness. She
cooed so prettily one was forced to love her. Before we reached Victoria
we were fast friends. Michaela thought me the queerest person she had
ever met, but, oh, so nice! Her tongue was loosed. She told me a great
deal about what a dear fellow she was engaged to. She spoke of him as
Toto. She also wanted to lend me a pound. But I sternly refused. I must
work out my own salvation in fear and trembling. (This Biblical trick
descends to me, no doubt, from the Pilgrim Fathers.)
Michaela gave me her card at Clapham Junction—“Miss Allardyce” it
said—and begged me to call upon her. I was driven to explain that in
the rank of life to which I now belonged people did not call upon one
another; more particularly that the Jews of Onslow Gardens (I am
dropping into it again) had no dealings with the Soho Samaritans.
Michaela dissented from this finding: her position was that “a lady was
a lady.” I granted the truth of that identical proposition, but flatly
disallowed that all ladies had time for calling. I also pointed out that
my first consideration was bread, which brought tears again into her
tender blue eyes. We parted the best of friends. We even kissed one
another, though I am an infrequent kisser. She thanked me mightily for
my company, which made me feel small again. For I had upset her nerves,
broken her machine, and borrowed some shillings, which I scarcely dared
to hope I might have the luck to repay her.
However, I took her address, and added one small square to the mosaic
design with which I am paving my possible future residence.
CHAPTER X.
SIC ME SERVAVIT APOLLO!
Perhaps you think I have made too much of those ancestors of mine who
fought and bled at Lexington. That is always possible; if so, on further
thought, you will feel that there are excuses for me. My ancestors
bequeathed me nothing save the memory of their courage. Had I inherited
from them an estate in Middlesex, or even in Massachusetts, I might
dwell less on their valour. But since they have left me heiress of their
glory alone, ’tis natural that I should magnify the one legacy I have
received from them. To deprive me of that pittance were to leave me poor
indeed. Let me salve my indigence with the honour of the family.
And, in truth, when I got back to my rooms in Soho, I stood in need of
every ghost among my ancestral warriors. All the dragons in London
flapped wings together in that narrow lodging.
Picture my position. I had no money in hand, and no machine to work
upon. Besides, with my maimed fingers, it would be impossible for me to
type-write for three days at least. I had no prospect of food till my
wounds recovered. Even then, much must depend upon the chance of an
engagement; and for record of my “last place” what had I but my mocking
letter to This Indenture Witnesseth?
_Must_ I fall back on the aunt, with her black thread gloves and her
Zenana Missions? I glanced at Commissioner Lin; no, a bone, and freedom!
However, petty troubles are the mustard of life: they add pungency.
Besides, we are all Cinderellas with a fairy godmother. Her name is
Aide-toi-et-Dieu-t’aidera. I have never failed to find much efficacy in
Citizen Danton’s prescription. In hopeless circumstances our three best
allies are audacity, audacity, and again audacity.
I made up my mind to be audacious. I have big black eyes, as Michaela
had truly observed, so audacity comes easily to me; celestial blue is
always shrinking. I presented myself at the door of my lodgings with the
air of one who had merely gone away for a few days’ bicycling trip, and
had thousands at her banker’s. I think my jauntiness impressed the
landlady. I spoke in vague terms of “a tour in Sussex,” and of its
premature close through the accident of a collision. Item, the knees of
my knickerbockers had distinctly suffered. However, as I had paid a
fortnight’s rent before I left, out of St. Nicholas’s benefaction, and
had been away for a week and a day, besides four days more or less spent
at Flor and Fingelman’s, I was still entitled to two clear nights’
lodging. If the worst came, I might even stop on for another week
without paying. The mere fact of my return was a guarantee of
“respectability,” which, in the lodging-house acceptation, is a synonym
for probable continuous solvency.
I commanded supper with my lordliest air. My landlady was too much taken
aback to refuse me. I suggested a chop, as though chops grew wild. She
acquiesced without a murmur.
I have remarked already that I belong to a generation which has analysed
conscience away. But I am sorry to say analysis is not really one with
annihilation. Conscience resembles nature in that, when driven out with
a pitchfork, it recurs in spite of you. My enjoyment of that excellent
chump chop—grilled brown to a turn—was sadly interfered with by the
floating fear that I might never be able to pay for it. I had painful
qualms. Had my landlady been rich, I might have swallowed them with the
chop: but she was a reduced widow with one invalid daughter.
Conscience, however, though it makes cowards of us all, does not (within
my experience) produce insomnia. I slept the sleep of the just, and woke
up an Antæus, or rather an Antæa. (This remark I offer as a contribution
to the unsolved problem whether or not I have been to Girton.)
The sun was shining. The thrushes (at the bird fancier’s opposite) were
bent on justifying Browning, by singing twice over each careless
_leit-motiv_. I ordered breakfast with an undaunted face, like Leonidas
at Thermopylæ. The landlady, completely subdued, brought up coffee and
rolls as if I had been a duchess. I almost soared to an egg; as the word
hung on my lips, conscience stepped in with “Necessaries, yes; but
luxuries—that were an infamy.” I forewent the egg, though my long ride
had begotten in me a noble hunger. And I rather flatter myself that in
saying “forewent” I am enriching the language with a new preterite.
Oxford Dictionary, please copy.
Breakfast inspired me with fresh hope. There is much virtue in a
breakfast. I began to surmise that I might have misjudged St. Nicholas.
Not the bland old bishop of the National Gallery—he was a humbug, I
felt sure—but that charming young benefactor in Fra Angelico’s panel;
could he be equally untrustworthy, and with so innocent a face? I, for
one, could scarce credit it. He seemed like the masculine counterpart of
Michaela. And Michaela was too mild not to be really guileless.
At least, I would stroll round to the Strand and seek another interview
with the holy man. For the next two days it were futile to hunt for
work. Those bandaged hands must tell against me. So perforce I took
holiday.
On Monday morning I sallied forth. I wore my little black dress and hat,
in which, even to myself, I looked absurdly proper. I love trudging down
the Strand. It may sound ungrateful to confess it, after the pains that
have been taken to make London ugly for us, but I find a weird charm in
its picturesque ugliness. When I reached the window of which I was in
search, a sudden thrill ran through me. It seemed as though I had
suffered some personal loss. My patron saint had disappeared! Not a
trace of St. Nicholas!
If the embalmed body of the holy bishop had been missing from the shrine
where it lies at Bari, still exuding manna, I could not have been more
disconcerted. In my surprise and alarm I even ventured into the shop.
“The little Fra Angelico,” I cried, “in the window—what has become of
it?”
My anxious manner made the astute proprietor scent a possible purchaser.
“Put up to auction to-day,” he answered. “You must be quick if you want
it.”
“Where?”
He mentioned a firm of picture-dealers in the West-End.
I know not what possessed me—unless it were the fairy godmother—but I
hurried off to the sale-rooms. I had never attended an auction before,
yet I wedged my way to the front with the assured air of a buyer.
I was only just in time. My patron saint was in the hands of the
slave-dealer, who expatiated, after the usual fashion of slave-dealers,
on his chattel’s youth, simplicity, and beauty. He also called attention
to the innocence and charm of the three sleeping maidens. His language
was florid. I could not help wondering whether, from some calm cell in
the heavenly monastery overhead, the angelic friar looked down with a
pitying smile on this vicissitude of his handicraft. How lovingly he
laid on his cinnabar and his cobalt! He painted that picture with holy
joy for some dim niche in a Florentine nunnery; could he have foreseen
how it would be bandied about, with unsympathetic remarks as to its
drawing and colouring, in the unsanctified hands of far northern
heretics?
It was hateful to behold that lovely youth, with his long fair hair and
his delicate trunk-hose, held up for competition to the highest bidder.
The desecration sickened me. There he stood on tip-toe, his back
half-turned to us, with his three purses of gold, a rich and noble
saint, yet not wealthy enough to redeem himself from such last
dishonour! Oh, strange craft of the brush which could so give life to a
dead thing that, ages after its fashioner had mouldered into dust, my
heart still went forth to it as to a living lover! Men began to bid for
St. Nicholas. Thirty, forty, fifty, sixty guineas; seventy guineas for
the saint; slower, slower, slower.
At last the auctioneer reached a hundred. Then came a long pause. I
could not bear to think that that coarse-looking dealer with the vulgar
laugh—fat, sleek, materialised—should possess my patron. A young man
with a sweet voice (on whose forehead I seemed to see the red star of
St. Dominic) had bid up to ninety-five. How I hoped he would continue!
But he was silent at the hundred. I could no longer contain myself. The
fairy godmother at my elbow impelled me. With an effort I gasped out, “A
hundred and five!”—just to keep up the bidding.
“Going at a hundred and five! A hundred and five guineas! A genuine Fra
Angelico! This exquisite work! _So_ small a price! Does no other
gentleman offer?” He made a dramatic pause. Then down came the hammer.
“The lady has it.”
In a second it rushed over me what I had done. I gasped in my
embarrassment. A clerk drew near and murmured something inaudible about
“conditions of sale.” Through a mist of words I caught faint echoes of
“Five per cent. at once, and the balance before to-morrow.”
My face was fiery red. I had dim dreams of prison. The young man with
the sweet voice stole quietly up to me.
“Excuse me,” he said, in my ear; “one moment, before you complete this
purchase. I want that picture. _Will_ you take five guineas for your
bargain?”
“Five guineas?” I cried, aghast. “For a picture worth more than a
hundred.”
“You misunderstand me,” he corrected. “I want that work very
much—though I doubt its authenticity: I believe it to be only a
contemporary replica. However, if you cede it to me, I will pay the
money down and give you five guineas over. I did not care to go on
bidding further against the dealer; he was running up the price: but I
will buy it from _you_. Do you accept my offer?”
_Sic me servavit Apollo!_ Thus St. Nicholas saved me! I repented of my
distrust. Twice was he tried at a pinch, and twice not found wanting!
In a haze, I assented. The stranger paid me the money, which I handed
over to the clerk, less my own profit. Then I went forth into the
street, a rich woman once more, with an almost inexhaustible capital of
five guineas.
Was it St. Nicholas, I wonder, or the fairy godmother?
The question is important, from the doctrinal point of view, for it
involves the conflict between the faith and paganism.
But my own opinion is that the young man with the star of Dominic on his
brow was St. Nicholas himself, come down to earth yet another time with
a purse of five guineas for a maiden’s dower. So have I seen him more
than once descending from solid clouds, in _ex voto’s_ in Italy.
CHAPTER XI.
A SAIL ON THE HORIZON.
“This story,” you say, “is deficient in love-interest.”
My dear critic, has anybody more reason to regret that fact than its
author? I have felt it all along. Yet reflect upon the circumstances.
Ten thousand type-writer girls crowd London to-day, and ’tis precisely
in this that their life is deficient—love-interest.
Remember, I am only telling you my own poor little story; and I am but
an amateur story-teller. The professional novelist keeps in stock in her
study a large number of vats, each marked (like drinks in a
refreshment-room) with the names of their contents in gilt
letters—“Sensation,” “Character-sketches,” “Humour,” and so forth. She
turns on the taps mechanically as they are needed. But by far the
biggest vat is labelled “Love-interest.” No matter what plot the
professional novelist may invent, she lets this tap run, as soon as her
puppets are devised, and drenches the whole work with an amatory
solvent, exactly as the chemist dilutes his mixtures with distilled
water to eight ounces. I, however, who am narrating to you the actual
history of one stray girl among ten thousand in London,—what can I do
but wait for the love-interest to develop itself?
My name is Juliet; you may well believe I have had moments when I
thrilled with the expectation of a Romeo. But Romeos do not grow on
every gooseberry bush. It were unreasonable to expect that any mere man
is sufficient. You will admit, for instance, that neither the Grand
Vizier, nor Rothenburg of the watery eyes, was precisely the ideal
knight my fancy painted. St. George, to be sure, was a dear: but I
suspected him of one fatal flaw—being married.
I waited and watched for that not impossible he; and the not impossible
he still lurked unmaterialised.
When I came into my fortune (of five guineas) my first impulse was
naturally to repay Michaela (which I did at once by post-office order),
and thus to transfer that particular square of mosaic pavement from its
nether abode to some celestial mansion. My second was, to buy a bunch of
tea-roses for my lodgings: and my third, to redeem my type-writer, so as
to return to St. Nicholas, as some small mark of my gratitude, thirty
shillings from his latest benefaction.
On further thought, however, it occurred to me that thirty shillings in
the hand are worth more at a crisis than a type-writer in the bush—a
mixed metaphor which not even the printer’s reader with his officious
query shall prevail upon me to rectify. If no work came, I could live
upon capital once more. Meanwhile, the machine could be of no possible
service.
After three days, my hands were so far recovered that I began to look
about me for a situation again. I took up a daily paper and, in a column
of mixed wants, read another “Wanted” advertisement: “Lady type-writer,
with good knowledge of shorthand. Apply, Messrs. Blank and Sons,
Publishers,”—and the address followed.
I liked the idea of a publisher’s office, and I liked that
advertisement. My theory is that a type-writer girl should call herself
a type-writer girl; but that an advertiser should do her the courtesy to
speak of her as a Lady Type-writer, or something of the sort: certainly
not as a (parenthetical) female. Also, I must have literature. The
literature at my aunt’s consisted of ladies’ newspapers, Bishop Jackson
on “The Sinfulness of Little Sins,” and books about the Holy Land. Here,
I should have access to the Springs of Culture.
So I hastened to apply for the vacant post. I was not the first this
time; I met a girl on the stairs, less strong than myself, coming down
from the office with a most dejected countenance. If this were the
struggle for life, it made my heart ache (for her sake) to think I must
engage in it. However, I continued on my way, and boldly stated my
errand to the young man in attendance. That young man struck a keynote.
He was neat, well-dressed, and had a black fringe of moustache; in spite
of which advantages he was not supercilious. His voice was a
gentleman’s. He told me Mr. Blank would be disengaged in a moment;
meanwhile, would I take a seat? I sank into one and waited.
The office was quite unlike Messrs. Flor and Fingelman’s. The anteroom
where I sat was exquisitely clean, and neatly fitted up with polished
shelves and wood-work. An air of quiet culture pervaded the whole; it
seemed to communicate itself even to the clerks. In the pigeon-holes
round the room stood rows of books in glazed paper covers, looking as
spotless and as tidy as if a woman had arranged them. Well-known names
adorned their backs. As for dust, it was not.
In a few minutes came the word, “Mr. Blank will see you.”
I followed my guide, expecting to be ushered into a rather bare room
with a venerable gentleman seated at a table; I pictured him, in fact,
as the exact original of the hale old grey-beard who testifies in the
omnibuses to the merits of Eno’s Fruit Salt. For the firm is one of the
most dignified in London. Instead of that, I found myself in a neat
study,—too cosy for an office, too severe for a boudoir. It had
curtains of silken Samarcand, and fittings of cedared Lebanon. It had
also a tawny Oriental carpet, and an old oak desk, at which sat a young
man of modest and statuesque countenance. I guessed his age at
twenty-seven. He rose undecided as I entered, like one whom native
politeness impels to an act which he half fears is ill-suited to the
occasion. As he turned towards me, I saw a face of notable strength and
culture; a finely-modelled nose, firm, yet soft in outline; acute brown
eyes, piercing, but gentle; abundant dark eyebrows that hung slightly
over them and gave a masterful air to their keenness and penetration.
His hair was black and shaggy, like a retriever’s. He was tall, but
well-knit. His eyes met mine as he gave a little inclination. A thrill
ran through me. I knew him as by instinct. I said to myself, “A Romeo!”
I suppose I was the only person in London at the time who did not know
that the head of the firm had lately died, and been succeeded by his
son, an Eton boy and Oxford man, who had taken high honours.
Romeo waved me to a chair. “You have come, I think,” he said, in a rich,
clear voice, pausing for a minute out of instinctive courtesy before he
seated himself, “in answer to our advertisement.”
“Yes,” I replied; “I understand you want a type-writer girl.”
His eyebrows moved up at the words. I could see they produced a
favourable impression. He was accustomed to the formula “a lady to
type-write for you.”
“Exactly,” he answered, folding his hands, and trying to assume the
official tone of a man of business; though I was aware that he was
unobtrusively observing my dress and appearance, not as Ahasuerus had
done, like a cross between an Oriental monarch and a horse-dealer, but
like a gentleman of keen insight, accustomed to take things in at a
glance without disconcerting the object of his scrutiny.
He put me a few stereotyped questions as to speed and qualifications,
which I was fortunately able to answer to his satisfaction. Then he went
on in a deprecatory way, “I must ask you, I am afraid, to write a little
to my dictation, and then transcribe what you have written. Excuse this
detail. One must test your ability.”
“Of course,” I assented, producing my stylograph.
“We have had applicants already who did not suit my requirements. One
left as you arrived. I—I was sorry not to be able to engage her; for I
judged her to be in want; but—she was quite incompetent.” He spoke
apologetically.
“I met her on the stairs,” I replied. “She appeared to be downcast.”
He gave me a hurried glance, for there was pity in my tone. “It is _so_
unfortunate,” he said, “that one must insist on competence! For often
the incompetent most need employment.”
“There is a beautiful story,” I answered, “about Robert Owen, when
somebody patted the head of a very pretty child at his school at Harmony
Hall. ‘You are like all the rest,’ said Owen; ‘you pat the prettiest.
But it is the ugly ones that need encouragement.’ That was true
philanthropy.”
He looked me through and through. I took out my note-book, and assumed a
business-like air. He reached down a volume of some History of Greece,
and began dictating rapidly. The passage, chosen of set purpose, was
full of Greek names, and rather recondite words of technical import. I
saw he had selected it as a test of knowledge as well as of speed. I was
glad I had been at——But that would be confessing. I wrote rapidly and
well—more rapidly, I think, than I had ever before done; and I knew
why: he was a Romeo.
“Do I go too fast?” he asked at last, looking up at me suddenly with a
gentle smile.
“Not at all,” I replied. “You might try a little faster, if you like, as
you really wish to test me.”
“And you know the names?” he inquired with an incredulous accent.
“Perfectly. Please go on; ‘the hegemony of Thebes’ was the last clause
you dictated.”
He continued to the end. “Bœotia thus lost the flower of her hoplites,”
were the words with which he finished.
I wrote it all out in long-hand, very clearly and distinctly. He ran his
eye over it. “But this is excellent!” he said at last, glancing at it
close. “You have all the words right. You must have studied Greek,
haven’t you?”
I temporised. “A little.”
He paused again. Then, after a few questions to draw me out, especially
as to attainments, he began rather timidly. “This is precisely what I
want. I require a lady of education, who can take down instructions and
write letters to authors on the subject-matter of their works, without
need for correction. But—I’m afraid the post would hardly suit you. If
you will excuse my saying so, you are too good for the place. I do not
mean as to salary—that, no doubt, I could arrange . . . in accordance
. . . with qualifications.” He glanced quickly at my black dress again.
“But I fear—I fear you will find the work beneath you.”
“You can set your mind entirely at rest on that score,” I answered
frankly. “I will tell you the plain truth—I am in need of a situation,
and shall be glad to get one.”
He hesitated once more. “Still, I feel doubts of conscience,” he went
on. “I will be quite open with you. You may think me quixotic, but I
have ideas of my own—social ideas—some people might even say
socialistic. Here is this work, which I have it in my hands to bestow;
which I hold as a trust, almost. It would suffice to keep some poor
lady’s wants supplied—some lady who is in need of actual necessaries.
Now, I do not think it right that young gentlewomen who have all they
need already found them at home should compete in the market against
poor girls in search of a bare subsistence. They ought not to deprive
such girls of bread in order to add to their own pin-money. This
movement for ‘doing something’ on the part of well-to-do women is
pressing hard on the girls of the lower middle-class. Pardon my putting
it so; but you come from a home, no doubt, where you have all you
require; and you seek this work just to increase your income.”
I thought it was sweet of him. I could see I was exactly the person he
wanted; yet for a matter of principle he was prepared to take someone
possibly less suited to his special requirements. I was glad that I
could answer with the ring of truth, “There, you are quite mistaken. I
am one of the class whom you desire to employ—in fact, a girl in search
of a bare subsistence. I do not say so in order to appeal to your
generosity; I only wish to obtain work on my merits for what my services
are worth in the open market. But if, as you say, I prove a suitable
person for your purpose in other respects, you need have no scruple on
the grounds you suggest about employing me. I have nothing to live upon
save what I can earn by type-writing.”
He blushed like a girl of eighteen. He was distressed that he had driven
me into making this avowal. “Oh, forgive me,” he said, rising again from
his chair. “I—it was awkward of me to put it thus bluntly. But you are
so evidently a lady of education that I took it for granted—you will
understand my natural error. I only hesitated to give a post which might
be filled by a person in need of employment to an amateur who wanted
occupation and pocket-money.”
“I quite understand,” I answered. “Out bicycling last week, I passed a
common where shaggy donkeys, with unkempt coats, stood in the sunshine
dejected, hanging their heads as if they had been reading Schopenhauer.”
(He looked up suddenly at the name with an inquiring glance.) “But their
mood was justified; for geese were tugging at the short grass hard by,
nibbling it close to the root; and I felt the four-footed beasts might
well be melancholy at the struggle for life when birds, winged creatures
that may career over the world, took to competing with them by grazing
like cattle, and snatched the bread out of the donkey’s mouth.”
His face wore an amused smile. “But you are learned,” he put in. “You
might obviously be engaged in so much higher work—a teacher’s, for
instance.”
“I should hate teaching!” I cried vehemently. “I prefer freedom. I am
prepared for the drudgery of earning my livelihood in a house of
business. But I must realise myself.”
“I understand that,” he answered; “and—and sympathise with it. Well, I
apologise for my mistake. Under the circumstances, we need only proceed
to arrange the business part of this transaction.”
He named a weekly sum. It was my turn to blush. “That is too much,” I
exclaimed. I could see he was fixing it, not by the market price, but by
what he thought a sufficient income for a person of my presumed position
in society. It was all so alien from Ahasuerus’s way of hiring a
Shorthand and Type-writer (female).
“Not for so competent an assistant,” he answered, still nervous.
Awkward as it might be to begin one’s relations with a new employer by
an apparent contest of generosity, yet I could not accept the sum he
proposed. I told him so in plain words; he insisted: I beat him down.
After a brief but well-contested skirmish, I camped on the field as
victor, though we compromised for a wage a little less than half-way
between what he wished to give and what I was prepared to accept. It did
not escape me at the time, however, that such a first step almost of
necessity entailed a certain sentimental tinge in our relations: they
would scarce be those of employer and employed, as regulated by custom
and political economy.
When all protocols were settled he went on, “Can you come in at once?”
“To-day, if you wish it.”
“Oh, that would be such a convenience to me! I have matters to settle
which I do not wish to hand over just now to my clerks; it was my desire
that you should act as confidential letter-writer in my dealings with
authors, quite outside the business.”
“I will begin this afternoon,” I said.
“Our type-writing machine—the one I intended for you—is——” I forget
precisely which make he mentioned, but it was one to whose keyboard I
was unaccustomed. “Can you work with it?”
“No,” I answered. “But I have my own. I will bring it.”
“How kind of you! Though you must not continue to use it, of course. We
have no right to impose upon you the wear and tear. If you will tell me
which sort you prefer, it shall be here to-morrow. Meanwhile, for
to-day, if you would bring round your own, I should be greatly obliged
to you.”
“I will go and fetch it,” I said, remembering that it lay close by in
St. Nicholas’s safe keeping.
“How? In a cab?”
I smiled. His politeness positively embarrassed me. “No; in my hands,” I
replied. “I am accustomed to carry it.”
“But type-writers are so heavy,” he remonstrated. (I felt his anxiety to
treat me like a lady was leading to complications, and I half regretted
the Grand Vizier’s lofty sense of masculine superiority.) “Had you not
better take a cab?”
“No,” I answered with firmness; for I felt I must put a stop to this
strain at the outset. An employer should know his place. “I can carry it
easily, thank you.”
He looked at me with a curious look. I suppose I have the average
endowment of feminine intuition; and I felt sure he was debating in his
own mind whether or not he should tell me to call a hansom and charge it
to the office. It was my own old duologue of Inclination and Duty.
Inclination said, “Make her take it”; Duty interposed, “You must begin
as you mean to go on. This is an office matter. If she cannot work your
machine, and wishes to bring her own, she must convey it at her own
expense. You have no ground to stand upon.”
After a pause in which, as I could see, either impulse got the upper
hand alternately, he compromised the matter. “Is it far?” he enquired.
“Close by. I can fetch it in five minutes.”
“Then one of my clerks will step round with you and carry it for you.”
I blushed bright crimson. I had imagined shyness to be (like
“sensibility,” hysterics, and fainting) an obsolete disease of the early
Victorian epoch. I now knew that it survived into our own time. I could
feel the hot blood flooding my ears and cheeks, and running down my
neck. What on earth could I answer? How let the clerk see where I had
left my machine? How confess to Romeo to whose keeping I had confided
it? He could never understand that, to a girl of my temperament, those
golden balls were but the mystic symbol of the saint of Myra. I knew not
what to answer. I stood still and blushed; and my blush it was that
betrayed, yet saved me.
Lifting my eyes one second in a mute appeal, I saw right into his soul
as he stood there, facing me, more nervous, more embarrassed than ever.
I saw he divined that I lived in some poor quarter, or had a drunken
mother, or something equally discreditable, and was ashamed to let his
clerk know it. But he withdrew, like a gentleman that he was to the
finger-ends. “How stupid of me!” he went on. “I see, of course, it would
be unpleasant for you to walk down the street with one of my
clerks—though they are nice young men, all of them. Excuse my
_gaucherie_. But—you are coming in at once to oblige me; I ought to
have arranged to have a machine here to suit you. Won’t you please take
a cab, and allow me to—to charge it to the office?”
He had got it out at last. I changed colour once more. To hide my
shyness—for to my vast surprise, I was speechlessly shy by this time—I
pulled out my handkerchief. As fate would have it—fate that mocks at
human souls—I drew with it from my pocket a little square of blue paper
which fell, face downward, on the floor. How can I confess the truth? It
was—the counterfoil or ticket I had received for my machine from the
representative of St. Nicholas.
CHAPTER XII.
A CAVALIER MAKES ADVANCES.
I grieve to hint a doubt of my chosen patron, but enlarged experience of
St. Nicholas has led me to believe that he lacks consistency. His action
is jerky. Though he will often sweep down, as of old, in a pale haze of
glory, to rescue some votary from instant shipwreck, he is hardly a
saint in whom a girl can repose implicit confidence. At tight places of
social trial he is apt to fail one.
I had but one consolation. The ticket had fallen on the floor face
downward.
I stooped to pick it up. My cheeks, I feel sure, must have glowed with
crimson. Shame tingled in my ears. But Romeo was beforehand with me. He
raised the scrap of paper and handed it to me, still face downward, with
a faint inclination. I lifted my lowered eyelids. My swimming eyes
parleyed with his for a second. I cannot say whether he was aware what
manner of thing he was passing me; but I fancy he _did_ know. Yet if he
knew I felt sure he interpreted the episode aright, for his glance was
one of mute respect and sympathy.
I crushed the unspeakable pasteboard into my pocket, never uttering a
word, and rushed, hot and red, from the room, without daring to speak to
him.
On the stairs I debated whether I could ever come back. Prudence and
Shame fought it out between them. Prudence won. I determined to go on as
if nought untoward had happened.
I might have failed, even so, in my resolution, had it not chanced that
my road to the Depository of my machine lay past the eating-house where
I was wont to retire for bodily refreshment from Flor and Fingelman’s.
As I reached the door a hand touched my arm. I looked round, startled,
and saw the Grand Vizier, outward bound from luncheon, with his hairy
hands, his goggle eyes, his shiny black coat grown green on the seams,
and his false diamond pin shaped like a shoe of the noble animal.
“Good-morning, miss,” he said in a pert tone.
I echoed his salute, and made as though I would pass on hurriedly. But I
noted in his accent, even from the three words he had spoken, a change
of mien; he was almost what for him might be deemed respectful.
“Look here,” he went on, striding after me, and keeping abreast of me
against my will. “That was a devilish clever letter of yours—to the
governor, you know—a _devilish_ clever letter!”
“I am proud to have earned the approbation of so competent a critic,” I
answered in my chilliest voice. “Praise from Sir Hubert Stanley——”
He glanced at me with suspicion. I think his first and most flattered
idea was that I mistook him for a distinguished baronet; his second,
neutral in tint, that I was mad; his third, and most reluctant, that I
was poking sly fun at him.
“Look here,” he began again—it was his formula for introducing a fresh
paragraph in his converse—“I’ve got an invitation for you. I’ve been
looking about for you everywhere. Will you come with me on Thursday
night, dress circle, at the Olympic?”
He rolled it out impressively, as one who felt sure that the solemnity
of the dress circle would subdue my stubborn neck.
“No, thanks,” I answered; “I never go to theatres with casual
acquaintances.”
Then I walked on still faster, for I foresaw that I must often meet him
in future, since our offices lay close together; and I judged it best to
let him see at once I did not crave the honour of his society.
“Oh, but this is on the square,” he went on. “You don’t understand. You
think I don’t mean right by you because I am a gentleman in a position
of Trust and Responsibility, and you are”—he was about to say “a
type-writer girl,” but he checked himself in time and substituted for it
the phrase “a lady stenographer.” “While you were at the office,” he
went on, “I couldn’t treat you on equal terms, of course, because of my
official position. But when I read that letter I saw at one glance you
had brains; and I like a girl with brains, and I mean to walk out with
one.”
“Indeed?” I answered. “Then I advise you not to waste your valuable time
on a woman who does not pant for that privilege.”
He let his mouth drop open. “But it’s a ticket for two,” he
expostulated, “given me by a friend of mine who takes a part in the
piece. You’d better think twice. It isn’t every day one gets a chance of
a seat in the dress circle. And if I go at all I like to take a young
lady.”
This marked advance. I had gone up in the world. At Southampton Row I
had been “a young person.”
He continued to talk, and I continued to turn my coldest shoulder.
At last we reached the door of the Depository. The goggle eyes ogled me.
I saw that some violent act was needful if I were to escape persecution
at the man’s hands in future. I paused by the step. “I am going in
here,” I said, bravely.
The Vizier did not observe the peculiar character of the shop as a
shrine of St. Nicholas. “I will wait for you,” he answered, waving one
hairy hand with cheerful promptitude.
I braced myself up for a deadly thrust. “I have left my machine here,” I
went on in a cold clear voice, “and I am going in . . . to redeem it. I
shall then carry it home. A Gentleman in a position of Trust and
Responsibility will not like to be seen by my side as I carry it.”
He glanced up at the mystic sign—one glance, no more. I saw his face
grow pale. To so respectable a man such conduct was inexplicable. Refuse
a ticket for the dress circle, and yet——
I darted in, with the same fierce flush of shame and repugnance as
before. But this time the need for getting rid of him had given me false
courage.
When I emerged with the machine, a limp flaccid creature, half-dead with
disgust, the Grand Vizier had melted away, disappeared among the
phantoms. So again Apollo or St. Nicholas had saved me.
Our courses crossed afterwards in the street many times. But his
tolerance of type-writer girls had its proper limits. He tacked across
to the other side as I hove in sight lest he should be exposed to the
risk of having to acknowledge a salute from so compromising a person.
I will say for St. Nicholas that though he has curious methods of
bringing about the deliverance of those who trust him, he is a gentleman
at heart, and he usually succeeds in the end in giving effect to his
benevolent intentions.
CHAPTER XIII.
CONCERNING ROMEO.
It is a far cry from Verona to London. The ways of the Corso are not the
ways of Pall Mall. Therefore, when I admit that my heart cried “A
Romeo!” you are not to infer that I had fallen in love with him. I
merely mean that I recognised in my new friend the type of man who might
conceivably command my heart and me, should fate so will it.
When Romeo of Verona first saw his Juliet at the Capulets’ masque, ’tis
on record that, at first sight of her, he forgot fair Rosaline (for
whose sake but one hour earlier he was dying to die), and seizing his
new goddess’s hand, assured her, without preamble or introduction, that
his lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stood to smooth that rough touch
with a tender kiss; while Juliet, in return, was prepared to avow at a
glance that if the stranger were married her grave was like to be her
wedding bed. Those be the modes of Verona, as vouched by Shakespeare.
Our northern hearts, however, have not the instant electric
responsiveness of Italian breasts. Love with us is the child, not the
mother of acquaintance. And though I thought of my Romeo as Romeo from
the first moment I beheld him, never calling him in my soul by any other
name, yet ’twas but some prophetic fancy on my part. For many weeks he
figured as no more than my employer.
Juliet of Verona, if I recollect aright, when she flung herself upon
Romeo, was not yet full fourteen till Lammas night; at her age our
northern maid, with her fair hair down, has conceived a romantic
attachment for chocolate-creams and the prettiest of her governesses. I
was twenty-two; and twenty-two, that mature age, takes time to consider.
Moreover, it waits till its Romeo asks it.
For, pretend as we will, the plain truth is this: woman is plastic till
the predestined man appears; then she takes the mould he chooses to
impose upon her. Men make their own lives, women’s are made for them.
Why, one of my dearest friends at the Guild—an ethereal being—was wont
to pace the garden with a vellum-covered Rossetti or Pater in her
pocket, composing chants-royal to the moon and to divine love, till a
man loomed on the horizon—a man in a Norfolk jacket, with a commission
in the Guards and estates in the Midlands; whereupon she exchanged the
Rossetti all at once for a blear-eyed ferret, and strolled about the
lanes accompanied by a fox-terrier and a Cuban bloodhound. This is not
poetical, but ’tis life as I have noted it.
To cut moralising short, I settled down at once to work at my Romeo’s.
When I arrived there with my machine, more dead than alive with shame,
the good-looking clerk carried it upstairs for me reverently. He was a
comely youth, with a clean round face, Devonshire apple cheeks, and
pleasant parsonage manners; he came, indeed, as I discovered later, from
an Exmoor rectory. A table was set for me in Romeo’s own room. I feared
to invade that sanctum. “Am I to sit right here?” I asked. He smiled and
answered, “Right there.” So I took my place under protest. Thenceforth,
I was part of the furniture of his study.
My life at Romeo’s was a life of routine. Now routine (varied by
outbreaks) is excellent for the nerves; but it does not afford material
for romance. It is the drab of life: art insists rather on the purple
and scarlet. So I make no apology for dealing with it here only in a few
brief episodes.
All our history is episode, with blanks between, which just serve
conveniently to divide the chapters.
At home, my social circle was limited to Mr. Commissioner Lin: my
conversation to “Did ’ums, then? did ’ums?” At occasional intervals I
dined with my aunt, who abode at Paddington: but I did not yearn to make
that joy too common. My revered relation has all the vices of the
decayed gentlewoman: unheroic vices, which interest nobody. She hoards
bits of string, and half-sheets of note-paper. Her table, her ideas, and
her discourse are meagre. She entertains angels, disguised as curates,
and is a prop of the Deaconesses’ Institute.
At the office, I had my seat in Romeo’s own room. Poverty emancipates.
It often occurred to me how different things would have been had my dear
father lived, and had I remained a young lady. In that case, I could
have seen Romeo at intervals only, under shelter of a chaperon; as it
was, no one hinted the faintest impropriety in the fact that the
type-writer girl was left alone with him half the day in the privacy of
his study. Not that this freedom gave me much occasion (at first) for
talk with Romeo. He was courtesy itself, and by nature conversible: but
his chivalrous feelings, and his sense of my isolation, made him chary
of speaking. He dictated all day, or left me to transcribe; but he
seldom broke silence save on matters of business.
Nevertheless, from the outset, he was markedly kind to me. I had two
nice boys at hand to run errands and carry my notes; one, a skimpy
London imp, compact of saucy humour; I called him Puck: the other, a
slender lad of fifteen, pale, delicate, girlishly pretty, with long
straw-coloured hair and a distracted manner, whom I rechristened Ariel.
Romeo gradually adopted this trick of speech from me. It is a habit of
mine (as you may have observed) to invent names for my friends; and
these generally stick—I suppose because I borrow them as a rule from
the poets, who have classified us into types which recur perennially.
After I had been at the office a few weeks, I happened one day to slip
into some Americanism. Though I have seen little of America (having gone
there but once on a visit to my father’s folk at Salem when I was not
quite fifteen) I have inherited from my ancestry not a few Massachusetts
idioms, one or other of which I sometimes let drop, unconsciously to
myself, in the course of conversation. Romeo snapped at the word at
once. “Why, you must be a New Englander!”
“Not quite,” I answered, flushing. “My father was born at Salem, an
American citizen; but he became naturalised in England young, and was a
British officer.”
“Not in the army?” Romeo cried, surprised.
“Yes,” I answered. “Why not? A colonel.”
I grew hot as I spoke. For the first and only time, I think Romeo
doubted me. “Then you—must have—a pension,” he broke out, slowly.
It was partly desire to avoid telling the truth, partly a certain native
love of mystification—or rather of piquing other people’s curiosity;
but I answered with a touch of defiance, “An officer’s daughter loses
her pension on marriage. I may be married, perhaps—or separated—or a
widow.” And I bent down over my work to hide my heightened colour.
He gazed at me for a second; his eye fell on my left hand; then he
glanced away. I could see him saying to himself he had no right to
cross-question me. But interest in me prevailed. He drew near, and stood
over me. “You must forgive my persistence,” he said, gently, in his
modulated voice—each syllable clear as crystal—“but I feel constrained
to ask you. Have you really a pension? . . . . For if so, you have
misled me.”
I looked up at him with proud eyes. My father’s blood rose hot in me. “I
must tell you the truth,” I said, “or you will think I am ashamed of my
father. I am not ashamed; I am proud of him. He was an English colonel;
but I have no pension. He was a very brave man. He threw up his
commission, in time of war, at a moment of danger, almost in face of the
enemy, because he would not carry out orders which seemed to him unjust.
And he died of anxiety and fever just after, on the West Coast of
Africa.”
“I remember the case. Pray forgive me. It was cruel of me to drive you.”
“Not at all. I am glad you did. Now you will understand better.”
I rose, flushed, and faced him. “They say a soldier should resign his
conscience into the keeping of the Queen’s advisers. My father could
not. He felt wrong was being done. He would not make his judgment blind.
He left me poor by it; and I am proud of it—proud of him.”
“You have reason to be proud,” Romeo answered. “I recall it all now. His
previous record showed it was courage, not cowardice. I honoured him for
it at the time—though the world thought otherwise.”
“Thank you,” I said in a low voice. “May I go now? It is nearly five.
And I feel, after this, I can do no more work this evening.”
He opened the door for me and bowed even more respectfully than usual.
There was sympathy in every movement. I felt he understood. I felt I had
made a friend. I felt, still more surely than before, that _this_ was my
Romeo.
CHAPTER XIV.
“NOW BARABBAS WAS A PUBLISHER.”
I regret to say that from that day forth Romeo was more marked in his
courtesy to me than ever. His manner had always a tinge of sweet antique
courtliness; but now he surpassed himself. I regret it, I say, because I
was afraid I recognised in this courtesy some lingering undercurrent of
class feeling. The dear fellow would have been polite to a type-writer
girl from the dregs of the people, no doubt—he did not know how to be
less than polite to anyone; but he was politer still when he understood
that I was an officer’s daughter, and (as he learned a week later) that
my mother had sprung from a great Anglo-Indian family. This was treason
to his principles; for Romeo, as he had said, was more than half a
socialist; but I condoned that fault for the sake of his unvarying
kindness.
Besides, I think he thought well of me because I was loyal to my
father’s memory. As though anyone who had known my dear father could
have been otherwise!
Romeo published for Sidney Trevelyan. From the moment when I first
noticed “An Heir of the Plantagenets” among the rows of books in glazed
paper covers in the pigeon-holes, I had always longed to be present some
day when the famous novelist came in to discuss royalties or _éditions
de luxe_ with his publisher. Sidney Trevelyan’s name was like Charing
Cross or Hyde Park Corner—a familiar piece of public property. One
afternoon I had my will. I was seated at my table, clicking away at some
letters, when I heard on the stairs a rich strident voice, diffusing
itself very loud in clear shrill accents. I know not which struck me
most, its richness or its stridency. It was a sonorous voice, which one
turn of a note would have made unendurable. “He is in his lair?” it
said, filling the room. “Plotting schemes to suck my blood? Then I will
track him to his earth—the young vampire. My dear Barabbas, how are
you?”
He burst into the sanctum, a whirlwind of a man—large, loose-limbed,
masterful, with a restless grey eye, and a huge mop of brown hair, shot
with threads of russet. Romeo rose to greet him. He flung himself into a
chair. It creaked beneath his elephantine weight. I left off clicking at
once, and went on with a piece of long-hand transcription. Or rather, to
be frank, I feigned to transcribe, though my pen was inkless.
As a rule, when authors came, ’twas my place to leave the study for
awhile, and take refuge with Puck and Ariel in the anteroom. But as the
great man entered—two yards of humanity, double width—Romeo signed to
me to remain, with a quick movement of the eyebrow. He knew my wish, and
was kind enough to remember it. I counted it to him for righteousness.
Sidney Trevelyan sniffed, and scanned the room, with its Oriental
hangings, and its scent of cedar-wood. “A nice den, Barabbas, a nice
den!” he observed, in a condescending tone; “an Ali Baba’s cave, rich
with bones of authors; vastly improved since the days of the old
robber!”
Romeo winced. Like myself, he respected his father.
“You have garnished it afresh,” the great novelist continued, “from the
spoils of the Egyptians. You have decked yourself in purple and fine
linen! Well, ’tis well you should be comfortable in this world, no
doubt: for in the next——But I refrain from painting a Tartarean
picture. Dante has done it so well before me that, like the grocer in my
street, he defies competition. I see you, my dear Barabbas,” he raised
his voice still louder, almost lapsing into a falsetto, “I see you
lolling here in Eastern opulence, bathed in Cyprian perfumes, and fanned
by obsequious Circassian odalisques”—I _felt_ him glance my way, though
my eyes were fixed on my paper; “I see you, like the sultan in Shelley’s
_Hellas_, surrounded by large-eyed houris, of voluptuous bosoms, who
strew your restless pillow with opiate flowers—I call your pillow
restless, my dear fellow, partly because that was Shelley’s epithet, if
memory serves me, but partly also because a publisher (especially a
young one) can scarcely expect to enjoy sound slumber; later on, no
doubt, as he becomes hardened in crime, he sleeps as well as a digestion
impaired by old port permits; but at first, remorse must disturb his
fitful rest—I see you, I say, with opiate flowers on your couch
stripped—what was the rhyme?—ah, yes, ‘flowers,’ ‘pillow’—stripped
from orient bowers by the Indian billow. That is the picture—_here_.
But at last comes the awakening.” He struck a dramatic attitude, and
held up one hand; he had impressive fat hands, which seemed always in
evidence. “You start from your sleep like Mahmood. ‘Man the
seraglio—guard! Make fast the gate!’ You dream yourself still lapped in
Eastern magnificence. Then . . . . ha! what’s this? An odour of
brimstone—a pallid whiff of blue flame—Mephistopheles smiling grimly
on the victim he has landed—you know where you are—unlike the current
hero of music-hall romance—you stretch dim hands of fear and grope—you
sink down, down, down, on a couch of liquid fire. ‘All is lost! Why was
I ever a publisher?’ In which of his circles did Dante place publishers?
Was it not close between the avaricious and the prevaricators? But aloft
in the empyrean, pillowed on purple cloud, meanwhile, I enjoy that
delight upon which Tertullian insisted as a prime element in the ecstasy
of the Blest—the delight of beholding you——But your satellites
overhear me! Sense of discipline forbids! Barabbas,” he waved his hand,
“I draw a veil over your future condition!”
He paused for want of breath. Most fat men are sluggish: this mountain
of flesh was alive and volcanic in every atom. Romeo began in his soft
voice, “And on what particular conspiracy of crime have you come to-day
to consult the habitual criminal?”
Sidney Trevelyan smiled. He liked to be taken in his mood. “Well, my
business,” he said, “is, as you anticipate, a fresh raid against the
purses of the Philistines. We must spoil them, my dear Barabbas; we must
spoil them, in unison. Here, our interests are identical. They have
taken two thousand, I see, of the three-volume ‘Mahatmas.’ That’s not
enough; you must issue at once a six-shilling edition. Grovelling
beasts, prone in the mud they love, what do they mean by rejecting this
so great salvation? Let Mudies see to it! I shall answer their neglect
by flinging back ‘Mahatmas’ in their teeth for six shillings. I know
whence it comes, this rebuff: those ignorant parrots, the critics. They
toss at me ever their parrot cry of ‘Artificial, artificial!’ Their own
thoughts grub and grunt in the mud of their sty, and they blame it to
the eagle that he should circle about gleaming icy peaks in clear ether.
‘Unnatural,’ they say; ‘Overloaded.’ That man Snigg, or Snagg, or
Snogg—something Teutonic and unlovely—I decline to remember his
honoured name—he reviewed me in the _Parthenon_. He has no wings
himself, and therefore he thinks flight an indecent gambolling. But what
do I care for the whole crew? Not an obolus, not a doit—neither for
Snagg nor Bagg, neither for Archer nor Parcher.”
He paused again to catch breath. In the lull, Romeo put in quietly, “It
is too soon, in my opinion, for a cheap edition.”
“No, Barabbas, it is not; it is the psychological moment. The world
awaits it with hushed breath. Six shillings—bound in cloth—Irish
linen—dark green—a subtle shade—a shade I have in my mind’s eye—like
lavender leaves in spring, when the sap mounts emerald through sea-hoary
stems. You catch my idea? A green not wholly green, not altogether blue,
not grey, not glaucous, but something of all, and more than all; with a
cunning design by that mad young Belgian—withy-bands that twist into
interlacing dragons; the title in their midst, in somewhat Celtic
letters.”
He broke off abruptly. Once more I could feel him glance my way. I
seemed to see through the back of my head. I was sensitive to his
movements.
Suddenly, he burst out in a quite different voice, snorting like a
war-horse: “Send that young woman away!” he cried, executing a sort of
ponderous rhinoceros-dance before me. “Send her away! I tell you I can’t
stand her. I won’t have her scribbling there and making notes of all I
say. She’s a paragraphist—a paragraphist: the vilest spawn on God’s
earth, a paragraphist! What do you mean by setting spavined shorthand
writers to report my _obiter dicta_?” He advanced towards me, striding:
I had risen hurriedly. “Go off!” he cried, waving his hands at me as if
I were a gadfly. “Go off! I won’t be listened to and paragraphed. I
could feel you paragraphing me. Away, young woman: away with you.” And
by dint of sheer bulk, he drove me before him.
Romeo opened the door for me. He spoke with deference. “I think, Miss
Appleton,” he said, “you had better take a seat in the anteroom for the
moment, as your presence here seems to disturb Mr. Trevelyan.”
I went out, mystified. As the door closed behind me, I heard the great
man snort again. “Now, really, Barabbas, if you choose to keep dusky
Samian slaves chained in your lair for your hours of leisure, you should
have the decency to unchain them when fellow-conspirators come in with
proposals for a joint campaign against Askelon.”
I sat in the anteroom for half an hour. Ariel gazed in my face with
sympathetic inquiry. “The old bear was rude?” he asked at last, in a low
voice.
“I might almost call him so.”
“It is his way,” Ariel replied. “He seems to wipe his shoes on one.”
“But he’s not a bad old chap, either,” Puck put in. “He chucked me
half-a-crown once for going a message for him.”
“And called you a Tartar-nosed imp,” Ariel added; “and hit you in the
eye with it.”
“He is a very great genius,” I observed, sententiously, half to salve my
own offended dignity.
“But a genius is a man,” Ariel remarked. And I felt he had reason.
Twenty minutes later, the famous writer emerged. He cast a scowl at me
in passing. “Change your type-writer woman!” he said curtly to Romeo.
“Good-bye, my dear Barabbas. Rob on, rob ever.” His broad back vanished
down the staircase like a sinking hippopotamus.
“Well?” Romeo asked, with an anxious face, as I returned to my post when
the tornado had passed. “Now you have seen him, what do you think of
Sidney Trevelyan?”
“I think,” I said, “I would rather be a Barabbas than a Byron.”
CHAPTER XV.
FRESH LIGHT ON ROMEO.
“Sidney Trevelyan is a great man,” Romeo said to me later; “but his
ideas are _too_ great—especially his idea of his own greatness. This
taints life for him: he moves in an atmosphere of social suspicion. ’Tis
his fixed belief that all the world is always thinking of him, when it
is really doing as he does—thinking of itself. He imagines reporters as
a sultan imagines poison, or as a tsar imagines nihilists; he scents a
paragraphist in every hedge, and a critic in every stranger.” Which
explains, I suppose, his odd behaviour.
But my own opinion is that he needed an audience; I could catch it in
his voice that he meant me to overhear; because I affected to be
absorbed in my work he thought I was not listening, and that made him
angry.
Romeo was kindness itself to me; yet I dare say I might never have grown
to know him better had it not been for the special providence of an
accident—or the accident of a special providence; put it whichever way
best suits your philosophy.
Straying one afternoon through the Cretan labyrinth of Soho, I happened
to note a young girl, very poorly dressed, but with the air of a lady,
staring in at a confectioner’s. Her face struck a chord. I ransacked my
memory for it in vain. Then I recalled in a flash where I had met her
before; she was the girl whom I had passed on the stairs at Romeo’s on
the day when I went to apply for the situation; the girl whom I had
supplanted in the struggle for existence.
Her shrinking figure, her whipped air, made me turn to ask an inevitable
question: “Have you found work yet?”
“No, none,” she said dejectedly. “How came you to know I wanted it?”
I explained where I had seen her, and how I had heard or guessed her
errand. She seemed unduly grateful. My heart was touched, for though I
doubt not you think me, on my own evidence, a heartless young woman, I
_have_ a heart, after all, when aught occurs to rouse it. I reflected at
once how even my gentle Romeo had said of this poor child that she was
hopelessly incompetent. Still, the incompetent have mouths to feed, and
bodies to clothe, and possibly, also, souls to save, like the rest of
us. The struggle for life has not quite choked out my soul (if I have
one). I invited her to my room for a cup of tea, and an ounce of
sympathy. Her gratitude was a satire on Christian charity in this town
of London. I found she could type fairly well, though quite
unintelligently, like a well-trained Chinaman; but she had no machine of
her own, and no money to buy one; nor could she undertake work where
dictation was necessary; though, given a copy, she could reproduce each
word with mechanical fidelity.
It flashed across me at once that all day long I was away at Romeo’s,
and did not need my machine. “Better come here,” I said, “and use it. I
will find you manuscripts to transcribe; we have plenty of such work to
give away at the office.”
She fawned on me like a dog accustomed to ill-treatment, and for once
used kindly. The ravenous way in which she ate bread and butter would
have satisfied even the Charity Organisation Society as to the
genuineness of her hunger. She was painfully grateful. Her gratitude
distressed me. After that we became fast friends. It is true, she was
terrified at the first smell of tobac—— But I forget; that delinquency
I have hitherto concealed from you. However, she used my machine every
day, and I helped her in the evenings. Pale, blue-eyed, colourless, with
thin hair tied up in a knot the size of a nutmeg, she was built on the
same lines as Michaela (whom I always remembered), but with this
trifling difference—that Michaela was rich, while my new little friend
had not a cent to bless herself with. One was bound in Morocco, with
gilt edges; the other, a cheap edition, in paper covers.
Her name was Elsie, her front name, that is to say; for she had another,
I suppose, a surname; but I took no heed of it. Surnames lie on the
surface of things, and do not interest me. They are of this age,
utilitarian; while I, who dwell ever in Once-upon-a-time, care little
save for the persons and dates of fairyland. We give each other
surnames, indeed, only so long as we are mutual phantoms; once pierce to
the underlying realities of human life, and we call one another by pet
names, like so many children.
In time Elsie became to me a sort of adopted daughter. She was older
than I to be sure; but her helplessness and incompetence inspired in me
at last that sense of motherliness which we women love—does it not come
out in us even toward our dolls in childhood? Her affection was canine.
I found work for her from a type-writing office hard by—simple work,
selected with a special eye to her limitations. She toiled at it with
that patience which one observes in the squirrel who turns the unceasing
treadmill of his cage; for minds of a certain calibre prefer routine,
which would kill a thinking animal, to any task that calls for the
slightest exercise of intelligence. As long as she was permitted to go
on copying like a machine, Elsie was perfectly happy: a doubt or a query
seemed (as she said) to comb her brain; she lost heart before an
alternative.
I spent little time in my room myself, save for the strict necessaries
of sleep and breakfast; at other times I was driven out of it by a work
of art on the walls—the Portrait of a Locket. It represented, or rather
represents (for doubtless it still exists), a gold locket and chain,
reposing on an ample black silk bosom, with a woman’s face and hands in
the background. The face and hands, so far as can be seen, are fat and
placid; the hands crossed; the face featureless. Flesh-tints and
modelling, however, cast much rude work upon the imagination. I had not
courage enough to suggest the removal of this gem to my landlady, who
valued it highly as “a real oil-painting”; but it, and two vases, drove
me out, I will not say to the public-house, but to the public buildings.
I retired at odd moments to my drawing-room in the National Gallery, or
to the hospitable electric light of the British Museum. Elsie, on the
other hand, was not repelled by the locket or the lady. I had now no use
for my machine, and she worked on it constantly. She and the
Commissioner struck up a violent friendship. It did her good to have
some living creature at hand in the room to whom she could talk in the
intervals of click-clicking. To enlarge her circle I added in time a
starling and a canary, whom we christened Beef and Mustard. The canary
was Mustard because of his colour, and the starling Beef because there
was so much more of him.
One of the points which had barred Elsie’s way in the matter of
obtaining employment, she felt profoundly convinced, was her religious
opinions, which were soundly narrow. This happily enabled her, like
Rothenburg, to gild her penury with the halo of the martyr.
For myself, I suspect that incompetence had more to do with her failure
than religious prejudice; but that is a private conviction. She was a
Positivist, or a Plymouth Sister, or a member of some other uncanny
small sect; I will plead guilty to discriminating ill these minor brands
of creed; I am hazy as to the true distinction between General and
Particular Baptists (though, perhaps, a Particular Baptist uses soap);
and I always mix up Swedenborgians with Irvingites. It was a surprise to
Elsie to find that her form of faith seemed to me a question of small
import either way. I hold that most men are human, and, still more, most
women. My tolerance astonished her. When I suggested that perhaps at
that very minute Swedenborg and Irving, John Knox and Thomas à Kempis,
might perchance be gazing down upon us with kindly eyes and an amused
smile from some sequestered garden bench in one of the spacious
pleasure-grounds of the Celestial City, where they sat in rapt converse
with the soul of John Glas, who first prospected her own strictly
provincial path to Paradise, she turned her face to me with mingled
delight and terror. My view seemed to her sweet but highly heterodox.
She refused to her God a breadth of sympathy which she instinctively
admired in a fellow-creature.
One evening I came home and found Elsie at work on a piece of
transcription which was evidently too deep for her. It was poetry, she
said, in an awed whisper: she had been given it at the office under a
promise of secrecy. But the arrangement of the long and short lines of
complicated stanzas, which needed some care in the adjustment of
margins, was evidently beyond her. She looked tired and worried, and was
mildly tearful. “Besides, dear,” she said, smoothing my hair, “there are
such difficult words in it—words nobody could spell; not even you, I
believe—such as _myrrh_ with two _r_’s and an _h_. I can’t manage them
anyhow.”
“Dictate to me,” I said; “I can write for a bit. I’ve not done much
to-day, and I’m hardly the least bit tired.”
She dictated several strophes. I was not surprised that she found the
words hard. “Chrysoprase” “mandragora,” “anaglyph,” “Libitina”—these
lay some miles outside poor little Elsie’s vocabulary.
At first I noticed only the rare richness of the language, the
many-faceted words, set like jewels so as to show their full beauty;
gradually, as she dictated, I began to be aware that the verses she read
aloud to me in her infantile sing-song were not merely rhyme but also
poetry. I do not pretend to the name of critic; but I judged them to be
written with limpid felicity. They had that artlessness which comes of
the apt use of the perfect word without show of effort. Each noun and
adjective fell so naturally into its place that one fancied the writer
could have used no other—till one began to reflect that only studious
care results in so absolute a sense of inevitability. And the poems were
statuesque; they had none of the tropical exuberance of our time; they
were Greek in their austerity.
“Who is the author?” I asked, curious to know the name of the poet with
this Ionic note, new to our English Helicon.
“They didn’t tell me. They wished me not to know. He particularly
desired that his verses should be kept secret.”
She went on dictating in her mechanical way. My hand struck the keys
rapidly. At last she paused, near the close of a curious variant on the
Spenserian stanza. “There’s a word I can’t make out,” she murmured.
“‘True woman has the magic’ _something_——”
I took the manuscript from her hands.
“True woman has the magic Midas gift;
Touched by her hand, dull clay transmutes to molten gold.”
But that was not what made me give a sudden cry of surprise, and then
turn red as a peony. The verses were written in Romeo’s hand. And Romeo
was their author.
In a second I was buried in them, like a bee in a crocus. I felt he was
even more to me than before. I had believed him a publisher; now I knew
him a poet. No Barabbas, but a Byron.
How long I lay awake in my garret that night—thinking of whom but of
Romeo!
CHAPTER XVI.
I TRY LITERATURE.
Next morning at lunch time, as I crossed Long Acre, I caught a glimpse
of Michaela, in the gondola of London, steering rapidly northward. A big
summer hat, all wild roses and gossamer, half hid her face, like a wild
rose itself, pink and white and delicate.
At sight of me she recognised me, and stopped her hansom short for a
second to grasp my hand. I was pleased at her remembrance. She had come
from Waterloo, she said, and was hurrying now to catch a train at
Euston. She looked radiantly happy; I told her so. Her face flushed with
pleasure; she leaned forward and confided to me in a thrilling whisper
that she was to be married in the autumn to the friend whom she had lost
on the day I first met her. I wished her joy, and waved my hand. She
vanished, smiling, towards Euston and the Unknown, a phantom once more
among the flickering phantoms.
Happy at her happiness, I tripped back to Romeo’s. She was an airy
little thing of gauze and bergamot, like a breath of fairyland.
That afternoon Romeo’s talk to me was more human than usual. It was
always plain that he wanted to talk, but a sense of the official nature
of our relation restrained him often. To-day he spoke much of woman’s
place in literature. So many women, he said, wrote of life with a note
of personality rare among men. They put more heart in it. Even squalor
or crime grew less base when they handled it.
Half unconsciously to myself, I murmured under my breath,
“True woman has the magic Midas gift;
Touched by her hand, dull clay transmutes to molten gold.”
I murmured it quite low; but he caught at the words with a sharp gasp.
“Where did you see that?” he asked quickly.
I was forced to confess, “The lines occurred in some verses a little
friend of mine—I told you of her some days since—had for copy
yesterday from a type-writing office.”
I tried not to let him know more; but, for a woman, I am a poor
dissembler; my colour or the trembling of my lips betrayed me.
“Did you see the manuscript?” he inquired.
“Yes; I helped her to transcribe it.”
“They promised secrecy!” he cried.
“And you shall have it,” I answered.
He paused a moment. “But _you_ were the last person I would have wished
to see them,” he went on, his face twitching.
I knew why. In some of them an allusion, a description—here, a
blue-veined eyelid; there, a gloss like a swallow’s wing on a woman’s
smooth hair—had seemed to me familiar.
He paced up and down the tawny carpet for awhile. Then he broke out once
more. “I have written verse since I was a boy,” he said. “It has ever
been my ambition to be found worthy of the crown of poet. But if I
printed these lyrics under my own name, what use? I could but give a
handle for Sidney Trevelyan to ask in the _Saturday Review_ ‘Is Barabbas
also among the prophets?’ Nobody will take a publisher’s rhymes
seriously. So I decided to issue mine under an assumed name, and with
another firm, that critics might at least be rude to them on their
merits. For that purpose I had them type-written—and not by you. I am
sorry you have seen them.”
“And I am glad,” I answered. “You may not care for my opinion; but these
verses are masterpieces of handicraft. You have the rare gift of
reticence. Besides, you understand the fitness of words; you appreciate
their melting shades of tone; you feel the emotional atmosphere with
which each is girdled.”
“Thank you,” he said, checking himself. “And _you_ are one of the few
whose praise I value. You speak well of my work for the qualities I
strive to have, not for those I know I have not.”
From that day forth he was much more at home with me. You see, we shared
a Secret in common.
When his volume came out, several months later, it made no stir in the
world; but it gained the approbation of five or six out of the
twenty-three men and women in England who love poetry. It will yet be
known, I think; for though the public often flock together like sheep
after some noisy impostor, true poetry is always forced upon them from
above by the chosen few who can discover and impose it. The few are
frequently obscure, and bear no hall-mark; but they know one another by
the two gifts which make a critic—insight and foresight.
My knowledge of this book drew me nearer to Romeo. Having once accepted
the fact that I knew of his work, he consulted me time and again as to
type and paper—sometimes also as to the choice of an epithet or a point
of cadence, when two equally-balanced alternatives divided his
preference. Should it be _lurid_ or _livid_? was _ruddy_ or _russet_ the
better? This led us into talks not altogether official. Though always
reticent, he began to treat me less as a type-writer and more as a
woman.
This quality of reticence, which I observed in Romeo’s self no less than
in his work, impressed me profoundly. I admired his quiet strength, his
calm, his urbanity. I am not urbane myself, and I fear I must grant that
I am rather vehement than strong; therefore I respected all the more
these traits in Romeo. One honours one’s complement above one’s
counterpart. He never spoke strongly; he reserved strength for action. A
week or two after Sidney Trevelyan’s visit I asked him one day whether
the cheap edition of “Mahatmas” was going forward. He smiled his
restrained smile, and answered, “No, certainly not; I never intended
it.”
“But Mr. Trevelyan was so urgent, so instant; he had quite made up his
mind.”
“Yes; that is unimportant. The moment had not arrived, and I told him
so, calmly. He is a rock when opposed; but calmness, like faith, can
move mountains. I did not oppose him at the time; opposition just then
could only have irritated him. I saw the state of his soul; he came to
me, seething internally with suppressed wrath at the critics. I let him
blow off steam; in such circumstances I judge it unwise to sit upon the
safety-valve. He opened his heart and had it out, flinging many hard
jibes at me and at the public. That relieved the tension. I let three
days pass; then I wrote an ultimatum, stating quietly what I thought. He
gave in at once. The cheap edition shall not appear till the autumn.”
Such masculine absence of fussiness pleased me.
Once or twice when I discussed with him he asked me seriously why I had
never written. I laughed off his assault. He returned to the charge; so
much racy material going to waste in my own adventures. I told him of my
work among the East-End slop-makers! “Ready-made stories,” was his
verdict. I doubted my own faculty. He was sure I possessed it.
This encouraged me to narrate my experience at Pinfold.
“Anarchists!—and they blamed me because I could not fall in love to
order!”
“You are an intrepid young lady,” Romeo said. “Do you know, I doubt if
you quite realise always in what galleys you have embarked.”
“I think I do,” I answered: “but I have confidence in myself and my
guardian angel.”
He urged me to try my hand at a short story of the modern girl who earns
her own living in London—“for example, this little friend who uses your
type-writer,” he added with a clever side-thrust; I was grateful to him
for thus diverting the theme from my own personality: “there is no more
pathetic figure in our world to-day than the common figure of the poor
young lady, crushed between classes above and below, and left with
scarce a chance of earning her bread with decency.”
“I fear,” I said, “I have no knack of pathos; even at difficult turns I
am apt to see rather the humorous than the tragic side of things.”
“So I note. But why not try; your own late adventures, for instance?”
I felt that that romance had not yet reached its _dénoûment_; but I
refrained from telling him so. I promised to make an attempt, however,
with one of my earlier East-End reminiscences, or else with a little
vignette of the infant anarchists, unsullied by soap, pulling
Commissioner Lin’s tail, while their sisters turned the House that Jack
built into Czech and Yiddish.
For a week or two I worked hard in my stray moments at this my poor
little literary first-born. I put its phrases in curl-papers till I was
sick of twisting them. When it was ripe for the birth, I confess I
thought meanly of it. Mine own, but a poor thing, to reverse
Touchstone’s saying: I brought it to Romeo, trembling. He read it and
was enthusiastic. For the first time now I felt sure he really cared for
me; what else could so have blinded his critical faculty? For he was a
judicious reader.
He praised it as if it were the work of a consummate artist. His
encouragement was unstinted. I will not repeat what he said as to my
style; you, who are reading my second effort in that line, would be
painfully aware how much personal partiality must have warped his
judgment.
“It is so breezy,” he said. “You write open-air English.”
“I learnt it on the moors, among the whins,” I answered.
“This eclogue must go into the magazine!” he cried; for, like most other
great houses, the firm published one of its own.
I drew a line at that. “Oh, no,” I cried, flushing. “You are too kind,
too generous. I will not allow it to be printed where—where personal
acquaintance and your recommendation may disturb the editor’s calmer
opinion. I must send it to someone else. Then it will be weighed for
what it is worth, and if it is accepted, I shall know on what grounds.”
“But I shall be sorry to lose it,” he exclaimed; “for the magazine’s own
sake. When one discovers a new writer, one wishes to keep the full
credit of the discovery.”
I looked down to hide my burning cheeks. “No, no,” I said firmly. “You
are too flattering—too good. Your”——I paused to think how I could
best word it; “your knowledge of me predisposes you too much in my
favour.”
He looked at me and hesitated. “Not my knowledge alone,” he corrected;
“my . . . friendship, my——”
He did not say “affection”; but we raised our eyes in unison; and in a
flash of those eyes each knew that he meant it.
There was a long pause. I was aware of my heart, which called attention
to its existence by a violent throbbing. I went back to my machine and
began typing mechanically. Then he added all at once, “But quite apart
from that, I _want_ this story; I want the honour of publishing it,
because I see it is a good one.”
I went on clicking. “You cannot separate these things,” I said, without
looking up. “A person is a totality. We do not know, ourselves, how much
of any feeling is due to this cause, and how much to that. Nothing ever
goes wholly free from either fear or favour. But I have made up my mind.
I shall send it to _The Pimlico_.”
I sent it in the end; and, to my great joy, not unmixed with surprise,
the editor accepted it, in a chastening letter. He did not say, like
Romeo, “a gem of English”; he called it on the contrary, “high-spirited
if flippant”; but he printed it none the less, and forwarded me a cheque
for twelve guineas.
Twelve guineas! Such wealth seemed to me almost incredible. I felt like
an Argonaut.
Still, Romeo was vexed. “We ought to have had it,” he said; “for, after
all, you were _my_ discovery.”
CHAPTER XVII.
A DRAWN BATTLE.
It was about this time, if I recollect aright (for _I_ am the girl who
does not keep a diary), that Romeo invited me to dinner.
I have two reasons for my avoidance of the besetting sin of
diary-writing. The first is that I am usually dog-tired with work when
evening comes, so that to ask me to fill in a journal with the day’s
events is like asking a galley-slave to take a scull in a pleasure-boat
after his toil is over. The second is that if you keep no diary it
cannot be used in evidence against you. As yet, ’tis true, by rigid
self-examination, I have steered clear of capital crimes; but I remember
always Ophelia’s wise saw, “We know what we are; we know not what we may
be.”
Romeo invited me with caution, and tentatively. He began by remarking,
as if for no special reason, that he was giving a dinner next week at
the Savoy—a dinner devised for a particular purpose. Then he added
after a while that his mother would be there. This to inspire
confidence, dear fellow! as though I ever doubted him. Next he inquired
in a rather timid voice whether, if his mother picked me up by the way
in her brougham, I would mind joining the party. “My mother has not
called upon you yet,” he murmured in an apologetic parenthesis, looking
up at me askance from under his ridged eyebrows with an interrogative
lid; “but—perhaps you would waive that.” From the way he said it I
could read much. I felt instinctively she was a black-satin old lady of
the straightest sect; Romeo had implored her to call; she had refused
point-blank to go and see a type-writer girl who lived in one room in an
impossible street in Soho. Romeo had begged and prayed; the mother had
presented the true stiff neck of the black-satin order. Then Romeo had
planned this dinner as a means of introducing me, confident (dear boy)
that if once we were brought together, his mother—well, would think as
much of me as he did. Poor purblind Romeo! I pitied him for that. How
little had he fathomed black-satin psychology!
I hesitated a moment. Not on Romeo’s account, nor even on the
mother’s—I do not fear the smoothest black satin; but because of the
mere material difficulty of a gown, which just at first rose
insuperable. Otherwise I thought so much of Romeo now—he had begun to
play so large a part in the unwritten dramas of my future with which I
lulled myself to sleep—that I felt at all costs I must be present at
this dinner and face the mother. A mother is almost inevitable; the
sooner one gets over her, like measles, the better.
I had one evening dress, or the ghost of one, which had descended to me
from the days when I was a lady. Its sleeves carried date; but the
bodice and skirt were of that fanciful kind which is above the fashion,
and therefore never either in it or out of it. The colour was
sweet—white, shot with faint streaks of the daintiest pink, like the
first downy stage of budding willow catkins. On the other hand, I was
still in mourning for my dear father. Had I loved him less I should have
shrunk from wearing that gown; but my sorrow was not of the sort that
measures itself by yards of crape, which is why I have troubled you with
it so little in this narrative. I reflected a moment; then I answered,
“Yes; it will give me great pleasure.”
That it gave Romeo great pleasure was visibly written on his face. He
had expected a _no_, and was delighted at my acceptance. I knew by his
eyes he had anticipated and even exaggerated the dress difficulty. I did
not misinterpret his pleased look, however. I never thought Romeo was in
love with me; I knew he was interested in me, both personally and as a
possible authoress; and I saw he wished much to bring me officially into
his mother’s circle. More than that, I did not believe, or rather, if I
am to tell you the precise truth, I thought Romeo was falling in love
with me by slow steps, but mistaking his love for mere interest and
friendliness.
For a week I was a woman, not merely a type-writer. I worked hard at
that gown, first planning, then executing my alterations. Dear little
Elsie helped me with it like a Trojan. Nay, in cutting out and fitting
she displayed or developed unexpected talent. When dress was in question
she was no longer stupid; the woman in her grew; she showed taste and
skill; indeed, I have noted in life, throughout, that taste has no
necessary connection, direct or inverse, with intelligence or stupidity;
it is a native endowment which may break out anywhere. She was glad it
was a dinner, not a dance; her religious opinions would not have
sanctioned her assisting me with a ball-dress. But all sects alike
approve the habit of feeding. I must admit that when it came to the
details of my gown she showed herself at once most frankly worldly.
Elsie had little chance of making dresses for herself, poor child; but
she aided me with her needle and her advice till I was truly grateful.
The way she reorganised the sleeves to a Parisian model made one believe
in alchemy. We spent a few shillings on new tulle and lining. Every
evening we had an orgy of dressmaking: whole packets of pins, snippets
of silk on the floor. Before the end of the week we had transformed that
old gown of mine into a joy for ever. It was better than new; as it fell
in soft folds the blush showed on the ridge and cream-white in the
hollows. When I tried it on, Elsie bent over me enraptured. “You dear
thing!” she cried, hugging me (to the danger of the tulle), “I always
knew you were pretty, but I never knew till now you were splendidly
beautiful.”
And I will honestly admit that the frock became me.
The day arrived at last. Elsie came round to help me dress my hair. We
made more of this dinner than I should have made of being presented in
the days of my grandeur—such as it was. Dear little Elsie had brought
me some flowers from a friend’s garden at Ealing, choice sweet-scented
flowers, with a background of maidenhair. If I had believed her, I would
have thought no fairy princess ever looked more radiant than I looked
that evening; and, indeed, our joint efforts on the gown repaid us with
interest. When the last touch had been given Elsie kissed me on both
cheeks. “He will propose to-night,” she whispered. “I know he will: he
can’t help himself, dear. You _are_ so captivating!” I blushed, for I
had never mentioned his name to Elsie; but then, I forgot that Elsie too
was a woman.
At ten minutes to eight the brougham arrived at the door. Never before
had our street beheld so distinguished an equipage. This was
unfortunate, for the children next door came to gaze at me with dirty
faces and unaffected interest, exclaiming, “Oh, my, don’t she look a
reel lidy?” as I made a rush for the carriage.
Romeo’s mother was precisely what I had painted her—a Lady Montague of
the severest, with coffee-coloured point-lace, a Cornelia one shade too
stout for the mother of the Gracchi. Her smooth white hair looked not
gentle, but forbidding; she listened to what I said with well-bred
reserve: too stiff to acquiesce, too polite to contradict, too stony to
show interest.
At the hotel, we were ushered into a handsome private room, most
gracefully decorated with crimson arabesques on white panelling. The
party consisted of Romeo and his mother with some six or eight more
(including a prebendary), among whom the chief guests seemed to be a
certain amiable-faced Lady Donisthorpe and her husband, Sir Everard. I
name them in this order, for though the husband was a man of some force
and character—early English, comfortable—Lady Donisthorpe, like Paul,
was the chief speaker. She seemed what is called “a womanly woman”—one
of those tranquil women with soft, rounded outlines, who look like wax,
but within are flint. She reminded me most of all of a pouter pigeon.
She apologised much because dear Meta could not come. It was _such_ a
disappointment. The poor child had been taken ill—nothing serious she
was glad to say—but impossible to go out. She hoped Romeo would excuse
her. Romeo expressed most courteous regret at dear Meta’s enforced
absence; though I, who knew him now so well, and was used at the office
to note the varying degrees of cordiality or boredom in his reception of
authors, inferred at once from his eyes that he was somewhat relieved at
heart by dear Meta’s non-appearance. It was clear to me, too, that Lady
Donisthorpe flung Meta inartistically at his head; twenty times during
the evening she referred with a rigid smile and a puff of the pouter
bust to one of dear Meta’s sweet ways or to something delightful that
dear Meta had said or done for somebody. The impression she left upon me
was that Meta must be an insipid paragon, with all the virtues and their
concomitant insupportability. Romeo’s absent smile at each such
advertisement of Meta’s charming qualities—“so gentle,” “so
unaffected”—made me feel convinced that he was of the same opinion.
To put it plainly, Lady Donisthorpe showed want of tact in her crude
mode of placarding Meta.
She had another trick of manner which disturbed my peace of mind; like
most of the newly-enriched, she attached an excessive importance to the
after all somewhat negative quality of ladylikeness. The highest praise
she could accord to each achromatically charming girl of her
acquaintance was that of being “a perfect lady.” She flung the phrase in
my teeth. Apart from the fact that it seems to imply a somewhat narrow
standard, I always suspect women who insist upon this point of being
themselves cotton-backed ladies.
I knew her type: she belonged to an aristocracy recruited by the names
of all the best-known brands of beer, soap, and whiskey.
I protest, however, that just at first I began by treating Romeo’s
mother and Lady Donisthorpe with the utmost cordiality. For had I not
good reasons for desiring to conciliate them? But their treatment
chilled me. I could see they had come prepared to dislike me for a
conceited upstart. In return, I soon found I disliked their texture.
Cornelia was cold; I felt she regarded my humour as ill-timed. Lady
Donisthorpe had the vulgar fear of vulgarity. I do not share it; nature
is vulgar enough; we can only be “perfect ladies” on the Donisthorpe
pattern by shutting our eyes, shutting our ears, and shutting our noses
to most things around us. Now, I will not shut my eyes nor my mouth
either. If facts obtrude themselves, I recognise them. I fear Lady
Donisthorpe thought it painfully unladylike of me to have lived in the
East-End, and positively rude to tell stories of slop-makers. She raised
her tortoise-shell glasses at the very word as a mute protest.
In fine, both were conscious of a social barrier. So was I—with a
difference. Lady Donisthorpe moved in what calls itself “good society,”
but _genteel_ would have been scarce too hard a word to describe her.
Romeo’s mother swept in to dinner on Sir Everard’s arm, a three-decker
under full sail. Romeo offered me his; I gathered it was because Meta
had not arrived as expected. Always handsome, he looked handsomer in
evening dress. A waxy white flower lay on each plate: Romeo pinned mine
on my bodice. Lady Donisthorpe’s placid eyes did not let the action pass
unnoticed.
The dinner—by which you shall understand the food—was the best I ever
tasted. The champagne, in the judgment of one who is no judge, was a
thought too dry, but delicious. The _mousse de jambon_ was an epicure’s
dream. I really enjoyed myself. Besides, I was conscious that Romeo
liked my dress and felt some mild surprise to see how well I looked in
it. He had hitherto known me in my black office gown alone. I forgot my
poverty and was once more a lady.
It suits me better. I blossom under it. I did not even object to Sir
Everard for being a millionaire; it was hardly his fault; millionaires,
after all, are an outcome of the age: one can but regret that they
absorb its income. Lady Donisthorpe’s talk reeked of wealth till I felt
it would be delightful to get home at night and see something cheap
again. My seat was between Romeo and a clever young man, with keen eyes
and _pince-nez_, a rising physiologist. It relieved me to learn he was
not an electrical engineer; all the young men I used to meet in my
præ-type-writing days had been given over to riotous electrical
engineering. My neighbour’s hobby was a cheerful one—the identity of
genius and madness. He took _Paradise Lost_ and the Vatican frescoes for
premonitory symptoms of acute mania; he held the steam-engine to be a
by-product of the insane temperament. Yet he urged his thesis so well
that, on his own showing, I foresaw he must be qualifying for residence
in an asylum. When I told him so, he cavilled at my graceful compliment.
To escape his retort, I turned to the other side and joined talk with
Romeo and the prebendary. I do not know what a prebendary does; his
functions are more mysterious than even the archidiaconal; but I have
said I love mystery; and I found the prebendary a capital talker.
Romeo was charming, as always—more charming to me that night, I
fancied, than ever. Perhaps it was because he had never seen me dressed
like a human being before; but also, I think, he was conscious of his
mother’s keen eyes and Lady Donisthorpe’s steely glance; smiling ever
her set smile, she felt Meta’s chances were slipping from her visibly.
She was an ox-eyed Hera, a little run to seed, and now almost cow-faced,
but cat-like in her watchfulness. To counteract the chilling effect of
the two mothers—one a feather-bed, the other a poker—and to put me at
my ease, Romeo behaved with the sweetest courtesy. He talked to me; he
drew me out; if I ever can be brilliant (which ’tis not for me to judge)
I was brilliant that evening. I flashed to my own surprise; Romeo’s
admiration, and the two elder women’s scarcely concealed hostility, put
me on my mettle.
I was not angry with his mother; it was comprehensible, of course;
mothers are made like that. We erect each other into a class, and judge
accordingly. Could any woman with an aquiline nose, and white hair
neatly dressed by an immaculate maid, sit by unperturbed while her only
son paid open court to a type-writer girl? I suppose I should have felt
as she did, had I been put in her place. Being put in my own, I
naturally did my best to let myself be seen to the greatest advantage.
So did Romeo. Having brought me there, he was determined I should be
treated with proper respect. He insisted on talking to me; Lady
Donisthorpe’s cat-like graciousness, Cornelia’s Roman austerity, only
increased his anxiety to do me honour. The more his mother froze, the
more Lady Donisthorpe, smiling her mechanical smile, and gently
crushing, raised her tortoise-shell eye-glasses to decide whether I was
human, the more did Romeo draw me out, and the more did I scintillate,
till at last all the table was talking to me or listening to me. I
laughed and raised laughter; I sparkled and parried. When Lady
Donisthorpe interposed sweetly, “And so you type-write at the office!
How fatiguing it must be!” on purpose to disconcert me, I had my
repartee ready: “At least it preserves me from being a perfect lady.” I
could see Romeo was pleased. I was a social success. I had justified his
temerity.
In the midst of our fencing, of a sudden, Cornelia drew out a gold
pencil, wrote something on a card, and handed it across to him. Romeo
glanced at it and crumpled it up; I could guess by his face her note had
not pleased him. “As you will,” he answered across the table; then he
turned to me once more. “That was delicious,” he said; “and what did you
reply to him?”
I went on with my story. Still, I could gather that he was annoyed; not
only annoyed, indeed, but perplexed and troubled. Dinner solemnised, we
withdrew to the comfortable divans of the balcony for Turkish coffee.
All the party crowded round me, save the two mammas; they did not sit
apart, but, joining our group, they preserved an austere moral
aloofness. The rest, however, redeemed their abstention. Even Sir
Everard was untrue to poor Meta’s chances. I was flushed by this time,
and the men’s eyes told me I was looking my prettiest. The two other
girls of the party chimed in and encouraged me. So did the prebendary; I
talked easily and brightly. Sir Everard laughed again and again at my
sallies. He was a portly old gentleman with a massive white waistcoat,
very like a toad as he leaned back on the ottoman. His voice, too, was a
purr; he was a toad, not a natterjack.
But Romeo had stolen away to give some mysterious orders. I felt rather
than saw that something had gone wrong somewhere with the machinery.
We were to adjourn to a theatre. We drove round in state. Our stalls
were near the centre; Lady Donisthorpe in claret-coloured velvet looked
truly imposing. In one of the interludes I looked round at the pit.
Directly behind me, in the front row, sat a foxey-headed man staring
open-eyed towards me. It was the Grand Vizier, accompanied by a lady (no
doubt “with brains”) and concealing but imperfectly the fact that he had
been dining.
For a moment—a rare moment—I felt really disconcerted. Under any other
circumstances it would only have amused me had the Vizier leaned forward
and shouted, “Good evening, miss,” in his own dialect. But to-night,
with the eyes of those two mothers fixed stonily on my face, I confess I
trembled lest he should rise in his seat, wave one hairy hand, and call
out loudly across the intervening rows, “Allow me to introduce my
fee-on-say to you, Miss Appleton!” I looked away hastily, not before he
had caught my eye. I expected to see his goggle eyes fall out and drop
upon the floor: he was so evidently surprised at my transfigured
appearance. The last time he had parted from me it was beneath the
golden symbol of St. Nicholas at the shop in the Strand; to light upon
me there that night, dressed like a lady, surrounded by a little court,
made much of by the men, and flushed from the Savoy, might naturally
astonish him.
However, he behaved with better taste than I could have anticipated. He
nudged his companion, and whispered in her ear, but kept his face
averted. He was puzzled, I felt sure; still he had sense enough to know
that this greeting would be ill-timed, and good feeling enough to
prevent him from forcing himself upon my notice.
When the play was over Romeo led me to the door. I was still hot and
uncertain. So far as he was concerned this evening was for me a great
triumph; every man and woman there, save only the two mothers, had paid
me much attention, and, I will even venture to add, admired me. I had
looked and talked my best, and I was satisfied with my performance. But
the two elder women hung like black clouds lowering in the rear; I could
feel them disapproving of me with various degrees of rancour. One feared
for her son, the other for her daughter.
Very natural, I knew; but so too was my own attitude. No woman is born
to be merely a type-writer.
At the door Romeo led me by myself into a well-appointed brougham. Then
I knew what had happened. Cornelia had written across to him that she
declined to take me back in her carriage to Soho; and Romeo, to save me
the knowledge of that slight, had slipped away at the hotel, and ordered
another carriage to await me at the theatre. He held my hand in his own
for a brief space after he put me into it.
“It was so good of you to come,” he said. “I have so much enjoyed this
talk with you.”
But the two mothers hardly gave me the tips of their fingers, and bowed
distantly as I drove away alone, with chilly politeness.
When I got back to my room my feelings were mixed. The jealous Gods thus
alloy our triumphs. Romeo had seen me at last as I really was. But I had
innocently disturbed the peace of two families.
I did what every other woman would have done in my place—sat down to a
good cry and thought about Romeo.
CHAPTER XVIII.
AN AUTUMN HOLIDAY.
I have large estates in Hertfordshire and the adjoining counties, free
of land tax. Some noble marquis, I am assured, lays claim to the bare
loam, the ploughed fields, the turnips; but who counts mere mud? The
rest is mine, to do as I will with. He may keep his rents: ’tis for me
to enjoy the green lawns, the huge buttressed beech-trees, the broad
circles of shade where drowsy sheep lie huddled: I own the stripling
streams that break against sharp stones in the sloping stickles, or
expand on the shallows between into placid pools, skimmed over by
water-beetles who dart and dance nimbly in interlacing whirligigs. The
sky overhead is mine, mine the road under foot; the scent of rain-wetted
earth; the broken song of the thrushes, the startled scream of the jay
as he bursts through the rustling oak-leaves, the long sweep of the
swift launching himself on the air from the battlements of the
church-tower. All these I own, by virtue of my freehold in the saddle of
my bicycle.
Such a Sabine farm costs nought to manage; it gives pure delight without
counter-poise of trouble. I visited mine often, both on summer evenings
and on Saturday afternoons or Sundays. Early in my time at Romeo’s a
whimsical fancy seized me (being ever irresponsible) to spend my Sabbath
mornings in such churches within easy reach of London as were dedicated
to my chosen ally, St. Nicholas. I ran them down with care in an
Anglican Directory. If the day were doubtful, I strayed no farther
afield than to St. Nicholas Cole Abbey, in the City, where in a dark bay
of the aisle I prayed the prayer now nearest to my heart, which I leave
you to guess. Often as my patron had failed me at a pinch, still oftener
had he proved kind; I was prepared to give him one more chance of
distinguishing himself. But if the day promised to be fair, I got under
weigh betimes, and was spinning down the roads that lead northward out
of town while the smocked milkman still stood balanced by frothing pails
in the meadows. London lay, a vast blur, behind me. Cows on the common
chewed the cud of penury. Their eye was pensive. Commissioner Lin showed
a nasty Jack-in-office disposition to disturb them. He was called to
heel with difficulty. Then I would seek some country church, with low
tower and wooden lych-gate, where St. Nicholas still bore sway, spite of
iconoclast or Puritan, to pour out my heart’s wish to I know not what
Power that compels the universe.
It was my wont to lean the bicycle meanwhile against the churchyard yew
or some convenient tombstone, leaving the Commissioner in charge. He was
well fitted for the task by his unregenerate monopolist views on private
property, backed up by a fine row of persuasive white arguments.
These weekly trips made me careless of holiday. I waited to take my
summer outing till it should suit Romeo’s convenience. I was so much his
personal secretary that I must delay my vacation till he could take his;
and it had long been arranged that he should put it off till late
September—his partner having desired to go away in August.
Romeo never alluded again to that evening at the Savoy; but I knew it
had brought him nought but disappointment. He had desired to include me
within his mother’s sphere, and Cornelia, gathering up her Roman robe,
had declined. Yet from that time he was more deferential and more
courteous, if possible, than even his wont.
It was decided that his holiday should begin on the fifteenth of
September. As the time drew near, Romeo grew visibly distressed and
depressed. The spring failed in his step. I fancied he was suffering
some internal conflict. His manner was distraught; he sat at times as if
he hardly heard what was passing. It was plain to see he was struggling
within himself; irreconcilable feelings drew him alternately in opposite
directions.
On the fourteenth he came down to the office as usual, but sat gloomy
and moody. He did not tell us whither he was bound: nay, more, he gave
orders that no letters should follow him. He made some mystery of his
destination. At three o’clock he went home, bidding me good-bye with
more reserve than was his wont. He kept his glance averted. I could see
he was fighting hard to avoid breaking down. This holiday must mean much
to him. He could not look me in the face to bid me good-bye. The tremor
of his eyelids was as of one who holds back tears with difficulty. I
wished him a pleasant trip. He answered a hurried “Thank you,” and
rushed out to his carriage.
If I had known where he was going I think I should have followed him.
As the thought passed through my mind, Puck came in for some money out
of hand. It was my duty to keep the petty cash for Romeo’s personal
office expenditure. “I want nine shillings, miss,” the boy said;
“Baedeker’s ‘North Italy’ and Hare’s ‘Venice.’”
My heart gave a quick bound. I had surprised his objective. I am an
erratic creature. In one second my mind was made up. I should follow
him.
I had still the twelve guineas I had received for my story. Thank
heaven, I am improvident. The _bourgeois_ vice of thrift is one from
which my family has never suffered: the Puritan blood in our veins must
have been too generously diluted. Besides, have I not learned from more
modern political economy that saving is the source of all the evils of
capitalism?—and do I not give thanks daily that I show not the faintest
tendency to develop in that direction? I have made up my mind never to
be a capitalist; and, up to date, I see every chance of my keeping my
resolution. So I decided to spend my twelve guineas like a man, to
please myself, leaving Providence or St. Nicholas to make good the
deficiency. This is called faith, and is a cardinal virtue.
I gave Romeo two clear days’ start, lest I should travel along with him
and seem to be dogging him; then I set out alone on my way to Venice.
I am nothing, if not frank. Therefore I do not seek to deny the truth
that I went to Italy on purpose to follow Romeo.
“Unwomanly!” you say. What a false convention!
Yes, I am always frank; I think the day has almost come for frankness.
Men novelists have depicted us as men wish us to be; we have meekly and
obediently accepted their portrait: to some extent, even, we have
striven, against the grain, to model ourselves upon it. A man’s ideal is
the girl that shrinks; the sweetly unconscious girl, who scarce knows
she loves, till his strong arm glides round her, and he clasps her to
his heart: then, with a sudden awakening, she awakens to the truth, and
knows she has loved him long, loved him from the beginning. That, I say,
is a man’s woman. Her purity, her maidenly modesty, are quite
unapproachable by concrete feminine humanity. She is too delicate in
mind ever to dream that she can love spontaneously, of her own mere
motion. She loiters in the shade; she waits to be wooed; she is coy,
undecided, shrinking, timid.
There was a time, I suppose, when such women were common. I do not
know—for have I not Shakespeare to the contrary? But the type was once
true, I dare say, and widely distributed. Still, has not time altered
it? In the world in which we live men are no longer ardent. We scarce
affect to conceal the fact that they grow shy of marriage. As a
necessary consequence, women have changed too; the woman of this age
often knows she loves, knows it poignantly, breathlessly, and must use
those weapons which the world allows her if she would gain the affection
of the man who has taken her maiden fancy. She cannot by open means
pursue him, I admit; but she has recourse to the immemorial feminine
devices of ruse and stratagem.
I have Shakespeare on my side, I say, because I remember Rosalind. A man
drew her; yet I see in her pure woman. She loves; she knows she loves;
she longs frankly for her lover. And that is the way with women as I
have found them.
Why did I follow Romeo? Why did Rosalind fly to the forest of Arden?
Only once—scarcely once—had Romeo seen me as I was: that evening of
the dinner. At the office, what was I but the type-writer girl? If I
could meet him in Italy, he would know me as myself; we could talk more
freely; he might pluck up heart of grace to break the ice, and tell me
he loved me.
For I knew he was fond of me. I could not now doubt it. When he talked
to me, it was with those unmistakable sidelong glances which a woman’s
heart can interpret. Often he broke off suddenly. But his mother was
against me; his mother wished him to marry Lady Donisthorpe’s dear Meta.
In London, I knew, I had little chance to prevail over that perfect
lady. But in Venice—ah, what miracles may not happen in Venice!
Mirage of the lagoons, you show men everything!
I had not set foot in the enchanted city since my father took me when I
was a girl of sixteen; but I remembered it well; I knew every refluent
ditch of it. I could have found my way, on foot, through little aimless
lanes that wander in and out, from the Piazza to the Ghetto.
If Romeo met me there by accident—if we loitered together among those
churches and galleries—if I told him of my saints, if I pointed him out
my best-beloved pictures, surely the struggle within him would be
settled in my favour. He would prefer my wayward Gypsy-American fantasy
to dear Meta’s insipid graces of the perfect lady. He would know which
he preferred, in spite of his mother and Lady Donisthorpe’s crude
advertisements.
My one regret was, that I could not take Mr. Commissioner and Elsie with
me.
CHAPTER XIX.
“O, ROMEO, ROMEO!”
When Linnæus first saw gorse in blossom he fell on his knees and thanked
God. Our modern Pharisees, who say grace before meat, never, I fancy,
say grace before Venice.
And yet there is only one Venice.
From the moment you arrive in the dusk at the station, and stroll down
slippery steps to your gondola, to glide with stealthy movement along
the lesser canals, under mysterious bridges where mysterious bystanders
lean over to watch you, unknown forms that creep from dark doors in
unknown streets—do you not thank God, like Linnæus, that he has brought
you to Venice? And does not this feeling of gratitude and wonder for
that living romance deepen on you each day that you remain? Do you not
long to float for ever down those noiseless ways, to gaze up for ever at
those water-stained palaces, to dream for all time among those
innocent-faced St. Ursulas? Mint, anise, and cumin, indeed, when God has
given us Venice! The country or the south! I pine in London.
I had loitered on my way out, breaking my nights at Lucerne and Milan,
that Romeo might have time to reach his journey’s end with certainty
before my arrival. And on my first morning of freedom by the motionless
lagoons, I set out early to renew my acquaintance with Venice.
I did not know where Romeo was stopping; nor did I seek to find out. I
left everything to St. Nicholas. If chance should throw me in my Romeo’s
way, well and good; if chance chose to be unkind, better so than that I
should track him. Besides, in Venice, you cannot long fail to meet
whoever else is there. All the world gravitates towards the centre of
the Piazza. Sooner or later, you must needs cross the path of everyone
in the city.
I set out from my hotel on foot; I love footing it in Venice; I love the
intricate tangle of narrow paved alleys, overhung by stone sills and
rusty iron balconies, by which the walker threads his way through the
mazes of the city. Millionaires in gondolas never know it. You must
ramble to see Venice. Past little dim shops where red water-melons,
sliced open, and strings of yellow carrots adorn the slabs; past odours
of salt fish and rank whiffs of garlic; past cavernous recesses where,
from murky Tintoretto-like gloom, the light of a little lamp just serves
to throw up the tinsel crown of Our Lady. So suddenly at once, under the
columns of a portico, into the open sky of the great square, the
thronging turmoil of pigeons, the liberal flood of southern sunshine,
the strong shadow of the campanile flung like a fallen obelisk on the
floor of the Piazza, the mighty flagstaffs of the dead republic, and
beyond them all, low and squat, a riot of white domes, the fantastic,
many-pinnacled carven front of St. Mark’s, glowing golden in the
pellucid air of morning.
I stood still and drew a deep breath. It was even as I thought. Grace
before St. Mark’s: “For what we are about to receive——” There is but
one Venice.
Holding my breath all the while, I drew near the great porches, with
their round-arched tops, and gazed up at the mosaics. My soul steeped
herself in beauty. I revelled in an orgy of jasper and porphyry. How
gross to give thanks for beef and pudding, but none for Carpaccio,
Bellini, Titian!
Slowly, out of the great dream of form and colour, bit by bit, as I
gazed, distinct visions framed themselves—palm-leaves and lilies, robed
shapes of angels, half-translucent alabaster shafts or capitals, rich
foliage of acanthus, wandering lines of tracery. In the midst of it all,
one little relief held my eye at last—a flat relief of quaint
Romanesque workmanship, beautiful with the winning beauty of infantile
art; two birds that faced one another, and pecked at a bunch of
grapes—when, all at once, I was aware of a start of surprise beside me.
I turned round. My heart fluttered for a second. It was Romeo.
Venice faded. Though I had come out to him, I was taken aback at his
presence.
He gave a little gasp. “What, _you_ here,” he faltered out—“Miss
Appleton—Juliet?”
“Yes,” I answered assuming an air of unconcern; “I thirsted for a breath
of Italy again. It is nearly five years since I have been out of
England.”
“But—this is fate!” he blurted out. “I—I came here—to avoid you.”
I was in a mischievous mood. “I can go away again,” I answered, looking
deep into his eyes, and half curtseying. “It is not for me to interfere
with my employer’s holiday.”
He cast me an imploring look. “Juliet,” he cried, “do not jest. Do not
break my heart. This is no time for pleasantry. My child, my child, I
have suffered.”
I saw it in his face. And yet I could not conceive what was his trouble.
Could a mother count for so much? I had never known mine. “You look
ill,” I said; “so different from what you looked last week in London.
Can I do anything for you? I—I will really go away—at once—if you
desire it.”
He restrained himself with an effort from seizing my hands, then and
there, in the open Piazza. “_Go away?_” he cried. “_Go away?_ No, _that_
is not my trouble. I wish you _not_ to go away. I wish you to stay with
me always. Juliet, you must have guessed it; you must have known it in
London. Do not tell me you did not know. You _saw_ that I loved you!”
“I thought so, at times,” I answered in a very low voice. “But—why then
did you wish to run away from me?”
He glanced about him with uneasy eyes. “Now this has come,” he burst
forth, “I must fight it out boldly. I must face it like a man. Juliet,
where can we go? I _must_ talk—alone—with you.”
“Let us take a gondola,” I suggested, my heart throbbing high with joy;
for I felt I had triumphed now; his mother, and dear Meta, and ox-eyed
Lady Donisthorpe were wholly forgotten.
“A gondola!” he echoed. “A gondola! Ah, how clever you are! Of course! I
never thought of that. There we can talk uninterrupted.”
We moved towards the Molo. I hailed a gondolier. “Put up the felze,” I
said, “so that we may not be overlooked.” The man raised the little
black box, and shut us in as in a sedan-chair. Romeo gazed admiration
again. “And you talk Italian!”
“Whither, signore?” the gondolier asked.
“Where shall we go?” Romeo inquired, turning to me.
“Where you will,” I answered; “it is all Venice.” I did not add that
with him by my side all the world would be Venice.
He pointed towards the open, where we would be less observed. The
gondolier nodded. Then the old fancy seized me. “To San Nicolò di Lido!”
I cried. It seemed like an omen. My patron saint had always brought me
luck, and his church lay before me. In this crisis of my fate I would
commend myself to his favour.
I told Romeo why I chose that way. He smiled, a little sadly. “May it
turn out as you wish,” he exclaimed. “May St. Nicholas help us!”
I sat by his side on the soft black cushions, never uttering a
word—placidly, quietly happy. I was in no hurry to speak; the sense
that I had Romeo alone to myself at last was joy enough for me. He took
my hand in his. I let it lie there, unresisting.
Words only spoil such first thrills of fruition. Touch is the
mother-sense of love; it needs no interpreter.
At last Romeo broke the charmed silence. I gave a little sigh as he
broke it. “Oh, why so soon?” I asked. But, like a man, he was eager to
speak and explain himself. They _are_ so precipitate!
“What am I to do, Juliet?” he cried, burying his face in his hands.
“Your coming has thrown me back upon my first resolve; it has driven me
from my stronghold. When I tore myself away from you in London and no
longer saw your eyes—those great magnetic uncomplaining eyes of yours,
those eyes that have bewitched me—I made up my mind that I must go
through with it now, and try to forget you. Not try, but pretend; for it
would be all pretence. Since the first day you came, daily and daily you
have meant more and more to me. It was hard to break away from you, but
I broke away and came here, so that I might be free from the spell; for
while I saw your eyes I could think of nothing else; and now chance has
thrown you in my path again, and—I cannot go through with it.”
“Not chance,” I murmured low; “not chance—but St. Nicholas! I have come
with the money that my story brought me.”
He smiled at my little conceit, for I had told him in London of my
half-fanciful cult of the poor maids’ saint, and I had called my little
tale “A Ward of St. Nicholas.”
“You are a brownie!” he cried, gazing at me. “You wild thing, what
brought you here?”
I laughed. “The Gotthard railway—and my love of adventure. I was
sickening of England; I had a migratory instinct, like birds when they
gather on the telegraph wires in autumn, or restless Spanish sheep in
spring, when they herd and leap, uneasy to be driven to their pastures
in the mountains.”
“What a wild thing you are!” he repeated. “A brownie, a brownie! I
wonder where you got it from?”
“From my gypsy ancestry, I suppose,” I answered.
“Gypsy—but I thought you told me you were American?”
“On my father’s side, yes; but on my mother’s Lowland Scot or
Anglo-Indian. She was a Baillie of the Borders; and I suspect all
borderers of sharing the blood of the Faas and the Petulengros. There
was plenty of intermarriage.”
“No doubt,” he mused. “The difference must have been slight between a
moss-trooper and a gypsy. Each had much the same gentility. And, indeed,
I remember the ‘Lord and Earl of Little Egypt’ was summoned to Edinburgh
as a peer of parliament.”
“At any rate,” I said gaily, “whether ’tis true or false, it accounts,
to my mind, for the Meg Merrilies vein in me. I was born a random
vagrant in the world, a peripatetic philosopher. I love movement, I love
freedom—Bohemia. Why, I could tell your fortune now if you cared to
cross my hand with silver.”
He gazed into my eyes. “I do not doubt it,” he answered, “for it lies in
your hands to-day.”
I thrilled and was still. The gondola glided over the glassy water.
Soon he began again. “Gypsy, I want your help. You must _make_ my
fortune, not tell it. Show me how to act. Show me how to get free. What
can I do in this crisis, Juliet—my Juliet?”
“How can I answer?” I replied. “’Tis for your own heart to say. I know
you are fond of me. But—your mother has money, I suppose, and you
prefer your mother.”
He withdrew the arm that lay half round me, and sat up facing me in
surprise. “My mother!” he cried. “My mother! Why, Juliet, my child, what
do you mean? It is not my mother I think of—not her, but poor Meta!”
A pang darted through me. “Then you love her!” I exclaimed; “that
woman’s daughter!”
“Love her? I do not say that. Yet, Juliet, consider; put yourself in her
place: I have been five years engaged to her!”
It burst upon me like a thunderbolt. Why had I never guessed it? From
the first day we met I had taken it for granted—unreservedly,
unthinkingly—that Romeo was heart-free and unfettered as I was. Even
when I met Lady Donisthorpe I imagined too fast that she was flinging
Meta openly at his head, but not that he was betrothed to her. My own
heart must have blinded me. Now that I realised it all, I stood aghast
at the way woman’s instinct had failed me. How had I managed to
misunderstand? I saw in a flash that the conflict I had observed in
Romeo before he left London was a conflict in his soul between love and
honour.
He seized my hand again. “It is _that_ that made it so difficult,” he
whispered. “From the first day _you_ came I began to love you. I fought
against it hard, oh! so hard; I tried to talk little with you. Day after
day I felt you sitting there, with your great gypsy eyes fixed ever
steadily on your sheet of paper, and your heart going forth to me. I
knew it went forth to me. I could feel it in the room. A subtle wave or
thrill throbbed ever between us. I began to love you; and still I fought
hard. But the more we talked together the more did I feel you were the
woman God made for me, and that Meta was not. At last I had a great
struggle—a great struggle with my heart, and came out of it as I
thought victorious. I fled from you here, where the Donisthorpes had
come, to remain with Meta till the day I married her. It was what honour
demanded; I made love yield to honour.”
I withdrew my hand slowly. “Give me time to think this out. It has burst
upon me so suddenly. Oh, Romeo, till this moment I never dreamt you were
engaged to her.”
“Why _Romeo_?”
I smiled, though my heart was aching. I remembered that he did not know
what I had always called him. Now I told him my fancy. “You have never
been anything but _Romeo_ to me,” I murmured.
He seized my hand again. “Juliet, I _am_ your Romeo. I felt it from the
first. We were meant for one another.”
“I know it!” I cried. “I know it! And this woman, who is not yours, has
stolen you from me. You are mine by natural fitness; and she took you,
_she_ took you!”
We leaned back on the seats and mused. The gondolier sang low to himself
a soft Venetian love-song.
After some minutes I began again. “Of course,” I murmured, “it is Lady
Donisthorpe’s daughter.”
“Of course. Five years ago I proposed to her.”
“Then _why_ did you not marry?” I cried vehemently. “I _hate_ these long
engagements! They are vile for everybody!”
“Her stepfather would not permit it till she came of age. She is a ward
in Chancery, and he has influence with the court. Till her marriage her
mother has some interest in the property, and Sir Everard, to preserve
it, being fabulously rich already, made an excuse that a publisher was
hardly the person to whom she might expect to aspire—though he
permitted, or rather encouraged the engagement.”
“And she is not yet of age?”
“In October.”
I gave an impatient wave of the hand. “But she was a child when you
proposed to her!”
“A child? We were both children. We did not know our own minds. The
Nemesis of it is that I know mine now, while she remains still at the
childish standpoint.”
“She loves you?”
“In her baby way—yes; else it were all easy. But it would break her
poor heart. Such a trusting little creature!”
“And _you_ love _her_?”
“Juliet, I thought I did once. But then, I had not learnt what love
meant. She was only my Rosaline. I did not know the world of difference
between a sweet little wax doll, with masses of light yellow tow for
hair, and a woman, a thinking woman, with heart, soul, brain, courage—a
woman who could face life full of intrepid self-reliance; a woman with
nerve, audacity, spirit; a woman with Homeric love of danger and
adventure; a woman made dearer by her sense of humour, the merry twinkle
of her eye, her gay laugh at misfortune. I feel now that I need a
comrade and a helpmeet for me. Someone who could brace me up for the
battle of life; someone with great thoughts, fine fibre, noble impulses.
I cannot go back to Meta. I could have done it last night. This morning,
with you by my side, I feel it, I know it, impossible.”
He drew a long breath. I lay back on the cushion. “Romeo,” I said,
pleading my rival’s cause, “you _must_ go back to her.”
“Never!” he answered, “never!”
I temporised. “This is not a question to decide all at once. Let us
think it over slowly; let us lay it—before St. Nicholas!”
“If I lay it before St. Nicholas,” he cried, “with you beside me, the
oracle can give but one answer, I warrant. For I want you; I need you;
my whole being cries out for you.”
We paused again. The water was cat’s-eye green. The inexorable gondola
glided on towards the Lido.
We talked it over clause by clause. A light began to break upon me. The
nearer I drew to San Nicolò the clearer grew the light. Ought a man to
wreck two lives—his own and the girl’s whom he means to marry (for my
private fate I ignored)—in order to satisfy a false sense of honour?
What, after all, was this honour? A bugbear dressed up to frighten us
from the truth. And what was the truth? That Romeo was rushing madly
into marriage with a girl for whom he was not fit, and who was not fit
for him.
“Romeo,” I said at last, “could you make her happy?”
“That’s the rub,” he answered. “It could hardly be for long. I could
give her my hand, but not my heart; for my heart, my heart, Juliet, is
yours—yours only.”
“Then for _her_ sake set her free,” I cried. “The whole man—body, soul,
and spirit—or nothing.”
“So I think,” he murmured. “The question is, when one has made a
mistake, a mistake that involves final ruin for two lives, which is the
better, after all: to repair it beforehand, while repair is still
possible, or bow to an antiquated ideal of honour, an ideal that comes
to us from an age when women were toys, all alike, and run one’s head
into a noose from which there will be no escaping? For her sake, as well
as my own and yours, ought I not to tell her, frankly but gently, that
this marriage she desires must mean misery for both of us?”
I tried to be impartial, though impartiality is hard when your own love
and life lie trembling in the balance. “You ought,” I answered, “if you
feel sure you cannot truly love her.”
“Juliet, I can never love anyone but you. I know you for my counterpart.
My love did not come suddenly; it grew up by degrees from living so near
you; and it has grown, grown, grown, like a vast growth in my heart,
till it has absorbed my nature. I have watched you every day, talked
with you, listened to you. You know me and you understand me. But Meta,
dear little soul, she seems to me like a child. I cannot share life with
her. I can only take care of her. You have originality, initiative;
Meta’s soul has the shape that her mother has put upon it. Look how you
loved and appreciated my verses! Your criticism, your help, were of
infinite use to me. In each word that you altered I felt you were right.
Your suggestion of ‘harmonious’ in that last line where I had written
‘consistent’ made a full close for the sonnet, in sonorous organ music,
and turned my prose into poetry. Whereas, when I gave Meta my book she
read it through, and then kissed me. ‘How clever of you, you dear boy,
to be able to write verses!’ Would _such_ a help be meet for me?”
I clung to his hand; it was hard to decide; but in a very low voice I
faltered out, “I think not, Romeo.”
He talked of my poor attempts at writing stories; he praised them, as he
had always done. “You will be famous yet, my child; and I shall be
proud, whatever comes, that I was the first to encourage you.” He
appreciated me, I appreciated him; surely, if marriages are made in
heaven, we two were moulded for one another. Not alike, but
complementary. And then, how rash to dream of marrying one woman when,
even before marriage, you love another better! Is _that_ the way to
insure a happy home? Is that the safe path to a life of wedded
confidence?
We drew near to San Nicolò at last. “Let us go in,” I said seriously,
“and submit ourselves to the saint. His body lies within. We will kneel
together before it.”
“But I thought you told me St. Nicholas lay throned in a gorgeous shrine
at Bari?” he objected.
“Why, of course,” I answered. “What is the use of being a saint if you
cannot have two bodies, and be in two places at once? And what is the
use of faith if it does not enable you to believe the impossible?”
“I _do_ believe it,” he answered; “since I came to Venice to be out of
your enchantment, and found you here, more deliciously enchanting than
ever. The fascination of your eyes——”
I cut him short with a gesture; but I was glad he praised them.
We landed by the steps, and entered the sailors’ church. I led Romeo up
to a scalloped niche by the tribune, where I had often prayed as a girl
with my father. We knelt down, side by side, before the jewelled shrine
that contains the blessed dust of St. Nicholas of Myra, I hope not
irreverently. I may be what the Warden at our Guild was fond of calling
me, “an amiable heathen,” but at least I am sincere. Tears stole down my
cheek. I asked with an earnest heart for light, for guidance. We know
not, indeed, whose saintly bones repose at peace within that sculptured
marble altar-tomb; nor does it matter to me much whether they be or be
not those of the benign bishop of Myra. I accepted them as the symbol of
that Power, above ourselves, to which our hearts go forth at moments of
doubt, of fear, of anguish; and to such a Power I prayed unfeignedly,
that at this turning-point of my life I might be led aright, might form
the just judgment, unbiassed by self-profit, holding an equal scale
between myself and my rival.
As I knelt there a single flashing ray of light beat down through a
little window above upon San Nicolò’s altar-slab. It gilt the niche for
a moment; it fell in gold on the tessellated floor; then it passed away
as a cloud covered the sun. Rightly or wrongly, I accepted the omen.
Tears stood in my eyes still, but they were tears of gladness. “St.
Nicholas has answered,” I whispered. “What did he say to you, Romeo?”
Romeo looked me in the face solemnly as he made reply. “He said, ‘Better
tell her early than tell her too late. Save her while she can be saved,
and let three hearts be lightened.’”
Venice hung like a haze. The row back to the Molo was a lane in
Paradise.
CHAPTER XX.
“WHEREFORE ART THOU ROMEO?”
At the Molo we parted. The Donisthorpes, Romeo said, must long have been
expecting him, fidgeting that he did not arrive; he knew not what lame
excuse he could rake up to satisfy them. It was agreed on both sides,
however, and impressed with last words, that he must not break poor
Meta’s heart prematurely, by too abrupt an avowal of his new decision.
We were to break it by degrees—to give her three days of purgatory.
Meanwhile, Romeo promised he would not see me again, at least to speak
together; though he asked leave, wistfully, to pass under my window once
each morning and smile at me, just so as to make sure of my presence. I
wanted this interval; I wished to see whether he would remain firm to
his purpose when he was removed for a day or two from that “magnetism”
of my eyes on which he dwelt so strongly.
I spent the three days of grace in wandering about Venice. For the most
part, I avoided the great square, St. Mark’s, the Academy—all the
familiar tourist haunts—because I did not desire collision with the
Donisthorpes. Most of my time I devoted to the out-of-the-way streets
and the out-of-the-way sights, which are so infinitely amusing; the
funny little alleys where the true Venetians stroll; the funny little
_campi_, where old men and children lie stretched in the shade on the
north side of some small church, as fallow-deer huddle on the north side
of the domed oaks in a park at noontide. Every turn revealed some
passing picture. As I had said to Romeo, it was all Venice. Not a remote
sunless lane, with walls of peeling plaster, tufted with pellitory, that
is not dear to my heart; not a sluggish side canal, into whose stagnant
green water branches of acacia and trailing sprays of Virginia creeper
hang from beyond the mouldering garden grill, but I love and cherish it.
Little Romanesque windows, high up on some red-washed steeple, with twin
round arches, tall and narrow, held apart in the midst by one twisted
column; great patches of sunlight falling through quatrefoils in
dazzling relief on the deep recessed gloom of the loggia; wee bridges
that rise, arched like a cat’s back, over streams strewn with
cabbage-leaves, where market boats from Mestre, laden high with
pumpkins, crawl slowly down the channel—do I not know them all? Are
they not etched on my brain by some fadeless process of mental
photography?
In spite of my haunting these remoter by-ways, however, I did once by
accident catch sight of the Donisthorpes. They were seated with the
prebendary at a _café_ in the great Piazza, as I crossed it one
afternoon on my way home from San Zaccaria, where I had been feasting on
saints in the placid enjoyment of every form of martyrdom. Sir Everard,
leaning back on his chair and sipping black coffee, with a small brown
cap pushed well off his forehead, a brown tourist suit, and a capacious
yellow waistcoat, amply displayed in front of him, looked more absurdly
like a fat toad than ever. Lady Donisthorpe, smiling sweetly upon Venice
in general, with her lady-like softness, her mechanical amiability, her
pouter-pigeon suavity, yet showed marks about the eyes of some inner
dissatisfaction. They did not observe me; I stole close behind them,
anxious to see the immaculate colourless Meta; I wished to know for
myself what manner of girl she might be; but she was not with them—gone
off, no doubt, for a stroll round the square with Romeo. That thought
drove me quickly home; like a frightened rabbit, I rushed under the
clock-tower and along the thronged Merceria to my hotel on a side canal;
I could not have endured to see them together like lovers.
Had I no qualms meanwhile? Aye, marry, had I? Do you think I slept much
through those three long nights of suspense and torture? If I tramped
from church to church and picture to picture during the day, ’twas but
to escape from my own stinging thoughts for a moment. I argued it all
out over and over again with myself. When we two had been seated side by
side in the gondola—Romeo’s arm half stealing round my waist, my head
half pillowed one second on Romeo’s shoulder—the question of ethics had
been translucent as crystal. We saw quite clearly our course was mapped
out for us by eternal equities. Even in Meta’s interest, I was advising
him for the best. “The whole man,” I had said—“body, soul, and
spirit—or else nothing!” That was woman’s full gospel of the new
dispensation. Less than that could be no true marriage. And “is it not
better, under such conditions, to change one’s mind early than to change
it too late? Is it not better for you to speak the truth, even at great
risk of pain and humiliation to a woman you have loved, than to tie her
for life to a man who cannot give her his whole heart unreservedly,
enthusiastically? Is it not better for her to be made miserable once
than to be made miserable for ever?” In advising Romeo to break off this
one-sided engagement, was I not advising him most of all in Meta
Donisthorpe’s interest?
At times I even felt as if I had succeeded in doing a great favour,
unasked, to Meta.
But in the dead hour of night, when all Venice slept, and the last
“Stalì!” had answered the last “Premè!” under my bedroom window, one
stanza of “In Memoriam” kept ever recurring most inopportunely to my
mind; I heard it in the creaking of the vane on the Dogana, in the lap
of the water against the honeycombed walls, in the sigh of the wind
through the arches of the belfry. It was a reproachful sound—the voice
of that conscience which I flattered myself the generation of whom I am
one had analysed away for ever.
“Hold thou the good; define it well;
For fear divine Philosophy
Should push beyond her mark, and be
Procuress to the Lords of Hell.”
The Lords of Hell! The Lords of Hell! It clanged with the hour from the
great Campanile! Was that where my sophisms were taking me, I wondered?
The Lords of Hell! The Lords of Hell! Had I advised Romeo aright, as the
woman who loves a man should strive to advise him at dangerous passes?
On the third day of the three I rose early from my sleepless bed—tired
of tossing off the quilt—and wandered out by myself eastward through
the tortuous labyrinth of elbow-bending streets that spreads between St.
Mark’s and St. George of the Slavonians. I was bound no whither in
particular; I let each narrow flagged alley, each canal-side causeway,
lead me onward where it would; but, without design on my part, I found
myself at last on the small paved platform with the slimy green steps
that catches the morning sun, in front of San Giorgio degli Schiavoni.
“San Giorgio!” I thought to myself; “I must stray in here for awhile for
rest and meditation. After Nicholas of Myra, has not the ever-blessed
George been most of all my patron? Let me lay before him my doubts—a
poor maiden’s doubts; it may be that the courteous young saint will
resolve them.”
I pushed aside the padded curtain, and sat down on one of the seats.
Venetian women were there with their babies, praying—dark-haired,
dusky-eyed, poorly-clad, eager-spirited. For a while my eyes strayed to
those ever-exquisite Carpaccios, high ranged on the left-hand wall,
which tell the pretty tale of the tutelary saint with naïve Venetian
idealistic realism. I scarce knew which of the two chief actors I
admired the more—in the episode of the slaying of the dragon, so
familiar to me from my own life, the beautiful, graceful youth, with his
loose golden hair rippling free on the wind; or, in the scene of the
baptism, the kneeling Princess Cleodolind, her long, fair tresses
flowing richly down her back as she bends to receive the sacrament of
the font at the hands of her chivalrous and devout deliverer. St.
George, I fancied, in his earnest, clear face, somehow recalled my
Romeo; but the Princess—I shuddered: what ill-omen was this? The
Princess whom he baptised was a fair-haired maiden. I knew Meta was
fair—had he not spoken of her “masses of yellow tow”? A cold thrill ran
down my spine. Oh, St. Nicholas—oh, St. George, avert the omen!
I pulled out my little silver crucifix, and, clasping it tight, decided
to lay my case before the Madonna herself, who reigns in the
altar-piece. Am I a Catholic, then? you ask. That is alien to this
story. There are three subjects which I decline to discuss: bimetallism,
the sex question, and my religious convictions.
As I bent my knee before Our Lady on the shrine a low sob by my side
distracted my attention. It came from a young girl a little apart in the
gloom. Her face lay hidden in her hands—small gloved hands, like a
lady’s; but her fine-fibred hair was golden and luxuriantly abundant. I
glanced from her to the Carpaccio, and from the Carpaccio to her. Yes,
it could not be gainsaid—this was the Princess Cleodolind.
Had her St. George proved untrue? She was crying bitterly.
I knew at once that was the right explanation. The sound of her sobs
betrayed it. For there are species in crying. There is the cry of the
mother for the loss of her son; there is the cry of the wife for the
faithlessness of her husband; there is the cry of the maiden for the
defection of her lover. Each has its own note, recognisable at the first
sound to those who have once heard it. We talk in such cases of woman’s
intuition; it were truer, I think, to call it inference, for inference
it is from delicate observation. All women observe keenly the symptoms
of emotion; at moments of exaltation or passion they observe them with
an almost miraculous acuteness. I knew in a second that Cleodolind had
lost her lover’s heart; and I guessed in a flash that Cleodolind was
Meta.
She was dressed like a lady; and out at this early hour; when she and I,
alone of our class, driven from our beds by alternative aspects of the
self-same problem, were abroad among the fisherwomen.
I gazed at her with the respect one always accords to sorrow. My heart
misgave me. How easy it was in the gondola to philosophise in the
abstract; but here, on dry land, and in sight of this poor child with
the breaking heart—philosophy in the concrete seemed to present its own
fresh difficulties.
Of a sudden she raised her face, and glanced across at me, piteously.
Her eyes met mine. I started. The wisp of a figure, the pathetic blue
eyes, the sunny fluff of hair: it was Michaela.
I took it in with a great gulp. Michaela was Meta, then, and Meta
Michaela.
I could not understand it, for the inscription on her card said, not
Donisthorpe, but “Miss Allardyce”; and had she not told me that her
Christian name was Margaret? But I had no time to think it out just
then. With a little cry of pleasure, she came over to me, still weeping.
“You dear thing!” she whispered, holding out her gloved hand, “what a
comfort to see you! I want to have a talk with you. You were so good to
me at Holmwood.”
I saw it was inevitable. I must face Meta now. I took her hand in mine,
with a deep sense of repentant treachery. “Come out with me, dear,” I
said, for she melted my heart. “Tell me all your trouble.”
She pressed my hand in return. “I knew you would be good to me,” she
answered. “You are odd, but oh, so good. I saw it in your big eyes the
first day I met you. Do you know, your eyes are magnetic; they seem to
draw one.”
“So I have been told,” I answered bitterly.
“Where can we go to talk?” she asked. She had a caressing voice. “I am
sure you will do me good. And I do so want to talk this over with
somebody else besides mamma. Mamma is like a feather-bed. She is kind in
her way, but so soft and comfortable. Nothing seems to make a dint in
her.”
Inventiveness forsook me. I had no suggestion to offer except another
gondola. And even at that moment, when the world whirled round madly
with myself for pivot, I was dimly conscious, as one is often conscious
of such trifles at a great crisis, that always in Venice, when people
wanted a _tête-à-tête_, they must have taken a gondola. Nowhere else in
that tangle of narrow streets and small squares could one go unobserved
for a second.
We called a gondolier. “Where shall we tell him to take us?” Michaela
asked. It was not in her nature to suggest a route spontaneously.
“Out on the open,” I replied. “We shall be less overlooked there.” Then
I added a little morosely, “If you are not afraid I shall drown you.”
She smiled through her tears. “You were always so queer,” she said, “but
so kind.” She did not guess how much more reason I had now for drowning
her. She jumped lightly into the boat; she was a light little atomy; you
could have blown her away with a good puff, like thistledown.
The gondolier took us across by San Giorgio Maggiore. Michaela sat by my
side, holding my hand in hers. If ever in my life, I felt guilty that
minute.
So all those months I had been doing in earnest what I had said in
jest—unconsciously playing Carmen to her Michaela. I had stolen away
her Don José—and had never known it!
She told me hurriedly how the man to whom she was engaged had always
seemed to love her, oh, so much—till five months ago; how, since that
time, his love had been gradually fading; how it had faded all away,
till she was wretched, hopeless!
She cried so intensely that I laid her head on my shoulder. ’Twas a soft
little head. I felt like a man to her as I tried to comfort her.
“Five years,” she sobbed out: “five years—all forgotten!”
“You must have been a child at the time when you began to love him,” I
murmured.
She raised her head. “Yes, a child. That’s what makes it so much worse!
We have loved and been loved since we were both children. Every thought,
every pleasure, we have shared with one another. I was cycling with him
that day when I first met you. We have grown up together. He has grown
into my heart—ever closer and closer.”
“What is his name?” I asked, trembling.
She told me. I hardly needed to ask it.
“Why, I know him a little,” I said. “But I thought—he was engaged to a
daughter of Lady Donisthorpe’s.”
“Yes, of course. Lady Donisthorpe is my mother.”
“But—her name is Meta; and you are Margaret Allardyce?”
“Mamma married again; I told you I had a stepfather.”
She went on with her story. She loved him more and more. Her heart was
bound up with him. After so long a time, too! If he had told her three
years ago—— But five years—you could never make five years seem
nothing.
“And can you account for it?” I inquired, to see how much she knew,
stroking her sunny hair with my hand as I did so.
“You _dear_ thing! How sweetly sympathetic you are! Oh, yes, but it is
almost too dreadful to tell. A hateful woman—a type-writer girl at his
office! Could you ever have believed a person like _that_ would come
between us?”
“Perhaps,” I ventured to suggest, “she did not mean it.”
“Did not mean it? Oh, she did: the dreadful creature, she has bewitched
him! He loves _her_ best now. And yet, you would think that the years
must count; the years must count!” She sobbed, and became inaudible.
“Has he told you of her?” I faltered.
“Oh! no; he says nothing. He only lets me feel it. But mamma met her
once at a dinner Toto gave at the Savoy—a hateful vulgar creature!
Mamma and his mother both spoke to him of the way he treated her—the
attention he paid her—bringing a woman like that to dine with ladies,
it was unpardonable.”
“Some type-writers _are_ ladies, Michaela,” I put in softly. “I am a
type-writer myself.”
“Ah! yes, but that is different! you are so sweet, so gentle. You know
so much; you have been brought up like a lady; you have sympathy and
magnetism. This other creature—mother said it was horrid to be in the
same room with her. So loud, so noisy! And she’s here now, she’s here;
she has followed him to Venice on purpose to thwart us. He came out to
stay with me till the day we were to be married. And this woman, when
she saw her hold on him was failing, rushed after him to prevent it. Can
you believe such wickedness? Mamma saw her with him in a gondola. Oh! I
can’t bear to say it, dear, in a gondola, near the Riva, with his arm
around her!”
“Perhaps,” I hazarded, “when she came here she did not know he was
engaged. Perhaps, if we could speak to her we might play upon some chord
in her better nature.”
Michaela looked up at me admiringly. “You beautiful, broad-minded
person,” she cried; “how good you are, how tolerant! You make allowances
and excuses for everyone, I declare! How I wish I was like you! But she
_has_ no better nature, I believe. Mamma says she is a person lost to
all sense of shame. Why, the stories she told at that dinner of Toto’s
about the places she had been in and the people she had met were quite
beyond, you know, quite beyond; oh, too dreadful for anything.”
I risked another card. “My dear little friend,” I said, “I speak of the
thing that I know: she _has_ a better nature.” (Oh, God, how it was
battling now against love of Romeo in her heart; how it was grappling
and struggling!) “I am almost sure I have met this girl of whom you
speak. There is a type-writer stopping at the same hotel as myself, and
I think she was out in a gondola the other day with your Romeo—let us
call him Romeo; it is ‘more real and agreeable,’ as Dick Swiveller said
to the Marchioness, and ’tis the only way in which I can talk about
people.” I maundered on, to gain time, for though outwardly I was
jesting, within I was fighting wild beasts at Ephesus. “Now, she has
talked to me of your Romeo, and I assure you solemnly, when she arrived
in Venice she had not an idea he was engaged—of that I am confident.”
“Ah, but she knows it now, I am sure; and yet, she bewitches him!”
I played one card still, a more doubtful and dangerous card than any.
“Perhaps,” I answered. “But the years must count. You are right in that.
Remember, as you say, I am (I hope) broad-minded. I try to see things
from everybody’s point of view. From yours, I see now that Romeo is
behaving—cruelly. From the type-writer girl’s, I see that she loves him
deeply, very deeply; but ’tis a new love, fresh grown; however firmly it
may have rooted itself, it has no claim on the score of age as against
yours; and if she is told so calmly and frankly, she may perhaps realise
it. From Romeo’s, I see—well, more than I like to tell you.” I paused
and hesitated. The effort to gain time made me didactic. “Life is the
interaction of individualities,” I said, “each seeing things its own
way. Justice is the attempt to reconcile them. Let us try here if we can
make this type-writer girl see something a little beyond her own point
of view—see, as you say, that the years must count. She is not wholly
bad, whatever Lady Donisthorpe may tell you. I will be your ambassador.
I will speak to _her_; I will speak to Romeo. I will try to make them
feel what you have made me feel—that the years should count. And I will
come to San Giorgio of the Slavonians to tell you what success I have
had in my embassy at this time to-morrow.”
She brightened up at the idea. She thanked me profusely. “He loves me
still,” she said, “a little; only, this girl bewitches him. Oh, I have
read about her eyes and her hair in his verses. He thought no one knew;
he put it so darkly—all wrapped up in words; but I could see they were
hers, though he thinks me so silly. I am clever enough where one’s heart
is concerned; I can catch at a straw then. But if _she_ were once away,
I am sure he would come back to me.” She nestled into my shoulder. “You
_dear_ thing!” she cried again, grinding her teeth with affection, “you
have put fresh hope in me.”
“Thank you, dear,” I answered. “Do you remember at Holmwood I called you
Michaela, because you were so fair, like the girl in the opera? Now,
this type-writer girl is dark, and she has been playing Carmen to
you—stealing your love away from you by her clever ways and her
blandishments. She has gypsy attractiveness. But, Michaela, I am sure
she did not mean it. If she had known of you, if she might have seen
you, she could not have wronged you. Do you recollect what I said to you
in the train that day—‘You dear little thing, no one could ever hurt
you!’? Well, I am sure the type-writer woman would feel as I do—if she
knew you. But I want to make you promise me one thing—if I bring you
back your Romeo, you will forgive her?—you will never again call her a
horrid creature?”
She soothed my hand in turn. “I could promise you anything,” she said.
“I never knew anyone so tender and helpful.”
We bid the gondolier turn. She held my hand still; blue sky in her eyes
shone after the rain. “Only to think,” she cried, “I have met you three
times—no more; and yet I feel you are a dear friend—the sort of friend
who would do anything for one.”
“You have reason,” I answered.
We returned to the Molo. A crushed heart and a doubtful one had embarked
in that gondola; a crushed heart and a doubtful one disembarked from it
again. But they had changed places.
Three days ago I had seen through the gates of Paradise. To-day an angel
with a flaming sword stood to bar my entrance. And, worst of all, I knew
his name was Justice.
CHAPTER XXI.
ENVOY PLENIPOTENTIARY.
I trailed back to my hotel, surely the most abject soul in Venice.
Michaela’s misapprehension of my motives I did not resent; the American
eagle in my breast had scarce a flap left—a more draggle-plumed bird I
had seldom seen. But all was at an end. I had lost my Romeo.
My interview with the first of the two delinquents whom I had engaged to
lure back to the path of rectitude I got over quickly on my way home. It
was not a hard one. The culprit, sitting meekly on the penitent’s bench,
listened to all my blame with a contrite heart; and in consideration of
her contrition I condoned her evil deeds. It was easy to condone, for
here I knew all, and to know all is to forgive all. Michaela would have
forgiven had she seen into that poor mangled heart as I did.
Looking back over my life dispassionately from the calm height of
twenty-three, as if I were looking at some other woman’s life, I think I
can say I have never acted wrong—grossly and unforgivably wrong—given
the circumstances. It is those alone that others fail to understand. If
they understood, they must sympathise where now they blame us.
Could Michaela have watched, stage by stage, the slow organic growth of
my love for Romeo; could she have felt the inevitability, the
consecutiveness of the way it unfolded; could she have realised its
foregone certainty as an outcome of two natures, I think, dear little
soul, even she would have hesitated to call me “that horrid woman.”
But it was all past now, and she had regained her Romeo.
One culprit had recanted. I had still to face my embassy to the second
high contracting party.
I sat by the balconied open window of my bedroom and looked down into
the canal. It was almost the hour for Romeo’s daily passage. Slow barges
with firewood drifted lazily by, then a boat-load of purple egg-fruit
and heaped golden melons, with a gondola or two loitering on the look
out for passengers, like our London crawlers.
At last my heart began to beat, not high as it had beaten the two
previous mornings, but with a low foreboding. Another gondola swung with
a graceful curve round the huge bosses of the corner palace; in it, a
familiar crush Tyrolese hat, and beneath the hat, Romeo.
He gazed up at me, smiled, and waved one hand; but his look was anxious.
I leaned out and called to him: “Romeo, Romeo, Romeo!”
He rose and glanced at me with checked breath and eager eyes.
“Come up here,” I faltered; “I want to speak with you.”
“In your room?” he cried, hesitating.
I felt it was no moment to stand on false convention. “Yes, in my room,”
I answered. “Have I not told you I have confidence in myself and my
guardian angel?”
He waved the gondolier to the steps, leaped lightly out, English athlete
that he was, and was with me in a moment.
I might have treated the situation melodramatically and hissed out at
him “Traitor!” (But then, it is true, I unconsciously shared his
treachery.) Instead of that I treated it like a woman, and burst into
tears before him.
He drew a chair by my side. His white face quivered. “You have seen
Meta?” he faltered out.
I could feel his heart throb.
“Yes,” I answered, “I have seen her, and—I find I know her. Romeo, we
were all wrong. We were deceiving our own hearts with specious sophisms.
She said to me in her soft small voice, all choked with tears, ‘The
years must count; the years must count!’—and—she was right when she
said it!”
He flung himself upon me. “Juliet!” he cried, “dear Juliet, I too have
suffered. I have battled with my own soul. The beast has fought the
angel and the angel the man in me. When I see her, when I am with
her—so gentle, so childish, so cruelly hurt by my coldness, or what she
thinks my coldness—how can I have the heart to break to her the
resolution we formed? Yet the moment I leave her I know it is the right
one. It would be wrong of me to marry her now, having found my true
mate—wrong for her own sake. ‘The whole man—body, soul, and spirit—or
nothing.’ Do not go back on your own words. It would be treason to the
eternal cause of woman.”
He spoke so vehemently that I faltered.
Then Michaela’s pale face, with the gentle blue eyes swollen red from
weeping, came up like a mist before me. “You shall not wrong that
child!” I cried. “Much as I love you, Romeo, not even for my sake will I
allow you to wrong her. She is right and we are wrong; the years must
count. She has grown up with your love inextricably twined by rootlets
and tendrils through the fibre of her being; to tear it away now were to
tear her very heart out. She lives on your affection. To see is to
understand; before I saw her I thought as we thought at the Lido. Now I
know better. I will not allow you to wrong her.”
He drew away a step and looked me over with his keen eyes from head to
foot. I quailed before his glance, so full it was of admiration. “My
Juliet!” he cried. “Why talk? I love you for _this_ better than I have
ever loved you! That you can contemplate such a sacrifice for honour’s
sake and for justice—the greater to the less, you to Meta—shows me you
are more worthy to be loved than even I thought you. I _cannot_ marry
anyone but you. You, you, you! O, God,” he flung himself upon me in an
ecstasy, “to think that in a world which holds such a woman as you they
should call upon me to content myself with that wax doll of a Meta!”
I untwined his arms quietly. I was fighting now the battle of my sex,
and I almost forgot myself in my advocacy of Michaela. “You shall not
speak so of her!” I cried; “the girl whom you have loved for years—the
girl to whom you have uttered such vows, on whom you have bestowed such
kisses. It is an insult to our sex. The years must count—the years and
the endearments.”
He stood away and began again. “Juliet,” he murmured, in caressing
tones, and in his flute-like voice, as if he loved to repeat my name,
“there is one woman in the world supremely fitted for me. She has
courage, she has wit, imagination, fancy. She can hold her own;
vivacious, brave, strenuous. One of her stray black elf-locks is worth
all Meta’s loose gold. Yet she has high purpose enough to plead another
woman’s cause against her own heart, her own happiness. Her brain is
alert; her eye electric; her soul womanly. The more she argues, the more
does she make me admire her, reverence her, worship her. Go on pleading
if you will, dear heart; I love to hear you, to watch you; but every
word you say, every hand you move, for Meta, only strengthens my resolve
that you I will have, or I will have nobody. Against your will, I will
make you happy.”
He sat down by my side again, and bent towards me coaxingly. In his low
sweet voice he began to reason. I listened while he said over again
every argument we had used together by the shrine of St. Nicholas, with
others like them. If he married Meta, how could she hold his heart? She
would be the mistress of his house, a sort of superior pet bird, to be
tricked out in fine feathers, to be coaxed, stroked, fondled; but not a
wife. If he married me, we should go through the world together, equally
paired, soul-wedded, each mirroring the other’s mind, each respecting,
admiring, reinforcing the other. We two were natural complements. Why
seek to throw him back from the higher upon the lower?
I listened and trembled. What he said was so flattering to one’s own
inner vanity, seemed so exactly what one thought in private when one
dared to be frank with oneself, had such a show of eternal and immutable
reason, that the temptation to go back on my word and accept his
argument as true was almost irresistible. If I had not seen Michaela, I
think I should have yielded. Love, one’s own heart, the man one adores
at one’s feet, these are dangerous assailants. But I closed my eyes, and
there Michaela’s blue eyes rose up, appealing to me in the gondola, with
that piteous cry, “The years must count; the years must count!” wailed
out ever from her heart; and I knew I was fighting the common battle of
womanhood. If I were to turn traitor now, I should turn traitor to
whatever I had within me best worth calling a conviction.
He seized my hand and kissed it. When the lips of the man you love touch
you, it is hard to refuse. But I drew the hand away. He followed it up.
His breath was warm upon my cheek. My bosom rose in a tumult. I began to
fear I had presumed too much upon my guardian angel. If Romeo pressed me
hard now, I must throw Michaela overboard—I must forget his honour, the
years that count, the battle of my sex, all that is sacred on earth,
everything save myself and Romeo. If he asked me, I must say, “Yes; let
the white girl go; I will be yours, my Romeo.”
Then, conscious of my own weakness—with an impulse as if from without,
of a sudden I flung myself on my knees, and prayed silently and
earnestly for strength to do right, strength to refrain from betraying
Michaela.
Romeo stood off with clasped hands, observing me in dead silence.
I rose from my knees another woman. The soul of womanhood found voice
within me. “Romeo, dear Romeo,” I cried, facing him, and speaking like
one inspired, “it is not a question for you; it is a question for me. I
love you with all my soul; but I refuse to marry you. I will not be a
traitor; the years must count: go back to Meta!”
He caught my hand in his. I let it lie like a stone. “Do not send me
away,” he implored. “Let me stop with you a little!”
I sank into a chair. He did the same. “But remember,” I gasped, between
two sighs, “this is final.”
Tears rose to his eyes. He began to speak once more. “You must not
think, dearest,” he said, “I have not felt for Meta. Not all these
nights have I slept; but, honestly, in the dark, I thought it out, and I
came to the conclusion it would be best in the end—even for Meta.”
“Romeo,” I said, raising my eyes, “do you love me?”
He made a hasty gesture as if he would fling himself upon me once more.
I waved him off with one open palm. “Then promise me, promise me, you
will go back to Meta.”
“I cannot!” he cried. “I love you.”
“Will you go back to Meta?”
It was a hard, long struggle. We parried, thrust, marched,
countermarched, evaded; but I had taken it in hand, and I determined to
finish it. Inch by inch falling back, but still fighting, he gave way.
He saw I was in earnest. Behind each line of defence, each logical
hedge, he tried to argue it out again. I cut him short with a hasty
gesture. “A man, yes, he can forget the years; but a woman—never!”
At last, worn out, he promised. In the agony of my excitement I took his
yielding as a personal triumph. I had asked of my lover a difficult
gift, and by dint of woman’s armoury, had prevailed on him to grant it.
“But—you will stop on at the office?” he asked at last, holding his
breath.
I turned on him. “How could I? For Meta’s sake, impossible; for my own,
an infamy.”
“And—I must never see you again?”
I bowed my head. “These things are made so. It is _yes_ or _no_. If
_yes_, for life; if _no_, then never.”
He advanced towards me, with his lips trembling visibly. “I may say
good-bye?” he faltered.
My heart leaped to break its strings. I knew not what to say. At
last—“Yes, if it is good-bye, and if you go back to Meta.”
He seized me in his arms. I will not deny that for one whole minute I
lay there sobbing, happy. It is little, for a lifetime. Then I moved him
away softly. He clung to me, panting. “Now you must go,” I whispered.
“Do not tell her it was _I_. Keep my secret!”
I opened the door. For a second he lingered. I waved him away. I could
endure it no longer. Looking back and breathing hard, he passed through
into the passage. I turned the key in the lock to satisfy myself that
that embassy was fulfilled; then I fell on the bed, and cried a low cry,
“Romeo! Romeo!”
CHAPTER XXII.
I CLING TO THE RIGGING.
So my poor little Odyssey had come to an end in shipwreck! Mr. Samuel
Butler must be wrong, after all. I doubt a woman’s ability to handle
these sustained epics. I was to get no farther on my way to Ithaca than
the episode of Phæacia. Nor would any Nausicaa come forth to aid me.
After I had cried my heart’s full—cried till that point when you begin
to leave off and to laugh like a child at nothing, for pure
weariness—the humorous element, which inevitably enters into all human
tragedy, pressed itself upon me. On the stage, art never lets these
incongruous incidents intervene at critical moments to disturb the
current: in real life, they _will_ obtrude their faces, like Paul Pry;
and ’tis my misfortune and my good luck that, with some grain of Heine
in my composition, I cannot shut my eyes to them. So here, the comic
muse, masquerading as Common Sense, stepped in with one grotesque
reminder: “You have no money to pay your way back to London.”
Now, gypsy or American or Anglo-Indian or what you will, I am true
Briton in this, that whatever misfortune lowers, I see one path of
safety—the road home to London. “If only I could get back to London!”
is the Briton’s heart-felt cry of distress in a foreign land. He can
starve in comfort, so he may starve in Piccadilly.
I have already explained that I am wholly free from the vile vice of
prudence. To take no thought for the morrow is to me an article of
religion, though ’tis rare among those who profess to accept it as a
divine injunction. Acting on this principle, I had bought a single
second-class ticket to Venice, as my funds were insufficient to pay for
a return. It was my idea, when I started, to trust for my journey home
to the saint who lies at the Lido. Now, however, I found myself in an
awkward predicament. St. Nicholas had played me a last bad turn. I had
bought perforce a new travelling costume before I left England, for I
recognised that my rational dress with the knickerbockers would
harmonise ill with the genius of Venice; the rest of my cash in hand had
gone for beds at Lucerne or Milan, and passing necessaries. I stood face
to face with an Italian court of bankruptcy; liabilities, my hotel bill;
assets, five paper lire.
To borrow from Romeo was now clearly impossible. And the canals are so
redolent of thirty generations of Venetian refuse that suicide does not
offer here its normal allurements.
This brought the revulsion. I lay on my bed and laughed to think that,
broken heart or not, I could not get away from Venice.
By evening, I had a headache. I was crying once more. But the worst of
headache is that it never kills.
Early next morning I woke from a short snatch of sleep with a dull pain
in my left side. It was moral, not physical. I rose, to ease it by
action. _Oubliez; voyagez!_ I had still qualms of conscience—I who
fancied I had dissected conscience out of existence: but this time they
were reversed. Had I done right, after all, in speeding Romeo to his
fate? Would Michaela be a mate for him? Was it not better as it was
before—for the greatest happiness of the greatest number at least? St.
Nicholas, help! John Stuart Mill, stand by me!
I dressed, bathed my red eyes, and went out to keep my appointment. I
was early at San Giorgio, but Michaela was before me. As I lifted the
heavy curtain, her eyes shone happiness. In her radiant countenance I
read my doom. She was calmly, serenely joyous. I beckoned her to the
_campo_. She flitted out, and with a charming baby impulse flung her
arms around me.
Tears rose in my eyes. It was sweet to see her happy. I held her hand
and said nothing.
“Well, he has explained all,” she whispered. “You were a dear to speak
to him.”
“Explained!” I cried. How true it is that explanations explain nothing!
“Yes, he told mamma he did not know the type-writer girl was coming to
Venice. He went out with her in a gondola because he met her by
accident—and it was such a surprise to him; and he wanted to avoid
mamma. But he is not going to see her again, and I believe he will
dismiss her.”
“No, dear,” I said gently, unable to restrain myself, “he will _not_
dismiss her, because—she will go away of her own accord. She does not
intend to remain with him. I have seen her, and I can assure you she is
better than you think. She did not know Romeo was engaged; and when she
fully realised it she relinquished all claim to him, or rather admitted
she had never had one. Michaela, dear child, you must not be hard upon
her. You promised to forgive her. I feel sure she has suffered, for she
loved him devotedly.”
“How good you are!” Michaela cried. “You sympathise so with everyone!”
“She has promised me,” I went on, “that she will never again see him,
that she will avoid him with care, that she will not speak to him nor
write to him. She will try to forget him, though to forget him is as
impossible for her as for you. But she will be true to you; she will
keep her word. I can answer for her as I could answer for myself; she
spoke with such earnestness. She is tearing out her heart; but because
she thinks it right she will tear it out ruthlessly.”
Michaela smiled a tranquil smile. “And it is all right now,” she said.
“We are to be married in October, as we arranged originally.”
We walked along the canal. We walked side by side, but great gulfs
separated us. At last I spoke again. “You forgive her, Michaela?”
“Oh! yes, dear, I forgive her. If she did not know, of course it was
natural. He _is_ such a dear! She could not help falling in love with
him!”
“So I feel,” I said. She glanced up at me with inquiring blue eyes. I
think for a second she half suspected the truth, for I had spoken too
deeply.
We walked on in silence a little farther. Then Michaela began again,
brimming over with her happiness. “I haven’t a quarter thanked you. But
I _am_ so grateful! You were a sweet to see them both. You will come to
my wedding?”
“No, dearest,” I answered, driving back the tears with a fierce effort.
“If so, I should be breaking a solemn promise.”
Again she seemed to suspect, and again the doubt went from her.
“It was all a mistake,” she continued, in a childish, sunny way, “a
passing cloud. And Toto seemed so distressed, I couldn’t help feeling
sorry to see him so sorry for me. It has touched him very deep. He cried
a great deal. He has been crying all the time. But it is all right now.
We shall be quite happy!”
I swallowed a lump. What a child it was! And _there_ lay the irony. I
think I could have spared Romeo better had I felt I was sparing him to
more of a woman. Self-sacrifice for some great soul would be easy: but
for a bit of thistledown! And yet I loved her.
“I told mamma how kind you had been,” Michaela went on, quite
guilelessly, “and she wants to see you so much. You must come and dine
with us at our hotel. How long do you stop in Venice?”
I paused and reflected. I had done her a service—a very great service;
what need to stand on trifles? For I do not share the vulgar dread of
putting myself under an obligation.
“Dear little Michaela,” I said, spanning her arm with one hand—it was
so fairy-like and tiny—and drawing her towards me, “I will confess the
truth. I am travelling with that type-writer girl. I know her
intimately. Now, I want to spirit her away from Venice at once, so that
she may not see Romeo, and that Romeo may not see her. It would be
awkward for both of them. But I have no money. I borrowed from you once
and repaid you faithfully; if I borrow from you again I will repay in
like manner. This is a worse strait than Holmwood. I shall need six or
seven pounds. My dear, can you lend it to me?”
She drew out the dainty purse. “Why, of course, dear, if I have it.
Fifty, a hundred and fifty, two hundred lire; will that be enough for
you?”
“Yes, my child,” I gasped out, taking the crumpled notes and crushing
them in my folded hand. “If I work my fingers to the bone you shall have
it back.”
We walked on towards the Molo. O grey, grey Venice! The greatest
happiness of the greatest number. Back, back, Stuart Mill! Get thee
behind me, Satan! A gondola approached. I hailed it.
“Where are you going?” she cried, surprised.
“Away,” I said, “at once. It is better—safer! I will give the devil no
chances.” Then to the gondolier, “Hold off a little!”
He held off beyond jumping distance. Michaela hung over on the bridge
close by, wondering.
“Michaela,” I cried, “now I will tell you!” An impulse came over me; I
could no longer resist it. “It was _I_ who stole your Romeo’s heart by
mistake! It was _I_ who played Carmen and beguiled your Don José. It was
_I_ who sent him back. _I_ am the type-writer girl!”
“You!” she cried, waving to me to return. “Oh, you dear thing, come
back! If it was you, how good you have been! Why, I can see it in your
face. You have suffered for my sake! Come back, and let me kiss you!”
“No, dearest,” I said, melting. “I must go. I dare not trust myself.
Good-bye for ever! Good-bye to you; good-bye to Romeo. Give him that
message for me; I will never again see him.” I turned to the gondolier.
“Quick, row for all you are worth! To my hotel first, then on to the
railway station!”
* * * * *
If this book succeeds I mean to repay Michaela. Meanwhile, in any case,
I am saving up daily every farthing to repay her. For I am still a
type-writer girl—at another office.
THE END
_Malcomson & Co., Ltd., Printers, Redhill._
NEW 3s. 3d. FICTION.
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TRANSCRIBER NOTES
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[The end of _The Type-writer Girl_, by Grant Allen.]
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