“It isn’t so much,” remarked Mr. Starling, obviously striving to be broad-minded, “that I object to women having the vote, it’s the way they’re going about things so as to get it.”
“Well,” said Dr. Ackroyd, “men didn’t get the vote till they had torn up a lot of railings, and done a lot of damage. I object very much to women having the vote, but then I object to men having the vote, too. I’d take it away from everybody.”
Mrs. Starling breathed a sigh of relief. Obviously the doctor couldn’t possibly mean what he was saying. The conversation wasn’t serious. She was always nervous when conversation was serious, especially between the gentlemen.
“Now I know you’re making fun of us, Doctor,” she said. “You believe in the higher education of women and all that. Why, you’re sending Miss Ackroyd here to college, and in my young days she’d just have stopped at home and kept house for her father.”
“Kept house!” exploded Dr. Ackroyd. “Any intelligent woman with a maid can get rid of the business of a house in half an hour, and in half a day if she’s single-handed. If she can’t do that she’s not fit to have in the house at all. Yes, Anne’s going to follow in my footsteps, I’m glad to say, and do you know what I can remember, Starling? I remember when I was a young man listening to a very old and famous surgeon on the platform at a meeting held to discuss the admission of women into the medical profession, and he said: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I would sooner see my daughter dead at my feet than earning her living in such a way.’ Funny,” continued the doctor, half to himself, and finishing his glass of port, “why daughters always had to be dead at your feet. Never anywhere else.”
Anne laughed. She had a very pretty, low laugh, and a pretty, low voice.
“I should hate to be dead at your feet, Daddy, and I’ll do the best I can to avoid it, but I think I’d go and learn to be a doctor even if you didn’t approve.”
“I hope so, I’m sure,” said Dr. Ackroyd. “It’s no good, Almond, you can’t keep young Julia at home doing nothing, even if you could afford to. That’s the way to make women husband-hunters and nothing else. Have you ever studied the habits of the common tick?”
“Certainly not,” said Mr. Almond, rather startled.
“Well, the tick lives in woods and such places, hanging on to a leaf or a blade of grass, and waiting and hoping for some animal, dog or sheep, to go brushing through the undergrowth, and it falls off and fastens itself on the animal, which unfortunate creature is afterwards called ‘the host.’ The insects do their mating upon the host, as well as sucking its blood, and when they’re swollen with food and young they drop off and lay their eggs. Then the whole business starts all over again when the young are hatched out. They climb up a blade of grass and wait for some animal to pass. Well, that’s very like women in the Victorian era, and lots of women now, if it comes to that. I’d sooner Anne learned all about the conduct of the stomach, than that she clung to an aspidistra leaf in the window waiting to drop on some unfortunate man, who would become her host—and worse, for in the human world the host is the mate as well.”
Anne laughed again, but Julia thought she understood how some people were shocked by Dr. Ackroyd. Obviously, both Mrs. Starling and Mrs. Almond were feeling outraged.
Herbert Starling cleared his throat: “Well, now, what about a game?” he said with forced cheerfulness.
“Sorry, can’t stop,” said Dr. Ackroyd. “I’m expecting a baby at any moment. Thanks for my supper, Mrs. Starling. I always say you’re one of the best women I know. Can’t eat anything yourself, and yet provide good food for others. Good-bye, good-bye,” and he talked himself out of the flat.
The four older people began to play whist, but after a while, Anne and Julia went to the kitchen to fetch Bobby. He had been lavishly fed by Emily, and had now climbed on to her steep lap, where he was hanging on precariously, the toes of his white paws curved tightly in the effort to retain his place, though the woman’s arms were also occupied in trying to hold his bulky twenty-five pounds or so of weight. It was one of Bobby’s most passionate convictions that he was a lap-dog.
He leapt off her lap without so much as a “thank you,” and began explaining matters to Julia, who kissed him ardently, and, holding him by the collar, led him through the dining-room to the balcony. There she and Anne settled themselves down under the painted green iron canopy that sloped down like a Chinese roof, and gave a sense of distance to the Square beyond. The sky was a deep night-blue now, but the almond blossom showed pale through the darkness, and in one corner where the light of a street lamp shone upon it, seemed touched by dawn. The air was soft, almost warm; there breathed through the night a feeling of youth and of spring, of country things, that was rather enhanced than spoiled by the clang and roar of the trams from the High Road. Bobby sat down, leaning heavily against Julia’s knee, and pressing his head against her, as she played with his velvet ears. Anne produced a cigarette and lit it calmly, to the intense surprise of Julia, who had never seen a girl smoke. But Anne, she knew, never did things for effect. Doubtless, she often sat and smoked and talked with that queer, kind, clever father. Julia, with her intense, imaginative sympathy, suddenly caught a glimpse of their life together. It wouldn’t have suited Julia, who wanted to be known and admired, and have love affairs, but it was rather lovely all the same.
Those two odd, clever, ugly beings, so sure of each other, so interested in ideas and the interchange of ideas … it must be lovely to have someone with whom you could exchange ideas. It would never be possible for her to do so with Dad or Mum, or Uncle George, or Aunt Mildred. Perhaps in this new life that was to open out before her, she would find someone to whom she could talk about what lighted windows at night, and glimpses of people in buses or parks, or the fate of characters in a thrilling book, did to her. Certainly the person wouldn’t be Miss Lestrange, or Mrs. Danvers, but she would meet heaps of people now. And Julia stared out at the faintly burning cloud of the almond blossom, and breathed the spring and the future into her consciousness.
Bobby stirred a little, and put first one white glove and then the other very gently upon her lap, laying his nose between them; then very slowly as he began to work himself forward, a hind leg came up and rested upon her thigh. Julia didn’t move, and, with infinite caution, the fourth leg came slowly up, and Bobby, hunched together and very uncomfortable, had succeeded in becoming a lap-dog once more. Julia laughed and pulled him into a more comfortable position, and with a deep sigh of relief he lay back, his head sentimentally pressed against her shoulder.
“It’s funny, isn’t it?” said Anne, watching these manoeuvres, “how quietly he goes on and on till he gets his own way. I often wonder what dogs, dogs as clever as Bobby, think about. Whether they really think at all in the way we do.”
“I’m sure Bobby thinks,” said Julia, as every dog owner has doubtless replied, from the days of the first cave-man to whom a dog was a companion.
“I wonder,” said Anne, “whether they know that they belong to a lower order of beings. You see, we’re God to them. I wonder if they accept the fact that there are lots of things they cannot understand, or if they wonder about it. The world must seem full of human beings who kick them or pat them, and they go wriggling about and wagging their tails and saying ‘thank you.’ Do you think they ever want to be us instead of themselves, just as we want to be people greater and more powerful than we are?”
Julia pondered for a moment. “I don’t think they mind,” she said, “they just look on it all as quite natural. It must be awfully funny to live in a world where there is quite another race, much taller and bigger and more powerful than you are.” And she remembered, though she didn’t say so, that sudden feeling of inferiority that had been hers in Miss Lestrange’s shop. Miss Lestrange and Mrs. Danvers had seemed such real ladies, but after all, there was no reason why she, Julia, shouldn’t become anything she chose.
“Are y
ou really awfully keen on being a doctor, Anne?” she asked.
“Oh, yes,” said Anne, with conviction.
“Why?” said Julia curiously.
“I suppose,” said Anne mildly, “I want to know things. Real things, facts, I mean, and I want to try and understand people, and Daddy says understanding their bodies is half-way to understanding their minds.”
“Don’t you want to fall in love and be married?”
“I hadn’t thought about it. I suppose I’d like to have children—every woman would—but I don’t suppose I ever shall. I’m not a bit attractive like you are, Julia, and I don’t want to be the tick on the aspidistra.”
“But love,” persisted Julia, “you must want to be in love,” and in Julia’s voice there spoke every novel and story she had ever read; every novel and story that her immediate female forebears had ever read.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Anne shyly, “it’s different for you. You’re pretty. At least you’re not pretty,” she added honestly, “because the bones of your face aren’t right, but you look as though you were, and anyway people will think you are. Nobody could ever think me pretty, and I think purely intellectual marriages must be horrible somehow, like religious marriages. I’ve just read a book; Daddy brought it home and threw it at me as usual: ‘This’ll amuse you; it’s about a saint, quite a new saint, in the Roman Catholic Church, whom they call The Little Flower.’ Isn’t it a dreadful name? Well, her father and mother wanted to be a monk and a nun, and for some reason or other they couldn’t, so they thought the next best thing would be to marry and have children, so as to add to the souls of the saved. Well”—and Julia could somehow feel that Anne was blushing through the darkness—“I think that’s dreadful. To mix that sort of thing up with religion makes both horrid.”
“Yes, it does,” agreed Julia, without really thinking very much of what she was saying. “I say, Anne, do you know about things, about what happens?”
“Oh, yes, of course,” said Anne. “Daddy thinks everyone ought to. Don’t you?”
“No,” said Julia, “nobody’s ever told me anything. I know babies come out of your inside.”
“Oh, that!” said Anne, laughing. Julia sat there longing to ask Anne how babies got in, in the first place, but quite unable to do so, and Anne gazed tranquilly out at the Square, and finally ground her cigarette to death against the stone floor of the balcony.
“The people one knows,” began Julia at last, “our parents, for instance, they’re not good-looking. Why, just look at Dad and Mum, and yet they’ve been married and had me.”
“I know,” said Anne. “It seems awfully funny to me somehow. It’s as though people ought to do that sort of thing when they’re young, and then forget it. It’s almost as though it were always wrong, and even impossible, except for now, and except for oneself. I tried to explain that to Daddy once, and he said it was nature’s way of making one feel that it was something new, and fresh, and wonderful. He said if young people understood all about it, they’d never do it, and the race would die out.”
“Then you do think it’s all right for the young,” argued Julia, “and yet you say you don’t think of it for yourself.”
“I don’t, not practically, but I suppose I shall want things just the same as most people, only you see I have got a face so dreadfully like a horse that I’m afraid I could only be loved for my mind, and I should hate to be loved only for my mind.”
“I think it would be marvellous to be loved for one’s mind,” said Julia.
“Oh, I don’t know, I think it would be very dangerous, and, anyway, all wrong.”
“If you’re like a horse,” said Julia, “what am I like?”
Anne, by the light of a match, from which she was lighting a fresh cigarette, looked at Julia carefully. “You’re like a funny mixture of animal and bird,” she said, “a soft, furry, slinky sort of animal, with the head and wings of a bird. When you move your head you always look just like a bird to me, just as though your neck could swivel right round.”
Julia was pleased. It sounded a nice description.
“You’re not altogether like a horse,” she said, “your eyes are like deer’s eyes, just like the deer in Bushey Park. I went there last summer to spend a day with Uncle George, Aunt Mildred, and that awful little Elsa, and Dad and Mum. They all looked to me ugly except the deer, and their eyes were like velvet, only a sort of wet velvet, if you know what I mean.”
Anne threw back her head and laughed. “Wet velvet eyes. Thank you, Julia, that’s about the only compliment I’ll ever have, and it’s a very nice one. Well, I’ve told you what I want to be. I want to be a doctor, at least I suppose I do; but most of all I want to study biology, and want to find out about thousands of things, specks on butterflies’ wings, and why some insects are like leaves, and why things, I mean animals and people, behave as they do. But you, what do you want?”
Julia, pressing Bobby’s heavy head against her shoulder, thought for a moment. “I suppose I want everything,” she said. “Most women aren’t clever like you, Anne, and do want everything. I want lots of people to love and admire me, particularly one person, and I want to love and admire him terribly, too.”
“You want to be happy,” said Anne.
“I suppose I do,” said Julia.
“Well, girls! Well, girls!” said a bright, brisk voice from the open French window, “this won’t do. Can’t have you stopping here, catching cold, and discussing your love affairs.” And Herbert, heavy, big, dark and somehow menacing-looking, when you couldn’t see his rosy cheeks, only the black loom of his head and shoulders against the light, stood behind them, a hand on either side of the window.
Bobby thumped his tail heavily, not because he liked Herbert Starling, but because here was one of the gods with a loud voice and the power to turn him out of his comfortable seat.
“Your father’s rung,” said Herbert Starling to Anne, “from his case. He says not to wait up for him, but go back home.”
“Oh,” cried Anne, jumping up, “I’ll go back. That’ll mean he’ll want sandwiches later. Did he say anything about the baby?”
Herbert coughed rather shyly. “I believe he did. A boy—”
“Oh, splendid,” said Anne, “I know they wanted a boy this time. It must have been a pretty quick affair. Daddy can only just have got there in time. How much did it weigh?”
Herbert coughed again: “I believe your father said eight and a half pounds.”
“Splendid! … I’ll go and say good-bye to Mrs. Starling. Good-bye, Julia, mind you let me know how you get on in the shop.” Anne stooped, kissed Bobby’s pink nose and was gone.
Herbert Starling came out on to the little balcony, and Julia suddenly felt she didn’t want to talk to him alone. It had been rather nice sitting out there in the warm darkness talking to Anne, and thinking her own thoughts, but she didn’t want to have to thank Herbert Starling for what he had done for her at supper. She spilled Bobby off her lap and without a protest he lay brown and limp upon the balcony, and, heaving a heavy sigh, closed his yellow eyes and prepared to go to sleep again.
“They’ll be wanting you,” said Julia.
Herbert Starling followed her into the house somewhat discontentedly. Julia curled herself up in an armchair, Bobby again on her lap, and tried to read one of the few books the Starlings possessed, a bound volume of The Quiver.
The Starlings were not, as they would have said, great readers. Mrs. Starling was one of those women who, with really nothing to do, always say they have no time for reading; and the evening paper after supper and the morning paper in the train going to the City sufficed for Herbert Starling’s intellectual needs. Julia derived a certain mild amusement from The Quiver, for her own imagination breathed life into any story, however banal, that she read, simply because she could always be the heroine. But she thought it very funny that whole
magazines should be written, as this one was, around things like religion and total abstinence. She herself knew nothing of either one or the other. This curious standpoint of things being right and wrong, which somehow informed the rather puerile pages of The Quiver meant nothing to Julia’s unaffected paganism. Anne and her father had standards, but they were not these. … Julia had been taught none.
She was glad when the card-playing came to an end, and she and Bobby could start for Two Beresford through the cool and starlit night. The trees rustled faintly in the Square; the trams clanged and shrieked in the High Road; quietness again lapped her round about when, the Goldhawk Road left behind, Love Lane was reached.
iii
The Job
There were many days during her first weeks and months at l’Etrangère when Julia wished with all her heart that she had never gone there. She soon learned that the apprentice is always wrong, and many were the tears she shed in secret, and sometimes even before the cool, faintly amused eyes of Miss Lestrange; but when this happened, Julia always turned her head away and tried to pretend that nothing was the matter. She had for Miss Lestrange none of the adoration she had felt for Miss Tracey, but this was not because of any particular quality in either of the two women, it was that she herself had grown past it.
Nevertheless, she liked to stand well in Miss Lestrange’s eyes as, for the matter of that, she always liked to do in the eyes of everyone she met. But with Marian Lestrange she was aware of a quality of criticism that was higher and more acute than any she had yet met with, and Julia was desperately anxious in consequence to acquit herself well. Marian Lestrange was not nearly as business-like as Gipsy Danvers. If it had rested entirely with her the shop might have been a failure in the first few weeks; but she certainly did decorate it by her presence, and she wore her clothes as though they had fallen upon her from heaven. Gipsy was not smart; she was pleasant, vital, capable. She could be very quick-tempered, but nevertheless, Julia soon found that she had a softer heart than Marian. Marian had a sort of cool good-nature, and was sometimes taken by a freakish kindliness, but then it was generally for her own amusement.
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