by Jean Devanny
“Don’t!” cried the man sharply.
“What now?”
“When you talk like that I feel the biggest cur on earth. Can’t you see, can’t you really see, Margaret, that it is just because he is so fine that I can’t bear it? If he were a brute to you I would be justified in deceiving him, but now—”
She almost wrung her hands. “That is not the point. Oh, I can’t explain, I can’t tell you just what it is I feel about it, but I know I am right. This has nothing to do with Barry at all. His character does not even touch on it. This is something which concerns you and me alone. I get hot all over; I hate you when you talk like that. I feel—yes, insulted; you insult me, you treat me as though I were not a human being at all. How dare you tell me that my happiness, my life, is to be regulated according to any man’s character; that I am not to have a mind, a will of my own? I tell you it does not matter what Barry is! It is the principle of the thing. I am myself, and will not be a subject doll of any man, not if he be a veritable Christ among men.”
“You’ve got to take the world as it is, girl. Your theories may be all right, but you know perfectly well what the world thinks of married women who conduct illicit love affairs.”
She laughed contemptuously. It sounded odd from her, and Glengarry looked sharply at her, surprised even in his misery. There was an ugly look upon her face. She met his look. “Do you know, Glen, I feel bad when you talk like that. I feel soiled and wicked in my mind. It just seems as though you have deliberately taken me by the scruff of the neck and rubbed my face in the dirt. You are soiling my mind with society’s filth. Women who subscribe to your sentiments are—are bad—bad through and through, it seems to me, because they are keeping alive the idea that they are an inferior race, that they are only society’s playthings, or society’s breeding animals; they are accepting the idea that man is lord of creation and themselves only his chief servants. I should like to kill them all, the—the cheap creatures!”
Again the man was nonplussed. “You bewilder me,” he cried hopelessly. “I can’t answer you.” They had stopped again. The bay foal waited patiently. “What would happen, Margaret, if men and women were promiscuous? Would you have a society of paramours?”
“No, no! You do not understand me! I would have a society of reasonable men and women unsoiled by filthy conventions; men and women equals in each other’s eyes; a society in which the natural love of man and woman can have natural expression without being trampled in the mire.”
A wry smile twisted his lips. “Impossible, girl. You judge other people by yourself. You are good, Margaret. You have never been up against it; you don’t know how horrible and ugly sex can be. You don’t know anything of the terrible sin in the world. If you did you would know the value of the conventions. Look here, girl, your theories and ideas are all right, and would be practicable enough in your individual case, but the great bulk of humanity is quite unfit for sex freedom. You can’t have laws made for individuals; they must be made to suit the generality of people. I can feel the agony of it in special cases such as ours, but I must admit the necessity of it for the bulk of humanity which is still largely plain animal. Society has fashioned these social laws through necessity; we must chain the beast to produce good humans and a decent society.”
“Oh, who wants the beast unchained? Am I beastly? Am I gross? You know better, Glen. I recognise necessities. I see the fact that our love would cause grievous trouble to Barry and harm to my children if known of. I see that and deal with it. A certain set of circumstances surrounds our love, and we must make the best of them. It is your attitude I object to, yours and the world’s. You are not considering Barry. Are you? Are you? No. You are not considering the welfare of my children. I know. It is all pretence and sham. You are considering my position as a wife. Wife with you is synonymous with slave. You think you are stealing the property of another man. I am not, to you and society, a human being with all the inalienable rights of a human being, living with Barry because of affection and because of circumstances which must compel me to remain living with him. I am a wife, a slave, the property of Barry, like his cattle, bound to him by the law.”
“Don’t talk like that; it is not so. I am thinking of morality. What I say applies to Barry as much as to you. Look here, if Messenger fell in love with another woman, do you think he would carry on with her as you are doing with me?”
She felt sickened. His vulgarity, his rough tongue, hurt her physically like actual blows. “Whether he would or would not makes no difference to my case,” she protested fiercely. “If he wouldn’t, it would be because he is weighted with the same mental slavery as you are. I know perfectly well that the woman he loved would take him and be right in doing so. In that case Barry would be caught in the same net of circumstances that I am, and the same duty would devolve upon him; to be true to himself and the other woman while at the same time protecting his children. Oh, I know what you are going to say: that it is impossible, human nature couldn’t do it. Well, it could, if it wasn’t for the rotten ideas in man’s mind regarding women and marriage. Women can do it; it can be done here if you regard me as a human being and not as a chattel of the estate. How dare you be jealous of Barry? You know how I am situated; you know I love him, as I love the children. You know I am clean, and that is all you have the right to demand of me—cleanliness. You are impudent, and Barry would be impudent to attempt to curtail my personal liberty in any way. Do you think, if the positions were reversed, I would be jealous of your wife? If I were, I should deserve to be whipped, as you do. But I wouldn’t. I would be her friend and still ‘carry on,’ as you elegantly phrase it, with you. Your responsibility and your wife’s would be towards your children, but you and your wife would still be human beings with the right to demand and take the best life has to offer.”
Glengarry passed an arm around the colt’s neck and watched the woman across it. She looked wonderful in her anger and outraged dignity, regal. Again he experienced that sensation of wonder that he had held her in his arms; that she should be fighting him for that very thing, claiming it as a privilege. He wondered at her and at himself. He knew that, just man and woman considered on their individual merits, he should be at her feet; he was of common clay; she was the gold so rare in the earth.
A world of mothers such as she! Almost he soared again into visionary realms, almost his mind went forth in search of the future, in which the mothers of men, released from the bondage of a mental and bodily slavery, would be all as she. But not quite. He stopped instead on the idea that they were hopelessly at cross purposes: the Woman in her was speaking; the Man in him. She would get him all right, whenever she liked, but a sense of sin would mar the communion for him, while conscience upheld her. Their eyes met and held as only lovers’ eyes can. Her splendid orbs, pure and clear as the soul behind, seemed to draw the heart out of the man; hard at first, they gradually softened under the blandishment of his worshipful regard.
“Oh, Margaret, you are wonderful and good!” he cried.
“And I would be just as good had I a dozen children each with a different father, Glen, so long as my mind remained clean and I chose my own mate. But let me have one man forced on me, chain me with the bonds of slavery, and I am bad, a menace to society. Already you have soiled me, not by your love, not by the expression of it, but by your attitude towards it. Be good, Glen.”
That night turned out beautifully fine, so Barry and Tutaki put up some beds on a screened-in part of the verandah for the Messengers to occupy on the warm summer nights.
As Margaret lay in bed watching through the slats of the blind the big poplars which bulwarked that side of the lawn and listening to the mysterious rustle of their broad leaves, she went again over the afternoon incident and made a resolution.
She and Glen would just be friends. She must accept him as he was. She lay awake for hours marvelling at the strange turn her life had taken—the second strange turn. If she had not come to Maunganui a decade befor
e she might still have been a working girl or married to a working-man living in penury. A little touch of the Romance of that young time came up through the years and turned her swiftly to kiss lightly the face of the man sleeping beside her. Dear Romance of Youth! How sad it was so fleeting! A decade of safe domesticity and then—this upheaval, engendering thoughts and moods and emotions altogether new and peculiar.
She had always been a woman’s woman, this Margaret; her splendid mentality had early grasped the actual, though often concealed, inequality of the sexes. She had been born rebellious, but her early marriage into affluent circumstances had disallowed the development of the tendency. Now the conditions were there to urge on that development.
Thinking in the dark of the night she accidentally stumbled on a great truth: that “conditions determine ideas,” though she did not formulate the idea in so many words. But she saw the truth only in relation to her own individual case. Being no scientist, she could not see that that truth was the fundamental proposition in regard, not only to her individual case, but to the whole of society. That it was the determining factor in mankind’s great trek through history.
CHAPTER XVI
So things went along smoothly at Maunganui. Margaret was content; Glengarry was tolerating the situation, managing along fairly well. The woman had soon seen the wisdom of her resolution. Her lover had avoided her; left alone with her by any chance he had assumed a hostile demeanour; he would seem frightened. Until he gathered the fact that she expected no intimacies. He never sought her after that, but he did not avoid her. The situation gradually eased; it settled down into some sort of comfort.
Margaret did not disguise from Barry the fact that she was greatly attracted by Glengarry. She often discussed him with her husband, frankly and critically.
Much of the maternal crept into her feeling for him; often her eyes would fill with tears to see him playing with the children. He took more interest in the children now, especially in small Margaret who resembled her mother so.
During the first weeks after Messenger’s arrival home it had been necessary for Glengarry to see a great deal of his employer, and a friendship had sprung into being between them. Barry still on occasion alluded to his manager as a “funny beggar,” but it was plain to Margaret and Tutaki that he set much store by Glengarry’s opinions and welcomed his company.
There were times when, despite themselves, love conquered both resolve and conscience and drove the lovers into each other’s arms; but Margaret, seeing the effect of such lapses on Glengarry, became watchful to avoid even those. For afterwards he would be morose and suspicious of her, abrupt in his manner towards Barry, and show signs to her now experienced eye of the old turbulent jealousy.
When Ian Longstair and his wife Miette arrived at the station things were fairly comfortable.
Miette Longstair was Barry’s cousin, a daughter of his mother’s sister Nana, who had left France at the same time as Barry’s mother, but who had remained in England teaching, while the other journeyed to New Zealand. Nana had married an Englishman, a butler in the same employ as herself, and Miette had been the only issue. She was a few years younger than Barry. After the death of the latter’s mother very little communication had taken place between the two families. As a matter of duty, Messenger senior had ascertained that the sister-in-law he had never seen was comfortably off; now and again for the first few years he had written to England, but as time went on the letters had become fewer, and when Barry received the one which was responsible for Miette’s journey to New Zealand (it had been, of course, addressed to his dead father) a period of fifteen years had elapsed between it and the preceding communication.
His Aunt Nana had written to say that her daughter Miette had, four years before that time, married an Englishman named Ian Longstair, an accountant by profession; that the marriage had turned out very happily until Longstair had sustained an accident through the falling of an elevator in the building in which his office was situated. It seemed that the unfortunate affair had resulted in a permanent minor injury to the spine; Longstair was able only to move about very slowly. His suit for compensation had failed, and almost all of their savings had gone in doctors’ expenses. What could they do? Could her relative make any helpful suggestion? Would it be worth while for the couple to invest the remainder of their money in tickets for New Zealand? Miette was an excellent chef; she had earned her five pounds a week in that capacity before her marriage.
Margaret’s reception of the news can be easily imagined. Return mail to London carried a cheque to cover passage to New Zealand and a letter of helpful sympathy. “All this big house that we’ve got, Barry, lying half empty or filled with useless visitors. They can have those three end rooms all to themselves. I’ll have the smallest room fitted up for a kitchen for them, and Miette (what a pretty name!) can do her own cooking.”
“Well, if you like. It is your business. The fellow can do the accounts. If we go on at this rate we shall soon be able to take our trip round the world.”
“Just as soon as the babies are grown up enough. I won’t have any more babies, Barry.”
So the coming of the Longstairs had been decided. Then Glengarry had come to the station, and Margaret had almost forgotten about her cousins. They arrived, however, in six months’ time.
Tutaki was holidaying in Wellington when their boat came in, and Margaret deputed him to meet them and put them on the train for Taihape. Jimmy met them all right. He went out to the steamer when it anchored in the stream and met them aboard.
The ship was crowded with emigrants standing around the decks straining their eyes shorewards to the new land. All sorts and conditions of migrants, filled with all sorts and conditions of emotions and thoughts. The old land lay behind them, away at the top of the world down which they had been borne on the bosom of the rolling oceans. Even the commonest heart, the tawdriest soul, had felt that sundering of itself from the mother land as “the ship sailed away from old England,” and here, as the ship anchored in Wellington’s grand land-locked harbour, those same common hearts and tawdry souls uplifted eagerly and went forth to meet the gay promises of the gloriously beautiful new land. The home-comers in the crowd threw kisses to their native hills; the waters of the bay, white in the glittering sunshine of late autumn, sparkled and laughed in silent greeting. The white-winged yachts gently sailed around, now and again dipping in exaggerated bows. New Zealand, sweet land of promise, gave welcome to the sons and daughters of the parent land.
Tutaki climbed aboard and stood quietly for a while wondering how to recognise his people in the throng. Then, seeing the doctor’s queue range up, he walked along to it and scrutinised the company. He picked up the couple first guess because of the halting gait of the man. They came slowly along the deck, the woman shielding the other from the jostling crowd. Tutaki walked up to them quickly, stopped in front of them and raised his hat. “Pardon, Madam, is your name Longstair?”
She looked startled and drew back a step. “Yes, but—who are you?”
“I am an employee of your cousin’s. Mrs. Messenger asked me to meet you and put you on the train for Taihape.”
“Taihape! What is that? Oh, the town. Of course, how silly of me!”
The man broke in: “We are very much obliged to you,” and held out a hand. “As soon as we get through the doctor’s hands we shall be in yours. I hope I shall have no trouble here.” He spoke worriedly.
“That will be all right,” said Jimmy cheerfully. “Messenger has provided against that contingency.” He drew a paper from his pocket and handed it to Longstair.
“Come along, then, Ian. We are missing our places in the queue. Do they bother much?” the wife asked Jimmy.
“I don’t know. This is my first experience,” he answered. “You have no need to worry, anyhow. I’ll stand over by the rail till you are finished. I’m in the way here.”
Standing back, Tutaki was able leisurely to survey the two. They very evidently discussed hi
m. Once the woman looked his way, and coloured as she met his regard. “Why, she must be thirty or more, if she’s a day,” said Jimmy to himself. “And he’s only a boy.” After a while he added, almost aloud: “I like him.”
Longstair was really “only a boy.” He was twenty-five years old to be exact, was of middle height and slimly built. A shock of bright curly auburn hair stood high off his head, “cow-licked” back off his forehead, which was high and well shaped. His face was the face of a boy, pure and clean-looking. His skin was of the beautiful texture which always accompanies auburn hair, and was freckled. His features were rather insipid, rather effeminate. He wore huge hornrimmed glasses and peered forward in the close manner of the student. He wore no hat.
His wife looked, as Jimmy said, at least thirty. She was short and plump and fair, not at all pretty, but attractive, very attractive to men—of a certain type. A close toque of red straw hid her hair and forehead; her eyes were her worst feature, being small and puffy, her nose was her best. It was distinctly a classical nose. Her mouth was the most sensuous mouth that can be imagined; an ill-formed curved upper lip drawing away from the teeth; a straight, thin, lower lip, which never seemed to meet the upper, leaving the close, tiny teeth, indicative of a vindictive and rattish nature, gleaming between them continually. Her skin was good, pink and white and glowing with brutal health. The close-fitting costume she wore showed off a splendidly shaped bust; beneath, one knew, were superb shoulders and beautifully modelled arms. Her bare hands were soft, white, and tiny—the hands of the incapable and ungenerous.
Below the waist she was—well, the only word is “sloppy.” Thick hips, protruding stomach, slightly bowed legs and “hen toed.” And her walk was utterly graceless. She walked like a woman of fifty; one could not imagine her running.