by Jean Devanny
“Oh! And why?” asked Ian, almost belligerently.
“Look here, Ian, you should have more sense than to ask why. Is Margaret Barry’s property?” Here the little knowledge she possessed spoke up. She stood with Margaret on the only common ground there was between them. “Where is your knowledge? Your principle? You talk as though you were soaked in superstition. When it comes to practice you are no more use to Progress than the most ignorant fool who regards his wife as a chattel. You said yourself that Margaret was a most extraordinary woman, head and shoulders above other women, and yet you think that such a woman should be only a tool of Barry’s.”
“Shut up! I said nothing of the kind. If Margaret wants Glengarry, let her go away with him.”
Miette subsided. “Oh, yes. Of course. That’s right. I forgot that.”
So those two, one a babe in all essential things, the other an incapable, settled serenely the vital issues of lives whose substance they knew not.
Miette triumphed over her enemy. How she exulted in the fact that she had brought this woman down from her pinnacle of impeccability! She knew that she had soiled Margaret in her own eyes, in the eyes of her lover, and of Ian. And the result had been so cunningly contrived that no tangible charge could be preferred against her. She wanted Man. Her enforced continence chafed her unceasingly, maddening her at times. And the cunning of her saw Margaret herself driving her lover where he would be willing to receive her, Miette, to get peace. So she dogged the other woman to get her work in; it was: “Oh, Margaret, the more intimate I get with Glen, the more I find we have in common. After you went to bed last night he came in to us and he and I talked for an hour.” And so on. Half-truths, not worth explaining.
CHAPTER XXII
The turmoil of the simple woman’s thoughts and emotions during that period! Like numberless deadly snakes, her thoughts twisted and twined around the fact of her lover’s repulsion of her. Her emotions billowed around her like poisonous vapours vomited from the mouths of hell’s choicest denizens. And yet, almost, she preserved appearances.
First the jealousy came. She was not fitted for her undertaking; why, she had even forgotten most of the lessons she had learned from Glengarry during their intimacy. Her mind was not one to dwell upon things of that nature. And he had ever been secretive, loth to discuss his passions and his emotions. He was a man of action, not at all dissertative. She had given her word to the man regarding the cessation of bodily intimacies between them, and she took it that he accepted her word as she held it—as sacred. Had he warmed to her and thus reassured her as to his love, she would have dismissed Miette’s trumpery play for what it was worth, and settled back into the old rut.
It was hard for her to see and realise that he was not warming to her. But once she saw and realised it, she saw more, perhaps, than there was for her to see. She saw him deliberately leave her side for Miette’s; she saw his averted eyes, his avoidance of her, his constrained manner; she heard his sometimes almost rude words, and she did not read their meaning. She saw Miette’s now exaggerated by-play, and began to imagine that the man reciprocated. Then it was that jealousy thrust its forked darts into the fabric of her and dragged her down from her pinnacle.
Now was Margaret at a loss. She searched back over all her past life and scarcely dared to believe that that good woman had been herself. Did this terrible thing she had brought to life in herself, this ravening demon that had it in its heart to kill, skulk within the depths of all men’s hearts? or was she an extraordinary creature? She believed she fathomed hell during the first few days when she made acquaintance with jealousy.
And through all her torment there ran a fierce flame of resentment at having been pulled from her pinnacle. Margaret felt bad. She pursued Glengarry now with a consciousness of badness continually marring her radiance and charm, with eyes that searched for confirmation, with hatred leaping hot for Miette, who was always there waiting.
But not all at once can the human heart lose habits of goodness. The feeling of badness so rowelled at Margaret that soon in the midst of her fiercest pangs it assailed her. The flame of resentment at being dragged down both by pride and humility turned against herself, and her reason made demands of her. What was she come to? She, Margaret Messenger, renowned throughout the country for her mental and moral pulchritude, had descended to the level of a drab. She had pursued a man who avoided her. If Glen had ceased to love her, if he preferred Miette, then surely she was woman enough, decent enough and big enough to accept it.
She shed tears that came from the eyes of the world.
Margaret gave little thought to Barry during that period. To his unobtrusive, solicitous remarks about her health (she looked fagged and listless those days) she would say that she did feel out of sorts, but it was nothing. Yet as she lay in the dark of the night she found strange comfort in creeping within his arms and nestling upon his breast.
The day she tremulously made her decision to try and put Glengarry from her mind Barry was away at Taihape, it being a sale day. He was not expected back till late at night. Margaret walked in the cherry orchard at five o’clock with her children, gathering the little ones about her in an effort to find solace. Ian and Miette were picking cherries, Ian from the low branches, and Miette from the steps of a ladder. They threw them to the children to eat. By and by Margaret left them and wandered indoors again. She would go to her room and lie down. Her head ached. In the passage upstairs she came face to face with Glengarry, who had just left his room. He retreated hastily. Margaret stopped. Her heart thumped so that she thought it rocked her visibly; her face paled to a deadly whiteness.
“You need not avoid me any more, Glen.” She spoke with tremulous dignity. “If you have ceased to love me, that is all there is to it. I shall try to forget you.”
He came forward a few steps, nonplussed. Then he spoke gruffly: “What makes you think I have ceased to love you? I thought we understood each other, Margaret.”
“Don’t pretend, Glen,” she said hastily. “You must not insult me by pretending. Nothing but the truth is good enough for me. You need not avoid me again. I thought your love was dying—and thought to revive it, but—” She spoke quietly now, with that queenly dignity which was all her own and made her regal. She turned away from him towards her room.
And at the womanliness of her, all the restrained passion and love of the man broke loose.
“Margaret!” he cried thickly, and in an instant he had her in his arms.
She fought him, but he only laughed, fiercely, madly, and had his will with her.
CHAPTER XXIII
The aftermath? A madman, born of the betrayal of his friend.
A woman frightened and regretful, but yet filled with a joy that seemed to be a flood of roselight permeating her. He did love her, after all. She wanted no explanation; she craved but to lie on her bed with closed eyes and restful body and let the fact that he did love her after all soak into the poor fagged brain that had suffered so.
Glengarry was so quiet she opened her eyes. He was sitting at her feet with his head sunk upon his breast. He did not stir for a full minute, while she watched him.
“Glen,” she whispered, awesomely. His stillness seemed unnatural.
Without raising his head, he looked round at her, and she shrank as though struck with a whip at that look, at that face with its load of remorse and self-accusation.
“Oh, Glen, what is it, dear?” She stretched out a hand to him, but she did not dare, somehow, to touch him. He did not answer, just looked at her, and something moved her to say: “Lift up your head, Glen.”
“I shall never lift it up again,” he whispered, and turned from her.
She waited, with the flood of roselight drained away. Then wild impatience seized her at the absurdity, to her, of all his soul racket over a perfectly natural thing. She sprang up before him and clenched her fists.
He rose, too, and faced her. “I would sooner have died a thousand deaths,” he said, and the
re was no love in the eyes he bent on her.
Her words of scorn and reproach stopped on her lips, she could only stare at him; but as he turned away to leave her a link seemed to snap in the chain of her womanhood; the man’s mental attitude, his debased idea of womanhood, struck into the quintessence of her and planted the first seeds of a real corruption. He was life to her; she had honoured him above all else on earth, and he spurned that honour as a thing unclean; he stripped from her the rights of a human being and placed her with the cattle on her husband’s estate.
She stared after him while those seeds sank in the essential soil of her, and her lip curled upwards so that she resembled not herself.
And then and there there dropped from Margaret the desire to regain her pinnacle. The world was a world of men, men like Glengarry, and women only lived for love of them. Let them have women worthy of their kind, then. She looked around her room: so pretty and dainty a room that she had, with its toilet accessories that kept her beautiful for her lord and master, for her owner. She almost shrieked aloud. She beat her breast. “My place is down in the stable or in the kennels with the dogs.” She laughed aloud, and her laughter was not good to hear.
She sat down before her mirror and inspected herself. All that beauty, all that charm the possession of which she could not but be cognisant of, all that love which had in some miraculous way become the pivot upon which her life turned, was wasted. And why? Because, in the early years of her life, she had become a wife.
If Glengarry had given any other reason, if he had adduced the difficulties of their position, a hatred of the skulking, say, which she herself felt, as the reason for renouncing her— Anything but that wifehood; anything but that honour among men which had as a basis woman’s degradation.
She looked back to her first love. Calf love, on her part, she knew now. How pale and insignificant a thing it had been when compared with this tempestuous surge she felt for Glengarry! A little voice whispered to Margaret that perhaps this wild love was not substantial; that it might not bear the burden of the passage of the years. Her calf love for Barry had not lasted. But then there had been no substance in it; she knew that had Barry been a different sort of man she might have learned to hate him. But she could never learn to hate the other; or if she hated, she would love as fiercely. She had not been able to help that calf love; how could she be blamed for being misled by it? What did she, a child, know of love or life, that she should be called upon to offer up the rest of her natural life as punishment for consummating that calf love? She stopped on that word: “consummating.” Ah! There it was! There was the kernel of the whole thing. The consummation of the calf love had bred all this misery. Who was to blame? Not she, surely, a child on life’s path, snatching, as a child would, at the toy it had set its heart on. Who then? Her parents? Oh, how could she blame that dear mother, who had married young herself, and had been fortunate enough to meet no other man to lesion the content of her domestic life? Not they. Who then? And this time the answer came to Margaret— Society. Society was to blame. But reason asked: “Is not society a collection of individuals like yourself? Is not society dumb, blind and deaf to the crisis of the individual in its ruthless march onward from the lower forms to higher?”
And the woman’s suffering answered her reason: “Not for ever. Society is far enough advanced now for progress to become a conscious striving of individuals in the mass. The individual has developed a complexity of desires, emotions and ideas, side by side and born of the complexity of his material life, and as these desires, emotions and ideas are developed they act and react one upon the other so that reasonably there should be no barrier to the reasonable individual demands to-day. And yet, the wife of to-day is the wife of the Middle Ages.”
Margaret became lost in the labyrinth of her own ignorance. The crushing injustice to her womanhood which she fully realised, and yet could not explain, roused a fury within her. Somewhere, at some time, for some reason, had begun that lordship of man over her sex, had been implanted in man’s mind the sense of property rights in woman. Her furious hatred of that bondage had to be directed somewhere, and the only channel it saw open was that of Man. “He would sooner have died a thousand deaths” than have accepted her love. Because her husband was his friend. She laughed again that hateful laugh, and, opening the door, ran downstairs.
The bell rang for tea as she did so. She could hear the clamorous voices of the children coming in, interspersed by the admonitions of a maid.
Glengarry did not come to the table, and she ate nothing. Her brain was on fire, it seemed. Harry asked her if she had a headache.
“No, dearie,” she answered.
“Then why are you so red in the face? Your eyes are funny. They are all—all bright like a bird’s.”
She laughed and turned him off.
After tea they went out again to the cherry trees. Many cherries were wanted for jam.
Margaret could not rid her thoughts of their burden. She noticed Longstair standing idly looking up at the trees, which were a sight for sore eyes with their crimson loads, and of a sudden she walked over to him.
“Have you a sense of property rights in woman, Ian?” she asked him abruptly.
He looked at her searchingly and answered: “No.”
“Then you would not object to Miette having sex-intimacies with another man if she so desired?”
“Good Lord, yes! So long as she lives with me I certainly should. What’s your idea?”
“Then you have a sense of property rights in woman?”
“Not at all. I don’t bind Miette in any way. If she wants another man, she is welcome to have him, but not while I am keeping her. She can get out with him. That’s fair and just.”
“Yes, perfectly, situated as you and Miette are. But supposing you had children?”
“Well, what about it?”
“Oh, Ian, don’t pretend to be stupid. Supposing you had children that demanded both father’s and mother’s care, that loved both their parents, and would suffer if deprived of either one?”
“That makes no difference,” he said doggedly. “I recognise no child’s rights. I hate the little devils, anyhow. If the parents consider the children, then let them stick to each other, no matter at what cost.”
She persisted in face of the rage that boiled within her, trying to arrive at she knew not what. “But if one of the parents fell in love with an outsider?”
“Then it would be a case of giving up one or the other, the children or the lover.”
“So. You, who tell me that you have no sense of property rights in woman, would yet compel your wife either to renounce the biggest thing in her life or to sacrifice the children just to gratify one man’s sense of property in his wife? Oh, you—you—” A faintness attacked her; she became deathly white.
Longstair was alarmed. He grabbed at her arm. He felt so sorry, too, for that glorious woman whose purgatory he could only guess at. What sort of man was Glengarry, anyhow, to put friendship before her? A man of steel or of ice, surely.
“Here, I say, Margaret, pull yourself together, there’s a girl—”
“All right,” she whispered with stiff lips. “I don’t know what is the matter with me. It is the injustice. I could take a knife and stab to the heart every cur in the world that calls himself a man.”
Ian shuffled uneasily. “It will take a long time to eradicate the possessive instinct in regard to the mate, Margaret. It took a long time to implant it. At least, I—”
She interrupted: “Do you know about that? Can it be explained?”
“Why, of course. Everything can be explained. Come and sit on the bench and we’ll discuss it.”
She followed him eagerly.
“Well,” he began, “you must know that in the early stages of history human propagation of the race was carried on by means of the institution known as group marriage. That was when mankind lived under an economic system known as communism. Goods were produced by all for the good o
f all. There was no idle owning class, living on the product of the labour of others. But the time came when private property in the means of production arose ….” Here he detailed the rise of private property in the means of production. “And with the rise of private property came of necessity also the rise of the sense of property rights in regard to woman—”
“Why? Why?”
“Because man wanted legal heirs to bequeath his property to. Of course, side by side with the legal wife man kept other women, slaves and concubines, if he could afford to keep them, and these women were his property also. But as time went on the changed economic conditions demanded the absorption of these slaves and concubines in industry, and man gradually lost his legal property rights over them.
“He did not, of course, cease to practise group marriage; he has persisted in the practice of group marriage right down to the present day. The women who formerly were his slaves, and whom he owned as he did his cattle, became, under the changed economic conditions, his prostitutes, who did not and do not cost him nearly so much as they did under their former status.”
“But there is something wrong there, Ian: the workers had no property to bequeath, and yet they also acquired the sense of property rights in woman.”
“Ah! They adopted the one woman system under compulsion. They could not afford any more. Away back a man was allowed his quota of women according to the size of his herd. He could keep as many women as he could afford to keep, but the legal wife bore his legal children. Over the wife, in order to be sure of his paternity, he kept strict watch and ward. For untold centuries the man has been acquiring a sense of property rights in his woman, and it will take a long time to eradicate that sense, even after the reason for it has ceased to be. That is, even after private property in the means of production has ceased to be. Woman, by virtue of her sex, since the inception of private property, has been a chattel. She shall cease to be a chattel and become a human being only after private property has ceased to exist.