Classic Works from Women Writers

by Editors of Canterbury Classics

  No longer able to consider marriage, or to weigh coolly what her nature was, or how it would be if they lived together, he dropped to the ground and sat absorbed in the thought of her, and soon tormented by the desire to be in her presence again.

  CHAPTER XIX

  But Hewet need not have increased his torments by imagining that Hirst was still talking to Rachel. The party very soon broke up, the Flushings going in one direction, Hirst in another, and Rachel remaining in the hall, pulling the illustrated papers about, turning from one to another, her movements expressing the unformed restless desire in her mind. She did not know whether to go or to stay, though Mrs. Flushing had commanded her to appear at tea. The hall was empty, save for Miss Willett who was playing scales with her fingers upon a sheet of sacred music, and the Carters, an opulent couple who disliked the girl, because her shoe laces were untied, and she did not look sufficiently cheery, which by some indirect process of thought led them to think that she would not like them. Rachel certainly would not have liked them, if she had seen them, for the excellent reason that Mr. Carter waxed his moustache, and Mrs. Carter wore bracelets, and they were evidently the kind of people who would not like her; but she was too much absorbed by her own restlessness to think or to look.

  She was turning over the slippery pages of an American magazine, when the hall door swung, a wedge of light fell upon the floor, and a small white figure upon whom the light seemed focussed, made straight across the room to her.

  “What! You here?” Evelyn exclaimed. “Just caught a glimpse of you at lunch; but you wouldn’t condescend to look at me.”

  It was part of Evelyn’s character that in spite of many snubs which she received or imagined, she never gave up the pursuit of people she wanted to know, and in the long run generally succeeded in knowing them and even in making them like her.

  She looked round her. “I hate this place. I hate these people,” she said. “I wish you’d come up to my room with me. I do want to talk to you.”

  As Rachel had no wish to go or to stay, Evelyn took her by the wrist and drew her out of the hall and up the stairs. As they went upstairs two steps at a time, Evelyn, who still kept hold of Rachel’s hand, ejaculated broken sentences about not caring a hang what people said. “Why should one, if one knows one’s right? And let ’em all go to blazes! Them’s my opinions!”

  She was in a state of great excitement, and the muscles of her arms were twitching nervously. It was evident that she was only waiting for the door to shut to tell Rachel all about it. Indeed, directly they were inside her room, she sat on the end of the bed and said, “I suppose you think I’m mad?”

  Rachel was not in the mood to think clearly about anyone’s state of mind. She was however in the mood to say straight out whatever occurred to her without fear of the consequences.

  “Somebody’s proposed to you,” she remarked.

  “How on earth did you guess that?” Evelyn exclaimed, some pleasure mingling with her surprise. “Do as I look as if I’d just had a proposal?”

  “You look as if you had them every day,” Rachel replied.

  “But I don’t suppose I’ve had more than you’ve had,” Evelyn laughed rather insincerely.

  “I’ve never had one.”

  “But you will—lots—it’s the easiest thing in the world—But that’s not what’s happened this afternoon exactly. It’s—Oh, it’s a muddle, a detestable, horrible, disgusting muddle!”

  She went to the wash-stand and began sponging her cheeks with cold water; for they were burning hot. Still sponging them and trembling slightly she turned and explained in the high pitched voice of nervous excitement: “Alfred Perrott says I’ve promised to marry him, and I say I never did. Sinclair says he’ll shoot himself if I don’t marry him, and I say, ‘Well, shoot yourself!’ But of course he doesn’t—they never do. And Sinclair got hold of me this afternoon and began bothering me to give an answer, and accusing me of flirting with Alfred Perrott, and told me I’d no heart, and was merely a Siren, oh, and quantities of pleasant things like that. So at last I said to him, ‘Well, Sinclair, you’ve said enough now. You can just let me go.’ And then he caught me and kissed me—the disgusting brute—I can still feel his nasty hairy face just there—as if he’d any right to, after what he’d said!”

  She sponged a spot on her left cheek energetically.

  “I’ve never met a man that was fit to compare with a woman!” she cried; “they’ve no dignity, they’ve no courage, they’ve nothing but their beastly passions and their brute strength! Would any woman have behaved like that—if a man had said he didn’t want her? We’ve too much self-respect; we’re infinitely finer than they are.”

  She walked about the room, dabbing her wet cheeks with a towel. Tears were now running down with the drops of cold water.

  “It makes me angry,” she explained, drying her eyes.

  Rachel sat watching her. She did not think of Evelyn’s position; she only thought that the world was full or people in torment.

  “There’s only one man here I really like,” Evelyn continued; “Terence Hewet. One feels as if one could trust him.”

  At these words Rachel suffered an indescribable chill; her heart seemed to be pressed together by cold hands.

  “Why?” she asked. “Why can you trust him?”

  “I don’t know,” said Evelyn. “Don’t you have feelings about people? Feelings you’re absolutely certain are right? I had a long talk with Terence the other night. I felt we were really friends after that. There’s something of a woman in him—” She paused as though she were thinking of very intimate things that Terence had told her, so at least Rachel interpreted her gaze.

  She tried to force herself to say, “Has he proposed to you?” but the question was too tremendous, and in another moment Evelyn was saying that the finest men were like women, and women were nobler than men—for example, one couldn’t imagine a woman like Lillah Harrison thinking a mean thing or having anything base about her.

  “How I’d like you to know her!” she exclaimed.

  She was becoming much calmer, and her cheeks were now quite dry. Her eyes had regained their usual expression of keen vitality, and she seemed to have forgotten Alfred and Sinclair and her emotion. “Lillah runs a home for inebriate women in the Deptford Road,” she continued. “She started it, managed it, did everything off her own bat, and it’s now the biggest of its kind in England. You can’t think what those women are like—and their homes. But she goes among them at all hours of the day and night. I’ve often been with her … That’s what’s the matter with us … We don’t do things. What do you do?” she demanded, looking at Rachel with a slightly ironical smile. Rachel had scarcely listened to any of this, and her expression was vacant and unhappy. She had conceived an equal dislike for Lillah Harrison and her work in the Deptford Road, and for Evelyn M. and her profusion of love affairs.

  “I play,” she said with an affection of stolid composure.

  “That’s about it!” Evelyn laughed. “We none of us do anything but play. And that’s why women like Lillah Harrison, who’s worth twenty of you and me, have to work themselves to the bone. But I’m tired of playing,” she went on, lying flat on the bed, and raising her arms above her head. Thus stretched out, she looked more diminutive than ever.

  “I’m going to do something. I’ve got a splendid idea. Look here, you must join. I’m sure you’ve got any amount of stuff in you, though you look—well, as if you’d lived all your life in a garden.” She sat up, and began to explain with animation. “I belong to a club in London. It meets every Saturday, so it’s called the Saturday Club. We’re supposed to talk about art, but I’m sick of talking about art—what’s the good of it? With all kinds of real things going on round one? It isn’t as if they’d got anything to say about art, either. So what I’m going to tell ’em is that we’ve talked enough about art, and we’d better talk about life for a change. Questions that really matter to people’s lives, the White Slave Traff
ic, Women Suffrage, the Insurance Bill, and so on. And when we’ve made up our mind what we want to do we could form ourselves into a society for doing it … I’m certain that if people like ourselves were to take things in hand instead of leaving it to policemen and magistrates, we could put a stop to—prostitution”—she lowered her voice at the ugly word—“in six months. My idea is that men and women ought to join in these matters. We ought to go into Piccadilly and stop one of these poor wretches and say: ‘Now, look here, I’m no better than you are, and I don’t pretend to be any better, but you’re doing what you know to be beastly, and I won’t have you doing beastly things, because we’re all the same under our skins, and if you do a beastly thing it does matter to me.’ That’s what Mr. Bax was saying this morning, and it’s true, though you clever people—you’re clever too, aren’t you?—don’t believe it.”

  When Evelyn began talking—it was a fact she often regretted—her thoughts came so quickly that she never had any time to listen to other people’s thoughts. She continued without more pause than was needed for taking breath.

  “I don’t see why the Saturday club people shouldn’t do a really great work in that way,” she went on. “Of course it would want organisation, someone to give their life to it, but I’m ready to do that. My notion’s to think of the human beings first and let the abstract ideas take care of themselves. What’s wrong with Lillah—if there is anything wrong—is that she thinks of Temperance first and the women afterwards. Now there’s one thing I’ll say to my credit,” she continued; “I’m not intellectual or artistic or anything of that sort, but I’m jolly human.” She slipped off the bed and sat on the floor, looking up at Rachel. She searched up into her face as if she were trying to read what kind of character was concealed behind the face. She put her hand on Rachel’s knee.

  “It is being human that counts, isn’t it?” she continued. “Being real, whatever Mr. Hirst may say. Are you real?”

  Rachel felt much as Terence had felt that Evelyn was too close to her, and that there was something exciting in this closeness, although it was also disagreeable. She was spared the need of finding an answer to the question, for Evelyn proceeded, “Do you believe in anything?”

  In order to put an end to the scrutiny of these bright blue eyes, and to relieve her own physical restlessness, Rachel pushed back her chair and exclaimed, “In everything!” and began to finger different objects, the books on the table, the photographs, the freshly leaved plant with the stiff bristles, which stood in a large earthenware pot in the window.

  “I believe in the bed, in the photographs, in the pot, in the balcony, in the sun, in Mrs. Flushing,” she remarked, still speaking recklessly, with something at the back of her mind forcing her to say the things that one usually does not say. “But I don’t believe in God, I don’t believe in Mr. Bax, I don’t believe in the hospital nurse. I don’t believe—” She took up a photograph and, looking at it, did not finish her sentence.

  “That’s my mother,” said Evelyn, who remained sitting on the floor binding her knees together with her arms, and watching Rachel curiously.

  Rachel considered the portrait. “Well, I don’t much believe in her,” she remarked after a time in a low tone of voice.

  Mrs. Murgatroyd looked indeed as if the life had been crushed out of her; she knelt on a chair, gazing piteously from behind the body of a Pomeranian dog which she clasped to her cheek, as if for protection.

  “And that’s my dad,” said Evelyn, for there were two photographs in one frame. The second photograph represented a handsome soldier with high regular features and a heavy black moustache; his hand rested on the hilt of his sword; there was a decided likeness between him and Evelyn.

  “And it’s because of them,” said Evelyn, “that I’m going to help the other women. You’ve heard about me, I suppose? They weren’t married, you see; I’m not anybody in particular. I’m not a bit ashamed of it. They loved each other anyhow, and that’s more than most people can say of their parents.”

  Rachel sat down on the bed, with the two pictures in her hands, and compared them—the man and the woman who had, so Evelyn said, loved each other. That fact interested her more than the campaign on behalf of unfortunate women which Evelyn was once more beginning to describe. She looked again from one to the other.

  “What d’you think it’s like,” she asked, as Evelyn paused for a minute, “being in love?”

  “Have you never been in love?” Evelyn asked. “Oh no—one’s only got to look at you to see that,” she added. She considered. “I really was in love once,” she said. She fell into reflection, her eyes losing their bright vitality and approaching something like an expression of tenderness. “It was heavenly!—while it lasted. The worst of it is it don’t last, not with me. That’s the bother.”

  She went on to consider the difficulty with Alfred and Sinclair about which she had pretended to ask Rachel’s advice. But she did not want advice; she wanted intimacy. When she looked at Rachel, who was still looking at the photographs on the bed, she could not help seeing that Rachel was not thinking about her. What was she thinking about, then? Evelyn was tormented by the little spark of life in her which was always trying to work through to other people, and was always being rebuffed. Falling silent she looked at her visitor, her shoes, her stockings, the combs in her hair, all the details of her dress in short, as though by seizing every detail she might get closer to the life within.

  Rachel at last put down the photographs, walked to the window and remarked, “It’s odd. People talk as much about love as they do about religion.”

  “I wish you’d sit down and talk,” said Evelyn impatiently.

  Instead Rachel opened the window, which was made in two long panes, and looked down into the garden below.

  “That’s where we got lost the first night,” she said. “It must have been in those bushes.”

  “They kill hens down there,” said Evelyn. “They cut their heads off with a knife—disgusting! But tell me—what—”

  “I’d like to explore the hotel,” Rachel interrupted. She drew her head in and looked at Evelyn, who still sat on the floor.

  “It’s just like other hotels,” said Evelyn.

  That might be, although every room and passage and chair in the place had a character of its own in Rachel’s eyes; but she could not bring herself to stay in one place any longer. She moved slowly towards the door.

  “What is it you want?” said Evelyn. “You make me feel as if you were always thinking of something you don’t say … Do say it!”

  But Rachel made no response to this invitation either. She stopped with her fingers on the handle of the door, as if she remembered that some sort of pronouncement was due from her.

  “I suppose you’ll marry one of them,” she said, and then turned the handle and shut the door behind her. She walked slowly down the passage, running her hand along the wall beside her. She did not think which way she was going, and therefore walked down a passage which only led to a window and a balcony. She looked down at the kitchen premises, the wrong side of the hotel life, which was cut off from the right side by a maze of small bushes. The ground was bare, old tins were scattered about, and the bushes wore towels and aprons upon their heads to dry. Every now and then a waiter came out in a white apron and threw rubbish on to a heap. Two large women in cotton dresses were sitting on a bench with blood-smeared tin trays in front of them and yellow bodies across their knees. They were plucking the birds, and talking as they plucked. Suddenly a chicken came floundering, half flying, half running into the space, pursued by a third woman whose age could hardly be under eighty. Although wizened and unsteady on her legs she kept up the chase, egged on by the laughter of the others; her face was expressive of furious rage, and as she ran she swore in Spanish. Frightened by hand-clapping here, a napkin there, the bird ran this way and that in sharp angles, and finally fluttered straight at the old woman, who opened her scanty grey skirts to enclose it, dropped upon it in a bundl
e, and then holding it out cut its head off with an expression of vindictive energy and triumph combined. The blood and the ugly wriggling fascinated Rachel, so that although she knew that someone had come up behind and was standing beside her, she did not turn round until the old woman had settled down on the bench beside the others. Then she looked up sharply, because of the ugliness of what she had seen. It was Miss Allan who stood beside her.

  “Not a pretty sight,” said Miss Allan, “although I daresay it’s really more humane than our method … I don’t believe you’ve ever been in my room,” she added, and turned away as if she meant Rachel to follow her. Rachel followed, for it seemed possible that each new person might remove the mystery which burdened her.

  The bedrooms at the hotel were all on the same pattern, save that some were larger and some smaller; they had a floor of dark red tiles; they had a high bed, draped in mosquito curtains; they had each a writing-table and a dressing-table, and a couple of armchairs. But directly a box was unpacked the rooms became very different, so that Miss Allan’s room was very unlike Evelyn’s room. There were no variously coloured hatpins on her dressing-table; no scent-bottles; no narrow curved pairs of scissors; no great variety of shoes and boots; no silk petticoats lying on the chairs. The room was extremely neat. There seemed to be two pairs of everything. The writing-table, however, was piled with manuscript, and a table was drawn out to stand by the armchair on which were two separate heaps of dark library books, in which there were many slips of paper sticking out at different degrees of thickness. Miss Allan had asked Rachel to come in out of kindness, thinking that she was waiting about with nothing to do. Moreover, she liked young women, for she had taught many of them, and having received so much hospitality from the Ambroses she was glad to be able to repay a minute part of it. She looked about accordingly for something to show her. The room did not provide much entertainment. She touched her manuscript. “Age of Chaucer; Age of Elizabeth; Age of Dryden,” she reflected; “I’m glad there aren’t many more ages. I’m still in the middle of the eighteenth century. Won’t you sit down, Miss Vinrace? The chair, though small, is firm … Euphues. The germ of the English novel,” she continued, glancing at another page. “Is that the kind of thing that interests you?”