CHAPTER XXI
AT ROGER MICHAEL'S
On an early April afternoon in the year 1902 a man and woman werecrossing, with much leisureliness, Trafalgar Square.
"We won't get run over! It isn't like Paris."
"Aren't you tired, Molly? Don't you want a hansom?"
"Tired? No! What could make me tired a day like this? I want to gostroke the lions."
They gravely went and did so. "Poor old British Lion!--Listen!"
News was being cried. "_Details of fight at Bushman's Kop!_"
Christopher Josslyn left the lions, ran across and got a paper, thenreturned. "A small affair!" he said. "How interminably the thing dragsout!"
"But they'll have peace directly now."
"Yes--but it's Poor old Lion, just the same--"
They moved from the four in stone, striking across to Pall Mall."There was a halcyon time in England, fifty years or so ago, when, ifyou'll believe what men wrote, it was seriously held that no civilizedman would ever again encroach upon a weaker brother's rights! ?onswere at hand of universal education, stained glass, and ascensionlilies. At any rate ?ons of brotherhood. Under the kindly control ofthe great Elder Brother England. And they had some reason--it lookedfor an illusory moment that way. I always try to remember that--andmoments like that in every land's history--at moments such as these.Why doesn't that moment carry on over? There's something deeply,fundamentally wrong."
He looked along the crowded street. Men were buying papers--that seemedtheir chief employment. _Delarey--Kitchener--Report of fight at HartzRiver._
"Not far from a billion dollars expended on this war--and those EastSide streets we went through yesterday--Concentration Camps--andthe Coronation--this reactionary Administration with its Corn Lawsand Coercion Laws and wretched Education Bill, and so on--and theCoronation talk--and Piccadilly last night after nine--"
"Oh," said Molly sharply. "That's the sting that I feel! It's women andchildren who are suffering in those Concentration Camps, I suppose--andit's women's sons who are lying on the battlefields--and it's womenjust as well as men who are paying the taxes--and it's women, too, inthose horrible slums, wretched and hopeless--and bad legislation fallson women just as hardly as on men--but the other! There we've got thetragedy mostly to ourselves--and there's no greater tragedy below thestars!" She dashed a bright drop from her eyes. "I'll never forget thatgirl, last night, on the Embankment--thin and painted and that hollowlaugh.... I wish women would wake up!"
"Women and men," said the other. "They're waking, but it's slow, it'sslow, it's slow."
The softened, softened English sunlight bathed the broad street, thebuildings, the wheeled traffic, the people going up and down. Thetwo Americans, here at last at the latter end of their six monthsabroad, delighted in the tender light, in the soft afternoon skywith a few sailing clouds, in the street sights and sounds, in theEnglish speech. They strolled rather than walked; even at times theydawdled rather than strolled. They developed a tendency to standbefore shop-windows. So strong and handsome a pair were they that theyattracted some attention. Thirty-five and thirty-two, both tall, bothwell-made, lithe, active, both aglow with health; she a magnificentrosy blonde, he blue-eyed, but with nut-brown hair; both dressed withan unconventional simplicity, fitness, and comfort; both interested aschildren and happy in each other's company--those who observed them didnot call them "Promise-Bearers"; and yet, in a way, that was what theywere. There were three children at home with as splendid a grandmother.A University had sent Christopher to make an investigation, and thechildren had said, "You go, too, mother! It'll be splendid. You need arest!" and Christopher had said, "Molly, you need another honeymoon."
The English weather was uncommonly good. As they came to Green Parka barrel-organ was playing. Spring was full at hand; you read iteverywhere.
Two men passed, talking. "Yes, to confer at Klerksdorp, with Steyn andBotha and De Wet. Peace presently, and none too soon!"
"I should think not. I'm done with wars."
"Little Annie Rooney," played the barrel-organ.
"There is more than one way for societies to survive," saidChristopher, "and some day men will find it out. You can surviveby being a better duellist and for a longer time than the otherfellow--and you can survive by being the better toiler, also withpersistence--or you can survive by being the better thinker, inan endless, ascending scale. Each plane makes the lower largelyunnecessary, is, indeed, the lower moved up, become more merciful andwiser. Survive--to live over--to outlive. The true survivor--wouldn'tyou like to see him--see her--see _us_, Molly?"
"Yes," said Molly soberly. "We are a long way off."
Christopher assented. "True enough. And, thank Heaven! the truesurvivor will always vanish toward the truer yet. But I don't know--itseems to me--the twentieth century might catch a faint far glimpse ofour lineaments! I am madly, wildly, rashly optimistic for the twentiethcentury--even when I remember how optimistic they were fifty years ago!Who could help being optimistic on such an afternoon? Look at the goldon the green!"
The barrel-organ played an old, gay dance.
"Do you suppose," said Molly, "that, in Merry England, the milkmaidsand shepherdesses danced about a maypole at thirty-two? For that's justexactly what I should like to do this minute! How absurd to be able toclimb the Matterhorn, and then not to be let go out there and dance onthat smooth bit of green!"
"You might try it. Only I wouldn't answer for the conduct of thepoliceman by the tree. And if you're arrested, we can't dine to-nightwith Roger Michael."
Roger Michael lived in a small, red, Georgian house in Chelsea. Hergrandparents had lived here, and her parents, and she had been bornhere, nearer fifty than forty years ago. It had descended to her, andshe lived here still. She had an old housekeeper and a beautiful cat,and two orphan children who were almost the happiest children in thatpart of the world. She always kept children in the house. There werea couple of others whom she had raised and who were out in the world,doing well, and when the two now with her were no longer children shewould find another two. She did not believe in orphan asylums. Sheherself had never married.
She remembered George Eliot, and she had known the Rossettis, and moreslightly the Carlyles. Now in her small, distinguished house, withits atmosphere of plain living and high thinking, fragrant and sunnywith kindliness and good will, she set her table often for her friendsand drew them together in her simple, old-fashioned, book-overflowingdrawing-room. Her friends were scholars, writing and thinking people,and simply good people, and any one who was in trouble and came to her,and many reformers. She was herself of old, reforming stock, and sheserved humanity in all those ways. She had met and liked the Josslynswhen she was in America years before, and when they wrote and told herthey were in London she promptly named this evening for them to come toChelsea.
They found besides Roger Michael a scientific man of name asked to meetChristopher, a writer of plays, a writer of essays, a noted Fabian, andas noted a woman reformer. The seventh guest was a little late. Whenshe came, it was Hagar Ashendyne.
"What an unexpected pleasure!" said the Josslyns, and meant every wordof it. "How long since that summer at the New Springs? Almost nineyears! And you've grown a great, famous woman--"
"Not so very great, and not so very famous," said Hagar Ashendyne."But I'm fortunate enough--to-night! You're a wind from home--youmountain-climbing, divine couple! The Bear's Den! Do you remember theday we climbed there?"
"Yes!" said Molly; "and Judge Black waiting at the foot. Oh, I am gladto see you! We did not dream you were in London."
"We--my father and I--have been here only a little while. All winter wewere in Algeria. Then, suddenly, he wanted to see the Leonardos in theNational."
Her voice, which was very rich and soft, made musical notes of herwords. She was subtly, indescribably, transfigured and magnified.She looked a great woman. While she turned to greet others in theroom, one or two of whom seemed acquaintances of more or less oldstanding, Mo
lly and Christopher were alike engaged in drawing rapidlyinto mind what they knew of this countrywoman. They knew what theworld knew--that she was a writer of short stories whose work wouldprobably live; that her work was fabulously in demand; that it had ametaphysical value as well as a clutching interest. They knew that shewas a world-wanderer, sailing here and there over the globe with afather whose insatiable zest for life crutches and wheel-chair couldnot put under. It was their impression that she had not been in Americamore than once or twice in a number of years. They read everything shepublished; they knew what could be known that way. They had that onesummer's impression and memory. She was there still; she was that HagarAshendyne also, but evolved, enriched....
Roger Michael never had large dinner-parties, and the talk wasoftenest general. The fare that she spread was very simple; it wasenough and good; it gained that recognition, and then the attentionwent elsewhere. The eight at the round table were, through a longrange, harmoniously minded; half, at least, were old friends andcomrades, and the other half came easily to a meeting-place. Thought,become articulate with less difficulty than usual, wove withductileness across and across the table. There sounded a fair dealof laughter. They were all workers here, and, necessarily, towardmany issues, serious-minded enough. But they could talk shop, andone another's shop, and shop of the world at large, with humour andquick appreciation of the merrier aspects of the workroom. At first,naturally, in a time of public excitement, they talked the war inAfrica, and the sick longing the country now felt for peace, and thegeneral public foreboding, undefined but very real, that had taken theplace of the old, too-mellow complacency; but then, as naturally inthis company, the talk went to underlying, slow, hesitant movements,evolutionary forces just "a-borning"; roads that people such as thesewere blazing, and athwart which each reactionary swing of the pendulumbrought landslides and floods enough, mountains of obstruction, gulfsof not-yet-ness. But the roadmakers, the pioneers, had the pioneertemper; they were spinning ropes, shouldering picks, stating tothemselves and one another that gulfs had been crossed before andmountains removed, and that, on the whole, it was healthful exercise.They were incurably hopeful, though at quite long range, as reformershave to be.
The Fabian told a mirth-provoking anecdote of a Tory candidate. Thescientific man, who possessed an imagination and was a member of theSociety for Psychical Research, gave a brief account of Thomson'snew Theory of Corpuscles, and hazarded the prediction that the nextquarter-century would see remarkable things. "We'll know more aboutradiation--gravity--the infinitely little and the infinitely big.And then--my hobby. There's a curious increase of interest in thequestion of a Fourth Dimension. It's a strange age, and it's goingto be stranger still--or merely beautifully simple and homecoming,I don't know which. Science and mysticism are fairly within hailingdistance of each other." The talk went to Christopher's investigation,and then to mountain-climbing, and Cecil Rhodes's Will, and Marconi'sastonishing feat of receiving in Newfoundland wireless signals froma station on the English coast, and M. Santos-Dumont's flight in averitable airship. The writer of essays, who was a woman and an earnestand loving one, had recently published a paper upon a term that hadhardly as yet come into general use--_Eugenics_; an article as earnestand loving as herself. Roger Michael had liked it greatly, and so hadothers at the table. Now they made the writer go over a point or two,which she did quietly, elaborating what she had first said.
Only the writer of plays--his last one being at the moment in the handsof the censor--chose to be strangely, deeply, desperately pessimistic."I am going," he said, "to quote Huxley--not that I couldn't say it aswell myself. Says Huxley, 'I know of no study which is so unutterablysaddening as that of the evolution of humanity.... Out of the darknessof prehistoric ages man emerges with the mark of his lowly originstrong upon him. He is a brute, more intelligent than other brutes; ablind prey to impulses which, as often as not, lead him to destruction;a victim to endless illusions which make his mental existence a terrorand a burthen and fill his physical life with barren toil and battle.He attains a certain degree of comfort and develops a more or lessworkable theory of life ... and then for thousands of years struggleswith varying fortunes, attended by infinite wickedness, bloodshed,and misery, to maintain himself at that point against the greed andambition of his fellow-men. He makes a point of killing and otherwisepersecuting all those who first try to get him to move on; and when hehas moved a step farther, foolishly confers _post-mortem_ deificationon his victims. He exactly repeats the process with all who want himto move a step yet farther.'--That," said the writer of plays, "iswhat happens to brains, aspiration, and altruism in combination--rackand thumbscrews and auto-da-f?s, and maybe in five hundred years or athousand a picture skied by the Royal Academy--'Giordano Bruno going tothe Stake,' 'Galileo Recanting,' 'Joan of Arc before her Judges.' Myown theory of the world is that it is standing on its head. Naturallyit resents the presence of people whose heads are in the clouds.Naturally it finds them rather ridiculous and contrary to all theproprieties, and violently to be pulled down. Moral: keep your brainsclose to safety and the creeping herb."
"I think that you worry," said the Fabian, "much too much about thatplay. I don't believe there's the slightest prospect that he'll thinkit fit to be produced."
The woman reformer was talking with Molly. "Yes; it's a longstruggle. We've been at it since the 'fifties--just as you have beenin America. A long, long time. The Movement in both countries is agrey-haired woman of almost sixty years. We've needed what they say wehave--patience. Sometimes I think we've been too patient. You youngerwomen have got to come in and take hold and give what perhaps theolder type couldn't give--organization and wider knowledge and moderncourage. We've given the old-time courage all right, and you'll have tohave the patience and staying qualities, too;--but there's needed nowa higher heart and a freer step than we could give in that world thatwe're coming out of."
"I think that I've always thought it right," said Molly, "but I'venever really come out and said so, or become identified in any way.--Ofcourse, it isn't thinking so very positively if you haven't done that--"
"It is like that with almost every one. Diffused thought--and then,suddenly one day, something happens or another mind touches yours, andout of the mist there gathers form, determination, action. You're allright, my dear! Only, I hope when you go home you will speak out, joinsome organization--That is the simple, right thing that every one cando. Concerted effort is the effort that tells to-day."
"Are you speaking," asked Hagar Ashendyne, "of the Suffrage Movement?"
They were back in the drawing-room, all gathered more or lessclosely around a light fire upon the hearth, kindled for the comfortof Americans who always found England "so cold." It softened andbrightened all the room, quaint and old-fashioned, where, for a hundredyears, distinguished quiet people had come and gone.
"Yes," said the older woman. "Are you interested?"
"Yes, of course--"
She had not spoken much at dinner, but had sat, a pearl of listeners,deep, soft eyes upon each discourser in turn. There was in the minds ofall an interest and curiosity regarding her. Her work was very good.She had personality to an extraordinary degree.
Now she spoke in a voice that had a little of the Ashendyne goldendrawl. "I have been--in the last eight years--oh, all over! Europe,yes; but more especially, it seems to me, looking back, the Orient.Egypt, all North Africa, Turkey and Persia, Japan and India. Yes, andEurope, too; Greece and Italy and Spain, the mid-Continent and theNorth. Around the world--a little of Spanish America, a little of theIslands. Sometimes long in one place, sometimes only a few days....Everywhere it was always the same.... The Social Organism with ashrivelled side."
The writer of plays was in a mood to take issue with his every deepestconviction; also to say banal things. "But aren't American women thefreest in the world?"
Hagar Ashendyne did not answer. She sat in a deep armchair, her elbowupon the arm, her chin in her hand, her eyes dreaming upon the f
ire....
But Christopher entered the lists. "'Freest'--'freest'! Yes, perhapsthey are. The Italian woman is freer than the Oriental woman, and theGerman woman is freer than the Italian, and the English woman is freerthan the German, and the American is freer than the English! But whathave they to do with 'freer' and 'freest'? It is a question of beingfree!"
"Free politically?"
"Free in all human ways, politically being one. I do not see how a mancan endure to say to a woman, 'You are less free than I am, but besatisfied! you are so much freer than that wretch over there!'"
Hagar rose. Her eyes chanced to meet those of the man who had talkedphysics and mysticism. "We shan't," she said, "get into the FourthDimension while we have a shrivelled side. We can't limp into that, youknow." She crossed the room and stood before a portrait hung above asofa. "Roger Michael, come tell me about this Quaker lady!"
She left before ten, pleading an early rising for work that must bedone. And Molly and Christopher would come to see her? She might be amonth in London.
Christopher and the Fabian saw her into her cab, and she gave each herhand and was driven away. "That," said the Fabian, as they turned backto the house, "is a woman one could die for."
It was a long way to the hotel where the Ashendynes were staying.A mild, dark, blurred night; street lights, houses with lights anddarkened houses, forms on the pavement that moved briskly, formsthat idled, forms that went with stealthiness; passing vehicles, thehorses' hoofs, the roll of the wheels, the onward, unfolding ribbon ofthe night. The air came in at the lowered window, soft and cool, witha hint now of rain. Hagar was dreaming of Gilead Balm. Up over thethreshold had peered a childhood evening, and she and Thomasine andMaggie and Corker and Mary Magazine played ring-around-a-rosy, overthe dewy grass until the pink in the west was ashes of roses and thefireflies were out.