Читать книгу Stinging Nettles - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 7

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§ I

LUCIE sat down beside a pale young woman who was rather a successful journalist; Lucie spoke to her of her little boy; she was the only woman in the room who had a child.

Mrs. Mayes responded cordially; the boy was "in the country," she didn't see him often; her work kept her in town; he was three, she was really only just beginning to recover from the "awful" time she had had when he was born.

She slid with relish into a brutal account of her confinement, the state of health it had left her with and her precautions to prevent the recurrence of such a catastrophe.

"My husband wants a little girl! I tell him he can have the next himself—"

"Yes," said Lucie mechanically and moved away, under the excuse of taking Miss Dornett's empty cup.

She was at once swept into the conversation between this lady, Miss Barden and Mrs. Biddulph, in which the violent Louisa Kingdom had now powerfully joined.

Mrs. Biddulph listened vaguely while the other three boomed and shrilled.

They were all on the same committees, belonged to the same societies and clubs, wrote on the same subjects.

The object of their venomous energies seemed the pursuit, punishment and castigation of man.

§ II

Had you not known they were honest, good, earnest, pure women, you might have likened them to harpies, flying about in search of filth, and finding it, flapping and screaming with triumph with their claws full of foulness.

They knew all the disgusting things in the world—intimately; there was no sore so deep hidden that they had not found it out and explored it; there was no vice so secret that they had not proclaimed it aloud; there was no disease, nor passion, nor crime, nor emotion, they had not turned over and examined.

They were social reformers.

They loathed man; they lost breath trying to relate his sins and wickedness; he was bestial, he was hideous—a Minotaur; and they must save the young virgins from him.

They were so pure that the thought of marriage offended them, so spiritual they thought of child-bearing as an outrage; but they knew backwards the holes and corners where foul and creeping vices hide.

They were feminists.

They used terms that would have been obscene if they had not been "scientific"; they flung about words that had never been on decent women's lips since they were coined; they drew their instances and statistics from the police courts and the hospitals, the gutters and the slums of Europe.

They scorned as cowards women who would not join them, and they proclaimed with gloomy satisfaction the fast approaching day when man would be a chained monster, bound by the delicate hands of women, scourged by the whips wielded by the angelic and triumphant sex.

§ III

Sophie was singing.

She had a full rich voice on which a good deal of money had been spent (Lucie's money), but it was all to pieces now for lack of practice, and Mrs. Falconer, tired and nervous, stumbled in the accompaniments.

Sophie posed.

Drooping, watchful, rigid with vanity and jealousy of every other woman there, yet apathetic, she dragged through her songs.

Lucie was appalled by a sense of failure; Simon Kaye had not come; he never did; and there was that letter to write to Pio.

Sophie danced.

Twisting gauze veils, she slopped through a series of poses to a melody on the gramophone, looking self-conscious and sullen; the men were enthusiastic in their praise; the women had an air of reserved judgment.

Mrs. Falconer, smoking furiously, gazed at her daughter with fierce eyes of love and admired her in warm phrases.

Aurora Bearish slipped in, bringing a foreign young man who appeared both shy and impertinent; the gas was lit; Mrs. Falconer kept saying "Hush!"

Sophie continued to circle aimlessly round the room, waving the chiffon scarf; soiled tea cups and bitten piece of cake were piled up in corners, crumbs were over the cheap mats, the sandwiches began to dry and curl; the tobacco smoke had drowned the opulent perfumes used by Lydia Copeland and Ellen Bowness; the gas fumes made the air acrid and heavy.

Lucie sat in a corner now next Mrs. Bearish, who whispered to her about her work; the woodcuts, the designs for costumes, the Eastern textiles, her illustrations...Oh, yes, she was doing quite well—it was all quite successful. Even as she spoke she felt how utterly little she cared if her work was praised or not; what did it matter save as a means of earning money?

§ IV

Oh, to get away from it all—to some ordered path of sober riches, or of austere poverty! Oh, for leisure and peace and the long day to live through in pleasant work and happy play—to feel well and content among quiet serene people, to love and be loved, walking the homely happy ways of every day.

To be noticed and valued as a woman, not as a money earning, fame catching asset—to be done with the struggle and the tumult, the press and clash, the uproar and the confusion—to have the grass beneath your feet and the stars above your head, fruit and flowers in your lap and a child in your arms.

Oh, to get away from it all!

§ V

At last Sophie stopped; her mother praised, petted and coaxed her; she said she had a headache, and there was a hunt for aspirin.

People began to leave; eager plans were made for other meetings; Mr. Dodd suggested "a dinner in Soho"; the Irish charlatan, Hamish O'More, invited everyone to a ghost-raising, the women shrilled and tittered; the younger ones tried to combine a party to go to some "palais de danse"; they all talked at once and Lucie's head throbbed steadily.

The young clerk, Mead Preston, lingered and with much familiarity and swagger asked Sophie—"Tommy" as he called her with an air of being witty "out to supper."

He included Mrs. Falconer as an afterthought. She declined, and Sophie, with a smirk under her rude apathy, thrust a flop hat on her disordered hair, dragged on a coat belonging to her mother, and went off leaving the other two women to "dear up."

"I am so glad he asked her," declared Mrs. Falconer, "it will take her mind off things—he is so much in love with her—it is wonderful how she turns their heads—poor child!"

"Sit down," said Lucie. "You're tired. I'll do this and get a little supper—"

"And something for Sophie when she comes back; she will be worn out—I thought she would have broken down—"

"Because Mr. Kaye didn't come?"

"Lucie," said Mrs. Falconer earnestly and impressively, "it is a tragedy—and I can do nothing!"

"Why does she go out with this young man?" asked Lucie rather sharply.

At that moment she hated Sophie, who appeared to her a fell figure, for Mrs. Falconer leant back and cried quietly, looking old and broken.

"I did so hope he would come, I did so hope it would be all right for her—she is breaking her heart and I can't bear it."

Lucie leant heavily against the back of the chair looking hopelessly down on the other woman, round them the litter of the feast, the gas-laden, smoke-tainted air.

Mrs. Falconer began to lament her fate, to bemoan Sophie's destiny with dreadful emotion and force.

Lucie sank to the low stool at her feet and caressed her hands.

She had heard it all so often before and there was nothing to be said.

She could think of nothing that would put things right but plenty of money, and she would never be able to command plenty of money.

Mrs. Falconer's piteous laments continued; the outcry of a brave soul, an impetuous and generous soul.

"Sophie's life is going to bits like mine did," she said. "And I can't bear it! I can't bear it!"

"She'll be all right—she'll get married," answered Lucie faintly.

"Married!" cried Mrs. Falconer. "I wish she would, but if it isn't that one man, it won't help Sophie much—not unless he had money—" she finished vaguely.

"Marriage is one of the best things we've got," said Lucie. "It seems to me a woman must get married unless she is a saint or a monster."

"Oh, that's out of date," answered Mrs. Falconer impatiently. "Surely we have all learnt that women were not made for domesticity."

"Then why aren't you happy about Sophie with her admirers and freedom?"

Mrs. Falconer sat up, lit a cigarette and smoked in silence. "Sophie ought to work," said Lucie, "she has too much time to brood."

"Sophie can't work while her heart and mind are agitated by this love affair—"

"Well, as I said, marriage—"

Mrs. Falconer interrupted.

"Sophie wants success. She sees other women with all they want who don't work—look at Lydia Copeland, she hasn't a tithe of Sophie's looks or charm or brains—"

"But she is a horrid woman," said Lucie quickly. "Common and—she has been divorced, hasn't she? And she isn't living with her present husband. And she has got a daughter hidden away in a cheap boarding school—she talks noisily about 'living her own life' and 'the right to be an individuality.'"

"She leads a very pleasant life," said Mrs. Falconer obstinately, "and of course a woman can do anything nowadays if she is clever."

Lucie could not argue further; she turned away and began to collect the soiled cups and plates and to put the remains of the cakes and biscuits into tins.

Mrs. Falconer, wholly absorbed in the problem of Sophie, sat over the gas fire talking vaguely, disjointedly, yet passionately and intensely about her daughter and herself and their "ill-luck."

It was all utterly illogical; even while Lucie's sympathy and affection groaned over the distress of the woman she loved, her clear brain showed her the unreasonableness of these typically feminine temperaments.

That was the worst of it—unreasonableness!

Something you couldn't deal with or argue with, that tangled and coiled you up till you felt half crazy yourself, that led to injustice, violence, hatreds and furious indiscretions. Minds without logic or philosophy or sense of law or order, feminine minds swayed by emotional impulses, strong jealousies, blind vanity, hungry cravings, natures shaken by thwarted instincts and suppressed desires, unstable, fluid, on the verge of perpetual hysteria, unbalanced to the edge of insanity—did not Lucie know the type?

Had she not been brought up by it, lived with it, did she not meet it every day among the women who composed her acquaintances?

She was herself an exceptional woman in so far as she could see and judge the temperaments of these others and herself, infected in so far as that she could not, dare not stand clear of all these discontented, piteous and dangerous women.

§ VI

Gamblers—that is what women were—they wanted "luck" and "chances"; they staked their sex, their looks, their personality—they coined themselves, as it were, into currency with which to purchase their desires; they hadn't any imagination or power of thought; they weren't really intelligent, most of them, only cunning.

And so few were, in any sense of the word, educated.

And they were so greedy; they were out for the real big prizes; they claimed idleness, luxury, admiration as a birthright; they schemed, contrived—gamblers always—evading work, evading responsibility, snatching at "chance," clutching at "luck."

§ VII

Yet Lucie yearned over Mrs. Falconer; she went up to her now and kissed her thin smooth cheek.

"I do wish I could make it different!" she whispered. "I do wish!"

And Mrs. Falconer caressed her warmly, and the two women cried together a little from sheer weariness of heart.

Yet all the time the elder resented the younger's feeble success, her poor marriage—Sophie had not achieved even this—passionately jealous was the maternal heart for Sophie.

§ VIII

Could some being of some other sphere, of angelic power but human compassion, have brooded over these two then, and seen into their hearts, would he not, for all their weaknesses and follies, have pitied them?

Knowing what their sweet natural uses were, seeing how they had been used by the passing breath of a civilization into which their flickers of lives had been cast, would he not have pitied them?

Truly there was cause for divine tears in the story of Elizabeth Falconer once so gay, so brave, so bright and alluring, full of warm impulses and generous thoughts, suppressed, but not trained, threatened, but not guided by the dull dictates of nineteenth century Christianity, left penniless by an extravagant father, married at eighteen to a handsome ruffian, watching her family "go to pieces," trying to "reform" her husband, trying to earn her living, on the stage, by writing, using her wits desperately, losing caste, following the black sheep she had married into his own sooty pastures until she had to cast him off and struggle on alone with two little children on her hands, intriguing, scheming, using her charm and her sex as her only weapons, borrowing shillings from women, taking pounds from men, dragging from sordid lodging to sordid lodging, familiar with debts, police courts, humiliations, of bittered poverty, seeing only the horrible side of things, consorting with a queer flotsam and jetsam of failures and knaves, quarrelling, fighting, weeping, starving and shabby, shaken by passionate friendships with men that ended in—nothing—lying awake in her dingy bed to hear her drunken husband smashing the bell or breaking the window below, or meeting him at street corners, thrusting a few shillings into his hand "to keep him quiet"—yet remaining always a refined gentlewoman, and never becoming utterly submerged or indeed much soiled by the putrid waters flowing round her. And then, the prosperity brought by Lucie's success, and the unwise, untrained spending of it, and Sophie's jealousy, and Sophie's failure, and still the struggle and the scheming, and the plots, and the quarrels, and the hot resentment against encroaching age and increasing languors of body, and the bitterness of her own empty hands...and the end of all things not so far away now.

The abominable husband was dead these ten years and his family, through this and Lucie's success, reconciled; very few of her present acquaintances knew what her life had been; but she could never forget; it had made her what she was.

And what of the younger woman who had grown up by her side through all her wretchedness and misery?

Starved and silenced, shabby and ashamed, outcast in every sense, untrained, uneducated, used to swirling passions and desperate scenes, familiar with bitter tears and angry outcries, suddenly finding she could earn money, quite a lot of money, with her gifts, writing, painting, designing feverishly, just for the money, delighting to spend it freely, in the most obvious ways on all of them; then, like her own mother, like Elizabeth Falconer, tripped and flung by her emotions.

Married recklessly—earning money to keep a sick husband—earning money to keep a baby, to keep all of them; now, in full youth, left with an invalid and a little grave.

And so they cried together, poor women, such fools, so scourged and lashed by that enigma we call Destiny.

And presently Lucie went back to finish "tidying up" and Mrs. Falconer lit another cigarette and asked Lucie if...she could manage ten pounds by the end of the week.