A Bed of Roses Part 48

'Oh, it isn't that, Mrs Ferris,' burst out the suffragist, 'I'm not thinking of myself. . . .'

'Excuse me, you must. You can't help it. If you could construct a scale with the maximum of egotism at one end, and the maximum of altruism at the other and divide it, say into one hundred degrees, you would not, I think, place your n.o.blest thinkers more than a degree or two beyond the egotistic zero. Now you, a pure girl, have been entrapped into the house of a woman of no reputation, whom you would not have in your drawing-room. Now, would you?'

Miss Welkin was silent for a moment; the flush was dying away as she gazed round eyed at this beautiful woman lying in her piled cushions, talking like a mathematician.

'I haven't come here to ask you into my drawing-room,' she answered. 'I have come to ask you to throw in your labour, your time, your money, with ours in the service of our cause.' She held her head higher as the thought rose in her like wine. 'Our cause,' she continued, 'is not the cause of rich women or poor women, of good women or bad; it's the cause of woman. Thus, it doesn't matter who she is, so long as there is a woman who stands aloof from us there is still work to do.'

Victoria looked at her interestedly. Her eyes were shining, her lips parted in ecstasy.

'Oh, I know what you think,' the suffragist went on; 'as you say, you think I despise you because you . . . you. . . .' The flush returned slightly. . . . 'But I know that yours is not a happy life and we are bringing the light.'

'The light!' echoed Victoria bitterly. 'You have no idea, I see, of how many people there are who are bringing the light to women like me. There are various religious organisations who wish to rescue us and to house us comfortably under the patronage of the police, to keep us nicely and feed us on what is suitable for the fallen; they expect us to sew ten hours a day for these privileges, but that is by the way. There are also many kindly souls who offer little jobs as charwomen to those of us who are too worn out to pursue our calling; we are offered emigration as servants in exchange for the power of commanding a household; we are offered poverty for luxury, service for domination, slavery to women instead of slavery to men. How tempting it is! And now here is the light in another form: the right to drop a bit of paper into a box every four years or so and settle thereby whether the Home Secretary who administers the law of my trade shall live in fear of buff prejudice or blue.'

The suffragist said nothing for a second. She felt shaken by Victoria's bitterness.

'Women will have no party,' she said lamely, 'they will vote as women.'

'Oh? I have heard somewhere that the danger of giving women the vote is that they will vote solid "as women," as you say and swamp the men. Is that so?'

'No, I'm afraid not,' said the suffragist unguardedly, 'of course women will split up into political parties.'

'Indeed? Then where is this woman vote which is going to remould the world? It is swamped in the ordinary parties.'

The suffragist was in a dilemma.

'You forget,' she answered, wriggling on the horns, 'that women can always be aroused for a n.o.ble cause. . . .'

'Am I a n.o.ble cause?' asked Victoria, smiling. 'So far as I can see women, even the highest of them, despise us because we do illegally what they do legally, hate us because we attract, envy us because we shine. I have often thought that if Christ had said, "Let her who hath never sinned . . ." the woman would have been stoned. What do you think?'

The suffragist hesitated, cleared her throat.

'That will all go when we have the vote, women will be a force, a n.o.bler force; they will realise . . . they will sympathise more . . . then they will cast their vote for women.'

Victoria shook her head.

'Miss Welkin,' she said, 'you are an idealist. Now, will you ask me to your next meeting if you are satisfied as to my views, announce me for what I am and introduce me to your committee?'

'I don't see . . . I don't think,' stammered the suffragist, 'you see some of our committee. . . .'

Victoria laughed.

'You see. Never mind. I a.s.sure you I wouldn't go. But, tell me, supposing women get the vote, most of my cla.s.s will be disfranchised on the present registration law. What will you women do for us?'

The suffragist thought for a minute.

'We shall raise the condition of women,' she said. 'We shall give them a new status, increase the respect of men for them, increase their respect for themselves; besides, it will raise wages and that will help. We shall . . . we shall have better means of reform too.'

'What means?'

'When women have more sympathy.'

'Votes don't mean sympathy.'

'Well, intelligence then. Oh, Mrs Ferris, it's not that that matters; we're going to the root of it. We're going to make women equal to men, give them the same opportunities, the same rights. . . .'

'Yes, but will the vote increase their muscles? will it make them more logical, fitter to earn their living?'

'Of course it will,' said Miss Welkin acidly.

'Then how do you explain that several millions of men earn less than thirty shillings a week, and that at times hundreds of thousands are unemployed?'

'The vote does not mean everything,' said the suffragist reluctantly.

'It will merely ensure that we rise like the men when we are fit.'

'Well, Miss Welkin, I won't press that, but now, tell me, if women got the vote to-morrow, what would it do for my cla.s.s?'

'It would raise. . . .'

'No, no, we can't wait to be raised. We've got to live, and if you "raise" us we lose our means of livelihood. How are you going to get to the root cause and lift us, not the next generation, at once out of the lower depths?'

The suffragist's face contracted.

'Everything takes time,' she faltered. 'Just as I couldn't promise a charwoman that her hours would go down and her wages go up next day, I can't say that . . . of course your case is more difficult than any other, because . . . because. . . .'

'Because,' said Victoria coldly, 'I represent a social necessity. So long as your economic system is such that there is not work for the asking for every human being--work, mark you, fitted to strength and ability--so long on the other hand as there is such uncertainty as prevents men from marrying, so long as there is a leisured cla.s.s who draw luxury from the labour of other men; so long will my cla.s.s endure as it endured in Athens, in Rome, in Alexandria, as it does now from St John's Wood to Pekin.'

There was a pause. Then Miss Welkin got up awkwardly. Victoria followed suit.

'There,' she said, 'you don't mind my being frank, do you? May I subscribe this sovereign to the funds of the branch? I do believe you are right, you know, even though I'm not sure the millennium is coming.'

Miss Welkin looked doubtfully at the coin in her palm.

'Don't refuse it,' said Victoria, smiling, 'after all, you know, in politics there is no tainted money.'

CHAPTER XIV

VICTORIA lay back in bed, gazing at the blue silk wall. It was ten o'clock, but still dark; not a sound disturbed dominical peace, except the rain dripping from the trees, falling finally like the strokes of time. Her eyes dwelt for a moment on the colour prints where the nude beauties languished. She felt desperately tired, though she had not left the house for thirty-six hours; her weariness was as much a consequence as a cause of her consciousness of defeat. October was wearing; and soon the cruel winter would come and fix its fangs into the sole remaining joy of her life, the spectacle of life itself. She was desperately tired, full of hatred and disgust. If the face of a man rose before her she thrust it back savagely into limbo; her legs hurt. The time had come when she must realise her failure. She was not, as once in the P. R. R., in the last stage of exhaustion, hunted, tortured; she was rather the wounded bird crawling away to die in a thicket than the brute at bay.

As she lay, she realised that her failure had two aspects. It was together a monetary and a physical failure. The last three months had in themselves been easy. Her working hours did not begin before seven o'clock in the evening; and it was open to her, being young and beautiful, to put them off for two or three hours more; she was always free by twelve o'clock in the morning at the very latest, and then the day was hers to rest, to read and think. But she was still too much of a novice to escape the excitement inherent in the chase, the strain of making conversation, of facing the inane; nor was she able without a mental effort to bring herself to the response of the simulator. As she sat in the Vesuvius or stared into the showcase of a Regent Street jeweller, a faint smile upon her face, her brain was awake, her faculties at high pressure. Her eyes roved right and left and every nerve seemed to dance with expectation or disappointment. When she got up now, she found her body heavy, her legs sore and all her being dull like a worn stone. A little more, she felt, and the degradation of her body would spread to her sweet lucidity of mind; she would no longer see ultimate ends but would be engulfed in the present, become a bird of prey seeking hungrily pleasure or excitement.

Besides, and this seemed more serious still, she was not doing well. It seemed more serious because this could not be fought as could be intellectual brutalisation. An examination of her pa.s.s books showed that she was a little better off than at the time of Cairns's death. She was worth, all debts paid, about three hundred and ninety pounds. Her net savings were therefore at the rate of about a hundred and fifty a year; but she had been wonderfully lucky, and nothing said that age, illness or such misadventures as she cla.s.sed under professional risk, might not nullify her efforts in a week. There was wear and tear of clothes too: the trousseau presented her by Cairns had been good throughout but some of the linen was beginning to show signs of wear; boots and shoes wanted renewing; there were winter garments to buy and new furs.

'I shall have stone martin,' she reflected. Then her mind ran complacently for a while on a picture of herself in stone martin; a pity she couldn't run to sables. She brought herself back with a jerk to her consideration of ways and means. The situation was really not brilliant.

Of course she was extravagant in a way. Eighty-five pounds rent; thirty pounds in rates and taxes, without counting income tax which might be anything, for she dared not protest; two servants--all that was too much. It was quite impossible to run the house under five hundred a year, and clothes must run into an extra hundred.