Helena Brett's Career Part 10

Yes, it was excellent. He had feared sometimes that she must be lonely in the mornings or from five to seven, and Alison, he knew, was of the work-when-I-feel-in-the-mood brigade (yes, it had certainly been Oxford), for he had finally been forced to tell him he was absolutely never free till after dinner-time.

He was the very man indeed. He spent his days in galleries, museums, theatres; wanted not only something new, like the Athenians, but every blessed new thing going; and if a heretic therefore on Art, was full of knowledge and when he cared to, could be very nice.

Helena thought him very nice indeed.

Of course he was ever so much cleverer than she was; she need not have feared that; and yet he did not seem to mind how elementary the thing was that she wished to see. He came with her and would explain it all.

And he was nearly always free. Hubert had said that he was too young to be busy, and yet she felt slightly puzzled. If Geoffrey Alison could be so nice to friends, of whom he must have several, it did seem odd that Hubert never could afford a morning for his wife, when he had only one! But maybe Mr. Alison had not got many friends as yet or wasn't as nice to them all?

At any rate life up at Hampstead was far less boring now. Sometimes on days when there was not much house-keeping to do, they would go by tube or 'bus to Trafalgar Square and spend long hours in the National Gallery or twenty minutes in the Tate to see the Watts room and three of the statues. At other times they would just ramble on the Heath, and prim Mrs. Herbertson, the vicar's wife, amused Helena one day enormously by thinking Mr. Alison was Hubert.

"Oh, I'm so sorry, dear Mrs. Brett!" she exclaimed, when Helena laughingly told her the mistake; "but seeing you two about upon the Heath so often in the mornings, I quite thought----! You must forgive my stupidity, please?" And she smiled a false smile.

Helena thought this delicious, considering that Hugh was tall and broad and dark and looked like a celebrity at once, whilst Mr. Alison was rather short and slim, not one half so good-looking--funny-looking, somehow, even when quite serious--with fair hair always a wee bit too long!

"Won't Hugh be convulsed?" she asked.

"I don't think I should tell him," he said, to her absolute surprise.

"But why on earth not?" she enquired.

He would not tell her. In other things he was so kind; unlike her husband, he would try to fill her gaps in education; but here he was quite firm. He only let her force him to say that Hubert was a splendid fellow but a curious sort of devil--which she had learnt already, although she did not think that Mr. Alison should say so. He added that you never knew. And finally she gave it up, quite angry.

But she said nothing to her husband and Mrs. Herbertson might easily have made the same mistake again, except that she learnt Hubert was not a church-goer--an atheist, she called him--and cut Helena entirely.

This left the young couple free, without social remorse, to make the most wonderful excursions on Hubert's one free day. All Sunday; the afternoon walk; meal-times; after dinner--such was what Hubert gave her, and for the rest, always half-conscious of his selfishness, he felt delighted to think whilst working that Helena would not be bored.

She was so busy, dear little simpleton, with this chimaera of her education!

It was Geoffrey Alison who first took her to causeries and lectures (she learnt almost at once to recognise a causerie, because the seats cost more), which took place at the Inst.i.tute, conveniently after tea.

Surprisingly good men came down--or up?--to speak, and spoke on a variety of subjects. Helena, always too nervous to air her knowledge before Hubert who was so clever and looked upon her (she knew) as a child, gradually began to juggle chaotically in her brain with such terms as Ethics, Syndicalism, Molecules, Collectivism, and Eugenics.

It was all most difficult, she told herself, but frightfully worth while.

"Odd of her, this thirst for culture, isn't it?" said Hubert smilingly to Kenneth Boyd, on one of their rare meetings away from the hostile wives; "but it's quite harmless and it keeps them quiet."

Kenneth Boyd spoke gloomily. "Not always," he said. Perhaps he knew more of Woman, even though he never wrote about her. "Sometimes it has the opposite effect."

"Oh, I know what you mean," Hubert replied, not caring to be patronised; "but Helena is not that sort. She doesn't want the Vote.

She's such a charming little innocent," and he laughed, half love but half pity.

"Really?" said the enigmatic Boyd. His thoughts had taken a far ampler sweep, and he spoke almost darkly.

Hubert did not answer. He was still thinking of the Vote. Most men persistently whittle down Woman's whole platform to a mere splinter convenient for smashing.

"Why," he elaborated, "if she were given it, she wouldn't know what she had got to do with it."

CHAPTER VII

THE CULT OF USELESSNESS

Helena certainly had small ambition towards the life political, even as anything no more exalted than a latch-key voter. She had been compelled to read politics in Devonshire but like a schoolboy who is forced to chapel, found it very dull, and took another course at the first opportunity. She could not think, she said, to Hubert's joy, how grown men even took the trouble of electing members who had no influence over their own party and spent most of the time in childishly hindering the other.

She did, however, wish to gain her self-respect.

She met, now, people vastly cleverer than those who had made her feel ignorant at home, so that her growing knowledge in no way kept pace with her aspirations. Those old vague yearnings for something which she used to call Being Herself were stronger now and in a form more definite. She had learnt, in the first year of her married life, all that a woman could learn about keeping house, but she still felt a fool. She knew that this was not enough for her, whatever it might be for others. She still loved to hear Hubert talking when he embarked on Art or some really big subject; but she wished to do more than listen.

And she was learning, too.

Those who give their time to that most wonderful and n.o.blest of all trades, the making of a man, have lately come by the belief that children have been taught quite wrongly. They have been stuffed with knowledge before their bodies were grown to receive it. A deluge of facts has been poured upon them, seated at their little desks, and most of it has gone out through the open window into G.o.d's fresh air, where they ought to have been themselves. They have almost burst with learning--and never learnt to learn. They have known all Euclid at thirteen: forgotten everything by thirty-one. They have been specialists at seventeen and city clerks at twenty-three.

Mrs. Hallam, that crusted theorist and advocate of the old way, unconsciously had done a curiously modern thing. She had kept her daughter back, given her a healthy body, a mind anxious to expand and able. Now, at twenty-two, Helena began to specialise--in learning and in life. She had been kept back: now she leapt forward the better.

Contemptible enough perhaps to a superior eye, the salad of quite disconnected lectures, random talks with a young artist-friend, and pencilled pa.s.sages from Mudie books, that formed this home curriculum; but as in health, contentment, as with life itself, the will to be is almost everything, and Helena was quite resolved to learn.

Her sole worry, in all the excitement of this onward surge into a fuller life whose endless s.p.a.ces thrilled and terrified, was that her husband would not bear her company. Oh, he was much too clever. She knew that. She never blamed him. He had no need for all her causeries and things. She would be dull to argue with; and yet----

Yet it is only human, only feminine, when one has got a clever husband and is adventuring on the long road of Art, to wish that he should take one's hand.

And she was proud of him.

Her simple mind had not yet probed the inwardness of Mrs. Herbertson's "mistake." It did not seem peculiar to her that Mr. Alison should be seen always, and he only, as her companion at the Inst.i.tute. It merely was that she wished it might sometimes have been Hubert. She longed to hear his views on all of it, and it would be nice, too, to show him.

It looked so odd that he would never come, when quite old-looking women brought husbands triumphantly along!

At length, when fifteen months of lectures gave her a new confidence, she tackled him point-blank one afternoon while they were walking on the Heath.

He looked at her reproachfully, as though he were a master who had just been asked for a half-holiday.

"My dear girl," he said, "is that quite logical?"

She knew at once that hope was dead. It always was when logic once appeared. She never had a chance.

"I don't know why not," she said gaily, for nowadays she did not go back to her kennel quite so easily. They had been married for two years.

Hubert was forced to put the thing in words.

"Well you see, my dear," he started, slowly, "I dare say other husbands have got their work finished by six o'clock. In fact"--and he brightened visibly--"that is really why they fixed that hour, I dare say. City men are back. But it's my best work-hour, you know."

"_Is_ it?" laughed Helena, and looked at him. Then, as he did not seem to see the joke, "The _morning_ is, you know, if I ask you to come out shopping. I'm afraid, Hugh, you're just a little naughty!" And she shook her finger.

"No," he said shortly, still not very much amused, for once, at her nice childish ways. "They _both_ are.... It's not much for a man to work, just two short goes at it, and I simply can't spare the time, however much I'd like to. I mustn't go out between tea and dinner when I'm on a book."

"You used to, though," persisted Helena, "in Devonshire."

It is a rash wife who recalls to her husband the days of single life.

"Very likely," he answered impatiently; "but we weren't married then.

I can't afford it now."

The rash wife had it, full between the eyes; a brutal blow provoked by her incaution; and she reeled.