Superseded Part 5

Miss Quincey admitted that it would be very nice.

"Hadn't you better put your cape on--the wind's changing."

She obeyed him.

"That's hardly a thick enough wrap for this weather, is it?"

She a.s.sured him it was very warm, very comfortable.

"Do you know what I would like to do with you, Miss Quincey?"

"No."

"I should like to pack you off somewhere--anywhere--for another three months' holiday."

"Another three months! What would my pupils do, and what would Miss Cursiter say?"

It was part of the illusion that she conceived herself to be indispensable to Miss Cursiter.

"Confound Miss Cursiter!"

Evidently he felt strongly on the subject of Miss Cursiter. He confounded her with such energy that the seat provided for them by the London County Council vibrated under it. He stared sulkily out over the park a moment; he gave his cuffs a hitch as if he were going to fight somebody, and then--he let himself go.

At a blind headlong pace, lashing himself up as he went, falling furiously on civilization, the social order, women's education and women's labour, the system that threw open all doors to them, and let them be squeezed and trampled down together in the crush. He was ready to take the nineteenth century by the throat and strangle it; he squared himself against the universe.

"What," said Miss Quincey, "do you not believe in equal chances for men and women?" She was eager to redeem herself from the charge of flightiness.

"Equal chances? I daresay. But not unequal work. The work must be unequal if the conditions are unequal. It's not the same machine. To turn a woman on to a man's work is like trying to run an express train by clock-work, with a pendulum for a piston, and a hairspring for steam."

Miss Quincey timidly hinted that the question was a large one, that there was another side to it.

"Of course there is; there are fifty sides to it; but there are too many people looking at the other forty-nine for my taste. I loathe a crowd."

Stirred by a faint _esprit de corps_ Miss Quincey asked him if he did not believe in the open door for women?

He said, "It would be kinder to shut it in their faces."

She threw in a word about the women's labour market--the enormous demand.

He said that only meant that women's labour could be bought cheap and sold dear.

She sighed.

"But women must do something--surely you see the necessity?"

He groaned.

"Oh yes. It's just the necessity that I do see--the d.a.m.nable necessity. I only protest against the preventable evil. If you must turn women into so many machines, for Heaven's sake treat them like machines. You don't work an engine when it's undergoing structural alterations--because, you know, you can't. Your precious system recognises no differences. It sets up the same absurd standard for every woman, the brilliant genius and the average imbecile. Which is not only morally odious but physiologically fatuous. There must be one of two results--either the average imbeciles are sacrificed by thousands to a dozen or so of brilliant geniuses, or it's the other way about."

"Whichever way it is," said Miss Quincey, with her back, so to speak, to the wall, "it's all part of civilization, of our intellectual progress."

"They're not the same thing. And it isn't civilization, it's intellectual savagery. It isn't progress either, it's a blind rush, an inhuman scrimmage--the very worst form of the struggle for existence. It doesn't even mean survival of the intellectually fittest. It develops monstrosities. It defeats its own ends by brutalising the intellect itself. And the worst enemies of women are women. I swear, if I were a woman, I'd rather do without an education than get it at that price. Or I'd educate myself. After all, that's the way of the fittest--the one in a thousand."

"Do you not approve of educated women then?" Miss Quincey was quite shaken by this cataclysmal outbreak, this overturning and shattering of the old beacons and landmarks.

He stared into the distance.

"Oh yes, I approve of them when they are really educated--not when they are like that. You won't get the flower of womanhood out of a forcing-house like St. Sidwell's; though I daresay it produces pumpkins to perfection."

What did he say to Miss Vivian then? Miss Quincey could not think badly of a system that could produce women like Miss Vivian.

A cloud came over his angry eyes as they stared into the distance.

"That's it. It hasn't produced them. They have produced it."

Miss Quincey smiled. Evidently consistency was not to be expected of this young man. He was so young, and so irresponsible and pa.s.sionate. She admired him for it; and not only for that; she admired him--she could not say exactly why, but she thought it was because he had such a beautiful, b.u.mpy, intellectual forehead. And as she sat beside him and shook to that vibrating pa.s.sion of his, she felt as if the blue moon had risen again and was shining through the trees of the park; and she was happy, absolutely, indubitably happy and safe; for she felt that he was her friend and her protector and the defender of her cause. It was for her that he raged and maddened and behaved himself altogether so unreasonably.

Now as it happened, Cautley did champion certain theories which Miss Cursiter, when she met them, denounced as physiologist's fads. But it was not they, nor yet Miss Quincey, that accounted for his display of feeling. He was angry because he wanted to come to a certain understanding with the Cla.s.sical Mistress; to come to it at once; and the system kept him waiting. It was robbing him of Rhoda, and Rhoda of her youth. Meanwhile Rhoda was superbly happy at St. Sidwell's, playing at being Pallas Athene; as for checking her midway in her brilliant career, that was not to be thought of for an instant.

The flower of womanhood--it was the flower of life. He had never seen a woman so invincibly and superlatively alive. Cautley deified life; and in his creed, which was simplicity itself, life and health were one; health the sole source of strength, intelligence and beauty, of all divine and perfect possibilities. At least that was how he began. But three years'

practice in London had somewhat strained the faith of the young devotee.

He soon found himself in the painful position of a priest who no longer believes in his deity; overheard himself asking whether health was not an unattainable ideal; then declaring that life itself was all a matter of compromise; finally coming to the conclusion that the soul of things was Neurosis.

Beyond that he refused to commit himself to any theory of the universe.

He even made himself unpleasant. A clerical patient would approach him with conciliatory breadth, and say: "I envy you, Cautley; I envy your marvellous experience. Your opportunities are greater than mine. And sometimes, do you know, I think you see deeper into the work of the Maker." And Cautley would shrug his shoulders and smile in the good man's face, and say, "The Maker! I can only tell you I'm tired of mending the work of the Maker." Yet the more he doubted the harder he worked; though his world spun round and round, shrieking like a clock running down, and he had persuaded himself that all he could do was to wind up the crazy wheels for another year or so. Which all meant that Cautley was working a little too hard and running down himself. He had begun to specialize in gynecology and it increased his scepticism.

Then suddenly, one evening, when he least looked for it, least wanted it, he saw his divinity incarnate. Rhoda had appealed to him as the supreme expression of Nature's will to live. That was the instantaneous and visible effect of her. Rhoda was the red flower on the tree of life.

At St. Sidwell's, that great forcing-house, they might grow some vegetables to perfection; whether it was orchids or pumpkins he neither knew nor cared; but he defied them to produce anything like that. He was sorry for the vegetables, the orchids and the pumpkins; and he was sorry for Miss Quincey, who was neither a pumpkin nor an orchid, but only a harmless little withered leaf. Not a pleasant leaf, the sort that goes dancing along, all crisp and curly, in the arms of the rollicking wind; but the sort that the same wind kicks into a corner, to lie there till it rots and comes in handy as leaf mould for the forcing-house. Rhoda's friend was not like Rhoda; yet because the leaf may distantly suggest the rose, he liked to sit and talk to her and think about the most beautiful woman in the world. To any other man conversation with Miss Quincey would have been impossible; for Miss Quincey in normal health was uninteresting when she was not absurd. But to Cautley at all times she was simply heart-rending.

For this young man with the irritable nerves and blasphemous temper had after all a divine patience at the service of women, even the foolish and hysterical; because like their Maker he knew whereof they were made. This very minute the queer meta-physical thought had come to him that somehow, in the infinite entanglement of things, such women as Miss Quincey were perpetually being sacrificed to such women as Rhoda Vivian. It struck him that Nature had made up for any little extra outlay in one direction by cruel pinching in another. It was part of her rigid economy. She was not going to have any bills running up against her at the other end of the universe. Nature had indulged in Rhoda Vivian and she was making Miss Quincey pay.

He wondered if that notion had struck Rhoda Vivian too, and if she were trying to make up for it. He had noticed that Miss Quincey had the power (if you could predicate power of such a person), a power denied to him, of drawing out the woman-hood of the most beautiful woman in the world; some infinite tenderness in Rhoda answered to the infinite absurdity in her. He was not sure that her att.i.tude to Miss Quincey was not the most beautiful thing about her. He had begun by thinking about the colour of Rhoda's eyes. He could not for the life of him remember whether they were blue or green, till something (Miss Quincey's eyes perhaps) reminded him that they were grey, pure grey, without a taint of green or a shadow of blue in them. That was what his mind was running on as he looked into the distance and Miss Quincey imagined that his b.u.mpy intellectual forehead was bulging with great thoughts. And now Miss Quincey supplied a convenient pivot for the wild gyrations of his wrath. He got up and with his hands behind his back he seemed to be lashing himself into a fury with his coat-tail.

"The whole thing is one-sided and artificial and absurd. Bad enough for men, but fatal for women. Any system that unfits them for their proper functions--"

"And do we know--have we decided--yet--what they are?" Miss Quincey was anxious to sustain her part in the dialogue with credit.

He stared, not at the distance but at her.

"Why, surely," he said more gently, "to be women first--to be wives and mothers."

She drew her cape a little closer round her and turned from him with half-shut eyes. She seemed at once to be protecting herself against his theory and blinding her sight to her own perishing and thwarted woman-hood.

"All Nature is against it," he said.

"Nature?" she repeated feebly.