The Daughters of Danaus Part 53

"Certainly," said Hadria, undismayed. "It was they who insidiously prepared the doom for their country, as they wove and span and bore children, with stupid docility. As surely as an enemy might undermine the foundations of a city till it fell in with a crash, so surely they brought ruin upon Greece."

"Oh, Hadria, you are quite beside yourself to-day!" cried Henriette.

"A love of paradox will lead you far!" said Lady Engleton. "We have always been taught to think a nation sound and safe whose women were docile and domestic."

"What nation, under those conditions, has ever failed to fall in with a mighty crash, like my undermined city? Greece herself could not hold out. Ah, yes; we have our revenge! a sweet, sweet revenge!"

Lady Engleton was looking much amused and a little dismayed, when she and her companions rejoined the party.

"I never heard anyone say so many dreadful things in so short a s.p.a.ce of time," she cried. "You are distinctly shocking."

"I am frank," said Hadria. "I fancy we should all go about with our hair permanently on end, if we spoke out in chorus."

"I don't quite like to hear you say that, Hadria."

"I mean no harm--merely that every one thinks thoughts and feels impulses that would be startling if expressed in speech. Don't we all know how terrifying a thing speech is, and thought? a chartered libertine."

"Why, you are saying almost exactly what Professor Theobald said the other day, and we were so shocked."

"And yet my meaning has scarcely any relation to his," Hadria hastened to say. "He meant to drag down all belief in goodness by reminding us of dark moments and hours; by placarding the whole soul with the name of some shadow that moves across it, I sometimes think from another world, some deep under-world that yawns beneath us and sends up blackness and fumes and strange cries." Hadria's eyes had wandered far away. "Are you never tormented by an idea, an impression that you know does not belong to you?"

Lady Engleton gave a startled negative. "Professor Fortescue, come and tell me what you think of this strange doctrine?"

"If we had to be judged by our freedom from rushes of evil impulse, rather than by our general balance of good and evil wishing, I think those would come out best, who had fewest thoughts and feelings of any kind to record." The subject attracted a small group.

"Unless goodness is only a negative quality," Valeria pointed out, "a mere _absence_, it must imply a soul that lives and struggles, and if it lives and struggles, it is open to the a.s.saults of the devil."

"Yes, and it is liable to go under too sometimes, one must not forget,"

said Hadria, "although most people profess to believe so firmly in the triumph of the best--how I can't conceive, since the common life of every day is an incessant harping on the moral: the smallest, meanest, poorest, thinnest, vulgarest qualities in man and woman are those selected for survival, in the struggle for existence."

There was a cry of remonstrance from idealists.

"But what else do we mean when we talk by common consent of the world's baseness, harshness, vulgarity, injustice? It means surely--and think of it!--that it is composed of men and women with the best of them killed out, as a nerve burnt away by acid; a heart won over to meaner things than it set out beating for; a mind persuaded to nibble at edges of dry crust that might have grown stout and serviceable on generous diet, and mellow and inspired with n.o.ble vintage."

"You really are shockingly Baccha.n.a.lian to-day," cried Lady Engleton.

Hadria laughed. "Metaphorically, I am a toper. The wonderful clear sparkle, the subtle flavour, the brilliancy of wine, has for me a strange fascination; it seems to signify so much in life that women lose."

"True. What beverage should one take as a type of what they gain by the surrender?" asked Lady Engleton, who was disposed to hang back towards orthodoxy, in the presence of her uncompromising neighbour.

"Oh, toast and water!" replied Hadria.

Part III.

CHAPTER x.x.xII.

The speed was glorious. Back flashed field and hill and copse, and the dear "companionable hedgeways." Back flew iterative telegraph posts with Herculean swing, into the Past, looped together in rhythmic movement, marking the pulses of old Time. On, with rack and roar, into the mysterious Future. One could sit at the window and watch the machinery of Time's foundry at work; the hammers of his forge beating, beating, the wild sparks flying, the din and chaos whirling round one's bewildered brain;--Past becoming Present, Present melting into Future, before one's eyes. To sit and watch the whirring wheels; to think "Now it is thus and thus; presently, another slice of earth and sky awaits me"--ye G.o.ds, it is not to be realized!

The wonder of the flying land--England, England with her gentle homesteads, her people of the gentle voices; and the unknown wonder of that other land, soon to change its exquisite dream-features for the still more thrilling, appealing marvel of reality--could it all be true?

Was this the response of the genius of the ring, the magic ring that we call _will_? And would the complaisant genius always appear and obey one's behests, in this strange fashion?

Thoughts ran on rhythmically, in the steady, flashing movement through verdant England. The Real! _that_ was the truly exquisite, the truly great, the true realm of the imagination! What imagination was ever born to conceive or compa.s.s it?

A rattle under a bridge, a roar through a tunnel, and on again, through Kentish orchards. A time of blossoming. Disjointed, delicious impressions followed one another in swift succession, often superficially incoherent, but threaded deep, in the stirred consciousness, on a silver cord:--the unity of the creation was as obvious as its multiplicity.

Images of the Past joined hands with visions of the Future. In these sweet green meadows, men had toiled, as thralls, but a few lifetimes ago, and they had gathered together, as Englishmen do, first to protest and reasonably demand, and then to buy their freedom with their lives.

Their countrywoman sent a message of thanksgiving, backward through the centuries, to these stout champions of the land's best heritage, and breathed an aspiration to be worthy of the kinship that she claimed.

The rattle and roar grew into a symphony--full, rich, magnificent, and then, with a rush, came a stirring musical conception: it seized the imagination.

Oh, why were they stopping? It was a little country station, but many pa.s.sengers were on the platform. A careworn looking woman and a little girl entered the carriage, and the little girl fixed her eyes on her fellow-traveller with singular persistence. Then the more practical features of the occasion came into view, and all had an enthralling quality of reality--poetry. The sound of the waiting engine breathing out its white smoke into the brilliant air, the powerful creature quiescent but ready, with the turn of a handle, to put forth its slumbering might; the crunching of footsteps on the gravel, the wallflowers and lilacs in the little station garden, the blue of the sky, and ah! the sweetness of the air when one leant out to look along the interminable straight line of rails, leading--whither? Even the very details of one's travelling gear: the tweed gown meet for service, the rug and friendly umbrella, added to the feeling of overflowing satisfaction. The little girl stared more fixedly than ever. A smile and the offer of a flower made her look down, for a minute, but the gaze was resumed. Wherefore? Was the inward tumult too evident in the face?

Well, no matter. The world was beautiful and wide!

The patient monster began to move again, with a gay whistle, as if he enjoyed this chase across country, on the track of Time. He was soon at full speed again, on his futile race: a hapless idealist in pursuit of lost dreams. The little girl watched the dawn of a smile on the face of the kind, pretty lady who had given her the flower. A locomotive figuring as an idealist! Where would one's fancy lead one to next?

Ah the sea! heaving busily, and flashing under the morning radiance.

Would they have a good crossing? The wind was fresh. How dreamy and bright and windy the country looked, and how salt was the sea-breeze!

Very soon they would arrive at Folkestone. Rugs and umbrellas and handbags must be collected. The simple, solid commonplace of it all, touched some wholesome spring of delight. What a speed the train was going at! One could scarcely stand in the jolting carriage. Old Time must not make too sure of his victory. One felt a wistful partisanship for his snorting rival, striving for ever to accomplish the impossible.

The labouring visionary was not without significance to aspiring mortals.

The outskirts of the town were coming in sight; grey houses bleakly climbing chalky heights. It would be well to put on a thick overcoat at once. It was certain to be cold in the Channel.

Luckily Hannah had a head on her shoulders, and could be trusted to follow the directions that had been given her.

The last five minutes seemed interminable, but they did come to an end.

There was an impression of sweet salt air, of wind and voices, of a hurrying crowd; occasionally a French sentence p.r.o.nounced by one of the officials, reminiscent of a thousand dreams and sights of foreign lands; and then the breezy quay and waiting steamboat.

The sound of that quiet, purposeful hiss of the steam sent a thrill along the nerves. Hannah and her charge were safely on board; the small luggage followed, and lastly Hadria traversed the narrow bridge, wondering when the moment would arrive for waking up and finding herself in her little bedroom at Craddock Dene? What was she thinking of? Dream?

_This_ was no dream, this bold, blue, dancing water, this living sunshine, this salt and savour and movement and brilliancy!

The _other_ was the dream; it seemed to be drifting away already. The picture of the village and the house and the meadows, and the low line of the hills was recalled as through a veil; it would not stand up and face the emphatic present. At the end of a few months, would there be anything left of her connexion with the place where she had pa.s.sed six--seven years of her life? and such years! They had put scars on her soul, as deep and ghastly as ever red-hot irons had marked on tortured flesh. Perhaps it was because of this rabid agony undergone, that now she seemed to have scarcely any clinging to her home,--for the present at any rate. And she knew that she left only sorrow for conventional disasters behind her. The joy of freedom and its intoxication drowned every other feeling. It was sheer relief to be away, to stretch oneself in mental liberty and leisure, to look round at earth and sky and the hurrying crowds, in quiet enjoyment; to possess one's days, one's existence for the first time, in all these long years! It was as the home-coming of a dispossessed heir. This freedom did not strike her as strange, but as obvious, as familiar. It was the first condition of a life that was worth living. And yet never before had she known it.

Ernest and Fred and even Austin had enjoyed it from boyhood, and in far greater completeness than she could ever hope to possess it, even now.

Yet even this limited, this comparative freedom, which a man could afford to smile at, was intoxicating. Heavens! under what a leaden cloud of little obligations and restraints, and loneliness and pain, she had been living! And for what purpose? To make obeisance to a phantom public, not because she cared one iota for the phantom or its opinions, but because husband and parents and relations were terrified at the prospect of a few critical and disapproving remarks, that they would not even hear! How mad it all was! It was not true feeling, not affection, that prompted Hubert's opposition; it was not care for his real happiness that inspired Henriette with such ardour in this cause; they would both be infinitely happier and more harmonious in Hadria's absence. The whole source of their distress was the fear of what people would say when the separation became known to the world. That was the beginning and the end of the matter. Why could not the stupid old world mind its own business, in heaven's name? Good people, especially good women of the old type, would all counsel the imbecile sacrifice. They would all condemn this step. Indeed, the sacrifice that Hadria had refused to make, was so common, so much a matter of course, that her refusal appeared startling and preposterous: scarcely less astonishing than if a neighbour at dinner, requesting one to pa.s.s the salt, had been met with a rude "I shan't."

"A useful phrase at times, of the nature of a tonic, amidst our enervating civilisation," she reflected.

There was a tramping of pa.s.sengers up and down the deck. People walked obliquely, with head to windward. Draperies fluttered; complexions verged towards blue. Only two ladies who had abandoned hope from the beginning, suffered from the crossing. The kindly sailors occupied their leisure in bringing tarpaulins to the distressed.

"Well, Hannah, how are you getting on?"

Hannah looked forward ardently to the end of the journey, but her charge seemed delighted with the new scene.