For Love Alone (17 page)

She must have fallen asleep. When she opened her eyes suddenly, she saw Lance standing looking in at her.

“What do you think you're doing?”

“Exercises,” she said promptly.

“In counting sheep. You were fast asleep.” He guffawed. “What do you want ?”

He had not come any farther than the door. “Your face is flushed.”

“Yours is pale-green.”

She got to her knees, feeling ashamed of teasing the poor willowy wretch. She and her sister Kitty did the housework and helped the washerwoman with the clothes; the two knew the secrets of the family in the way that servants know them.

“Lance,” she said, getting to her feet, “why don't you get married? Get a girl and get married. We'll manage here. I don't see why you should use your money up in this old hulk of a house. I won't stay here long myself. I'm going to get away. You get out too.”

“Get married,” he muttered, lowering at her. “That's all you girls think of, to get a man stuck.”

“Oh!”

He looked at the floor and then at her as he turned away. “Where could you live?”

“In a room.”

“To ask boys up ?”

“Why are you so nasty to everyone?”

As he lounged off, he said: “Anne's downstairs to see you. She's got something for you.”

“Anne!” She rushed out calling: “Anne!” Anne, rosy and brown, handed her a letter. “I happened to mention to Mrs Percy that I was walking over and she asked me to give it to you. She wrote it last night.” Flattered, Teresa tore the many close-written pages from Anne.

M
Y
D
EAR
M
ISS
H
AWKINS
,

When you come to visit Mrs Broderick next I hope we shall all be less distraught and able to review life's mysteries with clearer vision.

There are one or two out of all the myriad passers-by, who compel me. I mean they, these few, get into my soul so that I cannot not care how they travel their path, even though each one's path IS all his own and for no other's pointing out.

You may wonder who and what I am to presume to teach anyone? Well, you will know, as time goes on, that the matter which I have for the work is not trivial, and this momentousness has nothing to do with this obscure person, but only with its vital bearing upon all fundamental human problems.

No truth is maintained by ANY credentials of its exponent be he never so famous or worthy; but only by its own illuminating quality, as it is tested and applied in relation to FACTS & EVENTS.

Only these hard ugly concrete external, or even “material” things can teach wisdom to any man.

Our dreams whether waking or sleeping all spring from that quagmire of emotion which gives off its evanescent vapours—mostly very unhealthy; but sometimes to certain types—wholly pleasant.

Now I'm going to tell you a little more, for you are one of the very few who do need a special wakening mood.

Almost all upright and right-minded humans come into life with an instinctive sense of good & evil. Whether in themselves, or in the world around them, they are for ever at war with some form or other of “evil” or “wrong” or “sin” or “temptation” as they call it, and they from childhood know a sense of shame when guilty, a secret will to do the right & so on & so forth.

These are the rank & file of true humans.

But here & there are “white souls”—never mind where they come from—but they have no shame, no inner strivings against temptation, no horror of evil in the world, no will to resist or strive against anything. They enjoy loveliness, they are lovely, very much as angels are. But they have all yet to learn about man, human strifes & the unutterable hatefulness of that source & essence of Evil which has made the degenerates what they are.

Will you try to live in actualities and shake yourself from your sweet dreamings?

Look into the eyes of the worst humans you meet in slum or Bourse, oh, I almost wrote “brothel”. You do not know what that means. Clean men never mention it. Clean women mostly know nothing of its true horror & forget such things. But you are in the very midst of Hell's worst outrages and you are as innocent & oblivious of it all as a new-born babe.

To human life you are new-born.

These words are no fanatic's outpourings. I charge you, Miss Hawkins, weigh them well. Examine ALL that life shows you & learn to discriminate between what is good & what is bad.

Study facts, happenings, & events and get out with your excellent brains your own diagnosis of THE GOOD & the bad.

Then write to me—after some months of survey, & tell me which quality you find predominant in your world.

Now forgive me, but I must say one word more, presumptuous though it may seem—

Your sweetheart is getting you because he wanted to use for his own ends a very rare tool, namely, a woman as guileless & unsuspecting as a child who yet had very exceptional mental acumen.

Well, he got you, kept you, used you, & now YOU have what you could never have got otherwise, the rarest insight into one department of deviltry. Not so strong a word, please? All right, wait till you know all that IS going on about you, and all that it means in intrigue, malicious defeatment of the innocent, all in the name of love, and then see how much trickery & cunning deception has to go along in its train.

Ask yourself what all these things are. Look on it as from Mars—or Heaven—whence you came & tell your own soul whether or not you like & admire the things you see & lend your hand to.

I am a wise woman now—but I have had to gather wisdom only by getting into closest quarters with devils & deviltry in order to be awakened to what deviltry is, hate it, withstand it & go on to discover more & more.

Only so do any of us learn. But you, you babe in white raiment, have plunged straight from Heaven, that is the spirit realm behind all human life, right into Satan's pet stronghold, the trickeries that call themselves respectable, or cultivated or artistic & so forth.

Do get away from soft dream-fantasies & touch realities. You came into this grim battleground of human life to learn what evil is—because no soul however lovely can withstand evil or further the good till he experiences it, & stand against it in his own life.

Auntie is as far removed from you as woman could be. She is an ancient warrior—knows evil instinctively & understands shame, remorse, misgiving, will to strive & so forth. She sees you in a whirlpool of infamies, evidently enjoying life. SHE cannot explain your wondrous innocence, and I cannot ever talk to her, to enlighten her.

Do you see how it sways any undecided mind, to see an innocent and obviously pure soul actually upholding the very things all upright haters-of-evil agree to shun, if not loudly condemn?

There is no argument that can convince you. No man ever sees & hates evil because he is taught to, but only as his own innermost self (which can whisper only when thought is still) shudders at it, writhes in its presence, feels sick, nauseated and revolted in the presence of evil-minded persons. It is a SENSE not a mental attitude & you have yet to cultivate that sense.

You have been led into your world of evil for a great purpose. When you DO awake & know you know, & come out, you will be a great force for good.

Yours who would be your friend if it may be,

A
MABEL
P
ERCY
.

 

Anne, when she read it over her cousin's shoulder, cried: “What is she talking about?”

Teresa told her about Crow's talks on free love; it must have been that! Anne laughed comically, flushed. “Free love—does he really talk about that?”

“Everyone does.”

After a silence Anne asked in a subdued voice: “Do you—do they, I mean, when you're there? What can they say about it?”

“The old way of marrying and settling down is all finished,” said Teresa, curtly. “Malfi and all that—do you want to do that? Well, there's no reason why you shouldn't, if you want to.”

“What about the children?”

“Oh, the children—of course, it's all for a different world.” “What's the advantage, though—I wouldn't like it, I don't see the advantage,” pursued Anne, confused, anxious.

“Well, for one thing, children shouldn't live with their parents and be annoyed by them.”

“Annoyed by their parents!” cried Anne.

“Yes. You shouldn't live with Aunt Bea—you ought to be out on your own, you could easily get married then, in a month, in a day.”

Anne stared at her, her face strained.

“It isn't Aunt Bea's fault,” said Teresa hastily. “But now you ought to be alone, it's time.”

“But what would Mother do?”

“You never are alone—how can you look for a mate? Aunt Bea thinks she ought to be there with you—men don't want that.”

“Oh, the man I want to marry wouldn't think of having mother live alone,” said Anne.

“Then you'll never marry.” But Teresa looked kindly and sorrowfully at her cousin, and continued: “Anne, live by yourself, be brave. It takes a lot of courage—but you must.”

“I've thought of it,” said Anne, suddenly, in a low tone, her eyes dropped. “But Mother would be so cut up. She's done everything for me, since I was a baby. How can I?” she implored her cousin, raising her eyes and seeming to ask for a practical answer.

“I don't know, but you must.”

“I'll try,” said Anne hesitantly.

“Do it, do it, don't think it over.”

“Oh, but how can I?” Anne begged again. “It's out of the question.”

“Then it's all over with you. That's all.”

“I want Mother to meet any young man—” Anne began, stopped. After a short silence, she began to cry in a small, troubled, baffled way. “I know it's stupid,” she cried, “I know I'm so stupid, but I'm afraid I won't meet anyone.”

“Leave, leave,” Teresa importuned her, going too far. “Only leave—” She saw the hope already draining out of Anne's eyes, as she raised her face and wiped it.

O
n the eight-thirteen boat in the morning, which most of the office-workers took to the city, Terry Hawkins sat always with two girls from her own part of the Bay; Martha, who had been a stenographer for eleven years in a tyre salesroom, and Elsie, who worked a Moon's accounting machine. Martha was a pale, sedate, but spirited brunette, with wiry hair, long pious nose, and stiff purple mouth. She had been engaged for five years to a clerk in the Treasury Department and was always urging him to pass some examination or other, while they saved up to get married. When they had two hundred pounds she would leave work and they would marry. It was not considered respectable among these girls to work after marriage; a girl was supposed to find a man who would keep her, and if she worked after marriage, it was a reflection on man and wife alike. This was Martha's entire theory of marriage. Since she had first got her job at the age of fifteen she had been making her trousseau, which now filled a tea-chest and a trunk. This
alone marked her out as a woman with strength of mind; for the law of the boat was that while every girl might start on her trousseau, that is publicly, two or three mornings after her engagement, even her secret engagement, provided her secret engagement was properly given to rumour, a girl was vapid, a dreamer, silly, even pretentious, who worked on her trousseau (in these circumstances called glory-box, bottom drawer, or hope chest) before her engagement. This was observed so strictly that any girl doing sewing on the boat was believed to have a secret engagement to marry.

A girl, before the diamond ring, belonged to Martha's category of the Great Unwanted. Martha was the wit of the party, a village gossip of the forbidding, dangerous, upright, churchly kind, with a rapid, penetrating eye, who could strip a congregation down to its underlinen and who, completely integrated, feared neither man nor God; to the latter she gave lip service. Martha was respected over the whole boat, on the female side, for her ability to first guess how love affairs were going; who was about to leave, who about to return to, the Great Unwanted. For this reason, Martha held herself apart, and had only two regulars, that is comrades: Teresa, who was neither flesh nor fowl nor good red herring, and Elsie, a natural adjutant. Teresa's other friend, this Elsie, was also an Engaged Girl. She had been in tutelage to Martha for eight years and after four years she got the ring. She was a dark, slow-voiced, simple-hearted girl who loved accountancy, and was nearing the end of her engagement. She was going to give up work, too, but she said she was going to miss the office, she knew. From time to time she put a few stitches in a piece of sewing, but she did not care much for it; she dreamed the hours away on the boat. Martha chattered without end and Elsie would sit back with drooping shoulders, her eyes shining, a soft expression round her lips. Sometimes Martha's eyes would tire of sewing, and then the two girls would sit devouring fiction, “outwardly passive, inside a seething volcano”, in Aunt Bea's description. Teresa, belonging as yet to the Great Unwanted, could
not, of course, do any sewing. She bent over her book. Beside her, through the churning of the screws, the
whsh-to, whsh-to
of the open engine and the gush of water, she would hear their intimate give-and-take, a discussion of some book.

“What do you think of Laurette, as a character?”

“I think she's true to life.”

“I don't think any girl would say what she said to Mr Vansittart under the circumstances. She doesn't know him well enough yet.”

Occasionally, they came out of their private life to poke their noses into Teresa's affairs. She would show her book at once, anxious to explain it. Martha always wanted a résumé of it, Elsie listened because Martha wanted her to. Martha was implacable.

“But painters just paint. They don't think out all that! Why is it called
Dawn?
How can dawn possibly look like a woman? When is Man a pentagon? Why can't Prometheus have clothes on? We have monkeys now, did a man ever come from them? How do we know the sun goes round the earth? They have globes and things, but how do they know? You can't prove it, can you? You merely accept what they say in school.”