Mrs. Ames (27 page)

‘It is like this, Wilfred,' she said. ‘Cousin Amy did not like my joining the anti-Suffragette league which Mrs Altham started, and I have told Lyndhurst that I did not care a straw one way or the other, except that I could not go to prison to please Cousin Amy or anyone else. But it looked like taking sides, she thought. So Lyndhurst thought it would make everything easy if I didn't join any league at all. I think it very clever and tactful of him to think of that, and I will certainly tell Mrs Altham I find I am too busy. Of course, there is no quarrel between Cousin Amy and me, and Lyndhurst wants to assure us that he isn't mixed up in it, though there isn't any - and, of course, if Cousin Amy didn't see me the other day when I thought she pretended not to, it makes a difference.'

Millie delivered herself of these lucid statements with her usual deferential air.

‘I think it is very kind of Cousin Lyndhurst to take so much trouble,' she added. ‘He is stopping to lunch.'

Major Ames made a noble little gesture that disclaimed any credit.

‘It's nothing, a mere nothing,' he said, quite truly. ‘But I'm sure you hate little domestic jars as much as I do. As Amy once said, my profession was to be a man of war, but
my instinct was to be a man of peace. Ha! Ha! I'm only delighted my little olive branch has - has met with success,' he added rather feebly, being unable to think of any botanical metaphor.

The doctor got up. It is to be feared that, in his present state of mind, he felt not the smallest admiration or gratitude for the work of Lyndhurst the Peacemaker, but only saw in it a purely personal desire to secure an uninterrupted va et vient between the two houses.

‘I'm sure I haven't the slightest intention of quarrelling with anybody,' he said. ‘It seems to me the most deplorable waste of time and energy, besides being very uncomfortable. Let us go in to lunch, Millie; I have to go out again at two o'clock.'

Millie wrote an amiable and insincere little note to Mrs Altham, which Major Ames undertook to deliver on his way home, explaining how, since Elsie had gone to Dresden to perfect herself in the German language, she herself had become so busy that she did not know which way to turn, besides missing Elsie very much. She felt, therefore, that since she would not be able to give as much time as she wished to this very interesting anti-Suffragette movement, it would be better not to give to it any time at all. This she wrote directly after her husband had gone out again, and brought to Major Ames, who was waiting for it. He, too, had said he would have to be off at once. She gave him the note.

‘There it is,' she said; ‘and so many thanks for leaving it. But you are not hurrying away at once, are you?'

‘Am I not keeping you in?' he asked.

She pulled down the lace blinds over the window that looked into the street; the October sun, it is true, beat rather hotly into the room, but the instinct that dictated her action was rather a desire for privacy.

‘As if I would not sooner sit and talk to you,' she said, ‘than go out. I have no one to go out with. I am rather lonely since Elsie has gone, and I daresay I shall not see Wilfred again till dinnertime. It is rather amusing that I have just written to Mrs Altham to say how busy I am.'

He came and sat a little closer to her.

‘Upon my word,' he said, ‘I am in the same boat as you. I haven't set eyes on Amy all morning, and this afternoon I know she has a couple of meetings. It's extraordinary how this idea of votes for women has taken hold of her. Not a bad thing, though, as long as she doesn't go making a fool of herself in public, and as long as she doesn't have any more quarrels with you.'

‘What would you have done if she had really wished to quarrel with me over Mrs Altham's league?' she asked.

‘Just what I told her. I said I would be no partner to it, and as long as you would receive me here en garçon I should always come.'

‘That was dear of you,' she said softly.

She paused a moment.

‘Sometimes I think we made a mistake in coming to settle here,' she said; ‘but you know how obstinate Wilfred is, and how little influence I have with him. But then, again, I think of our friendship. I have not had many friends. I think, perhaps, I am too shy and timid with people. When I like them very much I find it difficult to express myself. It is rather sad not to be able to show what you feel quite frankly. It prevents your being understood by the people whom you most want to understand you.'

But beneath this profession of incompetence, it seemed to Major Ames that there lurked a very efficient strength. He felt himself being gradually overpowered by a superior force, a force that did not strike and disable and overbear,
but cramped and paralysed the power of its adversary, enfolding him, clinging to him. There was still something in him, some part of his will which was hostile and opposed to her: it was just that which she assailed. And in alliance with that paralysing force was her attraction and charm - soft, yielding, feminine; the two advanced side by side, terrible twins.

He did not answer for a moment, and it flashed across his mind that this cool room, shaded from the street glare by the lace curtains, and suffused with the greenish glow of the sunlight reflected from the lawn outside, was like a trap … She gave a little laugh.

‘See how badly I express myself,' she said. ‘You are puzzling, frowning. Don't frown, you look best when you are laughing. I get so tired of frowning faces. Wilfred so often frowns all dinnertime when he is thinking over something connected with microbes. And he frowns over his chess, when he cannot make up his mind whether to exchange bishops. We play chess every evening.'

Instinctively she had drawn back a little, when she saw he did not advance to meet her, and spoke as if chess and the pathos of her dumbness to express friendship were things of equal moment. There was no calculation about it: it was the expression of one type, the eternal feminine attracted and wishing to attract. Her descent to these commonplaces restored his confidence; the room was a trap no longer, but the pleasant drawing room he knew so well, with its charming mistress seated by him. It was almost inevitable that he should contrast the hot plushes and saddle-bag cushions of his own, its angular chairs and Axminster carpets with the cool chintzes here, the lace-shrouded windows, the Persian rugs. More marked was the contrast between the mistresses of the two houses. Amy had been writing at her davenport
a good deal lately, and her short, stiff back had been the current picture of her. Here was a woman, dim in the half light, wanting to talk to him, to make timid confidences, to make him realize how much his friendship meant to her. His confidence returned with disarming completeness.

‘Well, I'm sure I should find it dismal enough at home,' he said, ‘if I hadn't somewhere to go to, knowing I should find a welcome. Mind you, I don't blame Amy. For years now, when we've been alone in the evening, she has done her work, and I have read the paper, and I daresay we haven't said a dozen words till Parker brought in the bedroom candles, or sometimes we play picquet - for love. But now evenings spent like that seem to me very prosy and dismal. Perhaps it's Harrogate that has made me a bit more supple and youthful, though I'm sure it's ridiculous enough that a tough old campaigner like me should feel such things - '

Mrs Evans put forward her chin, raising her face towards him.

‘But why ridiculous?' she asked. ‘You must be so much younger than dear Cousin Amy. I wonder - I wonder if she feels that too?'

There was there a very devilish suggestion, the more so because, in proportion to the suggestion, so very little was stated. It succeeded admirably.

‘Poor dear Amy!' said he.

He had said that once before, when Cleopatra-Amy was contrasted with Cleopatra-Millie. But there was a significance in the repetition of it. Once the assumed identity of character had suggested the comment, now there was no assumed character. It concerned Millie and Amy themselves.

Mrs Evans put back her chin.

‘I am sure Cousin Amy ought to be very happy,' she said softly. ‘You are so devoted to her, and all. I almost think
you spoil her, Lyndhurst. It is all so romantic. Fancy being a woman, and as old as Cousin Amy, and yet having a young man so devoted. Harry, too!'

Again a billow of confidence tinged with self-appreciation surged over Major Ames. After all, his wife was much older than him, for he was still a young man, and his youth was being expanded on sweet peas and the garden roller. And he was stirred into a high flight of philosophical conjecture.

‘My God, what a puzzle life is!' he observed.

She rose to this high-water mark.

‘And it might be so simple,' she said. ‘It should be so easy to be happy.'

Then Major Ames knew where he was. In one sense he was worthy of the occasion, in another he did not feel up to all that it implied. He rose hastily.

‘I had better go,' he said rather hoarsely.

But he had smoked five cigarettes since lunch. The hoarseness might easily have been the result of this indulgence.

She did not attempt to keep him, nor did she make it incumbent on him to give her a kiss, however cousinly. She did not even rise, but only looked up at him from her low chair as she gave him her hand, smiling a little secretly, as Mona Lisa smiles. But she felt quite satisfied with their talk; he would think over it, and find fresh signals and private beckonings in it.

‘Come and see me again,' she said. There was a touch of imperativeness in her tone.

She looked through the lace curtain and saw him go out into the street. There was something in the gutter of the roadway which he inquired into with the end of his stick. It looked like a withered bunch of dusty chrysanthemums.

Mrs Ames, meantime, had lunched at home, and gone off immediately afterwards, as her husband had conjectured,
to a meeting. In the last month the membership of her league had largely increased, and it was no longer possible to convene its meetings in her own drawing room, for it numbered some fifty persons, including a dozen men of enlightened principles. Even at first, as has been seen, she had welcomed (thereby incurring Mrs Altham's disapproval) several ladies with whom she did not usually associate, and now the gathering was entirely independent of all class distinctions. The wife of the station master, for instance, was one of the most active members and walked up and down the platform with a large rosette of Suffragette colours selling current copies of the Clarion. And no less remarkable than this growth of the league was the growth of Mrs Ames. She was neither pompous nor condescending to those persons whom, a couple of months ago, she would have looked upon as being barely existent, except if they were all in church, when she would very probably have shared a hymn book with any of them, the ‘Idea' for which they had assembled galvanizing them, though strictly temporarily, into the class of existent people. Now, the idea which brought them together in the commodious warehouse, kindly lent and sufficiently furnished by Mr Turner, had given them a permanent existence, and they were not automatically blotted out of her book of life the moment these meetings were over, as they would have been so short a time ago in church, when the last ‘Amen' was said. The bonds of her barren and barbaric conventionality were bursting; indeed, it was not so much that others, not even those of ‘her class', were becoming women to her, as that she was becoming a woman herself. She had scarcely been one hitherto; she had been a piece of perfect propriety. And how far she had travelled from her original conception of the Suffragette movement as suitable to supply a novelty for the autumn that would
eclipse the memory of the Shakespearean ball, may be gathered from the fact that she no longer took the chair at these meetings, but was an ordinary member. Mr Turner had far more experience in the duties of a chairman: she had herself proposed him and would have seconded him as well, had such a step been in order.

Today the meeting was assembled to discuss the part which the league should take in the forthcoming elections. The Tory Government was at present in power, and likely to remain in office, while Riseborough itself was a fairly safe seat for the Tory member, who was Sir James Westbourne. Before polemical or obstructive measures could be decided on, it had clearly been necessary to ascertain Sir James' views on the subject of votes for women, and today his answer had been received and was read to the meeting. It was as unsatisfactory as it was brief, and their ‘obedient servant' had no sympathy with, and so declined to promise any support to, their cause. Mr Turner read this out, and laid it down on his desk.

‘Will ladies or gentlemen give us their views on the course we are to adopt?' he said.

A dozen simultaneously rose, and simultaneously sat down again. The chairman asked Mrs Brooks to address the meeting. Another and another succeeded her, and there was complete unanimity of purpose in their suggestions. Sir James' meetings and his speeches to his constituents must not be allowed to proceed without interruption. If he had no sympathy with the cause, the cause would show a marked lack of sympathy with him. Thereafter the league resolved itself into a committee of ways and means. The President of the Board of Trade was coming to support Sir James' candidature at a meeting the date of which was already fixed for a fortnight hence, and it was decided to make a
demonstration in force. And as the discussion went on, and real practical plans were made, that strange fascination and excitement at the thought of shouting and interrupting at a public meeting, of becoming for the first time of some consequence, began to seethe and ferment. Most of the members were women, whose lives had been passed in continuous self-repression, who had been frozen over by the narcotic ice of a completely conventional and humdrum existence. Many of them were unmarried and already of middle age; their natural human instincts had never known the blossoming and honey which the fulfilment of their natures would have brought. To the eagerness and sincerity with which they welcomed a work that demanded justice for their sex, there was added this excitement of doing something at last. There was an opportunity of expansion, of stepping out, under the stimulus of an idea, into an experience that was real. In kind, this was akin to martyrs, who rejoiced and sang when the prospects of persecution came near; as martyrs for the sake of their faith thought almost with glee of the rack and the burning, so, minutely, the very prospect of discomfort and rough handling seemed attractive, if, by such means, the cause was infinitesimally advanced. To this, a sincere and wholly laudable desire, was added the more personal stimulus. They would be doing something, instead of suffering the tedium of passivity, acting instead of being acted on. For it is only through centuries of custom that the woman, physically weak and liable to be knocked down, has become the servant of the other sex. She is fiercer at heart, more courageous, more scornful of consequences than he; it is only muscular inferiority of strength that has subdued her into the place that she occupies, that, and the periods when, for the continuance of the race, she must submit to months of tender and strong inaction. There she finds
fruition of her nature, and there awakes in her a sweet indulgence for the strange, childish lust of being master, of parading, in making of laws and conventions, his adventitious power, of the semblance of sovereignty that has been claimed by man. At heart she knows that he has but put a tinsel crown on his head, and robed himself in spangles that but parody real gold. She lays a woman's hand on his childhead, and to please him says, ‘How wise you are, how strong, how clever.' And the child is pleased, and loves her for it. And there is her weakness, for the most dominant thing in her nature is the need of being loved. From the beginning it must have been so. When Adam's rib was taken from him in sleep, he lost more than was left him, and woke to find all his finer self gone from him. He was left a blundering bumblebee: to the rib that was taken from him clung the courage of the lioness, the wisdom of the serpent, the gentleness of the dove, the cunning of the spider, and the mysterious charm of the firefly that dances in the dusk. But to that rib also clung the desire to be loved. Otherwise, in the human race, the male would be slain yearly like the drone of the hive. But the strange thing that grew from the rib, like flowers from buried carrion, desired love. There was its strength and its weakness.