Kitabı oku: «The Revolt of Man», sayfa 5

These words fell among them like a bomb. There was a dead silence. No one dared raise her eyes except the Professor, who looked up in warning.

Presently an old gentleman, who had been half asleep, shook his head and spoke.

‘The songs are all alike now. A young fellow gets made love to, and is engaged, and then thrown over. Then he breaks his heart: In real life he would have called for his horse and galloped off his disappointment.’

‘Come, Sir George,’ said the Professor, ‘you must allow us a little sentiment – some belief in man’s heart, else life would be too dull. For my own part, I find the words touching and true to nature.’

‘How would it do?’ asked Lord Chester, smiling, ‘to invert the thing? Could we have a ballad showing how a young lady – she must be young – pined away and died for love of a man who broke his promise?’

They all laughed at this picture, but the young men looked as if Lord Chester had said something wonderful in its audacity. Most certainly, thought the Professor, his words would be quoted in all the clubs that very day. And what – oh! what would the Duchess say? And although she had no legitimate power over the ward of Chancery, she could do what she pleased with the Chancellor.

There was one young fellow present, a certain Algy Dunquerque, who entertained an affection for Lord Chester amounting almost to worship. No one was like him; none so strong, so dexterous, so good at games; no one so clever; no one so audacious; no one so gloriously independent.

They were talking together in a low whisper, unregarded by the ladies, who were talking loudly.

‘Algy,’ said Lord Chester, ‘you said once that you would come to me if ever I asked you, and stand by me as long as I asked you. Are you still of the same mind?’

‘That kind of promise holds,’ said Algy. ‘What shall I do?’

‘Be in readiness.’

‘I am always ready. But what are you going to do? Shall we run away together?’

‘Hush! I do not know, – yet. All that a desperate man can do.’

CHAPTER VI
WOMAN’S ENGLAND

THE next day was Sunday, and of course Lord Chester went to church with the Professor, who was always careful to observe forms.

The congregation was large, and principally composed of men. The service was elaborate, and the singing good. Perhaps the incense was a little too strong, and there was some physical fatigue in the frequent changes of posture. Nothing, however, could have been more splendid than the procession with banners, which closed the service; nothing sweeter than the voices of the white-robed singing-girls. It was a large and beautiful church, with painted glass, pictures having lights burning before them; and the altar, on which stood the veiled figure of the Perfect Woman, was heaped with flowers.

The sermon was preached by the Dean of Westminster, whose eloquence and fervour were equalled by her scholarship. No one, except perhaps, Professor Ingleby, was better read in ecclesiastical history, or knew more about the beginnings of the New Religion. She had written a book, showing from ancient literature how the germs of the religion were dormant even in the old barbaric times of man’s supremacy. Even so far back as the Middle Ages men delighted to honour Woman. Every poet chose a mistress for his devotion, and ignorantly worshipped the type in the Individual. Every knight became servant and slave to one woman, in whose honour his noblest deeds were done. Even the worship of the Divine Man became, first in Catholic countries, and afterwards in England, through a successful conspiracy of certain so-called ‘ritualists,’ the worship of the Mother and Child. At all times the effigies of the virtues, Faith, Hope, Love, had been figures of women. The form of woman had always stood for the type, the standard, the ideal of the Beautiful. The woman had always been the dispenser of gifts. The woman had always been richly dressed. Men worked their hardest in order to pour their treasures into the lap of woman. All the reverence, all the poetry, all the imagination with which the lower nature of man was endowed, had been freely spent and lavished in the service of woman. From his earliest infancy, women surrounded, protected, and thought for men. Why, what was this, what could this mean, but a foreshadowing, an indication, a revelation, by slow and natural means, of the worship of the Perfect Woman, dimly comprehended as yet, but manifesting its power over the heart? The Dean handled this, her favourite topic, in the pulpit this morning with singular force and eloquence. After touching on the invisible growth of the religion, she painted a time of anarchy, when men had given up their old beliefs and were like children – only children with weapons in their hands – crying out with fear in the darkness. She told how women, at last assuming their true place, substituted, little by little, the true, the only faith – the Worship of the Perfect Woman, the Feminine Divinity of Thought, Purpose, and Production. She pointed out how, by natural religion, man was evidently marked out for the second or lower creature, although, by the abuse of his superior strength, he had wrested the authority and used it for his own purposes. He was formed to execute, he was strong, he was the Agent. Woman, on the other hand, was the mother – that is to say, the Creative Thought; that is, the Sovereign Ruler. In the animal creation, again, it is the male who works, while the female sits and directs. And even in such small points as the gender of things inanimate, everything of grace, usefulness, or beauty was, and always had been, feminine. Then she argued from the natural quickness and intelligence of women, and from the corresponding dullness of men, from the lower instincts of men compared with the spiritual nature of women; and she showed how, when women took their natural place in the government of the nation, laws were for the first time framed on sound and economical principles, and for the benefit of man himself. Finally, in a brilliant peroration, she called upon her male hearers to defend, even to the death if necessary, the principles of their religion; she warned the women that a spirit of questioning and discontent was abroad; she exhorted the men to find their true happiness in submission to authority; and she drew a vivid picture of the poor wretch who, beginning with doubt and disobedience, went on to wife-beating, atheism, and despair, both of this world and the next.

The sermon lasted nearly an hour. The Dean never paused, never hesitated, was never at a loss. Yet, somehow she failed to affect her hearers. The women looked idly about them, the men stared straight before them, showing no response, and no sympathy. One reason of this apathy was that the congregation had heard it all before, and so often, that it ceased to move them; the priestesses of the Faith, in their ardour, endeavouring constantly to make men intelligent as well as submissive supporters, overdid the preaching, and by continual repetition ruined the effect of their earnest eloquence, and reduced it to the level of rhetorical commonplace.

The Professor and her pupil walked gravely homewards.

‘I think,’ said Lord Chester, ‘that I could preach a sermon the other way round.’

‘You mean – ’

‘I mean that I could just as well show how natural religion intended man to be both agent and contriver.’

‘I think,’ said the Professor, ‘that such a sermon had better not be preached, at least, just yet. It was rather a risky thing to make that remark of yours about the ballad which you sang yesterday. Such a sermon as you contemplate would infallibly land its composer – even Lord Chester – in a prison – and for life.’

Lord Chester was silent.

‘Do you speculate often,’ asked his tutor, ‘in these theological matters?’

‘Of late,’ he replied. ‘Yes, this perpetual admonition about Authority worries me. Why should we accept statements on Authority? I have been looking through the text-books, and I conclude – ’

‘Pray do not tell me,’ she interrupted laughing. ‘For the present, let me not know the nature of your conclusions. But, Lord Chester, for your own sake, for every one’s sake, be guarded – be silent,’ She pressed his arm; he nodded gravely, but made no reply. When they reached home they learned that the Chancellor herself was waiting to see Lord Chester. She wished to see the Professor as well.

The Chancellor was in a great worry and fidget – as if this unhappy business of the Appeal was not enough for her – because, whatever decision was arrived at by the House, she would have to defend her own, and there was little doubt that her enemies would not lose so good a chance of attacking her; and now the boy must needs get saying things which were repeated in every club in London.

‘I must say, Lord Chester,’ she began irritably, ‘that a little respect – I say a little respect – is due to a person who holds my office. I have been waiting for you a good quarter of an hour.’

‘Had I known your ladyship’s wish to see me, I would have saved you the trouble of coming here, and waited upon you myself. I have but just returned from church.’ ‘Church!’ she repeated in mockery; ‘what is the good of people going to church if they fly in the face of all religion? Do not answer me, pray. Your lordship thinks yourself, I know, a privileged person. You are to say, and to do, anything you please. But I am the Chancellor, remember, and your guardian. Now, sir, I learn that you make dangerous, revolutionary remarks – you made one yesterday – openly, on the impossibility of a young man marrying a woman older than himself.’

‘Pardon me,’ said Lord Chester; ‘I did not say the impossibility of marrying, but of loving, a woman twenty years his senior.’

‘The distinction shows the unhappy condition of your mind. To marry a woman is to love her. What would the boy want? what would he have? Professor Ingleby, have you anything to advise? He is your pupil. You are, in fact, partly responsible for this deplorable exhibition of wilfulness.’

‘With your ladyship’s permission,’ replied the Professor softly, ‘I would venture to suggest that, considering recent events, it would be much better for Lord Chester to be out of London as soon as possible.’

‘What is the use of talking about leaving town when Lady Boltons is ill?’

‘If your ladyship will entrust your noble ward to my care,’ continued the Professor, ‘I will undertake the charge of him at my own house for the next three months.’

The Chancellor reflected. The plan seemed the best. Since Lady Boltons was ill, there was really no one to look after the young man, while, at the present moment of excitement, it seemed most desirable that he should be out of town. If the boy was to go on talking in this way about old women and young men, there was no telling what might not happen; and the Duchess would be pleased with such an arrangement. That consideration decided her.

‘If you really can take charge of him – you could draw on Lady Boltons for whatever you like, in reason, – it does seem the best thing to do. Yes – he would be safer out of the way. When can you start?’

‘To-morrow.’

‘Very good; then we will settle it so. You will accompany Professor Ingleby, Lord Chester; you will consider her as your guardian – and – and all that. And for Heaven’s sake, let us have no more folly!’

She touched his fingers with her own, bowed slightly to the Professor, and left them.

‘My dear boy,’ said the Professor, when the door was shut, ‘I foresee a great opportunity. And as for that sermon you spoke of – ’

‘Well, Professor?’

‘You may begin to compose it as soon as you please, and on the road I will help you. Meantime, hold your tongue.’

With these enigmatic words the Professor left him.

There was really nothing very remarkable in Lord Chester’s leaving London even at the height of the season. Most of the athletic meetings were over; it was better to be in the country than in town: a young man of two-and-twenty is not supposed to take a very keen delight in dinner-parties. Had it not been for the Appeal and the way in which people occupied themselves in every kind of gossip over Lord Chester – what he said, how he looked, and what he hoped – he might have left town without the least notice being taken. As it was, his departure gave rise to the wildest rumours, not the least wild being that the Duchess, or, as some said, the Countess, intended to follow and carry him off from his country house.

Without troubling themselves about rumours and alarms of this kind, the Professor and her pupil drove away in the forenoon of Monday. The air was clear and cool; there was a fresh breeze, a warm sun, and a sky flecked with light clouds. The leaves on the trees were at their best, the four horses were in excellent condition. What young fellow of two-and-twenty would have felt otherwise than happy at starting on a holiday away from the restraints of town, and in such weather?

‘There is only one thing wanting,’ he said, as they finally cleared the houses, and were bowling along the smooth highroad between hedges bright with the flowers of early summer.

‘What is that?’ asked the Professor.

‘Constance,’ he replied boldly; ‘she ought to be with us to complete my happiness.’

The Professor laughed.

‘A most unmanly remark,’ she said. ‘How can you reconcile it with the precepts of morality? Have you not been taught the wickedness of expressing, even of allowing yourself to feel an inclination for any young lady?’

‘It is your fault, my dear Professor. You have taught me so much, that I have left off thinking of unmanliness and immodesty and the copy-book texts.’

‘I have taught you,’ she replied gravely, ‘things enough to hang myself and send you to the Tower for life. But remember – remember – that you have been taught these things with a purpose.’

‘What purpose?’ he asked.

‘I began by making you discontented. I allowed you to discover that everything is not so certain as boys are taught to believe. I put you in the way of reading, and I opened your mind to all sorts of subjects generally concealed from young men.’

‘You certainly did, and you are a most crafty as well as a most beneficent Professor.’

‘You have gradually come to understand that your own intellect, the average intellect of Man, is really equal to the consideration of all questions, even those generally reserved and set apart for women.’

‘Is it not time, therefore, to let me know this mysterious purpose?’

Professor Ingleby gazed upon him in silence for a while.

‘The purpose is not mine. It is that of a wiser and greater being than myself, whose will I carry out and whom I obey.’

‘Wiser than you, Professor? Who is she? Do you mean the Perfect Woman herself?’

‘No,’ she replied; ‘the being whom I obey and reverence is none other than – my own husband.’

Lord Chester started.

‘Your husband?’ he cried. ‘You obey your husband? This is most wonderful.’

‘My husband. Yes, Lord Chester, you may now compose that sermon which shall show how Man is the Lord and Master of all created things, including – Woman. I told you I would help you in your sermon. Listen.’

All that day they drove through the fair garden, which we call England. Along the road they passed the rustics hay-making in the fields; the country women were talking at their doors; the country doctor was plodding along her daily round; the parson was jogging along the wayside, umbrella in hand, to call upon her old people; the country police in blue bonnets, carrying their dreaded pocket-books, were loitering in couples about cross-roads; the farmer drove her cart to market, or rode her cob about the fields; little girls and boys carried dinner to their fathers. Here and there they passed a country-seat, a village with its street of cottages, or they clattered through a small sleepy town with its row of villas and its quiet streets, where the men sat working at the windows in hopes of getting a chat or seeing something to break the monotony of the day.

The travellers saw, but noted nothing. For the Professor was teaching her pupil things calculated to startle even the Duchess, and at which Constance would have trembled – things which made his cheek to glow, his eyes to glisten, his mouth to quiver, his hands to clench; – things not to be spoken, not to be whispered, not to be thought, this Professor openly, boldly, and without shame, told the young man.

‘I might have guessed it,’ he said. ‘I had already half guessed it. And this – this is the reason why we are kept in subjection! – this is the LIE they have palmed upon us!’

‘Hush! calm yourself. The thing was not done in a day. The system was not invented by conscious hypocrites and deceivers; it grew, and with it the new religion, the new morality, the new order of things. Blame no one, Lord Chester, but blame the system.’

‘You have told me too much now,’ he said; ‘tell me more.’

She went on. Each word, each new fact, tore something from him that he would have believed part of his nature. Yet he had been prepared for this day by years of training, all designed by this crafty woman to arm him with strength to receive her disclosures.

‘What you see,’ she said, as they drove through a village, ‘seems calm and happy. It is the calmness of repression. Those men in the fields, those working men sitting at the windows – they are all alike unhappy, and they know not why. It is because the natural order has been reversed; the sex which should command and create is compelled to work in blind obedience. You will see, as we go on, that we, who have usurped the power, have created nothing, improved nothing, carried on nothing. It is for you, Lord Chester, to restore the old order.’

‘If I can – if I can find words,’ he stammered.

‘I have trusted you,’ the Professor went on, ‘from the very first. Bon sang ne peut mentir. Yet it was wise not to hurry matters. Your life, and my own life too, if that matters much, hang upon the success of my design. Nothing could have happened more opportunely than the Duchess’s proposal. Why? on the one hand, a sweet, charming, delightful girl; and on the other, a repulsive, bad-tempered old woman. While your blood is aflame with love and disgust, Lord Chester, I tell you this great secret. We have three months before us. We must use it, so that in less than two we shall be able to strike, and to strike hard. You are in my hands. We have, first, much to see and to learn.’

Their first halt was Windsor. Here, after ordering dinner, the Professor took her pupil to visit Eton. It was half-holiday, and the girls were out of school. Some were at the Debating Society’s rooms, where a political discussion was going on; some were strolling by the river under the grand old elms; some were reading novels in the shade; some were lying on the bank talking and laughing. It was a pleasant picture of happy school life.

‘Look at these buildings,’ said the Professor, taking up a position of vantage. ‘They were built by one of your ancestors, beautified by another, repaired and enlarged by another. This is the noblest of the old endowments – for boys.’

The Earl looked round him in wonder.

‘What would boys do with such a splendid place?’ he asked.

‘Have my lessons borne so little fruit that you should ask that question?’ The Professor looked disappointed. ‘My dear boy, they played in the playing-fields, they swam and rowed in the river, they studied in the school, they worshipped in the chapel. When it was resolved to divide the endowments, women naturally got the first choice, and they chose Eton. Afterwards the boys’ public schools fell gradually into decay, and bit by bit they were either closed or became appropriated by girls. There was once a famous school at a place called Rugby. That died. The Lady of the Manor, I believe, gradually absorbed the revenues. Harrow and Marlborough fell in, after a few years, for girls. You see, when once mothers realised the dangers of public school life for boys, they naturally left off sending them.’

‘Yes – I see – the danger that – ’

‘That they would become masterful, Lord Chester, like yourself; that they would use their strength to recover their old supremacy; that they would discover’ – here she sank her voice, although they were not within earshot of any one – ‘that they would discover how strength of brain goes with strength of muscle.’

She led the young man back across the river to the Windsor side. On the way they passed an open gate; over the gate was written ‘Select school for young gentlemen.’ Within was a gymnasium, where a dozen boys were exercising on parallel bars swinging with ropes, and playing with clubs.

‘As for your education,’ said the Professor, ‘we have discovered that the best chance for the world is for a boy to be taught three things. He must learn religion —i. e. submission, and the culture of Perfect Womanhood; he must learn a trade of some kind, unless he belongs to the aristocracy, so as not to be necessarily dependent; and he must be made healthy, strong, and active. History will credit us with one thing, at least; we have improved the race.’

It wanted an hour of dinner. The Professor, who was never tired, led her pupil over such portions of the old Castle as could still be visited – the great tower and one or two of the terraces.

‘This was once yours,’ she said. ‘This is the castle of your ancestors. Courage, my lord; you shall win it back.’

It was in a dream that the young man spent the rest of the evening. The Professor had ordered a simple yet dainty dinner, consisting of a Thames trout, a Châteaubriand, quails, and an omelette, with some Camembert cheese, but her young charge did scanty justice to it. After dinner, when the coffee had been brought, and the door was safely shut, the Professor continued the course of lectures on ancient history, by which she had already upset the mind of her pupil, and filled his brain with dreams of a revolution more stupendous than was ever suspected by the watchful bureau of police.

Their next day’s drive brought them to Oxford. It was vacation, and the colleges were empty. Only here and there a solitary figure of some lonely Fellow or Lecturer, lingering after the rest had gone, flitted across the lawns. The solitude of the place pleased the Professor. She could ramble with her pupil about the venerable courts and talk at her ease.

‘Here,’ she said, ‘in the old days was once the seat of learning and wisdom.’

‘What is it now?’ asked her disciple, surprised. ‘Is not Oxford still the seat of learning?’

‘You must read – alas! you would not understand them – the old books before you can answer your own question. What is their political economy, their moral philosophy, their social science – of which they make so great a boast – compared with the noble scholarship, the science, the speculation of former days? How can I make you understand? There was a time when everything was advanced – by men. Science must advance or fall back. We took from men their education, and science has been forgotten. We cannot now read the old books; we do not understand the old discoveries; we cannot use the tools which they invented, the men of old. Mathematics, chemistry, physical science, geology – all these exist no longer, or else exist in such an elementary form as our ancestors would have been ashamed to acknowledge. Astronomy, which widened the heart, is neglected; medicine has become a thing of books; mechanics are forgotten – ’

‘But why?’

‘Because women, who can receive, cannot create; because at no time has any woman enriched the world with a new idea, a new truth, a new discovery, a new invention; because we have undertaken the impossible.’

The Professor was silent. Never before had Lord Chester seen her so deeply moved.

‘Oh, Sacred Learning!’ she cried, ‘we have sinned against thee! We poor women in our conceit think that everything may be learned from books: we worship the Ideal Woman, and we are content with the rags of learning which remain from the work of Man. Yes, we are contented with these scraps. We will accept nothing that is not absolutely certain. Therefore we blasphemously and ignorantly say that the last word has been said upon everything, and that no more remains to be learned.’

‘Mankind is surrounded,’ the Professor went on as if talking to herself, ‘by a high wall of black ignorance and mystery. The wall is for ever receding or closing in upon us. The men of the past pushed it back more and more, and widened continually the boundaries of thought, so that the foremost among them were godlike for knowledge and for a love of knowledge. We women of the present are continually contracting the wall, so that soon we shall know nothing, unless – unless you come to our help.’

‘How can I help to restore knowledge,’ asked the young man, ‘being myself so ignorant?’

‘By giving back the university to the sex which can enlarge our bounds.’

Always the same thing – always coming back to the one subject.

There was a university sermon in the afternoon, being the feast of St Cecilia; they looked in, but the church was empty. In vacation time one hardly expects more than two or three resident lecturers with their husbands and boys, and a sprinkling of young men from the town. The sermon was dull – perhaps Lord Chester’s mind was out of sympathy with the subject; it treated on the old well-worn lines of Woman as the Musician.

‘I will show you at Cambridge,’ said the Professor when they came out, ‘some of the music of the past. What are the feeble strains, the oft-repeated phrases of modern music, compared with the grand old music conceived and written by men? Women have never composed great music.’

They left Oxford the next day and proceeded north.

‘I think,’ said the Professor as they were driving smoothly along the road, ‘that they did wrong in not trying to maintain the old railways. True there were many accidents, and sometimes great loss of life; yet it must have been a convenience to get from London to Liverpool in five hours. To be sure the art of making engines is dead: such arts could not survive when their new system of separate labour was introduced.’

They passed the old tracks of the railways from time to time, now long canals grass-grown, and now high embankments covered with trees and bushes. There were black holes, too, in the hill-sides through which the iron road had once run.

‘The country in the nineteenth century,’ said the Professor, ‘was populous and wealthy; but it would be at first terrible for one of us to see and to live in. From end to end there were great factories driven by steam-engines, in which men worked in gangs, and from which a perpetual black cloud of smoke rose to the sky; trains ran shrieking along the iron roads with more clouds of smoke and steam. The results of the work were grand; but the workmen were uncared for, and killed by the long hours and the foul atmosphere. I talk like a woman’ – she checked herself with a smile, – ‘and I want to talk so that you shall feel like a man – of the ancient type.

‘There is one point of difference between man’s and woman’s legislation which I would have you bear in mind. Man looks to the end, woman thinks of the means. If man wanted a great thing done, he cared little about the sufferings of those who did that thing. A great railway had to be built; those who made it perished of fever and exposure. What matter? The railway remained. A great injustice had to be removed; to remove it cost a war, with death to thousands. Man cared little for the deaths, but much for the result. Man was like Nature, which takes infinite pains to construct an insect of marvellous beauty, and then allows it to be crushed in thousands almost as soon as born. Woman, on the other hand, considers the means.’

They came, after three days’ posting, to Manchester. They found it a beautiful city, situated on a clear sparkling stream, in the midst of delightful rural scenery, and regularly built after the modern manner in straight streets at right angles to each other: the air was peculiarly bright and bracing. ‘I wanted very much,’ said the Professor, ‘to show you this place. You see how pretty and quiet a place it is; yet in the old times it had a population of half a million. It was perpetually black with smoke; there were hundreds of vast factories where the men worked from six in the morning until six at night. Their houses were huts – dirty, crowded nests of fever; their sole amusements were to smoke tobacco and to drink beer and spirits; they died at thirty worn out; they were of sickly and stunted appearance; they were habitual wife-beaters; they neglected their children; they had no education, no religion, no hopes, no wishes for anything but plentiful pipe and beer. See it now! The population reduced to twenty thousand; the factories swept away; the machinery destroyed; the men working separately each in his own house, making cotton for home consumption. Let us walk through the streets.’

These were broad, clean, and well kept. Very few persons were about. A few women lounged about the Court, or gathered together on the steps of the Town Hall, where one was giving her opinions violently on politics generally; some stood at the doorways talking to their neighbours; in the houses one could hear the steady click-click of the loom or spinning-jenny, as the man within, or the man and his sons, sat at their continuous and solitary labour.

‘This is beautiful to think of, is it not?’

‘I do not know what to say,’ he replied. ‘You ask me, after all that you have taught me, to admire a system in which men are slaves. Yet all looks well from the outside.’

‘It began,’ the Professor went on, without answering him directly, ‘with the famous law of the “Clack” Parliament – that in which there were three times as many women as men – which enacted that wives should receive the wages of their husbands on Monday morning, and that unmarried men, unless they could be represented by mothers or sisters, or other female relations of whom they were the support, should be paid in kind, and be housed separately in barracks provided for the purpose, where discipline could be maintained. It was difficult at first to carry this legislation into effect: the men rebelled; but the law was enforced at last. That was the death-blow to the male supremacy. Woman, for the first time, got possession of the purse. What was done in Manchester was followed in other places. Young man, the spot you stand on is holy, or the reverse, whichever you please, because it is the birthplace of woman’s sovereignty.