Dora Russell

“ May started back as if she had received a sudden blow.
“I married,” went on John Temple, nerving himself to speak the words, “the actress, Kathleen Weir—”
But he said no more; May’s lips parted, she gasped as if for breath, and then as John Temple caught her in his arms she sank senseless on the floor.
“My God! has it killed her!” he cried in sudden anguish, looking at her white and clammy face. He lifted her up, he placed her on a couch, he rang the bell wildly for assistance. But May lay like one dead. One arm fell motionless at her side; John grasped her wrist and could feel no pulsation. ”

“ Can we not persuade Jason from barbarity and Admetus to the abandonment of his fears? To live with [80] vigour, body and mind and imagination, without fear or shame or dread of death; to drive these baser passions from the hold they have upon our morality and our politics—this is what we ask of modern men and women. They can come to it only in a reckless love of one another, a passion that gives again and again without fear of hurt or exhaustion. It is not an abandonment to nature and to instinct that we need. Pure and barbaric instinct is no more. ”

“ There was no longer any doubt in Ralph Webster’s mind after he had read this letter as to the identity of the John Temple who had married two women. But there was a doubt; a strange vivid doubt as to how he should act under such painful circumstances. Before him rose the sweet, girlish face of May Churchill, with her glad eyes and quiet happiness; and then he thought of the change this cruel news would bring. The light would fade from her eyes, and the color from her smooth cheeks, and a crushing sense of shame and sorrow overshadow her young life. ”

“ Thirty shillings a week and typing or working in a shop, a still tongue, or a toss of the head and the assertion that independence is the best; and, in the background a lover with whom somehow evenings are spent—a lover who has no claim and cannot tyrannize. A lover, perhaps, who pleads to become a husband, but has no chance unless his income is good or secure. Marriage would change him: Aspasia knows it. Marriage would also rob her of that thirty shillings a week, which alone stands between her and the abyss of primeval submission. ”

“ Unconsciously almost to himself he had begun to hope that some day he would win May Churchill for his wife; that some day she might return his love. He was not a man to love lightly, nor one to change. His feelings were characteristic, strong, and undivided; his life high-toned and pure. Until he had seen May’s flower-like face he had loved no woman, and indeed scarcely had given the sex a thought. His profession, his career, had occupied his whole time, and he hardly knew that there lay a hidden fire in his breast, which had kindled and burst forth at the beauty of a country girl. ”

“ How old and proper people love a vigorous and god-like young male! How they look askance upon, brow-beat, and bully his equivalent in the opposite sex! Here is a community for ever starving and choking its finest women, stifling their voices in education and public life; then turning and rending the submissive residue for being what years of intimidation have made them. Let them marry, you say, and make a success of that and their children. That would be well enough but for the taboos and disabilities with which marriage is surrounded. ”

“ These words seemed like an epitaph on her life’s happiness. She knew it was all over, and that the young man to whom she had given so much was weary of her; weary of the frail bondage by which she held him.
And, in truth, never was man more weary. Young Henderson’s face was black as night as he strode on after he had left the girl he called Elsie. She was a chain around his neck, an intolerable burden, from which he could see no way to free himself.
And yet he must be free! Margaret Churchill’s lovely face rose before him as he passed down the fields of waving corn. ”

“ Men, on the other hand, like to pretend that our assumption of intelligence and independence is but a momentary spurt in a race which must end in masculine victory and feminine submission. They admit that the great development of our freedom in body and mind has given us a serious advantage, and the more discerning among them urge their fellows to press on and catch us up. Others trundle the golden apples beseechingly, but still Atalanta runs.
I believe it to be true that the education and outlook of men is more old-fashioned than that of women reared in the freedom of feminist traditions. ”

“ Again May Churchill laughed. She stood there a picture of youth and beauty; a girl in the prime of her girlhood, and conscious perhaps that John Temple’s gray eyes were fixed admiringly on her lovely face.
“Yes,” he repeated, “that will really be very sad. Age makes no matter to ordinary-looking people, you know, but to a flower—”
“When shall I begin to wither?” asked May, archly.
“Oh! do not speak of it! And yet,” he continued more seriously, still looking at May, “there are some faces that must always be beautiful; some eyes that can never grow dim.” ”

“ First and foremost, man or woman, we are human beings. There is a great deal of the work in the community which we can each do with equal ability, given equal training and opportunity. There are other tasks which we must agree to delegate to one another, and neither despise the other for performing them. Life and harmony, generosity and peace are the ideals which the best thought of feminism has set before us. We believe that States and individuals can put them into practice. Will man not pause to understand before he continues on the path of destruction and strife, cupidity and war? ”

“ I can not go, I can not go!” moaned May.
“You must,” said Webster; “do you think I would leave you alone in the miserable, desperate state you are in? I do not ask you to go back to Pembridge Terrace, or to see your father or Mr. Temple; all I ask you to do is to come with me, and I will take the best care of you that I can.”
“And—and you will tell no one where I am?”
“I solemnly promise I will tell no one where you are, if in return you will promise to do nothing rash. Miss Churchill, no man is worth it,” he added, half bitterly. “But come, now, let us go back to the cab.” ”

“ Our bodies are too much impregnated by inherited habit and knowledge, too much surrounded in their growth by the findings of science. Men and women are not creatures of clay, nor disembodied spirits; but things of fire intertwining in understanding, torrents leaping to join in a cascade of mutual ecstacy. There is nothing in life to compare with this uniting of minds and bodies in men and women who have laid aside hostility and fear and seek in love the fullest understanding of themselves and of the universe. ”