Mona Caird

“ A painter, a writer, a musician, never comes in touch at all with his public. We hear his name, we admire or we decry his works, but the man or the woman who has toiled, and felt, and lived, is unknown to us. He is lost in his work.”
Hadria gave a murmur of assent.
“But you, Mrs. Temperley, have a very different story to tell. It is you, yourself, your personality, in all its many-sided charm that we all bow to; it is you, not your achievements that—that we love.” ”

“ As Miss Du Prel says, ‘It is always the good men whom one wounds; the others wound us.’” Hadria was silent. “And Claude Moreton,” continued Algitha presently. “He is far too deeply interested in you, far too absorbed in what you say and do. I have watched him. It is cruel.”
Hadria grew fierce. “Has he never cruelly injured a woman? Has he not at least given moral support to the hideous indignities that all womanhood has to endure at men’s hands? At best one can make a man suffer. But men also humiliate us, degrade us, jeer at, ridicule the miseries that they and their society entail upon us. ”

“ Lady Engleton laughed. “Then, Mrs. Temperley, you do feel rather wicked yourself, although you don’t admire our nice, well-behaved, average woman.”
“Oh, the mere opposite of an error isn’t always truth,” said Hadria.
“The weather has run to your head!” cried Henriette.
Hadria’s eyes kindled. “Yes, it is like wine; clear, intoxicating sparkling wine, and its fumes are mounting! Why does civilisation never provide for these moments?”
“What would you have? A modified feast of Dionysius?”
“Why not? The whole earth joins in the festival and sings, except mankind. ”

“ Algitha drew herself up. “If one is unjustly restrained,” she said, “it is perfectly right to brave the infliction of the sort of pain that people feel only because they unfairly object to one’s liberty of action.”
“But what a frightful piece of circumstance that is to encounter,” cried Hadria, “to have to buy the mere right to one’s liberty by cutting through prejudices that are twined in with the very heart-strings of those one loves! Ah! that particular obstacle has held many a woman helpless and suffering, like some wretched insect pinned alive to a board throughout a miserable lifetime! ”

“ Hadria remained till it was time to dress for dinner. Professor Fortescue had promised to dine with her and Valeria on this last evening. Little Martha had been put early to bed, in order that she might have a long rest before the morrow’s journey. The golden curls lay like strands of silk on the pillow, the bright eyes were closed in healthful slumber. The child lay, the very image of fresh and pure and sweet human life, with no thought and no dread of the uncertain future that loomed before her. Hannah had gone upstairs to pack her own belongings. ”

“ Although Hadria had expected such a reception, she felt a chill run through her, and a sinking of the heart. It was like a cold word that rebuffs an offer of sympathy, or an appeal for it. It sent her back into depths of loneliness, and reminded her how cut off she was from the great majority of her fellows, after all. And then Guy de Maupassant’s dreadful “Solitude” came to her memory. There is no way (the hero of the sketch asserts) by which a man can break the eternal loneliness to which he is foredoomed. He cannot convey to others his real impressions or emotion, try as he may. ”

“ Hopelessness was her nearest approach to that condition of cheerful acquiescence which, Hadria had herself said, profound faith or profound stupidity can perhaps equally inspire.
“At least,” said Valeria, “you know that you are useful and helpful to those around you. You make your mother happy.”
“No, my mother is not happy. My work is negative. I just manage to prevent her dying of grief. One must not be too ambitious in this stern world. One can’t make people happy merely by reducing oneself, morally, to a jelly. Sometimes, by that means, one can dodge battle and murder and sudden death.” ”

“ I am none the less ready to cut my throat—ha, ha, ha! Admit, my dear Hadria—Mrs. Temperley—that it appeals also to your sense of humour. A common sense of humour, you know, was one of our bonds of union. What more appropriate than that we should part with shaking sides? Oh, Lord! oh, Lord! what am I to do? One can’t live on a good joke for ever.”
He grasped his head in his hands; then suddenly, he broke out into another paroxysm. “The feminine nature always the same, always, always; infinitely charming and infinitely volatile. ”

“ Algitha was walking restlessly to and fro.
“And I went to Dunaghee so often, so often,” she cried tearfully, “so that mother should not feel deserted, and you too came, and the boys when they could. But she never got over my leaving; she seemed to resent my independence, my habit of judging for myself; she hated every detail in which I differed from the girls she knew. If I had married and gone to the Antipodes, she would have been quite satisfied, but——”
“Ah, why do people need human souls for their daily food?” cried Hadria mournfully. ”

“ I have had one or two strange experiences and now a hope—I might say a faith—has settled upon me of an undying element in our personality. I feel that we shall meet again those we have loved here—some time or another.”
“What a sting that would take from the agony of parting,” cried Hadria.
“And, after all, is it less rational to suppose that there is some survival of the Self, and that the wild, confused earthly experience is an element of a spiritual evolutionary process, than to suppose that the whole universe is chaotic and meaningless? ”

“ But it comes, perhaps, once in a century, and if one is too fastidious, it passes by and leaves one forlorn; at best, it comes only to open the gates of Paradise, for a moment, and to close them again, and leave one in outer darkness.”
“Always?”
“I believe always,” answered Miss Du Prel.
The running of the river sounded peacefully in the pause that followed.
“Well,” cried Hadria at length, raising her head with a long sigh, “one cannot do better than follow one’s own instinct and thought of the moment. Regret may come, do what one may. One cannot escape from one’s own temperament.” ”

“ She shall be protected from the solemn fools—with sawdust for brains and a mechanical squeaker for heart—who, on principle, cut off from her mother all joy and all savour in life, and then punished her for falling a victim to the starved emotional condition to which they had reduced her.”
“The matter seems complex,” said Lady Engleton, “and I don’t see how revenge comes in.”
“It is a passion that has never been eradicated. Oh, if I could but find that man!”
“A man is a hard thing to punish,—unless he is in love with one.”
“Well, let him be in love!” cried Hadria fiercely. ”

“ Hadria was silent. The words sounded ominous.
“Will can do so much,” she said at length. “Do you believe in the power of the human will to break the back of circumstance?”
“Oh, yes; but the effort expended in breaking its back sometimes leaves one prone, with a victory that arrives ironically too late. However I don’t wish to discourage you. There is no doubt that human will has triumphed over everything—but death.”
Again the sound of the pony’s hoofs sounded through the silence, in a cheerful trot upon the white roads. ”

“ I don’t think it is all for the best,” said Hadria. “I think, as far as my influence goes, it is all for the worst. What fatal argument my life will give to those who are seeking reasons to hold our sex in the old bondage! My struggles, my failure, will add to the staggering weight that we all stumble under. I have hindered more—that is the bitter thing—by having tried and failed, than if I had never tried at all. Mrs. Walker, Mrs. Gordon herself, has given less arguments to the oppressors than I.”
“But why? But how?” cried Algitha incredulously. ”

“ He regarded the maternal instinct as the scourge of genius. It was, for women, the devil’s truncheon, his rod of empire. This “reproductive rage” held them—in spite of all their fine intuitions and astonishing ability—after all on the animal plane; cut them off from the little band of those who could break up new ground in human knowledge, and explore new heights of Art and Nature.
“I speak to you thus, Madame, not because I think little of your sex, but because I grudge them to the monster who will not spare us even one!”
Hadria worked with sufficient energy to please even Jouffroy. ”

“ Hadria received this letter from the postman when she was coming out of Dodge’s cottage.
It threw her into a conflict of strong and painful feeling: foreboding, heart-sickness, a longing so strong to see her friends that it seemed as if she must pack up instantly and go to them, and through it all, a sense of loneliness that was almost unbearable. How she envied Valeria! To love with her whole heart, without a shadow of doubt; to have that element of warmth in her life which could never fail her, like sunshine to the earth. ”

“ Algitha gave a startled exclamation, as the smoke thinned and revealed that bewildering glimpse of distant lands, half seen, as through the atmosphere of a dream. An exquisite city, with slender towers and temples, flashed, for a moment, through the mist curtain.
“If life is like that,” she said at length, drawing a long breath, “nothing on this earth ought to persuade us to forego it; no one has the right to hold one back from its possession.”
“No one,” said Hadria; “but everyone will try!”
“Let them try,” returned Algitha defiantly. ”

“ Lady Engleton had reminded her of a woman’s helplessness if she places herself in opposition to a man, for whom all things are ordered in the society that he governs; her only chance of striking a telling blow being through his passions. If he were in love with her, then there might be some hope of making him wince. And Hadria, with a fierce swiftness had accepted the condition, with a mixture of confidence in her own power of rousing emotion, if she willed, and of scorn for the creature who could be appealed to through his passions, but not through his sense of justice. ”

“ Professor Fortescue held that woman’s “goodness” had done as much harm in the world as men’s badness. The one was merely the obverse of the other.
“This is strange teaching!” cried Lady Engleton.
The Professor reminded her that truth was always stranger than fiction.
“To the best men,” observed Valeria, “women show all their meanest qualities. It is the fatality of their training.”
Professor Theobald had noted the same trait in other subject races.
“Pray, don’t call us a subject race!” remonstrated Lady Engleton.
“Ah, yes, the truth,” cried Hadria, “we starve for the truth.” ”

“ Algitha exclaimed with a dispirited laugh.
“It will be a trial,” Hadria admitted; “but it is said that suffering strengthens the character. You may look forward before long, to claiming as sister a creature of iron purpose.”
“I wonder, I wonder,” cried Algitha, bending her fine head; “we owe everything to her.”
“I know we do. It’s of no use disguising the unpleasant side of the matter. A mother disappointed in her children must be a desperately unhappy woman. She has nothing left; for has she not resigned everything for them? But is sacrifice for ever to follow on sacrifice? ”

“ Hadria gave a frightened start. Was she finding herself to be bad in a way that she had never suspected? If she could but fully and completely escape from tradition, so that her judgment might be quite unhampered. Tradition seemed either to make human beings blindly submissive, or to tempt them to act out of an equally blind opposition to its canons. One could never be entirely independent. In her confusion, she longed to turn to some clear mind and sound conscience, not so much for advice, as in order to test the effect upon such a mind and conscience of the whole situation. ”

“ Human bodies take but little room, and the abyss seemed to swallow them, as some greedy animal its prey. But Hadria knew, in her dream, that some day it would have claimed its last victim, and the surface would be level and solid, so that people would come and go, scarcely remembering that beneath their feet was once a chasm into which throbbing lives had to descend, to darkness and a living death. ”

“ The day broke into splendour, and the warm rays, rounding the edge of the eastward rock, poured straight into the little temple. Below and around on the cliff-sides, the rich foliage of holly and dwarf oak, ivy, and rowan with its burning berries, was transformed into a mass of warm colour and shining surfaces.
“What always bewilders me,” Hadria said, bending over the balustrade among the ivy, “is the enormous gulf between what might be and what is in human life. Look at the world—life’s most sumptuous stage—and look at life! ”

“ Otherwise the race would extinguish itself in cruelty and corruption. Let people talk as they please about the struggle for existence, it is through the development of the human mind and the widening of human mercy that better things will come.”
“One sees, now and then, in a flash, what the world may some day be,” said Hadria. “The vision comes, perhaps, with the splendour of a spring morning, or opens, scroll-like, in a flood of noble music. It sounds unreal, yet it brings a sense of conviction that is irresistible.” ”

“ I deny that motherhood has duties except when it is absolutely free, absolutely uninfluenced by the pressure of opinion, or by any of the innumerable tyrannies that most children have now to thank for their existence.”
Miss Temperley shook her head. “I don’t see that any ‘tyranny,’ as you call it, exonerates a mother from her duty to her child.”
“There we differ. Motherhood, in our present social state, is the sign and seal as well as the means and method of a woman’s bondage. It forges chains of her own flesh and blood; it weaves cords of her own love and instinct. ”

“ Temperley exclaimed.
The grave had made considerable progress before she descended from the stile and prepared to take her homeward way. On leaving, she made Dodge come with her to the gate, and point out the red-roofed cottage covered with monthly roses and flaming creeper, where the schoolmistress had passed so many years, and where she now lay with her work and her days all over, in the tiny upper room, at whose latticed window the sun used to wake her on summer mornings, or the winter rain pattered dreary prophecies of the tears that she would one day shed. ”

“ Hadria looked bewildered.
“To tell you the truth, I have always wondered why women have never felt as I am sure you feel towards life. You remember that day at Dunaghee when you were so annoyed at my guessing your thoughts. They were unmistakeable to one who shared them. Your sex has always been a riddle to me; there seemed to be something abject in their nature, even among the noblest of them. But you are no riddle. While I think you are the least simple woman I ever met, you are to me the easiest to understand.” ”

“ Miss Du Prel laughed. “What an observant young woman you are.”
“Renunciation is always preached to girls, you know,” said Hadria—“preached to them when as yet they have nothing more than a rattle and a rag-doll to renounce. And later, when they set about the business of their life, and resign their liberty, their talents, their health, their opportunity, their beauty (if they have it) , then people gradually fall away from the despoiled and obedient being, and flock round the still unchastened creature who retains what the gods have given her, and asks for more.” ”

“ 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. ”