Windyridge

by W. Riley

CHAPTER VII

THE CYNIC DISCOURSES ON WOMAN

"Woman," said the Cynic sententiously, "may be divided into five parts: the Domestic woman, the Social woman, the Woman with a Mission, the New Woman, and the Widow."

"Nonsense!" snapped the vicar's wife, "the widow may be any one of the rest. The mere accident of widowhood cannot affect her special characteristics. The worst of you smart men is that you entirely divorce verity from vivacity. The domestic woman is still a domestic woman, though she become a widow."

"No," returned the Cynic, "the widow is a thing apart, if I may so designate any of your captivating sex. Domestic she may still be in a certain or uncertain subordinate sense, just as the social woman or the woman with a mission may have a strain of domesticity in her make-up; but when all has been said she is still in a separate class; she is, in fact—a widow."

"I remember reading somewhere," I remarked, "that a little widow is a dangerous thing. Manifestly the author of that brilliant epigram was of your way of thinking. He would probably have classed her as an explosive."

He turned to me and smiled mockingly.

"I think all men who have seriously studied the subject, as I have, must have formed a similar opinion. The widow is dangerous because she is a widow. She has tasted of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. She knows the weak places in man's defensive armour. She has acquired skill in generalship which enables her to win her battles. Added to all this is the pathos of her position, which is an asset of no inconsiderable value. She knows to a tick of time when to allure by smiles and melt by tears, and woe to the man who thinketh he standeth when she proposes his downfall."

"My dear Derwent," interposed the squire from the other side the hearth; "you speak, no doubt, from a ripe experience, if an outside one, and no one here will question your authority; but surely the new woman and the woman with a mission may be bracketed together."

The squire was leaning back in a comfortable saddle-bag, one leg thrown easily over the other and his hands clasped behind his head. A tolerant half-smile hung about the corners of his lips and lurked in the shadows of his eyes. He has a grand face, and it shows to perfection on an occasion like this.

The vicar sat near him. He is a spare, rather cadaverous man, who lives among Egyptian mummies and Assyrian tablets and palimpsests and first editions, and knows nothing of any statesman later than Cardinal Wolsey. An open book of antiquities lay upon his knee, and his finger-tips were pressed together upon it, but the eyes which blinked over the top of his gold-rimmed spectacles were fixed upon space, and the Cynic's vapourings were as unheeded as yesterday.

The vicar's wife is the very antithesis of her husband. She is a plump, round-faced little body, and was tidily dressed in a black silk of quite modern style with just a trace of elegance, and a berthe of fine old lace which made me break the tenth commandment every time I looked at her. She was evidently on the best of terms with herself, and stood in no awe of anybody, and least of all of the Cynic, whom she regarded with a half-affectionate, half-contemptuous air. She had a way of tossing her head and pursing her lips when he was more than usually aggressive that obviously amused him. I had soon found out that they were old antagonists.

The Cynic himself puzzled me. I scarcely dared to look at him very closely, for I had the feeling that none of my movements escaped his notice, and I had not been able to decide whether his age was thirty or fifty. He is of average height and build, and was somewhat carelessly dressed, I thought. His dinner jacket seemed rather loose, and his starched shirt was decidedly crumpled. I wondered who looked after his ménage.

His hands are clean and shapely, and he knows where to put them, which is generally an indication of good breeding and always of a lack of self-consciousness, and from their condition I judged that he earned his bread in the sweat of his brain rather than of his brow.

As to his face—well, I liked it. It is dark, but frank and open, and he has a good mouth, which can be seen, because he is clean shaven, and his teeth are also good. But then in these degenerate days anyone who has attained middle life may have good teeth: it is all a matter of money.

I think it is the eyes that make the face, however. They are deep grey and remarkably luminous, and on this occasion they simply bubbled over with mischievousness. His smile was never very pronounced, and always more or less satirical, but his eyes flashed and sparkled when he was roused, though they had looked kindly and even plaintive when he arrived, and before he was warmed. He is the sort of man who can do all his talking with his eyes.

A high forehead is surmounted by a mass of hair—once black, but rapidly turning grey—which he evidently treats as of no importance, for it lies, as the children say, "anyhow." But how old he is—I give it up.

He passed his hand through his hair now, with a quick involuntary movement, as he turned to the squire.

"You may bracket the new woman and the woman with a mission together, but you can never make them one. That they have some things in common is nothing to the point. The new woman, as I understand her, has no mission, not even a commission. The new woman is Protest, embodied and at present skirted, but with a protest against the skirt. Her most longed-for goal is the Unattainable, and if by some chance she should reach it she would be dismayed and annoyed. Meantime, with the vision before her eyes of the table of the gods, she cries aloud that she is forced to feed on husks, and as she must hug something, hugs a grievance."

"Philip Derwent," interposed the vicar's wife, "you are in danger of becoming vulgar."

"Vulgarity, madam," he rejoined, "is in these days the brand of refinement. It is only your truly refined man who has the courage to be vulgar in polite society. No other dares to call a spade a spade or a lie a lie. Those who wish to be considered refined speak of the one as an 'agricultural implement' and of the other as a 'terminological inexactitude.' But to return to our sheep who are clamouring for wolves' clothing——"

"Really, Philip!" protested the vicar's wife, pursing her lips more emphatically than ever.

"The latest incarnation of Protest, if I may so speak, takes the form of a demand for the suffrage, and is accompanied by much beating of drums and——"

"Smashing of windows," I ventured.

He bowed. "And smashing of windows. By and by they will get their desire."

"And so have fulfilled their mission," the squire smiled.

"By no means; they have no mission; they have simply a hunger, or rather a pain which goes away when their appetite is stayed, and comes on again before the meal has been well digested. Then they go forth once more seeking whom or what they may devour."

"Tell us of the woman with a mission," I pleaded.

"Miss Holden is anxious to discover in what category she is to be classed," laughed the squire. "You are treading on dangerous ground, Derwent. Let me advise you to proceed warily."

"Mr. Evans, when a boy at school I learned the Latin maxim—'Truth is often attended with danger,' but I am sure Miss Holden will be merciful towards its humble votary."

I smiled and he continued: "The woman with a mission, Miss Holden, is an altogether superior creature. She may be adorable; on the other hand she may be a nuisance and a bore. Everything depends on the mission—and the woman."

"A safe answer, Philip," sneered the vicar's wife, and the squire smiled.

"There is no other safe way, madam, than the way of Truth, and I am treading it now. Even if the woman be a nuisance, even if the mission be unworthy, she who makes it hers may be ennobled. Let us assume that she believes with all her heart that she has been sent into the world for one definite purpose—shall we say to work for the abatement of the smoke nuisance? That involves, amongst other things——"

"Depriving poor weak man of his chief solace—tobacco," snapped the vicar's wife.

"Exactly. Now see how this strengthens her character, and calls out qualities of endurance and self-sacrifice. The poor weak man, her husband, deprived of his chief solace, tobacco, turns to peppermints, moroseness and bad language. His courtesy is changed to boorishness, his placidity to snappishness. All this is trying to his wife, but being a woman with a mission she regards these things philosophically as incidental to a transition period, and she bears her cross with ever-increasing gentleness and——"

"Drives her husband to the devil and herself into the widows' compartment," interrupted the vicar's wife, with disgust in her voice. "Miss Holden, do you sing?"

"I have no music," I replied, "but may I 'say a piece' instead, as the village children put it?" I turned to the Cynic and made him a mock curtsey:

"Small blame is ours
For this unsexing of ourselves, and worse
Effeminising of the male. We were
Content, sir, till you starved us, heart and brain.
All we have done, or wise or otherwise
Traced to the root was done for love of you.
Let us taboo all vain comparisons,
And go forth as God meant us, hand in hand.
Companions, mates and comrades evermore;
Two parts of one divinely ordained whole."

"Bravo!" said the squire, and the vicar murmured, "Thank you," very politely. The Cynic laughed and rose from his chair.

"I will take it lying down," he said. "Mr. Evans, may I look in the cabinet and see if there is anything Miss Holden can sing?"

I had to do it, because the cabinet contained all the Scotch songs I love so well. I was my own accompanist, faute de mieux, but the Cynic turned the leaves, and contributed a couple of songs himself. He talks better than he sings. The squire wanted us to try a duet, and the vicar's wife was also very pressing, but one has to draw the line somewhere. The only pieces we both knew were so sentimental that my sense of humour would have tripped me up, I know, and I should have come a cropper.

Just as coffee was brought in the squire asked me if I would sing for him, "Oh wert thou in the cauld blast." I saw he really wanted it, so I found the music, though I had to choke back the lump in my throat. I had never sung it since that memorable evening when we sat together—dad and I—on the eve of his death, and he had begged for it with his eyes. "I know, dad, dear," I said; "I must close with your favourite," and he whispered, "For the last time, lassie." And so it had been.

The tears fell as I sang, and the Hall and its inmates faded from my view. The Cynic must have left my side, for when at length I ventured to look round he was across the room examining a curio. But the squire rose and thanked me in a very low voice, and his own eyes were bright with tears that did not fall.

Soon after, the vicar's carriage came, and the Cynic accepted the offer of a lift to the cross-roads. I left at the same time, but the squire insisted on accompanying me. Under cover of the darkness he remarked:

"That was my wife's song. It gave me much pleasure and some pain to hear it again; but it hurt you?"

I told him why, and he said quite simply, "Then we have another bond in common."

"Another?" I inquired, but he did not explain; instead he asked:

"How fares your ideal? Have you met him of the cloven foot in Windyridge yet?"

"I fear I brought him with me," I replied, "and I fancy I have seen his footprints in the village. All the same, I do not yet regret my decision. I am very happy here and have forgotten some of my London nightmares, and am no longer 'tossed by storm and flood.' My Inner Self and I are on the best of terms."

He sighed. "Far be it from me to discourage you; and indeed I am glad that the moors have brought you peace. To brood over wrongs we cannot put right is morbid and unhealthy; it saps our vitality and makes us unfit for the conflicts we have to wage. And yet how easy it is for us to let this consideration lead us to the bypath meadows of indifference and self-indulgence. You remember Tennyson:

"'Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the Time,
City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime?'

"I have led a strenuous life, and taken some part in the battle, but now I have degenerated into a Lotus-eater, with no heart for the fray, 'Lame and old and past my time, and passing now into the night.'"

"Nay," I said, "let me quote Clough in answer to your Tennyson:

"'Say not the struggle nought availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain.
The enemy faints not nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain,

'For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.'

"You are no Lotus-eater: no shirker. You are just resting in the garden in the evening of a well-spent day, and that is right."

"For me there is no rest," he replied. "To-morrow I go to Biarritz, and thence wherever my fancy or my doctor's instructions send me; but I shall carry with me the burdens of the village. It is selfish of me to tell you this, for I would not make you sad, but I am a lonely man, and I am going away alone, and somewhat against my will, but Trempest insists.

"I think it has done me good to unburden myself to you, and I will say only this one word more. Always, when I return, there has been some tragedy, great or small, which I think I might have hindered."

"Surely not," I murmured, "in so small a place."

He rested his arm upon my garden gate and smiled. "A week ago I witnessed a terrible encounter between two redbreasts in the lane yonder. They are very tenacious of their rights, and one of them, I imagine, was a trespasser from the other side the hedge. They are country birds, yet very pugnacious, and the little breasts of these two throbbed with passion. But when I came near them they flew away, and I hope forgot their differences. I never even raised a stick—my mere presence was sufficient. And therein is a parable. Good-night, Miss Holden, and au revoir!"

He opened the gate, raised his hat, and was gone.