A lady and her husband

by Amber Reeves Blanco White

DURING the next few months Mary renewed her youth. She had never known before that it is delightful to possess, specifically, an intellect. It was not that she had altogether neglected this faculty, but its use had generally come in the form of worrying over something. Now she found an instinctive pleasure in addressing it to the understanding of abstract problems.

She had been looking forward to this autumn for other reasons, because at the end of it she was to become a grandmother, but a little to her surprise she found that it was not the new dignity, profoundly as it stirred her, that took the chief place in her thoughts. She had expected to be carried backward by Laura's motherhood to what she had felt to be the flowering-time of her own life. This should have been a season of memories, of echoes, of a faint, pleasant sadness. She had thought therefore that she could watch the withering of her own present with resignation now that her daughter's happiness had come, she had believed that she could relinquish the future without sorrow now that a little new inheritor was waiting to enter upon it. Perhaps when she looked at Laura's child she would see again the youth of her own eyes, or her own smile.

But as the autumn went by she found that respond as she might to the past her hold on the present had never been more eager. It was a matter for relief, not for the melancholy she had imagined that the nursery of her line had passed from hers into Laura's keeping. She felt free as she had never felt free before to come into contact with life, to try experiments with it. There were no children to guard from misery, from ugliness, from dangerous ideas.

A long forgotten curiosity woke in Mary and urged her to see for herself what the world was like.

One after another, simply, she read Rosemary's books, finding in them not so much facts and arguments as symbols of new freedom and a new exultation. She realised from them, for the first time, that there are passions in life other than personal love and personal ambition. She recognised a passion for knowledge, for adventure, she experienced a passion of sympathy for the poor.

She was not aware that she was reading the books for their emotional effects. It did not occur to her that she was not approaching the sources of wisdom in the most detached, intellectual spirit possible. She was anxious to be thorough and she applied herself, like a clever child, to tomes culled from the London library on account of the correctness of the titles printed soberly across their backs, the "Principles" or "Elements of Economics." She accepted the methods of these volumes with engaging good faith and watched eagerly for their smallest lapses from a rigid consistency. She made copious notes on the theory of money, which she found evasive, for it had no bearing that she could see on the problems in which she felt genuine interest. She struggled with what seemed at first sight the needlessly complex and technical procedure of banks. She prepared herself to pounce instantly, when she found it in pamphlets and newspapers and other lax vehicles of popular thought, on the least whisking tip of the tail of the wages fund theory. But in her heart, if not consciously, her attitude towards such accumulations of learning was tinged with a kindly toleration. It was characteristic of men, she thought, to spend such an amount of energy on what were often verbal differences, to pursue their points, through a wealth of subdivided nomenclature, to a distance from concrete usefulness that would have made any practical person slacken. Men did become excited in that fashion over purely unimportant things; one knew that when once they started arguing a wise woman bowed to the storm and escaped if she could. She had realised this in early youth, on an occasion when James and her father and Julius had argued for hours about the month in which one particular fish became seasonable. They had exhausted their knowledge of geography, of biology, and of travellers' tales, they had ransacked their memories for the dates and the menus of dinners, they had discovered in the recesses of the past hitherto unproclaimed intimacies and conversations with fish merchants and with sailors. And when her mother, in a naive belief that what they required was wisdom, had laid before them the agreement of cookery books and even fresh evidence brought by the maid from the fishmonger's round the corner, they had not shown gratitude but had embarked on a fresh discussion as to the modifications, if any, imposed by these cold facts on their various previous statements and theories. Mary had felt then that her kinsfolk were dears, if a little noisy, and she felt now that the professors were wonderfully clever, if a little verbose. After all, if you are a professor, and paid for it, you must fill in your time. So she did not trammel her soul, even if she burdened her memory, with the strict rigour of their conclusions.

She tried once or twice, when some work dealing in more concrete fashion with the conditions of the poor had moved her beyond silence, to talk about her reading with Rosemary. But Rosemary shrank a little from her mother's enthusiasm, from the exhibition of her intimate emotion. Her mother—she couldn't help recognising the fact—was very crude, and though she regarded this crudity, solemnly, as a necessary stage in poor Mary's development, she did not enjoy contact with it any the more for that. It made her impatient, it disturbed the slightly romantic element in her affection for her mother. She herself had read the books a year ago, glowed over them, shuddered at the condition they revealed, and inspired herself with a definite belief in Socialism. That being so, it was useless to go on feeling idle emotion when one might be persuading one's friends to join the Fabian Society. Rosemary imagined that she disliked emotion that was not serving some definite useful end. If Mrs. Heyham had come to her and said, "I too am a Socialist, what would the committee of the Fabian Society like me to do?" Rosemary would have hidden sincere delight beneath a great show of cool common-sense, have taken her mother to meetings, and introduced people to her who would undertake her future education. But Mary had not become a Socialist, the Socialism in Rosemary's books had slipped unheeded from her mind. She had been accustomed all her life to dwell upon the importance of individual action, and she had no experience of any need for collective effort that might emerge in a world of great affairs. She had governed her family, for over twenty successful years, by such appeals as she could make to their ideals and their better natures. It did not occur to her now to criticise this attitude, and the principal conviction she gathered from her studies was a heavy sense of personal responsibility. If things were bad then employers must sacrifice themselves to make things better. She couldn't doubt that they would, if they only understood how bad things were. And then when the men saw the masters really striving for their good they would learn to co-operate with those set over them and gradually the world would improve. Everybody nowadays, professors and Socialists alike, united to praise Trade Unions, so Mary was sure that they must be excellent things though at times she felt a little anxious about them. But, after all, clever men like Trade Union officials would soon see when an employer was doing his best—Mary imagined the labour leaders of England with their eyes turned constantly to James.

Poor James, the fact was that he was so busy with his work that he hadn't time to read these books; he didn't really understand what the lives of the poor were like. He had practically admitted that when he asked her not to read for herself. He hadn't, as Mary had by now, spent day after day visiting the homes of working-people. He had heard about it, of course, but that isn't the same as seeing it for yourself. Mary pictured a quickened, a glorified James, urging on a great employers' movement for raising the standard of national life. She felt sure that even James did not know how magnificent he could be. She had not formed any clear plans of what she would say to James or even of what she wanted him to do. Those would come later, when she had read more, and when she had gathered more experience. She would like, she thought, to work for a little on one of the great organisations that study and benefit the poor. One ought to see the poor as a whole and not only in the glimpses she obtained from the visits she paid with Miss Percival. But after all the chief thing was a change of attitude. James would think of the plans—that she could safely leave to him. Her task was to lead him to realise for himself that the people really needed his help. She had no doubt that he would begin with his own workers, but it was very probable, all questions being so fearfully tangled together, that it would be more complicated than she supposed.

There were bad employers, and the fact must be faced. Mary had known people who were unkind and people who were untruthful and dishonest—though it was generally because they had been badly brought up—but everybody had good in them somewhere. She could hardly conceive an employer so bad that he wouldn't respond to James at the head of an army of enlightenment. They didn't know; if only they knew, they would be different.

It was this optimism that Rosemary found hard to bear. It did not seem credible to her that a woman of forty-five could be so simple. Naturally Mary said nothing to Rosemary about her plans for James, and it seemed to the girl that her mother was going to do nothing. She felt thwarted, because she had been forming hopes. She herself was nobody, but if Mary, the wife of a well-known employer, would join the Fabian Society, or even the Independent Labour Party, it might do some good.