Canadian women, as a class, are not made for the vitrine. Their instinct is to be workers in the world and mates for men. They have no very high opinion of their privileges; they are not self-analytical. They rarely think of themselves as the birds and flowers of the human race, or as other than creatures to put their shoulders to the wheel in the ways of which God made them mistresses. Not ashamed to know how to bake and brew and mend and sew, they rule the house with a practically French economy. I was brought up in that way; not ignorant of books or of social amenities, but with the assumption that I was in this world to contribute something to it by my usefulness. I hadn't contributed much, Heaven only knows; but the impulse to work was instinctive.
And as Hugh's wife I began to see that I should be lifted high and dry into a sphere where there was nothing to be done. I should dress and I should amuse myself; I should amuse myself and I should dress. It was all Mrs. Rossiter did; it was all Mrs. Brokenshire did—except that to her, poor soul, amusement had become but gall and bitterness. Still, with the large exceptions which I cheerfully concede, it was the American ideal, so far as I could get hold of it; and I began to feel that, in the long run, it would stifle me.
It was a kind of feminine Nirvana. It offered me nothing to strive for, nothing to wait for in hope, nothing to win gloriously. The wife of Larry Strangways, whoever she turned out to be, would have a goal before her, high up and far ahead, with the incentive of lifelong striving. Hugh Brokenshire's wife would have everything done for her, as it was done for Mildred. Like Mildred she would have nothing to do but think and think and think—or train herself to not thinking at all. Little by little I saw myself being steered toward this fate; and, like St. Peter, when I thought thereon I wept.
I had taken to weeping all alone in my pretty room, which looked out on shrubberies and gardens. I should probably have shrubberies and gardens like them some day; so that weeping was the more foolish. Every one considered me fortunate. All my Canadian and English friends spoke of me as a lucky girl, and, in their downright, practical way, said I was "doing very well for myself."
Of course I was—which made it criminal on my part not to take the Brokenshire view of things with equanimity. I tried to. I bent my will to it. I bent my spirit to it. In the end I might have succeeded if the heavenly trumpet had not sounded again, with another blast from Sarajevo.
CHAPTER XXII
As I have already said, I had almost forgotten Sarajevo. The illustrated papers had shown us a large coffin raised high and a small one set low, telling us of unequal rank, even at the Great White Throne. I had a thought for that from time to time; but otherwise Franz Ferdinand and Sophie Chotek were less to me than Cæsar or Napoleon.
But toward the end of July there was a sudden rumbling. It was like that first disquieting low note of the "Rheingold," rising from elemental depths, presaging love and adventure and war and death and defeat and triumph, and the end of the old gods and the burning of their Valhalla. I cannot say that any of us knew its significance; but it was arresting.
"What does it mean?"
I think Cissie Boscobel was the first to ask me that question, to which I could only reply by asking it in my own turn. What did it mean—this ultimatum from Vienna to Belgrade? Did it mean anything? Could it possibly mean what dinner-table diplomats hinted at between a laugh and a look of terror?