“Nature’s great Salic Law will never be repealed.” “Women can never reach the highest places in civilisation.” Thomas Henry Huxley. With side-whiskers. A bouncing complacent walk. Thomas Henry Huxley. (Thomas Babington Macaulay.) The same sort of walk. Eminent men. Revelling in their cleverness. “The Lord has delivered him into my hand.” He did not believe in any future for anybody. But he built his life up complacently on home and family life while saying all those things about women, lived on them and their pain, ate their food, enjoyed the comforts they made ... and wrote conceited letters to his friends about his achievements and his stomach and his feelings.
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What is it in me that stands back? Why can’t it explain? My head will burst if it can’t explain. If I die now in wild anger it only makes the thing more laughable on the whole.... That old man lives quite alone in a little gaslit lodging. When he comes out he is quite alone. There is nothing touching him anywhere. He will go quietly on like that till he dies. But he is me. I saw myself in his eyes that day. But he must have money. He can live like that with nothing to do but read and think and roam about because he has money. It isn’t fair. Some woman cleans his room and does his laundry. His thoughts about women are awful. It’s the best way ... but I’ve made all sorts of plans for the holidays. After that I will save and never see anybody and never stir out of Bloomsbury. The woman in black works. It’s only in the evenings she can roam about seeing nothing. But the people she works for know nothing about her. She knows. She is sweeter than he. She is sweet. I like her. But he is more me.
CHAPTER XXV
1
The room still had the same radiant air. Nothing looked worn. There was not a spot anywhere. Bowls of flowers stood about. The Coalport tea service was set out on the little black table. The drawn-thread work table cover.... She had arranged the flowers. That was probably all she did; going in and out of the garden, in the sun, picking flowers. The Artist’s Model and The Geisha and the Strand Musicals still lay about; the curious new smell came from the inside of the piano. But there was this dreadful tiredness. It was dreadful that the tiredness should come nearer than the thought of Harriett. A pallid worried disordered face looked back from the strip of glass in the overmantel. No need to have looked. Always now, away from London, there was this dreadful realisation of fatigue, dreadful empty sense of worry and hurry ... feeling so strong riding down through London, everything dropping away, nothing to think of; off and free, the holiday ahead, nothing but lovely, lonely freedom all round one.
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Perhaps Harriett would be nervous and irritable. She had much more reason to be. But even if she were it would be no good. It would be impossible to conceal this frightful fatigue and nervousness. Harriett must understand at once how battered and abject one was. And it was a misrepresentation. Harriett knew nothing of all one had come from; all one was going to in the distance. Maddening.... Lovely; how rich and good they looked, more honest than those in the London shops. Harriett or Mrs. Thimm or Emma had ordered them from some confectioner in Chiswick. Fancy being able to buy anything like that without thinking. How well they went with the black piano and the Coalport tea-service and the garden light coming in. Gerald did not think that women were inferior or that Harriett was a dependent.... But Gerald did not think at all. He knew nothing was too good for Harriett. Oo, I dunno, she would say with a laugh. She thought all men were duffers. Perhaps that was the best way. Selfish babies. But Gerald was not selfish. He would never let Harriett wash up if he were there. He would never pretend to be ignorant of ‘mysteries’ to get out of doing things. I get out of doing things—in houses. But women won’t let me do things. They all know I want to be mooning about. How do they know it? What is it? But they like me to be there. And now in houses there’s always this fearful worry and tiredness. What is the meaning of it?
Heavy footsteps came slowly downstairs.
“I put tea indoors. I thought Miss Miriam’d be warm after her ride.”