Mummery: A Tale of Three Idealists

by Gilbert Cannan

How could Verschoyle, how could Charles, how could all the well-dressed and well-fed people be so happy while such things were going on before their eyes? Perhaps, like herself, they could not see them. It was very strange.

Stranger still was the release of energy in herself, bringing with it a new personal interest in her own life. She began to look more keenly at other women and to understand them a little better, to sympathise even with their vanity, their mindlessness, their insistence upon homage and flattery from their men. From that she passed to a somewhat bewildered introspection, realising that it was extraordinary that she should have been able to sever her connection with Charles and to maintain the impersonal when the personal relationship was suspended—or gone? Yes. That was quite extraordinary, and because of it she knew that she could never live the ordinary woman's life, absorbed entirely in external things, in position, clothes, food and household, shops.

She remembered Charles saying that his feeling for her was at the farthest end of love, and certainly she had never known anything like the relationship between, say, Freeland and Julia—easy, comfortable romance. To be either easy or comfortable had become an abomination to her, and at bottom this was the reason for her dissatisfaction. It had been too easy to procure the beginnings of success for Charles. They had secured control of the machinery of the theatre, and must now act in accordance with its grinding.

For some weeks she was paralysed and could do nothing but sit and brood; hardly thinking at all consciously, but gazing in upon herself and the forces stirring in her, creeping up and up to take control of her imagination that had hitherto been entirely free and in undisputed mastery of her being. This was a time of the acutest agony. She would not surrender. Without knowing what was being demanded of her she cried, 'I will not, I will not.' But the forces stirring in her were implacable, and changed her whole physical sensation of being. Her body changed, her figure altered most subtly and imperceptibly, her face gained in strength and beauty, but she loathed the change, because it was taking place without reference to her own will, or her own imagination, which for the first time in her life was baffled.... It was appalling to her, who had always found it so easy to direct the lives of others, to find her own life slipping with a terrible velocity out of control.... No thought, no notion of her recent days was now valid. At the very worst stage of all even simple movements seemed incomprehensible. When she caught sight of her own lovely arm that had always given her a thrill of pleasure, it now repelled her as something fantastic and irresistibly comic, revoltingly comic at this time when she was a prey to so much obscure suffering, so deep that she could trace it to no cause, so acute that she could discern in it no purpose.

She found it almost her sole relief to read, and she devoured among other curious works which she found at her bookshop, General Booth's Darkest London and Rose's The Truth about the Transvaal. Novels she could not read at all. Fiction was all very well, but it ought to have some relation to human emotions as they are. After her aerial life in Charles's imagination she needed a diet of hard facts, and, as usual, what she needed that she obtained. Both Booth and Rose dealt with the past, but that made them the more palatable, and they reassured her. The facts she was now discovering had been present to other minds and her own had not unsupported to bear the whole weight of them.... In her untouched youth she had always accepted responsibility for the whole universe, and so long as her life had been made easy, first of all by her grandfather, and then by Charles, the burden had been tolerable, and she had been able to mould the universe to make them comfortable. But now that life was suddenly for no apparent reason incredibly difficult, the burden was greater than she could bear, and it relieved her to find in these two books the utterance of suffering consciences..... As she read Rose she remembered a saying of her grandfather's, 'The British make slums wherever they go because in every British mind there is a slum.'

She could find relief in the books, but she could not stay the welling up of the mysterious forces which swamped the clarity of her mind and made her usually swift intuition sluggish.

Very thankful was she that she had steered Charles into the Imperium before this cataclysm broke in her.... She could well be alone to sort out if possible the surfeit of new impressions from which she was suffering. She no longer had thoughts but only obsessions. London.... London.... London.... The roaring traffic: the crowds of people: Coventry Street by night: the illuminated theatres: the statue in Piccadilly Circus: the hotel in which she and Charles had stayed on their first night in London: the painted faces of the women: policemen: commissionaires: wonderful cars lit up at night, gliding through the streets with elegant ladies in evening dress reclining at their ease, bored, mechanical, as hard and mechanical as the cars that carried them through the streets: the drunken women fighting outside her door: the woman opposite her windows who kept a canary in a cage and watered so lovingly the aspidistra on her window-sill: tubes: lifts: glaring lights and white tiles.... London.... London.... London....

Through it all there ran a thread of struggling, conscious purpose which kept her from misery and made it impossible for her to succumb. Deep in her heart she knew that she could not; that she had escaped; that it would never be for her an awful, a terrible, an overwhelming thing to be a woman.

With that knowledge there came an exultation, a pride, a triumphant sense of having come through an almost fatal peril, the full nature of which had yet to be revealed. And she had wrestled through it alone. Her childish detestation of her womanhood was gone. She accepted it, gloried in it as her instrument and knew that she would never be lost in it.

For ever in her mind that crisis was associated with Kropotkin's escape from prison, and she was full of a delighted gratitude to the little bookseller who had lent her the book, the second volume, the first having been borrowed.