CHAPTER III
"Youth from the windows of his innocence
Sent forth his soul to scan the future years.
Homeward it brings this strange intelligence—
'In life there are no tears.'
We who are older, shake our heads and say
'Another tale, we know, we who are men.'
But haply Youth espies the deathless years,
Seeing beyond our ken."
"I am not sorry that, after all, you were not there," wrote Lady Wereminster to Hare, a few weeks later. "The Burial Service always strikes me as comparatively gay when matched with the amended Marriage Service of the Church of England. The one gives hope; the other preaches duty instead. There is no romance in it, no mysticism. You are practically told it is your duty to marry because you are not good enough to remain unmarried, that you must bring children into the world because it would look so remarkably odd if you did not. As to the meaning of it all, whether it is to the glory of God or your next-door neighbour, the advertisement editor of the Morning Post is the best judge. Anyway, he is the person who immediately benefits.
"Did I tell you that Richard Farquharson and Dora Beadon were indissolubly united at St. Margaret's, Westminster, yesterday afternoon, by the bye? I suppose you read all in the papers; there was fuss enough, in all conscience. Miss Beadon saw to that. I dislike that girl more than ever. Is there anything more annoying than the incompetence of a woman who cannot fill the position she was born to?
"And now what will happen? I feel responsible, having set the machinery in motion. As a girl, I played with lives quite easily; it amused me to turn fate, or juggle with purposes the meaning of which I could not fathom. Now, in old age, I have grown afraid. Souls are such tiresome things. I know old Akbar said, 'I never saw any one lost on a straight road,' but occasionally one wonders if there are any straight roads left, now the County Council has played so many tricks with London streets?
"Dora Beadon is neither a fish nor a vegetable. She belongs to the new world which we have created in this after-Victorian era. Don't think I complain of her hypocrisy; I suppose we are all hypocrites more or less. I was one when I tried to persuade a man with a career to marry a selfish woman, with what I hoped to be a nondescript character, because I wanted him to save the reputation of a woman who reminds me more of my niece Asenath than any one I have ever met. As Dora is nondescript, she may be amiable. But—that mouth of hers! Have you ever seen it in repose?
"Well, now they are started for good or ill. I pin my faith on the man's ambition. All life's a compromise. No woman can have both a Grecian nose and a perfect figure; no man can have success and happiness. And success means more to a man than to a woman. If we are human, there's no single moment in which we would not lay down the biggest prize the world can offer us at the feet of the man we love, and say, 'Please take it, dear; I only won it for you.' But a man likes to have his prize in a substantial form, and keep it on his sideboard, so that his wife can show it, very highly polished, to his guests. Look at the presentation cups in our men's messes! The trophies, challenge cups! Why, a man can't even kill a big salmon without having it photographed or modelled in a glass case. We women kill our salmon every day and no one knows it.
"So I dispose of Richard Farquharson. He is off my conscience. Life will give him something, although it is not the thing he wants. And Dora—she need not complain; she will have a little more wealth, a little more luxury, a little more panoply of amusement and flattery; that is enough for her. But there's still Evelyn.
"She came to the wedding. He made her—her husband. Oh, if she were only a less good Catholic! It is a magnificent system. It reduces its subjects to such a pitch of subjection that they obey in spite of themselves. The happiness, the welfare of one unworthy little soul—what does it matter, so long as the Vatican coffers are full, so long as the Celebrations on high days and festivals have still their proper number of spectators? Inviolable, magnificent, the one wall that will never be broken, it rears itself ever higher and higher as the ages roll on, cemented with the blood of a thousand victims whose names will never be written in any book of martyrology.
"You like human problems, so I give you one. There they stand, the three of them, as opposed in temperament as any of the subjects in Browning's Ring and the Book. I cannot depict them; I cannot even prophesy. Very long ago I found that God knew a great deal more than I did—a fact that hardly seems possible to the cocksureness of youth. So—wicked old woman as I am supposed to be by many of my best friends—I end this letter to you, who know me well, with a real pious intention.