"Why are you so set against us, Gertrude?—your own flesh and blood. I'm sure if I ever was unkind to you I'm sorry for it. You used to say I favoured Albert at your expense—Well, he's as good as dead to me now, and I've got no good out of all the spoiling I gave him. I sit at home by myself, and I'm a pretty miserable woman. I read everything I can in the papers about what you're doing—you, who were my only child, seven years before Albert came. It doesn't matter to you what I think—at least, it oughtn't. I'm an old woman, and whatever I thought I'd never quarrel with you. But it would matter to me a good deal, if you'd sometimes come in, and sit by the fire a bit, and chat. It's three years since I've even seen you. Winnie says you've forgotten us—you only care about the vote. But I don't believe it. Other people may think the vote can make up for everything—but not you. You're too clever. Hoping to see you,"
"Your lonely old mother,
JANET MARVELL."
To that letter, Gertrude had already written her reply. Sometime—in the summer, perhaps, she had said to her mother. And she had added the mental proviso—"if I am alive." For the matters in which she was engaged were no child's play, and the excitements of prison and hunger-striking might tell even on the strongest physique.
No—her family were nothing to her. Her mother's appeal, though it should not be altogether ignored, was an insincere one. She had always stood by the men of the family; and for the men of the family, Gertrude, its eldest daughter, felt nothing but loathing and contempt. Her father, a local government official in a western town, a small-minded domestic tyrant, ruined by long years of whisky-nipping between meals; her only brother, profligate and spendthrift, of whose present modes of life the less said the better; her brother-in-law, Henry Lewison, the man whom, in her callow, ignorant youth, she was once to have married, before her younger sister supplanted her—a canting hypocrite, who would spend his day in devising petty torments for his wife, and begin and end it with family prayers:—these types, in a brooding and self-centred mind, had gradually come to stand for the whole male race.
Nor had her lonely struggle for a livelihood, after she had fled from home, done anything to loosen the hold of these images upon her. She looked back upon a dismal type-writing office, run by a grasping employer; a struggle for health, warring with the struggle for bread; sick headache, sleeplessness, anaemia, yet always within, the same iron will driving on the weary body; and always the same grim perception on the dark horizon of an outer gulf into which some women fell, with no hope of resurrection. She burnt again with the old bitter sense of injustice, on the economic side; remembering fiercely her own stinted earnings, and the higher wages and larger opportunities of men, whom, intellectually, she despised. Remembering too the development of that new and ugly temper in men—men hard-pressed themselves—who must now see in women no longer playthings or sweethearts, but rivals and supplanters.
So that gradually, year by year, there had strengthened in her that strange, modern thing, a woman's hatred of men—the normal instincts of sex distorted and embittered. And when suddenly, owing to the slow working of many causes, economic and moral, a section of the Woman Suffrage movement had broken into flame and violence, she had flung her very soul to it as fuel, with the passion of one to whom life at last "gives room." In that outbreak were gathered up for her all the rancours, and all the ideals of life, all its hopes and all its despairs. Not much hope!—and few ideals. Her passion for the Cause had been a grim force, hardly mixed with illusion; but it had held and shaped her.
Meanwhile among women she has found a few kindred souls. One of them, a fellow-student, came into money, died, and left Gertrude Marvell a thousand pounds. On that sum she had educated herself, had taken her degree at a West Country University, had moved to London and begun work as a teacher and journalist. Then again, a break down in health, followed by a casual acquaintance with Lady Tonbridge—Sir Robert's offer—its acceptance—Delia!
How much had opened to her with Delia! Pleasure, for the first time; the sheer pleasure of travel, society, tropical beauty; the strangeness also of finding herself adored, of feeling that young loveliness, that young intelligence, all yielding softness in her own strong hands—
Well, that was done;—practically done. She cheated herself with no vain hopes. The process which had begun in Delia would go forward. One more defeat to admit and forget. One more disaster to turn one's back upon.
And no disabling lamentations! Her eyes cleared, her mouth stiffened.
She went quietly back to her packing.