Miss Sheila Kaye Smith does not teach this
ideal in Joanna Godden, but she exposes it with her usual grim sincerity. The heroine of that profound tragedy kills her lonely soul by a perpetual struggle to snatch happiness for herself. Originally a strong woman, she goes on "blundering worse and worse," until "there she stood, nearly forty years old, her lover, her sister, her farm, her home, her good name, all lost."
A novel in which we can, however, clearly detect confusion between love and the quick, vicious, response to every sensuous impression, is The Sleeping Fire of W. E. B. Henderson, described by its author as a tale of "the urge in woman . . . where the flesh, crying like an infant for food, is yet held back by scruples of a spirit that bows to circumstance, from fastening on the breast of personal choice."
Here "the woman," Viva Barrington, is, again and again, described as "a human soul, innately decent and fine"; and yet she "suddenly kindled" at any man's mere touch. The young guardsman whom "considerable practice had enabled to use his fine eyes with much effect," declared "she could be no end o' fun, if she'd only let herself go." In fact, he took up a bet, "ten to one in quids," that he would kiss her before the last supper
dance; "a real live kiss, mind you, where she gives as good as she gets. None of your stolen pecks."
As this "splendid specimen of the vigorous young male smoothed back her hair, devouring her with his eyes . . . a delicious languor . . . as of one yielding to an anæsthetic . . . was stealing over her. Husband, children—everything of her outside life slipped away."
And at his kiss "primordial passion" awoke. "Feeling herself a live coal of shame from head to foot she raised herself slightly upwards towards him, and with closed eyes and utter abandon, passionately returned the pressure of his lips."
This "pure" woman, already a mother, is fired by a "vulgar wager," a vain boy wanting to kiss her "for the mere enjoyment of the contact," in the conservatory, heated by champagne and the dance. There is no attempt to suggest real feeling, the passionate awakening that may come after a foolish marriage; when the "right man" stirs unknown depths, beating down "fears, doubts, self-distrusts." She crumples up at the first chance shot.
No wonder that, after some months' experimenting among men, she grows "afraid—
afraid! . . . now I know I'm liable to—to kindle, suddenly, inexplicably. . . . There's a man here—one of those to-night. He's unclean, through and through. I never used to attract that type. And now apparently I do. The 'sleeping fire' . . . he sees it in me and tries to feed it. He sickens me! Oh, I'm frightened. Suppose one day that type ceased to sicken me. I've seen the demi-monde at the tables. Their faces haunt me. They began with the sleeping fire, and men fed it and fed it till it became a furnace . . . for me, it's been like summer lightning so far . . . only summer lightning. Look after me, help me, lest it ever be forked lightning . . . the lightning that can strike and destroy."