It was true. She was twenty-one, and she had a thousand pounds left her by her grandfather. She could snap her fingers at them all if she chose. She did not literally snap her fingers; she was gentle and regretful, she said she did not wish to cut herself adrift from her family, and saw no reason why they should cut themselves adrift from her. She would not bring their name into disrepute. She would trade under another name; she would cease to be Alice Jennings, she would become Lydia Protheroe. Secretly she was elated to escape from a name of whose homeliness she had always been ashamed, but this she was careful not to betray to her family; to her family she made the announcement with an air of sacrifice. Since they were humiliated by her, and by the trade she had chosen, she would go away; she would conceal her identity in a distant town. No; she shook her smooth head in answer to their protestations; what she had declared she would carry out; they should never say they had cause to blush whenever they opened a theatre programme. “Wigs by Jennings.” That should not offend their eyes. “Wigs by Protheroe,” and they could sit snugly in their stalls, being Jennings, looking Jennings; connected with the stage in any way? oh dear, no! Let them only think kindly of her in her lonely and distant—yes, distant—struggles. No doubt Miss Protheroe would find it hard at first, unfriended and unsupported; but armed with her thousand pounds she would survive the first reverses; and adversity was good for the character. Indeed, as she talked, always gentle and regretful, but perfectly obdurate, she felt her character stiffening under the test of this first adversity. The Presbyterian that was in her, as it was in all her relatives, welcomed in its austere and cheerless fashion this trial that made a demand upon her endurance. She enjoyed the self-satisfaction of the martyr. And yet, secretly, all the while, a little voice gibed at her “Hypocrite!” She knew her hypocrisy because, in spite of her affectation of martyrdom, she was rejoicing in her new isolation. She knew that she would embark on her adventure with a greater gusto since she was not to embark on it with the approval of her family. It was all very well for her to appeal to their sympathy with poor Miss Protheroe, unfriended and unsupported; the phrase sounded well, but the truth was that she wanted neither their friendship nor their support. “I want to get away from all this,” she cried suddenly and despairingly. She wanted independence; she wanted the fight. She would have been defrauded of both, by the lap of a comfortable middle-class family spread out behind her to receive her if she fell. Backed up by her family, she would have felt herself backed up by the whole of the English middle-class, cushioned, solid in the consciousness of its homogeneity and resources, an enormous family of Jennings, swarming in every town and with its place of assembly in every town-hall, inimical to the exotic, mistrustful of the new, tenacious of the conventions that were as cement to its masonry; a class sagacious and shrewd, nicely knowing safety from danger, and knowing, above all, its own mind, since nothing was ever admitted to that mind to which it could not immediately affix a label. This was the class to whose protection Alice Jennings had the birthright now rejected by Lydia Protheroe. She marvelled how she could have endured it for so many years. She made a gesture as she finally rejected it; the hands that had been clasping the elbows were unloosed, and the right hand tossed up in a gesture definitely histrionic, as one who tosses a feather to the wind. Her family had almost groaned when they saw it, for they recognized it as a defiance, a symbol and an enemy. She stood there, in their midst, a slim revolutionary, not visibly tremulous, and although her hair still lay in those sleek bands plastered down on her forehead, they felt that the moment was near at hand when they would cease to be sleek and would become rumpled; even curly; even puffed out; and that the snuff-coloured bombazine of her gown would become metamorphosed into some gaudy intolerable fustian. They looked at her as though they were looking their last. They uttered a preliminary caution; she smiled. Seeing her smile, they ceased the expostulations which had been wrung from them in their first dismay; they gathered themselves up in dignity and sorrow; they said that since nothing would turn her from this reckless, this unbecoming, this ... in short, this idea, and that since she was of age, as she had not scrupled to remind them, she must, they supposed, be allowed to follow her own course. But let her not expect to return to them when the consequences of her folly were heavy upon her. Let her not (it was her father who enunciated this figure of speech, shaking his finger solemnly at her), let her not hope to exchange for the glare of the lamplight the oil-lamp of the warm parlour of home. Once an outcast she should remain an outcast for ever. She had a sudden attack of panic as these impressive words boomed upon her ears. She saw herself alone in a deserted theatre, the holland covers over the stalls, the lights turned out, and the great pit of the stage yawning at her in front of the gaunt skeleton of the scenery; and simultaneously she saw the circle of her family—who were, after all, familiar, even if not particularly enlivening—seated at their snug evening tasks in the glow of that oil-lamp of which her father had reminded her. She came near to weakening; she knew that if she held out her hands to them, even now, they would receive her again into their bosom—but how they would cackle over her! they would pat her kindly; they would talk of her having come to her senses, of being once more their little Alice; and this her pride would not endure. She discovered that she could tolerate patronage even less than security; and for the rest of her days, if she capitulated now, she would be at the mercy of her family. She would be among them on sufferance. Sooner any loneliness, any quandary, sooner even starvation, than shelter on such terms. Inclining her head, she accepted her ostracism without a protest. As soon as she had accepted it—as soon, that is, as the worst had been definitely spoken and she had definitely survived it—she felt the sense of her liberty flooding over her. Her very name dropped from her like a piece of old skin. She became that unique being, the person who has no relations. Alice Jennings had had relations, Lydia Protheroe had none, Lydia Protheroe had never even had a mother. Independence could scarcely go further. She swept one last slow look around their circle, and passed out of the room.
III
After she had left them—for she had gone then and there, in her own phrase, “out into the night”—they had uttered, when they recovered a little from their consternation, all the things they might have been expected to utter. They were very hot and angry. Her father, a stout man, had blown out his cheeks, tugged at his whiskers and pronounced, “No daughter of mine.” It was an excommunication. “The ingratitude. To think that ever ...” her mother had whimpered. Her aunt, who was elderly, frail, and timorous, had bleated, “Oh, and to think of all the horrible men in the world.” Her brother, a severely good young man, had said, “All I ask, father, and you, too, mother, is that I may NEVER hear her name again,” and his wife, who was like a little brown wren, his mere echo, had said, “Oh, dear, it does seem hard, doesn’t it? but Bertie is always right about these things.”
Her sister, who was engaged, summed up their main unspoken thought as she said fretfully and anxiously, “But what are we to say to people?”
IV
Lydia Protheroe, whose mind worked instinctively in terms of drama, always saw herself afterwards, in retrospect, standing alone in the rain on the pavement outside her father’s house wondering where she should go. She had not expected events to be so rapid or so complete. She had foreseen long weeks of argument, during which her family would slowly be worn down to some reluctant compromise, and although this had not been much to her satisfaction as a prospect, she had resigned herself to hope for nothing more. She found herself now, triumphant indeed, but a little disconcerted, with no luggage and too much pride to slip into the house again in order to pack. No doubt they counted on her doing so; no doubt their ultimatum had been but bluff. Probably they were even now sitting expectant, waiting to hear her key in the door, waiting to rush out and overwhelm her in the passage, and to pull her in with cries of “Alice, dear, we didn’t mean it!” Let them wait! She started down the wet street, where the gas-lamps shone reflected in the roadway, and as she went she turned up the collar of the overcoat she had snatched off the row of hooks in the passage, for the rain was dripping into her neck. It then occurred to her that the overcoat was not her own. She had taken her own hat, cramming it down as far as her eyebrows; but she had got the wrong coat. She investigated it: it was her brother’s—Bertie’s. This seemed to her to be an extremely good joke—and Bertie, too, was always so particular about his things. She felt quite disproportionately heartened by this occurrence, and as she thrust her hands into the pockets to keep them dry she pretended to herself that she was a man, to give herself additional courage; she even affected a masculine stride, and whispered to herself, “Lydia Protheroe ... Richard Protheroe ... who am I?” and she skipped two or three paces in her excitement and trepidation. There was a pipe in the pocket of the coat; she curved her fingers round its little friendly bowl, and for a minute she even took it out and stuck it in her mouth, sucking at it as she had seen Bertie do, but almost immediately she slipped it back again with a guilty air and the sense of having done something inordinately daring, grotesque, and improper. The extravagance of her adventure was indeed going to her head. She had been for so long enveloped in the cotton-wool of her family that to be free of it was, simply, incredible. No father, no mother, no Bertie, to madden her with their injunctions and their restrictions. She skipped again, another two or three paces. But in the meantime she had no idea of where she was going or of what she meant to do. This irresponsibility was all very well, this release very delightful, but from Lydia Protheroe masquerading down a dark wet street in her brother’s overcoat, to Lydia Protheroe the proprietress of a flourishing theatrical business, with her name over the door and fat ledgers on her desk, was a far cry; and she had nowhere to sleep that night.
She turned towards the station. Where did the next train go to? There would she go, even if it carried her to Wick or Thurso. Since she had abjured all the common prudences, she would allow fate to decide for her hap-hazard: fate was a Bohemian, if ever there was one, overthrowing careful plans and disregarding probabilities—a random deity which must henceforth be her guide. Before very long, she reflected, scoffing, though a little uncertainly, at herself meanwhile, she would be ordering her life by the spin of a coin or the conjunction of the planets, since here she was already, with not ten minutes of liberty behind her, resigning her destination into the keeping of Bradshaw. She hurried on towards the station, huddled inside the coat that was much too big for her, frightened but indomitable: still pretending to herself that she was a man—a boy, rather, and such phrases as “He ran away to sea” kept flitting through her mind, inconsequent but vaguely inspiriting—and although she was thereby transporting herself into a world of pretence, she could not help feeling, with exultation, that she had discarded for ever the world of true pretence, of casuistry and circumspection, growing richer, more emancipated by the exchange. Presently she stood upon the railway bridge, looking down upon the station, an etching in silver-point never by her forgotten. The rails were lines of polished silver, the low black sheds of the station were spanned by girders against a black and silver sky. Only a few yellow lights gave colour; and, high up, the light of a signal, like a high and isolated ruby, burned deep upon the wrack of the silver-rifted clouds.
V
The difficulties of life had not sobered her. On the contrary, as she disencumbered herself more and more from the oppression of the traditions in which she had been brought up, her mettle had risen with proportionate buoyancy. She soared, as the weights dropped from her. She fled from these realities with increasing determination into the realms of make-believe. In her worst moments—for there had been bad moments, hours in her career which would have seemed to anyone else unpromisingly dark, hours when dishonesty saddened and failure discouraged her—she could always say to herself, “I don’t exist at all. There’s no such person as Lydia Protheroe.” And she thought of all the parish ledgers, serious and civic, in which the birth, baptism, and other faits et gestes of Lydia Protheroe ought properly to be recorded, and from which Lydia Protheroe was so gratifyingly absent. This habit of mind grew upon her, until every suggestion of her actual existence as a citizen and a ratepayer was enough to throw her into a state of indignation. Who was Lydia Protheroe, that unsubstantial and fantastic being, that she should be bound down to the orthodoxy of an urban district council form for the payment of property-tax or house-duty? that she should be asked to account for her income and to contribute a shilling in the pound towards the upkeep of her country? she who had no country, no status? she who was so impudently and audaciously a myth? It was manifestly impossible to induce the tax-collectors to take this view. It would have entailed, moreover, the betrayal of Lydia Protheroe’s secret, and the asking of questions leading inevitably to the resurrection of Alice Jennings. She consoled herself, therefore, in the midst of her mortification as she filled in her forms (never until “third application” glared across the top of the paper), by reflecting that she was playing a trick on the authorities with her tongue well thrust into her cheek. But there was nothing she would not do to evade the census returns, when they came round in 1891, and again in 1901, and again in 1911.