Where Victoria began to part issue with her own thoughts was when she considered the position of women. Their outlook was one of unrelieved gloom; and it one day came upon her as a revelation that Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, following in a degree on Rousseau, had forgotten women in the scheme of life. There might be supermen but there would be no superwomen: if the supermen were true to their type they would have to crush and to dominate the women. As the latter fared so hard at the hands of the pigmies of to-day, what would they do if they could not develop in time to resist the sons of Anak? Victoria saw that the world was entering upon a sex war. Hitherto a shameful state of peace had left women in the hands of men, turning over the other cheek to the smiter. The sex war, however, held forth no hopes to her; in the dim future, sex equality might perhaps prevail; but she saw nothing to indicate that women had sown the seeds of their victory. She had no wish to enrol herself in the ranks of those who were waging an almost hopeless battle, armed with untrained intellects and unathletic bodies. She could not get away from the fact that the best woman athletes cannot compete with ordinary men, that even women with high intellectual qualifications had not ousted from commanding positions men of inferior ability.
All this, she thought, was unjust; but why hope for a change? There was nothing to show that men grew much better as a sex; then why pin faith to the coming of better times? Women were parasites, working only under constraint, badly and at uncongenial tasks; their right to live was based on their capacity to please. This brought her to her own situation. The future lay before her in the shape of two roads. One was the road which led to the struggle for life; ending, she felt it too well, in a crawl to death on crippled limbs. The other was the road along which grew roses, roses which she could pluck and sell to men; at the end of that was the heaven of independence. It had golden gates; it was guarded by an angel in white garments with a palm leaf in his hands and beyond lay the pleasant places where she had a right of way. And as she looked again the heaven with the golden gates turned into a bank with a commissionaire at the door.
Her choice being made, she did not regret it. For the time being her life was pleasant enough, and if it could be made a little more profitable it would soon be well worth living, and her freedom would be earned. Meanwhile she took pleasure in small things. The little house was almost a show place, so delicate and refined were its inner and outer details. Victoria saw to it that frequently changed flowers decorated the beds in the front garden; Japanese trees, dwarfed and gnarled, stood right and left of the steps, scowling like tiny Titans; all the blinds in the house were a mass of insertion. These blinds were a feature for her; they implied secrecy. Behind the half blinds were thick curtains of decorated muslin; behind these again, heavy curtains which could be drawn at will. They were the impenetrable veil which closed off from the world and its brutalities this oasis of forbidden joys.
In the house also she was ever elaborating, sybaritising her life. She had a branch telephone fixed at the head of her bed; the first time that Cairns used it to tell his man to bring up his morning coat she had the peculiar sensation that her bed was in touch with the world. She could call up anybody, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Governor of the Bank of England or the headquarters of the Salvation Army. Her bed was the centre of the world. She fitted the doors of her bedroom and her boudoir with curious little locks which acted on the pressure of a finger for her mind was turned on delicacies and the sharp click of a bolt, the grating of a key savoured of the definite, therefore of the coarse. A twist of the knob between two fingers and the world was silently shut out.
Now too that she was beautiful once more she revelled in mirrors. The existing ones in her bedroom and in the boudoir were not enough; they were public, unintimate. She had a high mirror fixed in the bathroom, so that she could see herself in her freshness, covered with pearly beads like a naiad. She rejoiced in her beauty, in her renewed strength; she often stood for many minutes in the dim steamy light of the room, analysing her body, its grace and youth, with a growing consciousness of latent power. Then, suddenly, the faint violet streaks of the varicose veins would intrude upon the rite and she would wrap herself up jealously in her bath robe so that not even the mirror should be a confidant of the past.
CHAPTER V
Week after week passed on, and now monotony drew her stifling cloak over Victoria. Cairns was still in a state of beatitude which made him an unexciting companion; satisfied in his egoism, it never came into his mind that Victoria could tire of her life. He spent many afternoons in the back garden under a rose-covered pergola. By his side was a little table with a syphon, a decanter of whisky, and a box of cigars; he read desultorily, sometimes the latest motor novel, at other times the improving memoirs of eighteenth century noblewomen. Now and then he would look approvingly at Victoria in plain white drill, delightfully mischievous under a sun-bonnet, and relapse into his book. Once he quoted 'A flask of wine, a book of verse. . . .' and Victoria went into sudden fits of laughter when she remembered Neville Brown. The single hackneyed line seemed to link malekind together.
Cairns was already talking of going away. June was oppressively hot and he was hankering after some quiet place where he might do some sea-fishing and get some golf. He was becoming dangerously fat; and Victoria, foreseeing a long and very cheap holiday, favoured the idea in every way. They could go up to Scotland later too; but Cairns rather hesitated about this, for he neither cared to show off Victoria before the people he knew on the moors, nor to leave her for a fortnight. He was paying the penalty of Capua. His plans were set back, however, by serious trouble which had taken place on his Irish estate, his though still in the hands of Marmaduke Cairns's executors. There had been nightriding, cattle driving, some boycotting. The situation grew so tense that the executors advised Cairns to sell the estate to the tenants but the latter declined the terms; matters came to a deadlock and it was quite on the cards that an application might be made under the Irish Land Act. It was clear that in this case the terms would be bad, and Cairns was called to Limerick by telegram as a last chance. He left Victoria, grumbling and cursing Ireland and all things Irish.
Left to herself, Victoria felt rather at a loose end. The cheerful if uninteresting personality of Major Cairns had a way of filling the house. He had an expansive mind; it was almost chubby. For two days she rather enjoyed her freedom. The summer was gorgeous; St John's Wood was bursting everywhere into flower; the trees were growing opaque in the parks. At every street corner little whirlwinds of dry grit swayed in the hot air. One afternoon Victoria indulged in the luxury of a hired private carriage, and flaunted it with the best in the long line on the south side of the Park. Wedged for a quarter of an hour in the mass she felt a glow come over her. The horses all round her shone like polished wood, the carriage panels were lustrous, the harness was glittering, the brass burnished; all the world seemed to radiate warmth and light. Gaily enough, because not jaded by repetition, she caused the carriage to do the Ring, twice. She felt for a moment that she was free, that she could vie with those women whose lazy detachment she stirred for a moment into curiosity by her deep eyes, dark piled hair and the audacity of her diaphanous crèpe de chine.