WOMAN’S WAR
It was during these last weeks at Bosnia Road that Eve became fully conscious of that spirit of revolt that is one of the dominating features of contemporary life, for she was experiencing in her own person the thoughts and tendencies of a great movement, suffering its discontents, feeling its hopes and passions.
When she tried to analyse these tendencies in herself, she was confronted with the disharmonies of her life, disharmonies that reacted all the more keenly on a generous and impulsive nature. She was necessary to nobody, not even to the man who had thought that it would be pleasant to marry her, for she knew that in a month he would be as contented as ever with his old bachelor life. She had no personal corner, no sacred place full of the subtle and pleasant presence of the individual “I.” She had none of the simple and primitive responsibilities that provide many women with a natural and organic satisfaction.
A new class had arisen, the class of the unattached working women, and she was sharing the experiences of thousands. It was a sense of defencelessness that angered her. She had no weapon. She could only retaliate upon society by shutting her mouth and holding her head a little higher. Her individuality was threatened. She was denied the chance of living a life of self-expression, and was told with casual cynicism that she must do such work as society chose to offer her, or starve.
Of course, there were the chances of escape, the little, secret, fatal doorways that men were willing to leave open. Some women availed themselves of these opportunities, nor was Eve so prejudiced as to imagine that all women were martyrs and less hot blooded than the men. She had had the same doors opened to her. She might have become a mistress, or have married a man who was physically distasteful to her, and she understood now why many women were so bitter against anything that was male. It was not man, but the sex spirit, and all its meaner predilections.
Ninety-nine men out of a hundred concerned themselves with nothing but a woman’s face and figure. They reacted to physical impressions, and Eve realised the utter naturalness of it all. The working woman had got outside the old conventions. She was trying to do unsexual things, and to talk an unsexual language to men who had not changed. It was like muddling up business and sentiment, and created an impossible position, so long as the male nature continued to react in the way it did. Sexual solicitation or plain indifference, these were the two extreme fates that bounded the life of the working woman.
Eve told herself that there were exceptions, but that society, in the mass, moved along these lines. She had listened to Kate Duveen—Kate Duveen, who was a fanatic, and who had made it her business to look into the conditions under which working women lived. The shop-girl, the servant, the waitress, the clerk, the typist, the chorus-girl, the street-walker; always they held in their hands the bribe that men desired, that bribe so fatal to the woman when once it had been given. Eve began to understand the spirit of revolt by the disgust that was stirred in her own heart. This huge sexual machine. This terrible, primitive groundwork upon which all the shades of civilisation were tagged like threads of coloured silk. There was some resemblance here between the reaction of certain women against sex, and the reaction of the early Christians against the utter physical smell of the Roman civilisation. To live, one must be born again. One must triumph over the senses. One must refuse to treat with men on the old physical understanding. They are the cries of extremists, and yet of an extremity that hopes to triumph by urging a passionate and protesting celibacy. A million odd women in the United Kingdom, over-setting the sex balance, and clamouring, many of them, that they will not be weighed in the old sexual scale.
Eve caught the spirit of rebellion, divorced as she was from any comradeship with men. It is so much easier to quarrel with the hypothetical antagonists whom one meets in the world of one’s own brain. Bring two prejudiced humans together, get them to talk like reasonable beings, and each may have some chance of discovering that the other is not the beast that he or she had imagined. It is when masses of people segregate and refuse to mix that war becomes more than probable.
Insensibly, yet very surely, Eve began to imbibe this feeling of antagonism. It made her take sides, even when she happened to read the account of some law case in the paper. And this tacit antagonism abetted her in her refusal to accept the cheap labour that society, “male society,” she called it, chose to offer her. It behoved women to stand out against male exploitation, even if they had to suffer for the moment. Yet her revolt was still an individual revolt. She had not joined herself to the crowd. She wanted to complete her personal experiences before associating herself with the great mass of discontent, and she meant to go through to the end—to touch all the realities. Perhaps she was a little feverish in her sincerity. She had been ill. She had been badly fed. She had been worried, and she was in a mood that demanded that specious sort of realism that is to the truth what a statue is to the living body.
Her last morning at Bosnia Road turned out to be warm and sunny. She was ready to smile at contrasts, and to draw them with a positive and perverse wilfulness. Breakfast was just like other breakfasts, only different. The brown teapot with the chip out of its lid stood there, familiar yet ironical. The marmalade dish, with its pinky roses and silver-plated handle that was wearing green, reminded her that it would meet her eyes no more. The patchwork tea-cosy was like a fat and sentimental old lady who was always exclaiming, “Oh, dear, what a wicked world it is!” Even the egg-cup, with its smudgy blue pattern, had a ridiculous individuality of its own. Eve felt a little emotional and more than a little morbid, and ready to laugh at herself because a teapot and an egg-cup made her moralise.