His blue eyes twinkled.
“Not a bit of it, miss. The men were coming round. We’re better chaps, better husbands and fathers than we were a hundred years ago. You know, miss, a man ain’t averse to a decent amount of pleasant persuasion. It don’t do to nag him, or he may tell you to go to blazes. Well, I wish you good afternoon.”
They had reached the gates, and he touched the brim of his hard hat, smiling down at her with shrewd kindness.
“I’m very grateful to you.”
He coloured up, and his smile broadened, and Eve walked away down Oxford Street, doing some pregnant thinking.
The man had reminded her of Canterton. What was Canterton’s attitude towards this movement, and what was her attitude to Canterton now that she had touched more of the realities of life? When she came to analyse her feelings she found that Canterton did not appear to exist for her in the present. Fernhill and its atmosphere had become prehistoric. It had removed into the Golden Age, above and beyond criticism, and she did not include it in this world of struggling prejudices and aspirations. And yet, when she let herself think of Canterton and Lynette, she felt less sure of the sex antagonism that she was encouraging with scourge and prayer. Canterton seemed to stand in the pathway of her advance, looking down at her with eyes that smiled, eyes that were without mockery. Moreover, something that he had once said to her kept opposing itself to her arbitrary and enthusiastic pessimism. She could remember him stating his views, and she could remember disagreeing with him.
He had said, “People are very much happier than you imagine. Sentimentalists have always made too much of the woe of the world. There is a sort of thing I call organic happiness, the active physical happiness of the animal that is reasonably healthy. Of course we grumble, but don’t make the mistake of taking grumbling for the cries of discontented misery. I believe that most of the miserable people are over-sensed, under-bodied neurotics. They lack animal vitality. I think I can speak from experience, since I have mixed a good deal with working people. In the mass they are happy, much happier, perhaps, than we are. Perhaps because they don’t eat too much, and so think dyspeptically.”
That saying of Canterton’s, “People are much happier than you imagine” haunted Eve’s consciousness, walked at her side, and would not suffer itself to be forgotten. She had moments when she suspected that he had spoken a great truth. He had told her once to read Walt Whitman, but of what use was that great, barbaric, joyous person to her in her wilful viewing of sociological problems? It was a statement that she could test by her own observations, this assertion that the majority of people are happy. The clerks and shopmen who lunched in the tea-shops talked hard, laughed, and made a cheerful noise. If she went to the docks or Covent Garden Market, or watched labourers at work in the streets, she seemed to strike a stolid yet jocose cheerfulness that massed itself against her rather pessimistic view of life. The evening crowds in the streets were cheerful, and these, she supposed, were the people who slaved in shops. The factory girls out for the dinner hour were merry souls. If she went into one of the parks on Sunday, she could not exactly convince herself that she was watching a miserable people released for one day from the sordid and hopeless slavery of toil.
The mass of people did appear to be happy. And Eve was absurdly angry, with some of the prophet’s anger, who would rather have seen a city perish than that God should make him appear a fool. Her convictions rallied themselves to meet the challenge of this apparent fact. She contended that this happiness was a specious, surface happiness. One had but to get below the surface, to penetrate behind the mere scenic effects of civilisation to discover the real sorrows. What of the slums? She had seen them with her own eyes. What of the hospitals, the asylums, the prisons, the workhouses, the sweating dens, even the sordid little suburbs! She was in a temper to pile Pelion on Ossa in her desire to storm and overturn this serene Olympian assumption that mankind in the mass was happy.
In walking along Southampton Row into Kingsway, she passed on most days a cheerful, ruddy-faced young woman who sold copies of Votes for Women. This young woman was prettily plain, but good to look at in a clean and comely and sturdy way. Eve glanced at her each day with the eyes of a friend. The figure became personal, familiar, prophetic. She had marked down this young woman who sold papers as a Providence to whom she might ultimately appeal.