These men had set Eve down as a militant, and they had come precious near the truth.
She was on the edge of militancy, impelled towards strenuous rebellion by an exasperated sense of the injustice meted out to women, and by brooding upon the things she herself had experienced. It was a generous impulse in the main, mingling some bitterness with much enthusiasm, and moving with such impetuosity that it smothered any sound thinking. For the moment she was abnormal. She had half starved herself, and during weeks of loneliness she had encouraged herself to quarrel with society. She did not see the pathetic absurdity of all this spiritual kicking and screaming, being more than inclined to regard it as splendid protest than as an outburst of hysteria, a fit of tantrums more suited to an ill-balanced and uneducated servant girl.
A shrill voice carries. The frenzied few have delayed so often the very reforms that they have advocated. And there is a sort of hysterical enthusiasm that tricks the younger and more generous spirits, and acting like crude alcoholic drink, stirs up a so-called religious revival or some such orgy of purblind egoism as this phenomenon of militancy. The emotions make the brain drunk, and the power of sound reasoning is lost. The fools, the fanatics, the self-advertisers, the notoriety hunters, and the genuine idealists get huddled into one exclamatory, pitiable mob. And it is one of the tragic facts of life that the soul of a mob is the soul of its lowest and basest members. All the finer, subtler sensitive restraints are lost. A man of mind may find himself shouting demagogic cries next to some half drunken coal-heaver.
Now Eve Carfax was on the edge of militancy, and it was a debatable point with her whether she should begin her campaign that day. Necessity advised something of the kind, seeing that her purse was empty. Yet she could not quite convince a sensitive and individualistic pride that the breaking of a shop window or a scuffle with the police would be an adequate and suitable protest.
She walked about for an hour in the neighbourhood of Trafalgar Square, trying to escape from a treacherous self-consciousness that refused to suffer the adventure to be treated as an impersonal affair. The few people whom she passed stared rather hard, and so persistently, that she stopped to examine herself in a shop window. A dark green blind and the plate glass made an admirable mirror. It showed her her hair straggling most disgracefully, and the feminine part of her was shocked.
Her appearance mattered. She did not realise the significance of the little thrill of shame that had flashed through her when she had looked at herself in the shop window; and even when she made her way to St. James’s Park and found an empty seat she deceived herself into believing that she had come there to think things out, and not to tidy her hair, with the help of the little mirror and the comb she carried in her vanity bag. Moreover she felt that she had been chilled on that Embankment seat, and a cold in the head is not heroic. She had her protest to make. The whole day loomed over her, big with possibilities. It made her feel very small and lonely, and cold and insecure.
Hazily, and with a vague audacity that had now deserted her, she had assured herself that she would strike her blow when the hour came; but now that she was face to face with the necessity she found that she was afraid. Even her scorn of her own fear could not whip her into action. Her more sensitive and spiritual self shrank from the crude publicity of the ordeal. If she did the thing she had contemplated doing, she knew that she would be hustled and roughly handled. She saw herself with torn clothes and tumbled hair. The police would rescue and arrest her. She would be charged, convicted, and sent to prison.
She did not fear pain, but she did fear the inevitable and vulgar scuffle, the rough male hands, the humiliation of being at the mercy of a crowd. Something prouder than her pride of purpose rose up and refused to prostitute itself in such a scrimmage. She knew how some of these women had been handled, and as she sat there in the hush of the early morning she puzzled over the psychological state of those who had dared to outrage public opinion. Either they were supreme enthusiasts or women with the souls of fishwives, or drunk with zeal, like those most offensive of zealots, the early Christians, who scolded, spat, and raved until they had exasperated some Roman magistrate into presenting them with martyrdom. She discovered that she had not that sort of courage or effrontery. The hot, physical smell of the ordeal disgusted her.
Yet Nature was to decide the question for her, and the first interposition of that beneficent tyrant began to manifest itself as soon as the stimulating effect of the hot coffee had worn off. Eve felt chilly, an indefinable restlessness and a feeling of malaise stole over her. She left the seat in the park, and walking briskly to warm herself, came into Pall Mall by way of Buckingham Gate. The rush of the day was beginning. She had been conscious of the deepening roar of the traffic while she had been sitting over yonder, and now it perplexed her, pressed upon her with a savage challenge.
She had thought to throw the straw of herself into this torrent of strenuous materialism. For the moment she was very near to laughter, near twitting herself with an accusation of egregious egoism. Yet it was the ego—the intimate, inward I—that was in the ascendant. The hurrying figures that passed her on the pavement made her recoil into her impressionable individualism. She felt like a hyper-sensitive child, shy of being stared at or of being spoken to. The hurry and the noise bothered her. Her head began to ache. Her will power flagged. She was feverish.