Life moves in circles. Some are larger than the span between infancy and senility, but that is about the only difference we know of. It is a far cry from the primigenous mere female, or even the Sabines, to the women that compose the advance guard of their sex to-day, but when man wants to win and wear this highest product of civilization, he would better kidnap her, and pay her the compliment of arguing with her brain later. Her impulses are still primitive, but they must be taken by assault. The more he reasons, the more vigorously will she throw up mental defences, and, what is worse, in the utmost good faith with herself.
This, of course, in regard to women that already know something of life, or that have an instinctive love of liberty and independence. The maternal girl, and she is legion, may safely be left in charge of the race, and wooed in the orthodox fashion favored of society. But the women that exert a powerful attraction for men, either exceptionally advanced themselves, or exceptionally weak in character while possessing every charm of mind, women that are approaching closer and closer to that exact balance of masculine and feminine attributes which, when attained, will give them the one perfect happiness, setting them free, as it must, from the present curse of the race, the longing for completion, are already too close to independence to be won by simple methods. It is little, after all, that man can give them. They are conscious of too many resources both within themselves and in life; after a man’s novelty has worn off, they are more likely than not—certainly apt!—to find him their inferior in brain, and almost inevitably in character, full of the little weaknesses and dependencies of childhood. If they make these discoveries after marriage, the man has some small chance of keeping his spouse, particularly if he has won a measure of respect by audacity and brute force plus sympathy, but too much consideration for a woman who is almost half male while he is still but one-fourth female will lose him the game.
Nigel, of all the men that Julia had met, was the best equipped to appeal to sentimental, romantic, and clever young women, who were at the same time cultivating their wings for the higher flights. As a matter of fact, he had appealed to a good many women of various sorts in his earlier twenties when he was all freshness, frankness, adoration, and honest eager youth. Later, when he wore the literary halo with ease and modesty, his charm was not diminished; and it was easy to predict that when the war was really over and London, her mourning laid aside, roused herself to do honor to her heroes, Nigel would come in for thrice his share of lionizing. As a matter of fact, he did, and he philosophically accepted it as a compensation for the lack of better things.
When he stepped from the fly on that gloomy Wednesday morning and walked across the dripping garden, the dark and romantic wall of woods behind him, he looked as gallant a knight as ever came to the rescue of a damsel in distress; and Julia, as dreary as Mariana in the moated grange, was in the proper frame of mind to be taken by assault. She was still very young, she was very lonely, she was on the verge of despair; her imagination, always active, had been bred in youth by dreams, and developed later by real castles and titles, purple moors, London society, and great expectations. She hailed from the West Indies, one of the most romantic spots to look at on earth, and all the circumstances of her life there had been exceptional. She was still more or less romantically environed, when you consider the old world dinginess, inconvenience, and isolation of White Lodge, a presumptive lunatic always threatening developments, and that she was as much cut off from her friends as if she literally were in an underground dungeon with walls instead of trees dropping the constant tear. Take all this into consideration, and add the momentous fact that she had never loved, and had arrived at the susceptible age of twenty-five, that she was more attracted to Nigel than she ever had been to any man, that underneath her despair and her manufactured stolidity she was full of eager curiosity and the desire to live, and it will readily be seen that if Nigel did not win her, it was strictly his own fault.
He should have retained the fly. He should have descended upon her like a whirlwind (having ascertained that France was out of the way,—which, as a matter of fact, he did at Stanmore), refused to listen to protests, caused in her bewildered mind what psychologists call an inhibition, swept her out into the fly, up to London, on to an Atlantic liner (passage already engaged), turned her over to Mrs. Herbert (thus eliminating every possible excuse for reproach during the subsequent and less glamorous period of matrimony), joined her at the earliest possible moment in Reno (where Bridgit and Reno would have seen that she was sufficiently amused), and when she walked out of the court-house with her decree, met her with a license. That is the only way to manage them, my masters. Try it, or take a back seat, now and forever.
But Nigel, alas! in spite of his manly qualities, was the most considerate and tender of men. The very idea of kidnapping a woman would have horrified him. He had all those instincts of the hunter upon which men pride themselves, but he wanted to hunt according to the rules of the game. It would have given him the most exquisite pleasure to woo Julia day by day, in Reno or out of it, and it never occurred to him that this program might induce a yawn in Julia.
She sat up all that night thinking. It was a rosy panorama he had unrolled before her, this charming young man that she might have loved if he had not given her so many opportunities to like him. He was a rich man and would one day be richer. They would live in New York and other wonderful cities of America, play with the kaleidoscopic society American novelists wrote about, hunt in the Rockies, steep themselves in the romance of California, vary this exciting program with frequent trips to Europe and the Orient. England would be closed to them, lest France cause her arrest for bigamy, as one of many offensive actions. On the other hand, he might release her by divorce. Then she could marry according to the laws of her country, and all the world would be her oyster.
Above all, and Nigel had emphasized this point during their afternoon conversation, she would have a strong and devoted husband to protect her, to shield her from all that was harsh and unlovely in life, to study her every wish, and make her a queen among women.
Curiously enough it was this last alluring set of promises that lost him the game. Nothing he had said to Julia had appealed to her so forcibly at the moment. He had never looked so handsome and so manly, so distinguished, so perfect a specimen of his type. His face had flushed until the lines and the sallowness had disappeared, his eyes forgot the things they had looked upon this last year, forgot that their inward gaze saw his heart a tomb crowded with beloved dead; they flashed with hope and passion, with undying love for the one woman that must ever make to him the complete appeal. She had almost put her hands in his then and there. But he had left soon after, and without even kissing her. Dear knightly soul! Julia never forgot his tender consideration, but on the other hand she never regretted it.
For when she had finished visualizing the United States of America and all their centres of delight, to say nothing of certain states of Europe and Asia, which she longed unceasingly to visit; when she had dwelt upon the deep relief of turning her back forever upon Harold France (France prowling about the halls and breathing heavily against her door materially assisted Nigel at this point); when these phases were disposed of, and her imagination, weary, left the brain free to face the particular ego of Julia France, in some ways so typical of woman, in others individual and peculiar, a very different set of ideas marched to the front and argued pro and con.
Did she want another husband, no matter how good, how devoted, how generous, how strong? It was now nearly a year and a half since she had lived with France, but if the memories of her married life were no longer active, no longer embittered her existence, she had by no means buried them, and they affected her attitude toward all men. Had Nigel swept her out of England and into that strange bizarre world of America, no doubt the experiences in the new land, assisted by the fiction that she was about to begin life over, really would have annihilated memory; but thinking it all over in the cold small hours of an English winter morning, wrapped in a blanket and shovelling coals into a small unwilling English grate, she failed to visualize love as the sweetest thing in the world.
Even so, this inability to respond to the genuine love that was offered her might not have prevented her ultimate acceptance. The man’s foe was far more deadly.
Looking into herself, Julia slowly understood that what she, in her youth and inexperience, had mistaken for hardness and callousness, was in reality strength. Nature had endowed her with strength of character and independence of mind. For eighteen years her mother had dominated her, almost without her knowledge; then she had been flung into the world and treated to a succession of experiences which had left her gasping and dizzy, without either the maturity or the opportunities to develop herself with deliberation. But the subsequent years had done their work; ultimately certain influences, sufferings, horrors, terrors, had pushed her on to a point where she must sink or swim. In swimming she had proved that she belonged to the army of the strong, not to the vast and insignificant majority of her sex that found their only strength in man.
She was strong. She fully realized it for the first time. All the spurious cynicism and philosophy of youth fell away from her; she saw herself for what she was, a woman, equipped with a nature of flexible steel, able to endure any test without snapping, fashioned not so much for endurance as for conquest. Conquest of what? She speculated, that something which so long had striven for expression moving dumbly. Never mind, it was there; she should find the connection in time.
Her mind rapidly reviewed the whole field of woman. She had no statistics, but she knew that several millions of her sex were forcing the world to recognize them as breadwinners, independently of any assistance from man. It was magnificent, the opportunities of to-day, when compared with the meagre resources of the past, and the repeated struggle of woman for expression and independence almost from the dawn of history. They had found themselves at last, the twentieth century was theirs, and they were driving rapidly toward the goal of complete equality with man. But how many of these women were strong enough to go through life without love? None, she fancied, until they had undergone a process of disillusion similar to her own. Then she rejoiced in what for so long had seemed to her the harshest of destinies; for sitting there in the cold dawn, the one perfect destiny seemed to her to be an utter independence of soul and mind and body, the power to cultivate every faculty toward a state of development in which one human being, having in perfect balance the highest potencies of both sexes, should stand alone, indifferent to all extrinsic aid. And this perfect balance could be attained only by woman, unhampered as she was by the animality of man.
Perfection. The word started her off on another train of thought. How was this perfection of strength, character, mind, and poise to be attained? To stand alone without aid from man or woman was neither a means nor an end. She had none of the common need of religion. It could play little or no part in her development. Nor could happiness be found merely in perfecting self toward a standard which must inevitably deteriorate into self-righteousness. To stand alone is the most magnificent ideal of the human character, but that strength must be used toward some end beyond self. She groped along and began to see clearly. She must work for the race. She must regard herself as a chosen instrument of usefulness, as, indeed, all exceptionally gifted people were. And for this she was peculiarly equipped, not only by nature, but by life. Had she not married at all, or at the most, casually, her woman’s nature would have protested against any such program, demanded its rights first; but these sources of disturbances were choked with hideous weeds, and Julia was unable to conceive that the weeds might rot in time and the waters rise refreshed. She felt that she was fortunately accoutred, and she longed for her opportunities.
What they might be she had no inkling as yet, nor was she conscious of love for her kind, and a desire to be useful to it on general principles. Her ambition, if ambition it could be called, was centred in her brain. If she had been chosen for a work, she would perform it. What else, in fact, was there for her to do? It had not needed Bridgit and Ishbel to teach her contempt for the morbid type of female that exaggerates sex until it becomes a disease, the women that play with their nerves until they have become mere neurotic systems without either sex or brains, and that exhibit egos either in private or public whose swollen deformities cause a momentary thrill and a prolonged disgust. Abnormal without individuality. It was an ideal carefully avoided by all the sane strong women Julia had met.
For the present, she could only wait and endure. She could not even go out and study the great problems of life, those problems she had chosen to ignore. But there is hardly any greater test of strength than passive endurance; and the time of her liberation could not be far off. The day Ishbel married Lord Dark she should leave France and look for work in London.
Nigel’s fate was settled before the rising of the sun. Far away on what to Europeans seem the confines of civilization, in other words, San Francisco, a youth was growing to masterful manhood, who, in due course, would avenge him, and, incidentally, much else. But of that poor Nigel could know nothing, nor would he have felt consoled had he foreseen; when he received Julia’s letter, whose finality was as convincing as a black midnight without stars, he wished that he had left his wretched heart and bones in South Africa, retired to the country with his broken father, and began another book. There was still the Nöbel Peace Prize to work for, and he felt peculiarly fitted to win it. It may be stated here that he did, and all England (of his class, and one or two strata just below) was astonished that an Englishman should have competed for a prize that involved a damnifying of war. It deeply disapproved.
The hunting season closed. France still rode for several hours every day, but it was patent that his restlessness was increasing. When he was not riding, he was walking, and he walked more than half the night about the house and grounds. Oddly enough, however, the serenity of his mien was unruffled, and Julia came upon him several times standing before a long mirror in one of the halls, his head so high that the muscles of his neck creaked, his eyes flashing with a pride and triumph no harassed king ever felt on his coronation morn. As a rule, he left the table the moment the meal was over, preferring to take his coffee alone out of doors or in the library, but one day Julia, who was beginning to take a certain scientific interest in his developments, arrested his attention as he was about to rise.
“Didn’t you tell me once that Kingsborough and the little chap were delicate? I heard the other day that both are remarkably fit. The little boy always has been, and the duke gets stronger every day.”
She looked at him ingenuously as she spoke, quite prepared for an outburst of rage, but he only bestowed upon her a smile of withering contempt.
“They are merely indulging in what the Americans call ‘bluff.’ I happen to know that they are both full of disease and cannot last the year out. I shall be Duke of Kingsborough before Christmas.”
“How nice. That is the reason, I suppose, you don’t mind all these duns. We may be sold out any day, you know. Summonses are becoming as thick as rain, and I am told that not a man in the stables or kennels has been paid —”
“They all understand perfectly. The summonses and grumblings are a mere matter of form. I have promised an enormous rate of interest and higher wages when I have moved into Kingsborough House and Bosquith. The other estates I have already agreed to let to American millionnaires. They are impatiently awaiting Kingsborough’s death.”
“Ah? Where have you met the millionnaires?”
“They have been hunting with the Hertfordshire all winter, and we have discussed matters at my solicitor’s.”
Julia knew that he had not been to London for several months, save for the queen’s funeral, but forbore to press the subject. She remarked amiably: —
“What a fine income you will have!”
His eyes flashed. “Ah, yes! Millions.”
“Surely not quite that.”
“Millions. Kingsborough’s income alone is two millions.”
“I thought it was forty thousand pounds.”
“Forty thousand for a duke of Kingsborough! No emperor has a vaster revenue.”
“How jolly. My robes of state shall be woven of pure gold. Meanwhile, why don’t you go to Paris for a while? I notice that you are restless, since you have nothing to ride after, and nothing to kill. You keep me awake at night banging about the house.”
“Do I?” France’s eyes flashed with something besides triumph, but it passed almost at once. He was losing interest in her. As he rose, bent his head graciously and sauntered out into the garden, he forgot her absolutely in a new vision that had haunted him since the queen’s funeral. There for the first time he had seen sovereigns en masse. The sight had thrilled him; he had made up his mind to signalize his succession by the greatest banquet London had ever known; all the reigning princes of Europe should attend it. The letters of invitation were already written. He had written them many times, finding one of the keenest pleasures he had ever known in the process, congratulating himself that for the first time in his life he was about to have associates worthy of his name and ego. But although he had never heard the word paranoia, and while at Bosquith had finally dismissed from his mind the haunting thought of insanity (it was outside of reason that he, Harold France, could even sprain the wonderful organ he had inherited with other unique characteristics from the most illustrious house in Europe), nevertheless, instinct warned him to lock up his letters of invitation, and keep his grandiose dreams to himself. Only to Julia, and only when she spurred him to speech, did he admit a very little of what filled his thoughts day and night.
But he was well aware that his nerves were on edge, and he was beginning to be troubled with pains in his head. He slept little, and when he thought of it took a malicious pleasure in disturbing his prisoner, whom he could imagine sitting on the edge of her bed pistol in hand.
But it was not the pistol that kept him from breaking down the door and laughing in her face. He had anticipated amusing himself with her female terrors as soon as the hunting season closed, but he found himself grown quite indifferent not only to her charm, but to the exquisite pleasure it had once given him to torture her. His dreams and visions, his increasing delusions, filled his life. Woman was too contemptible to consider; were it not that it gratified his growing passion for autocracy to have a prisoner of state, he might have amused himself by turning her out of the house in the middle of the night and dogging her footsteps to Stanmore or Bushey.
He still compelled her attendance at table, but otherwise took no notice of her whatever. So absorbed was he that he failed to observe that his wife was now well supplied with books and no longer looked desperate or even discontented. Her three devoted friends had made an arrangement with her bookseller to send her all that she ordered from his catalogue, and Bridgit had turned over her membership with the London Library. One of the first books she sent for was a recent work on insanity. She was not long discovering that France was a paranoiac, and she wrote to her aunt, asking her to invite him to dinner, and two alienists to meet him. But Mrs. Winstone was shocked at the suggestion, not only because she hated increasingly the “grimy,” in other words serious, side of life, but because it would be a thankless task to assist in proving that a member of one of the great families of Britain was a lunatic. She chose, therefore, to believe Julia quite mistaken, that France was merely a trifle more impossible than ever, and assumed the high moral ground that it would be unfair to take advantage of a trusting guest. Julia concluded that to write to the duke would be equally ineffective, besides making an enemy of him for life, and she knew that France would not be induced to dine with either Bridgit or Ishbel. He had always hated both of them. There was nothing to do, therefore, but wait for him to develop acute mania, and to keep a pistol in her pocket; taking her walks abroad while he was forced to sleep, and locking herself in her room when she was not at table.
It was during this strain on her nerves that she began to long for the repose of the East. Orientalism was in her brain cells. What imagination her mother possessed had been projected toward the East for long before and after her birth. The science of astrology is the birthright of the East, the very word sways and parts the shadowy curtains that hang before civilizations old before the Occident was born, evokes the gorgeous heavy sinister pictures of ancient cities, of vast arid plains where only the stars were alive. This mysterious poetical science had been the romance of Julia’s youth, and the East was the one quarter of the globe, save Great Britain, that she had ever heard discussed. In London she had escaped theosophy and other made-up fads of the same nature, but although the call of the East had often and for long been overlaid in her consciousness, it never failed to make itself heard if she stood before a picture portraying India, Arabia, Persia, or read of personal adventures in the East by writers with the rare gift of atmosphere. In the loneliness and terrors and constant tension of her present life she forgot the call of the too modern, too similar life, across the Channel, hearkened increasingly to that of the East. It promised a vast repose, an endless feast of beauty, unfathomable mysteries, a life as different from that of the West as it was in the days of Mohammed, Zoroaster, or Christ.
Julia’s first passion was slowly growing in the unsatisfied depths of her mind, but that is the last name she would have given it. She was yet to realize that imaginative people with productive activities, however latent, have passions of the brain or ego as intense and profound as ever one sex compelled in the other in the interests of the race. Julia, abominating all that the word love implied (a state of mind inevitable unless she had been coarse and callous), but young, fervent, and conceptive, was both situated and tuned to be caught in the eddies of an impersonal passion. It might have been art, but she was not an artist; study and politics had failed her, and although psychology interested her, she was too restless for science in any form; therefore, she had no sooner chanced upon one or two picturesque old books of Eastern travel than she succumbed to the passion for place. She sent for no more books save those that carried her to the Orient. Her imagination blazed. She was transported into a new and enchanting world. Her good resolutions to live for the race were forgotten. The moment she was free she would fly to the East and live. She was almost happy. Then she descended into England and the purely personal life with a crash. Ishbel sent her a marked copy of a newspaper containing the announcement of Mr. Jones’s death, a week later wrote that she should marry Lord Dark as soon as a decent interval had elapsed, and commanding her to leave France and come to London, where employment awaited her.
Julia became her cool practical self at once. She packed her boxes, sent for a fly when France had gone for one of his merciless rides,—he was killing his horses,—and left this note behind her: —
“Mr. Jones is dead. Ishbel will marry Lord Dark as soon as possible. If you make a second attempt to wreck her business you will have him to reckon with. He is, in any case, well able to take care of her, and no doubt she will give up the business. As there is now no way in which you can injure her or any of my friends, I have made up my mind to leave you once for all. You will save yourself trouble by recalling that we are in the twentieth century and that the law does not compel me to live with you.
“Julia.”
Bridgit met Julia at the train and there was purpose in her eye. Julia laughed, knowing that her time had come, but returned the warm embrace with which she was greeted, and allowed herself to be carried without protest to the house in South Audley Street. Mrs. Herbert was no less handsome and fascinating than of old, but if anything she was still more upright of carriage, determined of eye, and expressive of ardent purpose. Widowed long before the war, Geoffrey’s death had made no change whatever in her life, although she had sent after him the sincere and hearty regret she would have felt for the loss of any friend. As she was needed in South Africa she had gone there, made herself useful without any fuss, and returned as soon as she could to her work in England. This work was now clearly defined. Bridgit Herbert, indeed, was not the woman to spend any great amount of time seeking or floundering. No dreamer, her mind, once awakened to the futilities of the life of pleasure, her energies roused, she had applied herself immediately to a survey and study of her times, and found the work which coincided with her particular talents. Horrified and disgusted with poverty, she sought and found the obvious remedy in the Socialism of the advanced and more practical of the Fabians, although the “ideology” of the older Socialists would have made little appeal to her. Soon convinced, however, that Socialism could make little headway against the individualistic and acquisitive mind of the twentieth century male, her fighting blood had warred with her direct practical mind until she had happened to go to the north with an inspector of factories, and listened to somewhat of Christabel Pankhurst’s propaganda in behalf of Woman’s Suffrage among the trade-union organizations, a factor in politics of increasing power. She was struck, not only by the abominable grievances of the working women in general and the factory women in particular, but by their intelligence; nor was she long discovering that the average of intelligence all over England was higher among poor women than among poor men. Where a man grew dull in the routine of his work and further blunted his faculties in the public house, his wife, with her manifold petty interests and schemings to make a little money go a long way, and filled with ever changing anxieties for her children, was far more alert of mind and eager for improvement. It did not take either Mrs. Pankhurst or her sleepless daughters to remind Bridgit that in this great body of women lay the future hope of Socialism, or of any reform directed against the elimination of poverty. But this army was of no more consequence at present than an army of ants. It must have the ballot, and Bridgit had spent much of her time in the last two or three years among the working women of England, educating them to a sense of their responsibilities. It was not until 1903 that the women of the middle class were generally roused from the apathy into which they had fallen, with the exception of spurts, since 1884, and the Woman’s Social and Political Union was formed by Mrs. Pankhurst; but when Julia arrived in London, the old movement was beginning to lift its head, and Bridgit Herbert was not the only hopeful and far-seeing mind at work.
“And what is it you want?” asked Julia, listening to the old familiar and beloved roar of London. They were in Mrs. Herbert’s den, and the hostess, her eyes still radiant with hospitality, was standing behind the low fire-screen with a hand on either point. Julia wondered if White Lodge were a nightmare.
“The vote. Because the time has come, men having made a mess of most things, for women to apply their higher faculties to the domestic affairs of the nation; also because the condition of poor women and children in this country is appalling, and men have proved their utter indifference to a fact which is also a factor in so many great incomes. Moreover, men have had their day, just as monarchies and aristocracies have had their day. The day of woman and the working-class is dawning, and it is high time.”
“And are women ready?”
“Those that are not can be taught. That is what we are for.”
“We? I suppose,” with a sigh of resignation, “that is my métier, what I have been struggling toward all this time.”
“You recognize that you have abilities at last, then?”
“Oh, yes, and I shouldn’t wonder if I had ambition, but just now I don’t feel either ambitious or energetic. I’m wild to go to India and the rest of the East —”
“Oh, nonsense, we’ve a great fight coming, and you must brace up and be one of the generals. Time enough to idle when you are old. Just now, until we can shut France up and ask the courts to give you an income, you are going to be my secretary —”
“Do you really need one?”
“Do I? Well, rather. I had one of the best, but her mother is ill and she may not be able to return to me for months. You’ll have tons of letters to write.”
“So much the better, for I couldn’t live on even your charity.”
“Charity? When my only chance to have an intimate friend is in a secretary, I am so rushed? I’m companionless, but life is frantically interesting.”
And if Julia found herself unable to reach this pitch of enthusiasm, she certainly found the new book of life offered for her daily reading quite absorbing enough to fill her time and thoughts. Her clerical hours were short. The rest of the day, and often during half the night, she was seeing all the problems at first hand. She went daily with Bridgit to the East Side and saw poverty outside of books; poverty, unthinkable, criminal, fleshless, stinking. At night she dreamed that all the babies in the world were wailing for food, all the mothers were emaciated, with eyes of bitter resignation, all the little girls pinched and old and hard. Herded misery, hopeless filth, black despair. Julia was quite unable to recall the reverse side of the picture, in which many were healthy in spite of poverty, and cheerful if only because temperament is stronger than circumstance. She hoped that some day she should fully wake up and burn with a zeal as great as Bridgit’s, but now her brain was tired, and, had she but known it, she protested against living for others until she had lived for herself first. Quite as unconsciously her mind was made up to live her Eastern romance the moment she was free. She heard not a word from France, but guessed the truth; he had forgotten her. If this were the case, however, it might mean that at any moment he would be a dangerous lunatic, and she felt that the duke should be warned. As this was a delicate task, and as her uneasiness grew, she finally, on Bridgit’s advice, wrote to his firm of solicitors. Solicitors are probably the most conservative members of conservative England; but full of duty withal. The junior member found himself overtaken by a storm near White Lodge and craved hospitality of his patron’s distinguished kinsman. France, either because suspicion was still active in a brain not clouded, but blazing with a light unknown to common mortals, or because he happened to be in a good humor, had never appeared to better advantage. The solicitor returned to London so inflamed with indignation that the letter he wrote to Julia breathed his contempt for her entire sex. Julia shrugged her shoulders and dismissed the matter from her mind. Let them work out their own destinies.
When she was not haunting the slums, she was attending meetings: Fabian, labor, working-women, coöperators’, old and new suffrage; at all of which the eternal problem of poverty was the main topic of discussion. She was also taken to visit the slaughter-houses, where the ignorance and savagery of the women employed was primeval. She visited the textile factories of the north, where the work of women and children at the loom was relieved only by alternate hours of drudgery in the home, and where there seemed no object in living whatever. The pit-brow women, at least, had developed the strength and endurance of men, and no doubt would have proved equally efficient in war.
Manchester was a very hot bed of social reform, and Julia was shown all the horrors to which reform owed its concept. She wondered increasingly at the frail fabric of aristocracy and wealth that tottered on its heaving foundations, and conceived some measure of respect for its cleverness.
This drastic experience was enlivened now and again by glimpses of Ishbel, still the merriest, and now the happiest, of mortals. The lines of fatigue and anxiety had disappeared, she was once more the prettiest woman in London, and she needed but the halo of her future position as Countess of Dark to make good people wonder how they could have forgotten it. Julia thought her the most fortunate of women, if only because she was realizing all the romantic dreams of her girlhood on the bogs. Dark was handsome, clever, kind, almost unselfish. He was profoundly in love and he had a very decent income. Above all he had the most romantic title in the British peerage—Earl of Dark! No wonder those fluttering moths of American girls wanted titles. Such a one would make the dullest man in England look romantic to yearning republican eyes, when even an Ishbel was enchanted at the prospect of owning it.
“And yet I am the most practical of mortals—the half of me!” she said gayly, one day, as they sat in the boudoir over the shop, drinking tea unseasoned with reform. “Odd and modern combination!”
“But you’ll give up the shop?”
“Not really. It is coöperative now, and too many would suffer if I neglected it altogether, or withdrew. I must continue to see that it remains a success, for it is something to have solved the problem of living for a few women, at least.”
Julia hastily changed the subject.
“Shall you become a society beauty again?”
“I’ve hardly thought of it. I mean to be happy, and I think we’ll travel and live in the country for a year. Society is always with us. That first year! No duties shall share an hour of it.”
“Right you are. I never could love and never want to, and I’m quite resigned to becoming a torch-bearer, suffering martyrdom, if necessary, in the cause of woman, but meanwhile I’ve something up my sleeve. I dare not mention it to Bridgit again, and shall have to run away when my time comes, but I can confide in you. The moment I am free I am going to India—Persia—Arabia—and stay there until some other part of me is gratified, I hardly know what. I only know that the call is unceasing and that I never can accomplish anything here, whole-heartedly, at least, until I have got that off my mind.”
“By all means, go. It’s unhealthy to repress your strongest personal desires, and you are young yet. I wonder, by the way, if you will ever have the zeal of these other women? You have a sort of sardonic humor —”
“I want a career, and in this rising inevitable woman’s movement lies my chance. When my time comes, my zeal will be great enough—for all they can give me I’ll pay them back a hundred fold. I want power if only because nothing less will pay the debt of these last years, and I am horribly sorry for the poor of the world. When I am ready I shall jump into the arena with my torch, but I’ll find myself wholly in the East first.”
“Why not go now? I can let you have the money.”
“No, I’ll wait.”
As it happened she did not have long to wait. She and Bridgit were driving home one evening after talking to an intelligent club of East End women, when they heard the familiar cry of “Extra,” and a flaming handbill was waved in front of the window as the brougham was blocked. Bridgit, whose quick glance overlooked nothing, exclaimed, “Great heaven!” and leaned out, throwing the boy a sixpence.
“What is it?” asked Julia, languidly. She had been forced on to the platform, and was still cold from fright. “A strike?”
Bridgit lifted the tube and gave an order to the coachman that made Julia sit erect.
“Kingsborough House.” Then to her companion, “France tried to kill the duke this afternoon.”
They found Kingsborough House in confusion, the flunkys looking as flabby as if the ramrods in their backs had dissolved, leaving nothing but the sawdust stuffing. The duchess was in hysterics upstairs (“she is sure to be an anti,” remarked Mrs. Herbert); the duke was under the care of his doctor; but Lady Arabella received them, and graciously observed that she was glad to see that Julia still felt herself a member of the house of France. She told them the story, which was brief enough. France had suddenly appeared that afternoon, and upon being shown into the duke’s study had sprung upon his kinsman before the footman had closed the door, demanding that he should abdicate in his favor, threatening him with immediate death if he refused. The footman had called other footmen, and it had taken four of them to hold France down while the duke, his coat torn off and his face bleeding, had himself telephoned for the police. France meanwhile had struggled like a demon, shouting that he had come to kill not only the duke but the boy, that his time had come to live and theirs to die, that they were deliberate malicious enemies who stood between him and the greatness which would permit him to send his invitations to the crowned heads of Europe; and “heaven knows what else,” added the distressed Lady Arabella. “To think of poor Harold going mad. At first we thought he might merely have been drinking, but with the police came poor Edward’s doctor, and he pronounced him as mad as a hatter. Do stay here with me to-night, Julia. You are a clever little thing, and always keep your wits about you.”
Julia remained at Kingsborough House for several days. When the duke heard what little of her own story she was willing to tell, and that she had endeavored to protect him through his solicitors, he was honest enough to admit that he would have been hard to convince of a kinsman’s insanity, and generous enough to be grateful to her. Indeed, so relieved was he at his narrow escape, and at the report of the lunacy commission which incarcerated France for life, that he bubbled over with something like human nature; and, as the expensive sanatorium would cut deeply into his cousin’s original income, announced his intention of giving Julia for life seven hundred and fifty of the thousand pounds he had so long allowed her husband. Julia refused this offer, until the duke told her impatiently that if she did not take it he would merely pay Harold’s expenses in the sanatorium, and leave her to the courts, also that she was legally a member of his family, and pride, therefore, absurd. Julia turned this over, and concluding that the house of France owed her a good deal more than it could ever pay, consented and thought no more about it. A month later she was on a P. and O. steamer bound for India.
Upon Julia’s return to England in April of 1906 she was greeted with the news of the destruction of San Francisco by earthquake and fire. Nigel, to whom it had occurred to her to send a telegram from Flushing, met her at Queenboro’, and, his imagination fired by the great physical drama, it was the first piece of news he imparted. Julia, although she was looking straight into a pair of ardent handsome eyes (Nigel had recovered his looks, and the subtle marks of Time enhanced them), sent her mind on a flight of seven thousand miles to centre about the young American friend that she had so nearly forgotten.
“He must be—let me see—five- or six-and-twenty,” she announced.
“Who?” Nigel’s eyes flashed.
“A Californian I met when he was a boy—Mrs. Bode’s brother. You can’t mean that everybody was killed.”
“Let us hope not. First reports are always exaggerated. But the Californians in London are frantic—can’t get a penny on their letters of credit, either. Indeed, nothing outside of our own bailiwick has excited us as much as this in many a long day.”
“I felt some big earthquakes in India—”
“Oh, nothing like this,” said Nigel, who would brook no cheapening of the magnificent panorama in his mind. “With the possible exception of the eruption of Mont Pelée, this is the most dramatic thing that Nature has done in our time. Think of it! Not a second’s warning. The most important city on the Pacific Coast and its half million people wiped out. The earth rocking miles of blazing buildings for hours. Precipices along the coast plunging into the sea! The hills rolling like grain. Jupiter! What a sight from an airship! Would that I had been there to see.”
“I don’t fancy you would have seen much from an airship, if there was any smoke with the fire. Have you reconstructed all that from bald cablegrams?”
“The bald facts are enough—”
“To have made your imagination happy. I have always said that you would satisfy it yet with a work of pure romance. But I don’t mean to joke. It is too awful. I heard only a confused rumor on the train yesterday. Poor Dan! But I feel sure that he could take care of himself, and of a good many others—if there was any chance at all.”
“Possibly. But enough of horrors. I want to look at you.” (They had a compartment to themselves.) “You must have enjoyed yourself quite as well as you meant to do. I never saw any one so—well—improved, although that sounds banal. It never occurred to me that you could be prettier than when you first came to London, but you are. Your eyes—what is it?”
“Oh, my eyes have seen things. I have done a good deal more than enjoy myself.”
“Have you come back to be the high priestess of some cult?”
“Not I. I have sat at the feet of wise men in Benares and in Persia, and learned—a little. We Occidentals are never initiated into the deeper mysteries. They despise—or fear—us too much for that. But even a little of the wisdom of the East must widen our vision and prove an everlasting antidote to the modern spirit of unrest—about nothing.”
“And enable you to forget your friends for four years? We have each had three letters from you and three or four times as many post cards.”
“One secret of enjoying the East is to forget the West. And for at least a year I was intoxicated—drunk is more expressive—with its enchantments. The spell broke in Calcutta, where I spent a winter in society. Then I went to Benares to study.”
“You could have told me as much in a cablegram. What took you to Acca?”
“I went to see Abdul Baha Abbas, and investigate the new religion. My master told me of it in India, and I found that in Persia, after losing some twenty-five thousand by massacre, it had got the best of its enemies by converting the government. Even the women are receiving the higher education. So I went on to headquarters. Not that any religion could make a personal appeal to me, but I had an idea about this one. The idea proved to be reasonable, and, accordingly, I have brought you the Bahai religion as a present.”
“Brought me? What should I do with it?”
“Make use of it to your own glory and the benefit of the race. We have always agreed that Socialism would never prevail until it acquired a soul. That admirably constructed but unappealing machine needs the Bahai religion to give it light and fire; and the Bahai religion, sane and practical as it is, needs a good working medium. Combined, they will sweep the world. With your skill and enthusiasm, you will find the task congenial and not too difficult. Like Socialism, the new and practical sort, Bahaism must begin at the top and filter down, for it makes its appeal to the brain, to the advanced thinker, to those that feel the need of a religion, but have long since outgrown all the silly old dogmas, with their bathos and sentimentalities, primarily intended only for the ignorant. Unity in rights. Freedom of the political as well as the spiritual conscience. In other words, the elimination of all that provokes war; which means universal peace. Peace. Peace. Peace. That is the keynote of the Bahai religion, as love was intended to be of Christianity. All the best principles of the five prevailing religions are incorporated in this, all the barriers between them razed, and all the nonsense and narrow-mindedness left out. And the keynote of all this? Knowledge. True knowledge, intellectual as well as spiritual. The universal spread of science and the development of the arts, to war in men’s minds—the real battleground—against the greed of money which makes man so stunted, uninteresting, and miserable to-day. One language, one people, one faith. No hierarchy. Good morals and charitable deeds as a matter of course. The worship of one God, and the universal peace, to be founded in the centre of the civilized world. Unity and Peace! Then we are promised that the earthly world shall become heavenly. Not in our time. But it will be interesting to help start the ball rolling, and to watch it roll. Every man is supposed to have a latent desire for perfection. There is your cue. There lies the brain of this religion. What a subtle appeal to vanity, man’s primal and deathless weakness! Even greed only ministers to it. If I wrote fiction I should take this cue myself, but as it is I have brought it to you. Go to Acca, get it all at first hand, and write your immortal book.”
“So you did think of me that far?” Nigel stared at her, fascinated, but with his man’s ardor checked. In spite of her frank delight in greeting him, the spontaneous friendliness of her manner, she seemed to him incredibly remote. The eyes that looked straight into his had new and unfathomable depths, and he wondered if she had not learned more of Eastern lore than she had any intention of admitting.
“Of course,” she said, smiling. “And I have speculated a great deal about you. All I know is that you won the Nöbel Peace Prize—a wonderful book! I read it—and your last—in the colonial edition. But I know nothing else about you. Have you fallen in love with any one else?”
“No, I have not,” said Nigel, crossly, “and I am not so sure that I am still in love with you. I only know that you haunt my imagination and make all other women seem flat.”
“Ah! We could be the ideal friends. But hasn’t anything happened to you besides merely writing books and becoming a peer of the realm?”
“Oh, yes, I have been discovered by the United States of America.”
“They were long enough about it. But they always get hold of the little men first.”
“Well, I might be one of the little ones, judging by the fuss they are making over me. Reams of stuff in magazines and the Sunday newspapers—all about my ‘great’ works; in which I find myself credited with an assortment of philosophies no two men could carry; at least a hundred attitudes toward Life; and incredible designs upon the peace of the world—although still others maintain that I am merely a dilettante aristocrat playing with picturesque material. I am so bewildered that I hardly know what I am myself. Some of the adverse criticisms are so good that I forget the writer doesn’t in the least know what he is writing about. The only thing clear to me is that my income is trebled, and that I am offered unheard-of sums (from the modest European point of view) to write for their magazines and newspapers. I have even been invited to go over and lecture, and am promised a unique advertisement: ‘The Peer among Authors.’ Fancy trying to be original after that! I believe I have also a cult—and am making hay while the sun shines; for I am given to understand that crazes don’t last long over there. Each of us, as discovered,—sometimes a few of us at once,—is the ‘greatest of modern English authors.’ I should think their own authors would combine, capture the press, and train their guns on us, and their eloquence on their public: it would appear that the American public, in art matters, believes everything it is told long enough and loud enough. Far be it from me, however, to complain. It has enabled me to put a new roof on my old castle—as good as an American wife, without the bother—and buy a villa on the Riviera—which I am hoping you will consent to occupy with me.”
“Not I. You go to Acca, and I to my work here. If it hadn’t haunted me, assisted by indignant letters from Bridgit, I doubt if I ever should have left the East. But if the East is in my blood, some magnet in the West directed at my brain cells dragged me home. Besides, what have I developed myself for? Now is the time to find out.”
Nigel sighed. “The old order changeth. You women are not far off from getting all you want, no doubt about that, but you will lose more than you gain.”
“From your point of view. It is not what you want. We shall get what we want, which is more to the point.”
“Well, I can’t blame you,” said Nigel, honestly. “Man was bound to have his day of reckoning. For my part I hardly care, being a lover of change, and wanting to see all of this world’s progress it shall be possible to crowd into my own little span. And although you are far from all the old ideals, it would be the more interesting to live with you. I have always had a sneaking preference for polygamy—one wife for children and solid comfort, and one for companionship—to keep a man from roving abroad.”
To his surprise Julia colored and a look of distress and apprehension routed the bright composure of her face.
“I should like children!” she exclaimed. “They would not interfere with my work, either. Why should they?” Then she darted off the track of self. “Tell me of Ishbel. She is happy, I feel sure, and she has two dear little babies. I am the godmother of the first.”
“Yes, but she haunts that shop. It was running to seed without her, and she had no sooner taken hold again than the work microbe woke up. Dark doesn’t fancy it, but says there’s nothing for a sensible man to do these days but take woman as he finds her and chew his little cud in silence. He doesn’t forget how both Ishbel and Bridgit calmly shuffled off their husbands when they had no further use for them.”
“Work. I fancy that was the real magnet that brought me back. I revelled—revelled—but the reaction set in like a rising tide, and at last was quite as irresistible. I should have come back before this, but I wanted to remain in Acca until I was convinced that the Bahai religion was all it attempted to be. Go there at once. Abdul Baha has promised that you shall live in his house. Moreover, they want a big author to exploit it in the West before it has been misrepresented and cheapened by the swarm of little writers, always in search of what they call ‘copy.’ ”
“I should feel like a bally hypocrite. I’ve no more religion in me than you have. If God is in man, and self is God, then that atom we call self is what is given us to lean on without asking for more. To demand help outside of ourselves is a confession of failure.”
“Of course. But how many have penetrated the secrets that far? The majority must have a religion to talk about and lean on. When they get the right one, the world will be a far more comfortable place to live in. That, to my mind, is the whole point. You and I have useful brains, and it is our business to help the world along. In my inmost soul, I don’t care any more for the cause of woman or the rights of the working-class—save in so far as it gives me the horrors to think of any one being cold and hungry—than you care about religion; but I shall work just as hard for both as if I never had had a thought for anything else. Now tell me about Bridgit.”
Nigel left her at the door of her hotel and did not see her again for two days. Little did he guess the reason. He carried away to his club (both resentfully and sadly) the picture of a new Julia, all intellect, poise, and mystery; a Julia from whom the impulsiveness, ingenuousness, and young enthusiasm had gone forever, left in that unfathomable East which gives knowledge and takes personality; a cold brilliant creature, with developed genius, no doubt, but with nothing left to beg unto a man’s heart and senses. And this, indeed, was one side of Julia, and the only one she purposed the world should see; because in time it was to be her whole self, and she a happy mortal.
When she shut the door of her sitting-room in the gloomy exclusive hotel in one of the quiet streets near Piccadilly, to which she had telegraphed for rooms, she subsided into the easiest chair and cried for half an hour; nor did she ascend from the slough of her despondency for the rest of the day. For the past four years she had lived virtually out of doors. As her angry frightened eyes looked back they recalled nothing but floods of golden light, an endless procession of Orientals, gleaming bronze or copper, turbanned, hooded, dressed in flowing robes of white or every primal hue; streets, crooked, latticed, balconied, sun-baked; gorgeous bazaars; life, color, beauty, romance (to Western eyes) everywhere. She was come to a London wrapped in its old familiar drizzle; huddled over the small grate, its cold penetrated her marrow; in the narrow street, dull, grimy, flat, there was rarely a sound. As she had entered the ugly entrance hall below she had been met by two solemn footmen, one of whom had conducted her slowly up three flights of stairs (there was no lift in this exclusive hostelry); another followed an hour later with her luncheon of good food cooked abominably. The butler stood in front of her like a statue and pretended not to observe her swollen eyes.
If she had been wise, she would have gone to the Carlton or the Ritz, where at least she could have descended at intervals into a very good similitude of luxury and magnificence, been able to fancy herself in the midst of “life”; she would have dined with brilliantly dressed and animated people, and, incidentally, been cheered by French cooking. But, like many others, she favored the small hotel where one was almost obliged to bring a letter of introduction, where one was supposed to be “at home” with personal servants; and where, indeed, one was as deeply immersed in privacy and silence as if quite at home in North Hampstead. Julia, who had been consoled for the loss of the dainty dishes of the East by the kaleidoscopic pleasures of the continent, choked over her shoulder of mutton, large-leaved greens, and hard round peas unseasoned, boiled potatoes, and pudding, wept once more after the remains and the butler had vanished, cursed women, and half determined to take the night train for Egypt and Syria.
She had not wanted to “be met,” shrinking from too prompt a reminder of the past. Now she wished that everybody she had ever known had crowded the platform at Victoria, and “rushed her about,” until she felt at home once more in this huge and dismal and overpowering mass of London. And as ill-luck would have it even her two best friends would be denied her for days, possibly for weeks. Ishbel was in Paris. Bridgit was in Cannes recovering from severe physical injuries incurred in the cause of woman. At one of the great Liberal meetings in the north, during the General Election, she had risen and demanded that the new Government declare its intentions regarding the enfranchisement of women. She had been pulled down, one man had held his hat before her face, and when she struggled to her feet again, protesting that she had the same right to interrupt the speaker with questions as any of the men that had gone unreproved, she had been dragged out by six stewards and plain-clothes detectives, with as much vigor as if she had been the six men and they the one dauntless female. They had mauled her, twisted her, pummelled her, and finally flung her with violence to the pavement. She had gathered herself up, although suffering from a broken rib, attempted to address the crowd in the streets, been arrested and swept off to the town hall. She had given a false name that she might be shown no favor, and the next morning, refusing to pay her fine, was sent to gaol for seven days. She had lain in a cold cell for nearly twenty-four hours unattended, in solitary confinement, and on a small allowance of food which she could not have eaten if well. At the gaol she asked to be sent to the hospital, but before her request was granted, a member of the new Government ascertained her name, and, horrified at the possible consequences to himself, paid her fine summarily, and sent her to a nursing home. Here she had lain until her broken rib had mended, and was now in the south of France assuaging a severe attack of intercostal neuralgia.
This story, told by Nigel, had filled Julia with an intense wrath, and struck the first real spark of enthusiasm in her for the cause of woman, but it burned low in these dull hours of loneliness and nostalgia, and she wished that her magnificent friend had remained as in the early days of their acquaintance, whole in bone and skin, and untroubled of mind.
But if Julia was acting much as the average woman acts during her first hours alone in an immense and inhospitable city, which the sun refuses to shine upon, a city that knows not of her existence and cares less, she was furious with herself, even before she recovered. Where was the poise, the serenity, the grand impersonal attitude, she had learned from her subtle masters in the East? Where the full calm determination with which she had returned to take up her self-elected duties, to gratify a long latent but now full-grown ambition to build a unique pedestal for herself in the world; in other words, to achieve fame and power? Out there it had been both easy and natural to plan, to dream, to vision herself at the head of womankind, burning with the enthusiasm of the artist, even if the cause itself left her cold. She had believed herself made over to that extent, at least; and now she dared not see Nigel Herbert lest she marry him off-hand, and insure herself a life companion and the common happiness of woman.
She denied him admittance, even refusing to go down to the telephone (such were the primitive arrangements of this exclusive hostelry), and vowed that once more, peradventure for the last time, she would wrestle with her peculiar problem and inspect her new armor at every joint.
For Julia, even during her first year in India, had learned lessons untaught by Eastern philosophers. She had no difficulty in recalling the moment when that green shoot had wriggled its head out of what she called the morass in the depths of her nature. She had been floating one moonlight night in a boat propelled by a turbanned silhouette, on a small lake surrounded by a park as dense as a jungle. From the head of the lake rose a marble palace of many towers and balconies, whose white steps were in the green waters. Just overhead was poised the full moon,—a crystal lantern lit with a white flame. A nightingale was pouring forth its love song. Warm, delicious odors were wafted across the lake from the gardens about the palace.
Julia, whose soul had been steeped in all this beauty, her senses swimming with pleasure, suddenly, with no apparent volition, sat upright and gasped with resentment. Why was she alone on such a night? Why, in heaven’s name, was not a man with her,—the most charming man the world held, of course (there never was anything moderate in Julia’s demands upon Life)? why was not this perfect mate, his own soul steeped, his senses swimming, even as were her own, sitting beside her, looking at her with eyes that proclaimed them as one and divinely happy? It was the night and the place for the very fullness of love, and she was alone. How incongruous! How inartistic! What a waste! Women have been known to feel like this in Venice. How much more so Julia, in the untravelled undesecrated depths of India, at night, with the moon and the nightingale and the heavy warm scents of Oriental trees, and shrubs, and flowers!
When Julia realized where her unleashed imagination had soared, she frowned, deliberately laughed, and opened her inner ear that she might enjoy the crash to earth. But she sat up all that night. From her room in the guest bungalow (her friends had provided her with many letters), she could look upon the white palace, gleaming like sculptured ivory against the black Eastern night, hear the waters lapping the marble steps. Strange sounds came out of the quarters devoted to the superfluous wives and their female offspring: passionate melancholy singing, sharp infuriated cries, monotonous string music, infinitely hopeless.
And she was free, free as the nightingale, free to love; young, beautiful, with the world at her feet. What a fool she was!
Although she had now been in India for nearly a year, this was the first time the sex within her had stirred, and she had been one with scenes lovelier than this, revelled from first to last in all the beauty and variety and mystery and color which she had craved so long in England. In spite of dirt and stench, of entomological bedfellows, bullock carts, and lack of every luxury in which the British soul delights, she was too young and too philosophical to have permitted the worst of these to interfere with her complete satisfaction. And it had, this wondrous East, absorbed and satisfied her until to-night. She had asked for nothing more. And now she wanted a lover.
Looking back upon her life with France, she discovered that she had practically forgiven him the moment she had been assured of his insanity. No doubt he had been irresponsible from the first. This admission had subconsciously wiped out his offences, and with them the memory of that whole odious experience. She still blamed her mother, but she had pitied France when she thought of him at all. The heavy noxious growth in her soul had withered and disappeared, the dark waters turned clear and sparkling. She was ready for love, for the rights and the glory of youth.
Kneeling there, gazing out at the enchanted palace, watching the moon sail over the misty tree-tops to disappear into the dark embrace of the Himalayas, her annoyance passed, she exulted in this new development, these vast and turbulent demands. She would find love and find it soon.
With Julia to think was to do. The next day she set out on her quest. To love any of these Indian princes was out of the question, even though she might live in marble palaces for the rest of her life. There was nothing for it but to go to Calcutta and present her letters to the viceroy and notable British residents. She found Calcutta the most ill-smelling city on earth, but its society was brilliant and industrious, and she met more charming men than in all her years in England. For some obscure reason Englishmen always are more charming, natural, and even original in the colonies and dependencies than on their own misty isle. Perhaps they are more adaptable than they think, more susceptible to “atmosphere” than would seem possible, bred as they are into formalities and mannerisms of a thousand years of tradition, too hide-bound for mere human nature to combat unassisted.
Moreover, in India they wear helmets, which are vastly becoming, and white linen or khaki, which wars with stolidity. Julia met them by the dozen and liked them all. She danced six nights out of seven, flirted in marble palaces whose steps were in the Ganges, on marble terraces vocal and scented. She had never been so beautiful before, she was quite happy, she was indisputably the belle of the winter, she had several proposals under the most romantic conditions (carefully arranged by herself), and she was wholly unable to fall in love.
At the end of the season she understood, and was aghast. She demanded the wholly impossible in man, a man that never will emerge from woman’s imagination and come to life; a man without common weaknesses, who was never absurd, who was a miracle of tenderness, passion, strength, humor, justice, high-mindedness, magnetism, intellect, cleverness, wit, sincerity, mystery, fidelity, provocation, responsiveness, reserve; who was gay, serious, sympathetic, vital, stimulating, always able to thrill, and never to bore; a being of light with no clay about him, who wooed like a god, and never looked funny when his feelings overcame him, and never perspired, even in India.
In short, Julia packed her trunks and went to Benares to study Hindu philosophy.
But although she was not long finding her balance (in which humor played as distinguished a part as her learned masters), she never wholly ceased to be haunted by the vision of the perfect lover and the complete happiness he must bestow upon a woman as yet not all intellect. There were times when she sat up in bed at night exclaiming aloud in tones of indignation and surprise, “Where is my husband? Mine? He must exist on this immense earth. Where is he?”
She knew that other women of humor and intellect, Ishbel, for instance, had ended by accepting the best that life purposed to offer them, and been quite happy, or happy enough. But she dared make no such experiment with herself. Genius of some sort she had, and she guessed that geniuses had best be content with dreams and make no experiments with mere mortal men. She knew that if she exiled herself to America, or the continent of Europe, with the most satisfactory man she had met in Calcutta, or even with Nigel Herbert, she ran the risk of hating him and herself before the honeymoon was out. Nevertheless, the woman in her laughed at intellect and went on demanding and dreaming.
But all this did not affect her will nor hinder her mental progress. While automatically hoping, she was hopeless, and bent all her energies toward accomplishing that ideal of perfection she had vaguely outlined the night at White Lodge when once more settling the fate of Nigel. Here in Benares, sitting at the feet of men that appeared to live in their marvellous intellects, and to be quite purged of earthly dross, it seemed simple enough to her strong will and brain. Of mysteries she was permitted more than one glimpse. She felt herself drawing from unseen, unfathomable sources a vital fluid which she chose to believe would in time restore in her that perfect balance of sex qualities, that unity in the ego, which had been the birthright of the man-woman who rose first out of the chaos of the universe, who was happy until clove in half and sent forth to wage the eternal war of sex, even while striving blindly for completion. She learned that in former solar systems, whose record is open only to those so profoundly versed in occult lore that their disembodied selves read at will the invisible tablets, that chosen women had attained this state of perfection, of absolute knowledge, of original sex, and with it immortality. Immortal women. Wonderful and haunting phrase! At certain periods of even earth’s history, they had reappeared in human form to accomplish their great and individual work. But their number so far had been few, and they were easily called to mind, these great women that stood out in history; indispensable, mysteriously powerful; disappearing when their work was done, and leaving none of their kind behind them.
Julia’s favorite teacher, an old Sufi Mohammedan named Hadji Sadrä, told her that the world, the Western world particularly, was ripe for them again, that now their numbers would be many, for modern conditions made their general supremacy possible for the first time in Earth’s history. There was no movement in the East or West that this old philosopher was not cognizant of, no tendency, no deep persistent stifled mutter; and although he had all the contempt of the ancient Oriental brain for the crude attempts of the Occident to think for itself, he had a growing respect for Western women, and told Julia that all conditions, both in the heavens and on the earth pointed to the coming reign of woman; led in the first place by those reincarnated immortal souls of whom he was convinced she was one, possibly the greatest. So he interpreted her horoscope, laughing at the narrow wisdom of the Western mind which could see naught but a ridiculous position in the peerage of Europe; the starry hieroglyphics plainly indicated that she was to rule her sex and lead it to victory.
All this was highly gratifying to Julia (to whom would it not be?), and feeling herself destined to greatness, found its spiritual part simpler of achievement than if the suggesting had been lacking. In this ideal of perfection there was no question of eliminating human nature, with its minor entrancing elements, its sympathy, tenderness, its power to love; merely the complete control of a highly trained mind over the baser desires, the contemptible faults, the foolish ambitions and temptations, which keep the average mind in a state of bondage, restless, vaguely aspiring, always dipping, and never happy. Nevertheless, love could be but an incident. The highest ideal was to stand alone. The greatest attributes of the masculine and female mind united in one mortal brain, the ability to obliterate the world at will and live in the contemplation of knowledge, the irresistible power which comes of absolute mastery of self and of living in self alone,—unity in the ego, independence of mortal conditions—here was the perfect ideal which Julia was bidden to attain, which few but Orientals have even formulated.
On this high flight had Julia been sustained during the following years. But, sitting in her gloomy, chill and tasteless London sitting-room, she looked back upon it as a fool’s paradise, and felt merely a dismal traveller in a strange city; but recalling a threat of Hadji Sadrä, dared not send for the man she still liked best in the world.