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Chapter VII.
The next six months were the happiest time of her life, for
Herminia. All day long she worked hard with her classes; and often
in the evenings Alan Merrick dropped in for sweet converse and
companionship. Too free from any taint of sin or shame herself
ever to suspect that others could misinterpret her actions,
Herminia was hardly aware how the gossip of Bower Lane made free in
time with the name of the young lady who had taken a cottage in the
row, and whose relations with the tall gentleman that called so
much in the evenings were beginning to attract the attention of the
neighborhood. The poor slaves of washer-women and working men's
wives all around, with whom contented slavery to a drunken, husband
was the only "respectable" condition,—couldn't understand for the
life of them how the pretty young lady could make her name so
cheap; "and her that pretends to be so charitable and that, and
goes about in the parish like a district visitor!" Though to be
sure it had already struck the minds of Bower Lane that Herminia
never went "to church nor chapel;" and when people cut themselves
adrift from church and chapel, why, what sort of morality can you
reasonably expect of them? Nevertheless, Herminia's manners were
so sweet and engaging, to rich and poor alike, that Bower Lane
seriously regretted what it took to be her lapse from grace. Poor
purblind Bower Lane! A life-time would have failed it to discern
for itself how infinitely higher than its slavish "respectability"
was Herminia's freedom. In which respect, indeed, Bower Lane was
no doubt on a dead level with Belgravia, or, for the matter of
that, with Lambeth Palace.
But Herminia, for her part, never discovered she was talked about.
To the pure all things are pure; and Herminia was dowered with that
perfect purity. And though Bower Lane lay but some few hundred
yards off from the Carlyle Place Girl's School, the social gulf
between them yet yawned so wide that good old Miss Smith-Waters
from Cambridge, the head-mistress of the school, never caught a
single echo of the washerwomen's gossip. Herminia's life through
those six months was one unclouded honeymoon. On Sundays, she and
Alan would go out of town together, and stroll across the breezy
summit of Leith Hill, or among the brown heather and garrulous
pine-woods that perfume the radiating spurs of Hind Head with their
aromatic resins. Her love for Alan was profound and absorbing;
while as for Alan, the more he gazed into the calm depths of that
crystal soul, the more deeply did he admire it. Gradually she was
raising him to her own level. It is impossible to mix with a lofty
nature and not acquire in time some tincture of its nobler and more
generous sentiments. Herminia was weaning Alan by degrees from the
world; she was teaching him to see that moral purity and moral
earnestness are worth more, after all, than to dwell with purple
hangings in all the tents of iniquity. She was making him
understand and sympathize with the motives which led her stoutly on
to her final martyrdom, which made her submit without a murmur of
discontent to her great renunciation.
As yet, however, there was no hint or forecast of actual martyrdom.
On the contrary, her life flowed in all the halo of a honeymoon. It
was a honeymoon, too, undisturbed by the petty jars and discomforts
of domestic life; she saw Alan too seldom for either ever to lose
the keen sense of fresh delight in the other's presence. When she
met him, she thrilled to the delicate fingertips. Herminia had
planned it so of set purpose. In her reasoned philosophy of life,
she had early decided that 'tis the wear and tear of too close daily
intercourse which turns unawares the lover into the husband; and she
had determined that in her own converse with the man she loved that
cause of disillusion should never intrude itself. They conserved
their romance through all their plighted and united life. Herminia
had afterwards no recollections of Alan to look back upon save
ideally happy ones.
So six months wore away. On the memory of those six months Herminia
was to subsist for half a lifetime. At the end of that time, Alan
began to fear that if she did not soon withdraw from the Carlyle
Place School, Miss Smith-Waters might begin to ask inconvenient
questions. Herminia, ever true to her principles, was for stopping
on till the bitter end, and compelling Miss Smith-Waters to dismiss
her from her situation. But Alan, more worldly wise, foresaw that
such a course must inevitably result in needless annoyance and
humiliation for Herminia; and Herminia was now beginning to be so
far influenced by Alan's personality that she yielded the point with
reluctance to his masculine judgment. It must be always so. The man
must needs retain for many years to come the personal hegemony he
has usurped over the woman; and the woman who once accepts him as
lover or as husband must give way in the end, even in matters of
principle, to his virile self-assertion. She would be less a woman,
and he less a man, were any other result possible. Deep down in the
very roots of the idea of sex we come on that prime antithesis,—the
male, active and aggressive; the female, sedentary, passive, and
receptive.
And even on the broader question, experience shows one it is always
so in the world we live in. No man or woman can go through life in
consistent obedience to any high principle,—not even the willing
and deliberate martyrs. We must bow to circumstances. Herminia
had made up her mind beforehand for the crown of martyrdom, the one
possible guerdon this planet can bestow upon really noble and
disinterested action. And she never shrank from any necessary
pang, incidental to the prophet's and martyr's existence. Yet even
so, in a society almost wholly composed of mean and petty souls,
incapable of comprehending or appreciating any exalted moral
standpoint, it is practically impossible to live from day to day in
accordance with a higher or purer standard. The martyr who should
try so to walk without deviation of any sort, turning neither to
the right nor to the left in the smallest particular, must
accomplish his martyrdom prematurely on the pettiest side-issues,
and would never live at all to assert at the stake the great truth
which is the lodestar and goal of his existence.
So Herminia gave way. Sadly against her will she gave way. One
morning in early March, she absented herself from her place in the
class-room without even taking leave of her beloved schoolgirls,
whom she had tried so hard unobtrusively to train up towards a
rational understanding of the universe around them, and sat down to
write a final letter of farewell to poor straight-laced kind-hearted
Miss Smith-Waters. She sat down to it with a sigh; for Miss
Smith-Waters, though her outlook upon the cosmos was through one
narrow ***, was a good soul up to her lights, and had been really
fond and proud of Herminia. She had rather shown her off, indeed, as
a social trump card to the hesitating parent,—"This is our second
mistress, Miss Barton; you know her father, perhaps; such an
excellent man, the Dean of Dunwich." And now, Herminia sat down with
a heavy heart, thinking to herself what a stab of pain the avowal
she had to make would send throbbing through that gentle old breast,
and how absolutely incapable dear Miss Smith-Waters could be of ever
appreciating the conscientious reasons which had led her,
Iphigenia-like, to her self-imposed sacrifice.
But, for all that, she wrote her letter through, delicately,
sweetly, with feminine tact and feminine reticence. She told Miss
Smith-Waters frankly enough all it was necessary Miss Smith-Waters
should know; but she said it with such daintiness that even that
conventionalized and hide-bound old maid couldn't help feeling and
recognizing the purity and nobility of her misguided action. Poor
child, Miss Smith-Waters thought; she was mistaken, of course, sadly
and grievously mistaken; but, then, 'twas her heart that misled her,
no doubt; and Miss Smith-Waters, having dim recollections of a
far-away time when she herself too possessed some rudimentary
fragment of such a central vascular organ, fairly cried over the
poor girl's letter with sympathetic shame, and remorse, and
vexation. Miss Smith-Waters could hardly be expected to understand
that if Herminia had thought her conduct in the faintest degree
wrong, or indeed anything but the highest and best for humanity, she
could never conceivably have allowed even that loving heart of hers
to hurry her into it. For Herminia's devotion to principle was not
less but far greater than Miss Smith-Waters's own; only, as it
happened, the principles themselves were diametrically opposite.
Herminia wrote her note with not a few tears for poor Miss
Smith-Waters's disappointment. That is the worst of living a life
morally ahead of your contemporaries; what you do with profoundest
conviction of its eternal rightness cannot fail to arouse hostile
and painful feelings even in the souls of the most right-minded of
your friends who still live in bondage to the conventional lies and
the conventional injustices. It is the good, indeed, who are most
against you. Still, Herminia steeled her heart to tell the simple
truth,—how, for the right's sake and humanity's she had made up her
mind to eschew the accursed thing, and to strike one bold blow for
the freedom and unfettered individuality of women. She knew in what
obloquy her action would involve her, she said; but she knew too,
that to do right for right's sake was a duty imposed by nature upon
every one of us; and that the clearer we could see ahead, and the
farther in front we could look, the more profoundly did that duty
shine forth for us. For her own part, she had never shrunk from
doing what she knew to be right for mankind in the end, though she
felt sure it must lead her to personal misery. Yet unless one woman
were prepared to lead the way, no freedom was possible. She had
found a man with whom she could spend her life in sympathy and
united usefulness; and with him she had elected to spend it in the
way pointed out to us by nature. Acting on his advice, though
somewhat against her own judgment, she meant to leave England for
the present, only returning again when she could return with the
dear life they had both been instrumental in bringing into the
world, and to which henceforth her main attention must be directed.
She signed it, "Your ever-grateful and devoted HERMINIA."
Poor Miss Smith-Waters laid down that astonishing, that incredible
letter in a perfect whirl of amazement and stupefaction. She didn't
know what to make of it. It seemed to run counter to all her
preconceived ideas of moral action. That a young girl should venture
to think for herself at all about right and wrong was passing
strange; that she should arrive at original notions upon those
abstruse subjects, which were not the notions of constituted
authority and of the universal slave-drivers and obscurantists
generally,—notions full of luminousness upon the real relations and
duties of our race,—was to poor, cramped Miss Smith-Waters
well-nigh inconceivable. That a young girl should prefer freedom to
slavery; should deem it more moral to retain her divinely-conferred
individuality in spite of the world than to yield it up to a man for
life in return for the price of her board and lodging; should refuse
to sell her own body for a comfortable home and the shelter of a
name,—these things seemed to Miss Smith-Waters, with her
smaller-catechism standards of right and wrong, scarcely short of
sheer madness. Yet Herminia had so endeared herself to the old
lady's soul that on receipt of her letter Miss Smith-Waters went
upstairs to her own room with a neuralgic headache, and never again
in her life referred to her late second mistress in any other terms
than as "my poor dear sweet misguided Herminia."
But when it became known next morning in Bower Lane that the
queenly-looking school-mistress who used to go round among "our
girls" with tickets for concerts and lectures and that, had
disappeared suddenly with the nice-looking young man who used to
come a-courting her on Sundays and evenings, the amazement and
surprise of respectable Bower Lane was simply unbounded. "Who
would have thought," the red-faced matrons of the cottages
remarked, over their quart of bitter, "the pore thing had it in
her! But there, it's these demure ones as is always the slyest!"
For Bower Lane could only judge that austere soul by its own vulgar
standard (as did also Belgravia). Most low minds, indeed, imagine
absolute hypocrisy must be involved in any striving after goodness
and abstract right-doing on the part of any who happen to
disbelieve in their own blood-thirsty deities, or their own vile
woman-degrading and prostituting morality. In the topsy-turvy
philosophy of Bower Lane and of Belgravia, what is usual is right;
while any conscious striving to be better and nobler than the mass
around one is regarded at once as either insane or criminal.
End of Chapter VII Chapter VIII.
They were bound for Italy; so Alan had decided. Turning over in his
mind the pros and cons of the situation, he had wisely determined
that Herminia's confinement had better take place somewhere else
than in England. The difficulties and inconveniences which block
the way in English lodgings would have been well-nigh insufferable;
in Italy, people would only know that an English signora and her
husband had taken apartments for a month or two in some solemn old
palazzo. To Herminia, indeed, this expatriation at such a moment
was in many ways to the last degree distasteful; for her own part,
she hated the merest appearance of concealment, and would rather
have flaunted the open expression of her supreme moral faith before
the eyes of all London. But Alan pointed out to her the many
practical difficulties, amounting almost to impossibilities, which
beset such a course; and Herminia, though it was hateful to her thus
to yield to the immoral prejudices of a false social system, gave
way at last to Alan's repeated expression of the necessity for
prudent and practical action. She would go with him to Italy, she
said, as a proof of her affection and her confidence in his
judgment, though she still thought the right thing was to stand by
her guns fearlessly, and fight it out to the bitter end undismayed
in England.
On the morning of their departure, Alan called to see his father,
and explain the situation. He felt some explanation was by this
time necessary. As yet no one in London knew anything officially
as to his relations with Herminia; and for Herminia's sake, Alan
had hitherto kept them perfectly private. But now, further
reticence was both useless and undesirable; he determined to make a
clean breast of the whole story to his father. It was early for a
barrister to be leaving town for the Easter vacation; and though
Alan had chambers of his own in Lincoln's Inn, where he lived by
himself, he was so often in and out of the house in Harley Street
that his absence from London would at once have attracted the
parental attention.
Dr. Merrick was a model of the close-shaven clear-cut London
consultant. His shirt-front was as impeccable as his moral
character was spotless—in the way that Belgravia and Harley Street
still understood spotlessness. He was tall and straight, and
unbent by age; the professional poker which he had swallowed in
early life seemed to stand him in good stead after sixty years,
though his hair had whitened fast, and his brow was furrowed with
most deliberative wrinkles. So unapproachable he looked, that not
even his own sons dared speak frankly before him. His very smile
was restrained; he hardly permitted himself for a moment that weak
human relaxation.
Alan called at Harley Street immediately after breakfast, just a
quarter of an hour before the time allotted to his father's first
patient. Dr. Merrick received him in the consulting-room with an
interrogative raising of those straight, thin eyebrows. The mere
look on his face disconcerted Alan. With an effort the son began
and explained his errand. His father settled himself down into his
ample and dignified professional chair—old oak round-backed,—and
with head half turned, and hands folded in front of him, seemed to
diagnose with rapt attention this singular form of psychological
malady. When Alan paused for a second between his halting
sentences and floundered about in search of a more delicate way of
gliding over the thin ice, his father eyed him closely with those
keen, gray orbs, and after a moment's hesitation put in a "Well,
continue," without the faintest sign of any human emotion. Alan,
thus driven to it, admitted awkwardly bit by bit that he was
leaving London before the end of term because he had managed to get
himself into delicate relations with a lady.
Dr. Merrick twirled his thumbs, and in a colorless voice enquired,
without relaxing a muscle of his set face,
"What sort of lady, please? A lady of the ballet?"
"Oh, no!" Alan cried, giving a little start of horror. "Quite
different from that. A real lady."
"They always ARE real ladies,—for the most part brought down by
untoward circumstances," his father responded coldly. "As a rule,
indeed, I observe, they're clergyman's daughters."
"This one is," Alan answered, growing hot. "In point of fact, to
prevent your saying anything you might afterwards regret, I think
I'd better mention the lady's name. It's Miss Herminia Barton, the
Dean of Dunwich's daughter."
His father drew a long breath. The corners of the clear-cut mouth
dropped down for a second, and the straight, thin eyebrows were
momentarily elevated. But he gave no other overt sign of dismay or
astonishment.
"That makes a great difference, of course," he answered, after a
long pause. "She IS a lady, I admit. And she's been to Girton."
"She has," the son replied, scarcely knowing how to continue.
Dr. Merrick twirled his thumbs once more, with outward calm, for a
minute or two. This was most inconvenient in a professional
family.
"And I understand you to say," he went on in a pitiless voice,
"Miss Barton's state of health is such that you think it advisable
to remove her at once—for her confinement, to Italy?"
"Exactly so," Alan answered, gulping down his discomfort.
The father gazed at him long and steadily.
"Well, I always knew you were a fool," he said at last with
paternal candor; "but I never yet knew you were quite such a fool
as this business shows you. You'll have to marry the girl now in
the end. Why the devil couldn't you marry her outright at first,
instead of seducing her?"
"I did not seduce her," Alan answered stoutly. "No man on earth
could ever succeed in seducing that stainless woman."
Dr. Merrick stared hard at him without changing his attitude on his
old oak chair. Was the boy going mad, or what the dickens did he
mean by it?
"You HAVE seduced her," he said slowly. "And she is NOT stainless
if she has allowed you to do so."
"It is the innocence which survives experience that I value, not
the innocence which dies with it," Alan answered gravely.
"I don't understand these delicate distinctions," Dr. Merrick
interposed with a polite sneer. "I gather from what you said just
now that the lady is shortly expecting her confinement; and as she
isn't married, you tell me, I naturally infer that SOMEBODY must
have seduced her—either you, or some other man."
It was Alan's turn now to draw himself up very stiffly.
"I beg your pardon," he answered; "you have no right to speak in
such a tone about a lady in Miss Barton's position. Miss Barton
has conscientious scruples about the marriage-tie, which in theory
I share with her; she was unwilling to enter into any relations
with me except in terms of perfect freedom."
"I see," the old man went on with provoking calmness. "She
preferred, in fact, to be, not your wife, but your mistress."
Alan rose indignantly. "Father," he said, with just wrath, "if you
insist upon discussing this matter with me in such a spirit, I must
refuse to stay here. I came to tell you the difficulty in which I
find myself, and to explain to you my position. If you won't let
me tell you in my own way, I must leave the house without having
laid the facts before you."
The father spread his two palms in front of him with demonstrative
openness. "As you will," he answered. "My time is much engaged.
I expect a patient at a quarter past ten. You must be brief,
please."
Alan made one more effort. In a very earnest voice, he began to
expound to his father Herminia's point of view. Dr. Merrick
listened for a second or two in calm impatience. Then he consulted
his watch. "Excuse me," he said. "I have just three minutes. Let
us get at once to the practical part—the therapeutics of the case,
omitting its aetiology: You're going to take the young lady to
Italy. When she gets there, will she marry you? And do you expect
me to help in providing for you both after this insane adventure?"
Alan's face was red as fire. "She will NOT marry me when she gets
to Italy," he answered decisively. "And I don't want you to do
anything to provide for either of us."
The father looked at him with the face he was wont to assume in
scanning the appearance of a confirmed monomaniac. "She will not
marry you," he answered slowly; "and you intend to go on living
with her in open concubinage! A lady of birth and position! Is
that your meaning?"
"Father," Alan cried despairingly, "Herminia would not consent to
live with me on any other terms. To her it would be disgraceful,
shameful, a sin, a reproach, a dereliction of principle. She
COULDN'T go back upon her whole past life. She lives for nothing
else but the emancipation of women."
"And you will aid and abet her in her folly?" the father asked,
looking up sharply at him. "You will persist in this evil course?
You will face the world and openly defy morality?"
"I will not counsel the woman I most love and admire to purchase
her own ease by proving false to her convictions," Alan answered
stoutly.
Dr. Merrick gazed at the watch on his table once more. Then he
rose and rang the bell. "Patient here?" he asked curtly. "Show
him in then at once. And, Napper, if Mr. Alan Merrick ever calls
again, will you tell him I'm out?—and your mistress as well, and
all the young ladies." He turned coldly to Alan. "I must guard
your mother and sisters at least," he said in a chilly voice, "from
the contamination of this woman's opinions."
Alan bowed without a word, and left the room. He never again saw
the face of his father.
End of Chapter VIII
Chapter IX.
Alan Merrick strode from his father's door that day stung with a
burning sense of wrong and injustice. More than ever before in
his life he realized to himself the abject hollowness of that
conventional code which masquerades in our midst as a system of
morals. If he had continued to "live single" as we hypocritically
phrase it, and so helped by one unit to spread the festering social
canker of prostitution, on which as basis, like some mediaeval
castle on its foul dungeon vaults, the entire superstructure of our
outwardly decent modern society is reared, his father no doubt
would have shrugged his shoulders and blinked his cold eyes, and
commended the wise young man for abstaining from marriage till his
means could permit him to keep a wife of his own class in the way
she was accustomed to. The wretched victims of that vile system
might die unseen and unpitied in some hideous back slum, without
touching one chord of remorse or regret in Dr. Merrick's nature.
He was steeled against their suffering. Or again, if Alan had sold
his virility for gold to some rich heiress of his set, like Ethel
Waterton—had bartered his freedom to be her wedded paramour in a
loveless marriage, his father would not only have gladly
acquiesced, but would have congratulated his son on his luck and
his prudence. Yet, because Alan had chosen rather to form a
blameless union of pure affection with a woman who was in every way
his moral and mental superior, but in despite of the conventional
ban of society, Dr. Merrick had cast him off as an open reprobate.
And why? Simply because that union was unsanctioned by the
exponents of a law they despised, and unblessed by the priests of a
creed they rejected. Alan saw at once it is not the intrinsic
moral value of an act such people think about, but the light in
which it is regarded by a selfish society.
Unchastity, it has been well said, is union without love; and Alan
would have none of it.
He went back to Herminia more than ever convinced of that spotless
woman's moral superiority to every one else he had ever met with.
She sat, a lonely soul, enthroned amid the halo of her own perfect
purity. To Alan, she seemed like one of those early Italian
Madonnas, lost in a glory of light that surrounds and half hides
them. He reverenced her far too much to tell her all that had
happened. How could he wound those sweet ears with his father's
coarse epithets?
They took the club train that afternoon to Paris. There they slept
the night in a fusty hotel near the Gare du Nord, and went on in
the morning by the daylight express to Switzerland. At Lucerne and
Milan they broke the journey once more. Herminia had never yet
gone further afield from England than Paris; and this first glimpse
of a wider world was intensely interesting to her. Who can help
being pleased, indeed, with that wonderful St. Gothard—the crystal
green Reuss shattering itself in white spray into emerald pools by
the side of the railway; Wasen church perched high upon its
solitary hilltop; the Biaschina ravine, the cleft rocks of Faido,
the serpentine twists and turns of the ramping line as it mounts or
descends its spiral zigzags? Dewy Alpine pasture, tossed masses of
land-slip, white narcissus on the banks, snowy peaks in the
background—all alike were fresh visions of delight to Herminia;
and she drank it all in with the pure childish joy of a poetic
nature. It was the Switzerland of her dreams, reinforced and
complemented by unsuspected detail.
One trouble alone disturbed her peace of mind upon that delightful
journey. Alan entered their names at all the hotels where they
stopped as "Mr. and Mrs. Alan Merrick of London." That deception,
as Herminia held it, cost her many qualms of conscience; but Alan,
with masculine common-sense, was firm upon the point that no other
description was practically possible; and Herminia yielded with a
sign to his greater worldly wisdom. She had yet to learn the
lesson which sooner or later comes home to all the small minority
who care a pin about righteousness, that in a world like our own,
it is impossible for the righteous always to act consistently up to
their most sacred convictions.
At Milan, they stopped long enough to *** a glimpse of the
cathedral, and to take a hasty walk through the pictured glories of
the Brera. A vague suspicion began to cross Herminia's mind, as she
gazed at the girlish Madonna of the Sposalizio, that perhaps she
wasn't quite as well adapted to love Italy as Switzerland. Nature
she understood; was art yet a closed book to her? If so, she would
be sorry; for Alan, in whom the artistic sense was largely
developed, loved his Italy dearly; and it would be a real cause of
regret to her if she fell short in any way of Alan's expectations.
Moreover, at table d'hote that evening, a slight episode occurred
which roused to the full once more poor Herminia's tender
conscience. Talk had somehow turned on Shelley's Italian wanderings;
and a benevolent-looking clergyman opposite, with that vacantly
well-meaning smile, peculiar to a certain type of country rector,
was apologizing in what he took to be a broad and generous spirit of
divine, toleration for the great moral teacher's supposed lapses
from the normal rule of tight living. Much, the benevolent-looking
gentleman opined, with beaming spectacles, must be forgiven to men
of genius. Their temptations no doubt are far keener than with most
of us. An eager imagination—a vivid sense of beauty—quick
readiness to be moved by the sight of physical or moral
loveliness—these were palliations, the old clergyman held, of much
that seemed wrong and contradictory to our eyes in the lives of so
many great men and women.
At sound of such immoral and unworthy teaching, Herminia's ardent
soul rose up in revolt within her. "Oh, no," she cried eagerly,
leaning across the table as she spoke. "I can't allow that plea.
It's degrading to Shelley, and to all true appreciation of the
duties of genius. Not less but more than most of us is the genius
bound to act up with all his might to the highest moral law, to be
the prophet and interpreter of the highest moral excellence. To
whom much is given, of him much shall be required. Just because
the man or woman of genius stands raised on a pedestal so far above
the mass have we the right to expect that he or she should point us
the way, should go before us as pioneer, should be more careful of
the truth, more disdainful of the wrong, down to the smallest
particular, than the ordinary person. There are poor souls born
into this world so petty and narrow and wanting in originality that
one can only expect them to tread the beaten track, be it ever so
cruel and wicked and mistaken. But from a Shelley or a George
Eliot, we expect greater things, and we have a right to expect
them. That's why I can never quite forgive George Eliot—who knew
the truth, and found freedom for herself, and practised it in her
life—for upholding in her books the conventional lies, the
conventional prejudices; and that's why I can never admire Shelley
enough, who, in an age of slavery, refused to abjure or to deny his
freedom, but acted unto death to the full height of his principles."
The benevolent-looking clergyman gazed aghast at Herminia. Then he
turned slowly to Alan. "Your wife," he said in a mild and
terrified voice, "is a VERY advanced lady."
Herminia longed to blurt out the whole simple truth. "I am NOT his
wife. I am not, and could never be wife or slave to any man. This
is a very dear friend, and he and I are travelling as friends
together." But a warning glance from Alan made her hold her peace
with difficulty and acquiesce as best she might in the virtual
deception. Still, the incident went to her heart, and made her
more anxious than ever to declare her convictions and her practical
obedience to them openly before the world. She remembered, oh, so
well one of her father's sermons that had vividly impressed her in
the dear old days at Dunwich Cathedral. It was preached upon the
text, "Come ye out and be ye separate."
From Milan they went on direct to Florence. Alan had decided to
take rooms for the summer at Perugia, and there to see Herminia
safely through her maternal troubles. He loved Perugia, he said;
it was cool and high-perched; and then, too, it was such a capital
place for sketching. Besides, he was anxious to complete his
studies of the early Umbrian painters. But they must have just one
week at Florence together before they went up among the hills.
Florence was the place for a beginner to find out what Italian art
was aiming at. You got it there in its full logical development—every
phase, step by step, in organic unity; while elsewhere you saw
but stages and jumps and results, interrupted here and there by
disturbing lacunae. So at Florence they stopped for a week en
route, and Herminia first learnt what Florentine art proposed to
itself.
Ah, that week in Florence! What a dream of delight! 'Twas pure
gold to Herminia. How could it well be otherwise? It seemed to
her afterwards like the last flicker of joy in a doomed life,
before its light went out and left her forever in utter darkness.
To be sure, a week is a terribly cramped and hurried time in which
to view Florence, the beloved city, whose ineffable glories need at
least one whole winter adequately to grasp them. But failing a
winter, a week with the gods made Herminia happy. She carried away
but a confused phantasmagoria, it is true, of the soaring tower of
the Palazzo Vecchio, pointing straight with its slender shaft to
heaven; of the swelling dome and huge ribs of the cathedral, seen
vast from the terrace in front of San Miniato; of the endless
Madonnas and the deathless saints niched in golden tabernacles at
the Uffizi and the Pitti; of the tender grace of Fra Angelico at
San Marco; of the infinite wealth and astounding variety of
Donatello's marble in the spacious courts of the cool Bargello.
But her window at the hotel looked straight as it could look down
the humming Calzaioli to the pierced and encrusted front of
Giotto's campanile, with the cupola of San Lorenzo in the middle
distance, and the facade of Fiesole standing out deep-blue against
the dull red glare of evening in the background. If that were not
enough to sate and enchant Herminia, she would indeed have been
difficult. And with Alan by her side, every joy was doubled.
She had never before known what it was to have her lover
continuously with her. And his aid in those long corridors, where
bambinos smiled down at her with childish lips, helped her
wondrously to understand in so short a time what they sought to
convey to her. Alan was steeped in Italy; he knew and entered into
the spirit of Tuscan art; and now for the first time Herminia found
herself face to face with a thoroughly new subject in which Alan
could be her teacher from the very beginning, as most men are
teachers to the women who depend upon them. This sense of support
and restfulness and clinging was fresh and delightful to her. It
is a woman's ancestral part to look up to the man; she is happiest
in doing it, and must long remain so; and Herminia was not sorry to
find herself in this so much a woman. She thought it delicious to
roam through the long halls of some great gallery with Alan, and
let him point out to her the pictures he loved best, explain their
peculiar merits, and show the subtle relation in which they stood
to the pictures that went before them and the pictures that came
after them, as well as to the other work of the same master or his
contemporaries. It was even no small joy to her to find that he
knew so much more about art and its message than she did; that she
could look up to his judgment, confide in his opinion, see the
truth of his criticism, profit much by his instruction. So well
did she use those seven short days, indeed, that she came to
Florence with Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, mere names;
and she went away from it feeling that she had made them real
friends and possessions for a life-time.
So the hours whirled fast in those enchanted halls, and Herminia's
soul was enriched by new tastes and new interests. O towers of
fretted stone! O jasper and porphyry! Her very state of health
made her more susceptible than usual to fresh impressions, and drew
Alan at the same time every day into closer union with her. For
was not the young life now quickening within her half his and half
hers, and did it not seem to make the father by reflex nearer and
dearer to her? Surely the child that was nurtured, unborn, on
those marble colonnades and those placid Saint Catherines must draw
in with each pulse of its antenatal nutriment some tincture of
beauty, of freedom, of culture! So Herminia thought to herself as
she lay awake at night and looked out of the window from the
curtains of her bed at the boundless dome and the tall campanile
gleaming white in the moonlight. So we have each of us
thought—especially the mothers in Israel among us—about the unborn
babe that hastens along to its birth with such a radiant halo of the
possible future ever gilding and glorifying its unseen forehead.
End of Chapter IX
Chapter X.
All happy times must end, and the happier the sooner. At one short
week's close they hurried on to Perugia.
And how full Alan had been of Perugia beforehand! He loved every
stone of the town, every shadow of the hillsides, he told Herminia
at Florence; and Herminia started on her way accordingly well
prepared to fall quite as madly in love with the Umbrian capital as
Alan himself had done.
The railway journey, indeed, seemed extremely pretty. What a march
of sweet pictures! They mounted with creaking wheels the slow
ascent up the picturesque glen where the Arno runs deep, to the
white towers of Arezzo; then Cortona throned in state on its lonely
hill-top, and girt by its gigantic Etruscan walls; next the low
bank, the lucid green water, the olive-clad slopes of reedy
Thrasymene; last of all, the sere hills and city-capped heights of
their goal, Perugia.
For its name's sake alone, Herminia was prepared to admire the
antique Umbrian capital. And Alan loved it so much, and was so
determined she ought to love it too, that she was ready to be
pleased with everything in it. Until she arrived there—and then,
oh, poor heart, what a grievous disappointment! It was late April
weather when they reached the station at the foot of that high hill
where Augusta Perusia sits lording it on her throne over the wedded
valleys of the Tiber and the Clitumnus. Tramontana was blowing.
No rain had fallen for weeks; the slopes of the lower Apennines,
ever dry and dusty, shone still drier and dustier than Alan had yet
beheld them. Herminia glanced up at the long white road, thick in
deep gray powder, that led by endless zigzags along the dreary
slope to the long white town on the shadeless hill-top. At first
sight alone, Perugia was a startling disillusion to Herminia. She
didn't yet know how bitterly she was doomed hereafter to hate every
dreary dirty street in it. But she knew at the first blush that
the Perugia she had imagined and pictured to herself didn't really
exist and had never existed.
She had figured in her own mind a beautiful breezy town, high set
on a peaked hill, in fresh and mossy country. She had envisaged
the mountains to her soul as clad with shady woods, and strewn with
huge boulders under whose umbrageous shelter bloomed waving masses
of the pretty pale blue Apennine anemones she saw sold in big
bunches at the street corners in Florence. She had imagined, in
short, that Umbria was a wilder Italian Wales, as fresh, as green,
as sweet-scented, as fountain-fed. And she knew pretty well whence
she had derived that strange and utterly false conception. She had
fancied Perugia as one of those mountain villages described by
Macaulay, the sort of hilltop stronghold
"That, hid by beech and pine, Like an eagle's nest hangs on the crest
Of purple Apennine."
Instead of that, what manner of land did she see actually before
her? Dry and shadeless hill-sides, tilled with obtrusive tilth to
their topmost summit; ploughed fields and hoary olive-groves
silvering to the wind, in interminable terraces; long suburbs,
unlovely in their gaunt, bare squalor, stretching like huge arms of
some colossal cuttlefish over the spurs and shoulders of that
desecrated mountain. No woods, no moss, no coolness, no greenery;
all nature toned down to one monotonous grayness. And this dreary
desert was indeed the place where her baby must be born, the baby
predestined to regenerate humanity!
Oh, why did they ever leave that enchanted Florence!
Meanwhile Alan had got together the luggage, and engaged a
ramshackle Perugian cab; for the public vehicles of Perugia are
perhaps, as a class, the most precarious and incoherent known to
science. However, the luggage was bundled on to the top by Our
Lady's grace, without dissolution of continuity; the lean-limbed
horses were induced by explosive volleys of sound Tuscan oaths to
make a feeble and spasmodic effort; and bit by bit the sad little
cavalcade began slowly to ascend the interminable hill that rises
by long loops to the platform of the Prefettura.
That drive was the gloomiest Herminia had ever yet taken. Was it
the natural fastidiousness of her condition, she wondered, or was
it really the dirt and foul smells of the place that made her
sicken at first sight of the wind-swept purlieus? Perhaps a little
of both; for in dusty weather Perugia is the most endless town to
get out of in Italy; and its capacity for the production of
unpleasant odors is unequalled no doubt from the Alps to Calabria.
As they reached the bare white platform at the entry to the upper
town, where Pope Paul's grim fortress once frowned to overawe the
audacious souls of the liberty-loving Umbrians, she turned mute
eyes to Alan for sympathy. And then for the first time the
terrible truth broke over her that Alan wasn't in the least
disappointed or disgusted; he knew it all before; he was accustomed
to it and liked it! As for Alan, he misinterpreted her glance,
indeed, and answered with that sort of proprietary pride we all of
us assume towards a place we love, and are showing off to a
newcomer: "Yes, I thought you'd like this view, dearest; isn't it
wonderful, wonderful? That's Assisi over yonder, that strange
white town that clings by its eyelashes to the sloping hill-side:
and those are the snowclad heights of the Gran Sasso beyond; and
that's Montefalco to the extreme right, where the sunset gleam just
catches the hill-top."
His words struck dumb horror into Herminia's soul. Poor child, how
she shrank at it! It was clear, then, instead of being shocked and
disgusted, Alan positively admired this human Sahara. With an
effort she gulped down her tears and her sighs, and pretended to
look with interest in the directions he pointed. SHE could see
nothing in it all but dry hill-sides, crowned with still drier
towns; unimagined stretches of sultry suburb; devouring wastes of
rubbish and foul immemorial kitchen-middens. And the very fact
that for Alan's sake she couldn't bear to say so—seeing how
pleased and proud he was of Perugia, as if it had been built from
his own design—made the bitterness of her disappointment more
difficult to endure. She would have given anything at that moment
for an ounce of human sympathy.
She had to learn in time to do without it.
They spent that night at the comfortable hotel, perhaps the best in
Italy. Next morning, they were to go hunting for apartments in the
town, where Alan knew of a suite that would exactly suit them.
After dinner, in the twilight, filled with his artistic joy at
being back in Perugia, his beloved Perugia, he took Herminia out
for a stroll, with a light wrap round her head, on the terrace of
the Prefettura. The air blew fresh and cool now with a certain
mountain sharpness; for, as Alan assured her with pride, they stood
seventeen hundred feet above the level of the Mediterranean. The
moon had risen; the sunset glow had not yet died off the slopes of
the Assisi hill-sides. It streamed through the perforated belfry
of San Domenico; it steeped in rose-color the slender and turreted
shaft of San Pietro, "Perugia's Pennon," the Arrowhead of Umbria.
It gilded the gaunt houses that jut out upon the spine of the Borgo
hill into the valley of the Tiber. Beyond, rose shadowy Apennines,
on whose aerial flanks towns and villages shone out clear in the
mellow moonlight. Far away on their peaks faint specks of
twinkling fire marked indistinguishable sites of high hill-top
castles.
Alan turned to her proudly. "Well, what do you think of that?" he
asked with truly personal interest.
Herminia could only gasp out in a half reluctant way, "It's a
beautiful view, Alan. Beautiful; beautiful; beautiful!"
But she felt conscious to herself it owed its beauty in the main
to the fact that the twilight obscured so much of it. To-morrow
morning, the bare hills would stand out once more in all their
pristine bareness; the white roads would shine forth as white and
dusty as ever; the obtrusive rubbish heaps would press themselves
at every turn upon eye and nostril. She hated the place, to say
the truth; it was a terror to her to think she had to stop so long
in it.
Most famous towns, in fact, need to be twice seen: the first time
briefly to face the inevitable disappointment to our expectations;
the second time, at leisure, to reconstruct and appraise the
surviving reality. Imagination so easily beggars performance.
Rome, Cairo, the Nile, are obvious examples; the grand exceptions
are Venice and Florence,—in a lesser degree, Bruges, Munich, Pisa.
As for Umbria, 'tis a poor thing; our own Devon snaps her fingers
at it.
Moreover, to say the truth, Herminia was too fresh to Italy to
appreciate the smaller or second-rate towns at their real value.
Even northerners love Florence and Venice at first sight; those
take their hearts by storm; but Perugia, Siena, Orvieto, are an
acquired taste, like olives and caviare, and it takes time to
acquire it. Alan had not made due allowance for this psychological
truth of the northern natures. A Celt in essence, thoroughly
Italianate himself, and with a deep love for the picturesque, which
often makes men insensible to dirt and discomfort, he expected to
Italianize Herminia too rapidly. Herminia, on the other hand,
belonged more strictly to the intellectual and somewhat inartistic
English type. The picturesque alone did not suffice for her.
Cleanliness and fresh air were far dearer to her soul than the
quaintest street corners, the oddest old archways; she pined in
Perugia for a green English hillside.
The time, too, was unfortunate, after no rain for weeks; for
rainlessness, besides doubling the native stock of dust, brings out
to the full the ancestral Etruscan odors of Perugia. So, when next
morning Herminia found herself installed in a dingy flat, in a
morose palazzo, in the main street of the city, she was glad that
Alan insisted on going out alone to make needful purchases of
groceries and provisions, because it gave her a chance of flinging
herself on her bed in a perfect agony of distress and disappointment,
and having a good cry, all alone, at the aspect of the home where
she was to pass so many eventful weeks of her existence.
Dusty, gusty Perugia! O baby, to be born for the freeing of woman,
was it here, was it here you must draw your first breath, in an air
polluted by the vices of centuries!
End of Chapter X �