The Woman Who Did
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Grant Allen >> The Woman Who Did
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Charles Aldarondo Aldarondo@yahoo.com
Don Lainson dlainson@sympatico.ca
THE WOMAN WHO DID
by
Grant Allen
1895
TO MY DEAR WIFE
TO WHOM I HAVE DEDICATED MY TWENTY HAPPIEST YEARS
I DEDICATE ALSO
THIS BRIEF MEMORIAL OF A LESS FORTUNATE LOVE
WRITTEN AT PERUGIA
SPRING 1893
FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE
WHOLLY AND SOLELY TO SATISFY
MY OWN TASTE
AND MY OWN CONSCIENCE
PREFACE
"But surely no woman would ever dare to do so," said my friend.
"I knew a woman who did," said I; "and this is her story."
I.
Mrs. Dewsbury's lawn was held by those who knew it the loveliest in
Surrey. The smooth and springy sward that stretched in front of
the house was all composed of a tiny yellow clover. It gave
beneath the foot like the pile on velvet. One's gaze looked forth
from it upon the endless middle distances of the oak-clad Weald,
with the uncertain blue line of the South Downs in the background.
Ridge behind ridge, the long, low hills of paludina limestone stood
out in successive tiers, each thrown up against its neighbor by the
misty haze that broods eternally over the wooded valley; till,
roaming across them all, the eye rested at last on the rearing
scarp of Chanctonbury Ring, faintly pencilled on the furthest skyline.
Shadowy phantoms of dim heights framed the verge to east and
west. Alan Merrick drank it in with profound satisfaction. After
those sharp and clear-cut Italian outlines, hard as lapis lazuli,
the mysterious vagueness, the pregnant suggestiveness, of our
English scenery strikes the imagination; and Alan was fresh home
from an early summer tour among the Peruginesque solidities of the
Umbrian Apennines. "How beautiful it all is, after all," he said,
turning to his entertainer. "In Italy 'tis the background the
painter dwells upon; in England, we look rather at the middle
distance."
Mrs. Dewsbury darted round her the restless eye of a hostess, to
see upon whom she could socially bestow him. "Oh, come this way,"
she said, sweeping across the lawn towards a girl in a blue dress
at the opposite corner. "You must know our new-comer. I want to
introduce you to Miss Barton, from Cambridge. She's SUCH a nice
girl too,--the Dean of Dunwich's daughter."
Alan Merrick drew back with a vague gesture of distaste. "Oh,
thank you," he replied; "but, do you know, I don't think I like
deans, Mrs. Dewsbury." Mrs. Dewsbury's smile was recondite and
diplomatic. "Then you'll exactly suit one another," she answered
with gay wisdom. "For, to tell you the truth, I don't think SHE
does either."
The young man allowed himself to be led with a passive protest in
the direction where Mrs. Dewsbury so impulsively hurried him. He
heard that cultivated voice murmuring in the usual inaudible tone
of introduction, "Miss Barton, Mr. Alan Merrick." Then he raised
his hat. As he did so, he looked down at Herminia Barton's face
with a sudden start of surprise. Why, this was a girl of most
unusual beauty!
She was tall and dark, with abundant black hair, richly waved above
the ample forehead; and she wore a curious Oriental-looking navy-blue
robe of some soft woollen stuff, that fell in natural folds
and set off to the utmost the lissome grace of her rounded figure.
It was a sort of sleeveless sack, embroidered in front with
arabesques in gold thread, and fastened obliquely two inches below
the waist with a belt of gilt braid, and a clasp of Moorish jewel-work.
Beneath it, a bodice of darker silk showed at the arms and
neck, with loose sleeves in keeping. The whole costume, though
quite simple in style, a compromise either for afternoon or
evening, was charming in its novelty, charming too in the way it
permitted the utmost liberty and variety of movement to the lithe
limbs of its wearer. But it was her face particularly that struck
Alan Merrick at first sight. That face was above all things the
face of a free woman. Something so frank and fearless shone in
Herminia's glance, as her eye met his, that Alan, who respected
human freedom above all other qualities in man or woman, was taken
on the spot by its perfect air of untrammelled liberty. Yet it was
subtle and beautiful too, undeniably beautiful. Herminia Barton's
features, I think, were even more striking in their way in later
life, when sorrow had stamped her, and the mark of her willing
martyrdom for humanity's sake was deeply printed upon them. But
their beauty then was the beauty of holiness, which not all can
appreciate. In her younger days, as Alan Merrick first saw her,
she was beautiful still with the first flush of health and strength
and womanhood in a free and vigorous English girl's body. A
certain lofty serenity, not untouched with pathos, seemed to strike
the keynote. But that was not all. Some hint of every element in
the highest loveliness met in that face and form,--physical,
intellectual, emotional, moral.
"You'll like him, Herminia," Mrs. Dewsbury said, nodding. "He's
one of your own kind, as dreadful as you are; very free and
advanced; a perfect firebrand. In fact, my dear child, I don't
know which of you makes my hair stand on end most." And with that
introductory hint, she left the pair forthwith to their own
devices.
Mrs. Dewsbury was right. It took those two but little time to feel
quite at home with one another. Built of similar mould, each
seemed instinctively to grasp what each was aiming at. Two or
three turns pacing up and down the lawn, two or three steps along
the box-covered path at the side, and they read one another
perfectly. For he was true man, and she was real woman.
"Then you were at Girton?" Alan asked, as he paused with one hand
on the rustic seat that looks up towards Leith Hill, and the
heather-clad moorland.
"Yes, at Girton," Herminia answered, sinking easily upon the bench,
and letting one arm rest on the back in a graceful attitude of
unstudied attention. "But I didn't take my degree," she went on
hurriedly, as one who is anxious to disclaim some too great honor
thrust upon her. "I didn't care for the life; I thought it
cramping. You see, if we women are ever to be free in the world,
we must have in the end a freeman's education. But the education
at Girton made only a pretence at freedom. At heart, our girls
were as enslaved to conventions as any girls elsewhere. The whole
object of the training was to see just how far you could manage to
push a woman's education without the faintest danger of her
emancipation."
"You are right," Alan answered briskly, for the point was a pet one
with him. "I was an Oxford man myself, and I know that servitude.
When I go up to Oxford now and see the girls who are being ground
in the mill at Somerville, I'm heartily sorry for them. It's worse
for them than for us; they miss the only part of university life
that has educational value. When we men were undergraduates, we
lived our whole lives, lived them all round, developing equally
every fibre of our natures. We read Plato, and Aristotle, and John
Stuart Mill, to be sure,--and I'm not quite certain we got much
good from them; but then our talk and thought were not all of
books, and of what we spelt out in them. We rowed on the river, we
played in the cricket-field, we lounged in the billiard-rooms, we
ran up to town for the day, we had wine in one another's rooms
after hall in the evening, and behaved like young fools, and threw
oranges wildly at one another's heads, and generally enjoyed
ourselves. It was all very silly and irrational, no doubt, but it
was life, it was reality; while the pretended earnestness of those
pallid Somerville girls is all an affectation of one-sided
culture."
"That's just it," Herminia answered, leaning back on the rustic
seat like David's Madame Recamier. "You put your finger on the
real blot when you said those words, developing equally every fibre
of your natures. That's what nobody yet wants us women to do.
They're trying hard enough to develop us intellectually; but
morally and socially they want to mew us up just as close as ever.
And they won't succeed. The zenana must go. Sooner or later, I'm
sure, if you begin by educating women, you must end by emancipating
them."
"So I think too," Alan answered, growing every moment more
interested. "And for my part, it's the emancipation, not the mere
education, that most appeals to me."
"Yes, I've always felt that," Herminia went on, letting herself out
more freely, for she felt she was face to face with a sympathetic
listener. "And for that reason, it's the question of social and
moral emancipation that interests me far more than the mere
political one,--woman's rights as they call it. Of course I'm a
member of all the woman's franchise leagues and everything of that
sort,--they can't afford to do without a single friend's name on
their lists at present; but the vote is a matter that troubles me
little in itself, what I want is to see women made fit to use it.
After all, political life fills but a small and unimportant part in
our total existence. It's the perpetual pressure of social and
ethical restrictions that most weighs down women."
Alan paused and looked hard at her. "And they tell me," he said in
a slow voice, "you're the Dean of Dunwich's daughter!"
Herminia laughed lightly,--a ringing girlish laugh. Alan noticed
it with pleasure. He felt at once that the iron of Girton had not
entered into her soul, as into so many of our modern young women's.
There was vitality enough left in her for a genuine laugh of
innocent amusement. "Oh yes," she said, merrily; "that's what I
always answer to all possible objectors to my ways and ideas. I
reply with dignity, '_I_ was brought up in the family of a
clergyman of the Church of England.'"
"And what does the Dean say to your views?" Alan interposed
doubtfully.
Herminia laughed again. If her eyes were profound, two dimples
saved her. "I thought you were with us," she answered with a
twinkle; "now, I begin to doubt it. You don't expect a man of
twenty-two to be governed in all things, especially in the
formation of his abstract ideas, by his father's opinions. Why
then a woman?"
"Why, indeed?" Alan answered. "There I quite agree with you. I
was thinking not so much of what is right and reasonable as of what
is practical and usual. For most women, of course, are--well, more
or less dependent upon their fathers."
"But I am not," Herminia answered, with a faint suspicion of just
pride in the undercurrent of her tone. "That's in part why I went
away so soon from Girton. I felt that if women are ever to be
free, they must first of all be independent. It is the dependence
of women that has allowed men to make laws for them, socially and
ethically. So I wouldn't stop at Girton, partly because I felt the
life was one-sided,--our girls thought and talked of nothing else
on earth except Herodotus, trigonometry, and the higher culture,--
but partly also because I wouldn't be dependent on any man, not
even my own father. It left me freer to act and think as I would.
So I threw Girton overboard, and came up to live in London."
"I see," Alan replied. "You wouldn't let your schooling interfere
with your education. And now you support yourself?" he went on
quite frankly.
Herminia nodded assent.
"Yes, I support myself," she answered; "in part by teaching at a
high school for girls, and in part by doing a little hack-work for
newspapers."
"Then you're just down here for your holidays, I suppose?" Alan put
in, leaning forward.
"Yes, just down here for my holidays. I've lodgings on the
Holmwood, in such a dear old thatched cottage; roses peep in at the
porch, and birds sing on the bushes. After a term in London, it's
a delicious change for one."
"But are you alone?" Alan interposed again, still half hesitating.
Herminia smiled once more; his surprise amused her. "Yes, quite
alone," she answered. "But if you seem so astonished at that, I
shall believe you and Mrs. Dewsbury have been trying to take me in,
and that you're not really with us. Why shouldn't a woman come
down alone to pretty lodgings in the country?"
"Why not, indeed?" Alan echoed in turn. "It's not at all that I
disapprove, Miss Barton; on the contrary, I admire it; it's only
that one's surprised to find a woman, or for the matter of that
anybody, acting up to his or her convictions. That's what I've
always felt; 'tis the Nemesis of reason; if people begin by
thinking rationally, the danger is that they may end by acting
rationally also."
Herminia laughed. "I'm afraid," she answered, "I've already
reached that pass. You'll never find me hesitate to do anything on
earth, once I'm convinced it's right, merely because other people
think differently on the subject."
Alan looked at her and mused. She was tall and stately, but her
figure was well developed, and her form softly moulded. He admired
her immensely. How incongruous an outcome from a clerical family!
"It's curious," he said, gazing hard at her, "that you should be a
dean's daughter."
"On the contrary," Herminia answered, with perfect frankness, "I
regard myself as a living proof of the doctrine of heredity."
"How so?" Alan inquired.
"Well, my father was a Senior Wrangler," Herminia replied, blushing
faintly; "and I suppose that implies a certain moderate development
of the logical faculties. In HIS generation, people didn't apply
the logical faculties to the grounds of belief; they took those for
granted; but within his own limits, my father is still an acute
reasoner. And then he had always the ethical and social interests.
Those two things--a love of logic, and a love of right--are the
forces that tend to make us what we call religious. Worldly people
don't care for fundamental questions of the universe at all; they
accept passively whatever is told them; they think they think, and
believe they believe it. But people with an interest in
fundamental truth inquire for themselves into the constitution of
the cosmos; if they are convinced one way, they become what we call
theologians; if they are convinced the other way, they become what
we call free-thinkers. Interest in the problem is common to both;
it's the nature of the solution alone that differs in the two
cases."
"That's quite true," Alan assented. "And have you ever noticed
this curious corollary, that you and I can talk far more
sympathetically with an earnest Catholic, for example, or an
earnest Evangelical, than we can talk with a mere ordinary worldly
person."
"Oh dear, yes," Herminia answered with conviction. "Thought will
always sympathize with thought. It's the unthinking mass one can
get no further with."
Alan changed the subject abruptly. This girl so interested him.
She was the girl he had imagined, the girl he had dreamt of, the
girl he had thought possible, but never yet met with. "And you're
in lodgings on the Holmwood here?" he said, musing. "For how much
longer?"
"For, six weeks, I'm glad to say," Herminia answered, rising.
"At what cottage?"
"Mrs. Burke's,--not far from the station."
"May I come to see you there?"
Herminia's clear brown eyes gazed down at him, all puzzlement.
"Why, surely," she answered; "I shall be delighted to see you!"
She paused for a second. "We agree about so many things," she went
on; "and it's so rare to find a man who can sympathize with the
higher longings in women."
"When are you likeliest to be at home?" Alan asked.
"In the morning, after breakfast,--that is, at eight o'clock,"
Herminia answered, smiling; "or later, after lunch, say two or
thereabouts."
"Six weeks," Alan repeated, more to himself than to her. Those six
week were precious. Not a moment of them must be lost. "Then I
think," he went on quietly, "I shall call tomorrow."
A wave of conscious pleasure broke over Herminia's cheek, blush
rose on white lily; but she answered nothing. She was glad this
kindred soul should seem in such a hurry to renew her acquaintance.
II.
Next afternoon, about two o'clock, Alan called with a tremulous
heart at the cottage. Herminia had heard not a little of him
meanwhile from her friend Mrs. Dewsbury. "He's a charming young
man, my dear," the woman of the world observed with confidence.
"I felt quite sure you'd attract one another. He's so clever and
advanced, and everything that's dreadful,--just like yourself,
Herminia. But then he's also very well connected. That's always
something, especially when one's an oddity. You wouldn't go down
one bit yourself, dear, if you weren't a dean's daughter. The
shadow of a cathedral steeple covers a multitude of sins. Mr.
Merrick's the son of the famous London gout doctor,--you MUST know
his name,--all the royal dukes flock to him. He's a barrister
himself, and in excellent practice. You might do worse, do you
know, than to go in for Alan Merrick."
Herminia's lip curled an almost imperceptible curl as she answered
gravely, "I don't think you quite understand my plans in life, Mrs.
Dewsbury. It isn't my present intention to GO IN for anybody."
But Mrs. Dewsbury shook her head. She knew the world she lived in.
"Ah, I've heard a great many girls talk like that beforehand," she
answered at once with her society glibness; "but when the right man
turned up, they soon forgot their protestations. It makes a lot of
difference, dear, when a man really asks you!"
Herminia bent her head. "You misunderstand me," she replied. "I
don't mean to say I will never fall in love. I expect to do that.
I look forward to it frankly,--it is a woman's place in life. I
only mean to say, I don't think anything will ever induce me to
marry,--that is to say, legally."
Mrs. Dewsbury gave a start of surprise and horror. She really
didn't know what girls were coming to nowadays,--which, considering
her first principles, was certainly natural. But if only she had
seen the conscious flush with which Herminia received her visitor
that afternoon, she would have been confirmed in her belief that
Herminia, after all, in spite of her learning, was much like other
girls. In which conclusion Mrs. Dewsbury would not in the end have
been fully justified.
When Alan arrived, Herminia sat at the window by the quaintly
clipped box-tree, a volume of verse held half closed in her hand,
though she was a great deal too honest and transparent to pretend
she was reading it. She expected Alan to call, in accordance with
his promise, for she had seen at Mrs. Dewsbury's how great an
impression she produced upon him; and, having taught herself that
it was every true woman's duty to avoid the affectations and
self-deceptions which the rule of man has begotten in women, she
didn't try to conceal from herself the fact that she on her side
was by no means without interest in the question how soon he would
pay her his promised visit. As he appeared at the rustic gate in
the privet hedge, Herminia looked out, and changed color with
pleasure when she saw him push it open.
"Oh, how nice of you to look me up so soon!" she cried, jumping
from her seat (with just a glance at the glass) and strolling out
bareheaded into the cottage garden. "Isn't this a charming place?
Only look at our hollyhocks! Consider what an oasis after six
months of London!"
She seemed even prettier than last night, in her simple white
morning dress, a mere ordinary English gown, without affectation of
any sort, yet touched with some faint reminiscence of a flowing
Greek chiton. Its half-classical drapery exactly suited the severe
regularity of her pensive features and her graceful figure. Alan
thought as he looked at her he had never before seen anybody who
appeared at all points so nearly to approach his ideal of
womanhood. She was at once so high in type, so serene, so
tranquil, and yet so purely womanly.
"Yes, it IS a lovely place," he answered, looking around at the
clematis that drooped from the gable-ends. "I'm staying myself
with the Watertons at the Park, but I'd rather have this pretty
little rose-bowered garden than all their balustrades and Italian
terraces. The cottagers have chosen the better part. What
gillyflowers and what columbines! And here you look out so
directly on the common. I love the gorse and the bracken, I love
the stagnant pond, I love the very geese that tug hard at the
silverweed, they make it all seem so deliciously English."
"Shall we walk to the ridge?" Herminia asked with a sudden burst of
suggestion. "It's too rare a day to waste a minute of it indoors.
I was waiting till you came. We can talk all the freer for the
fresh air on the hill-top."
Nothing could have suited Alan Merrick better, and he said so at
once. Herminia disappeared for a moment to get her hat. Alan
observed almost without observing it that she was gone but for a
second. She asked none of that long interval that most women
require for the simplest matter of toilet. She was back again
almost instantly, bright and fresh and smiling, in the most modest
of hats, set so artlessly on her head that it became her better
than all art could have made it. Then they started for a long
stroll across the breezy common, yellow in places with upright
spikes of small summer furze, and pink with wild pea-blossom. Bees
buzzed, broom crackled, the chirp of the field cricket rang shrill
from the sand-banks. Herminia's light foot tripped over the spongy
turf. By the top of the furthest ridge, looking down on North
Holmwood church, they sat side by side for a while on the close
short grass, brocaded with daisies, and gazed across at the cropped
sward of Denbies and the long line of the North Downs stretching
away towards Reigate. Tender grays and greens melted into one
another on the larches hard by; Betchworth chalk-pit gleamed dreamy
white in the middle distance. They had been talking earnestly all
the way, like two old friends together; for they were both of them
young, and they felt at once that nameless bond which often draws
one closer to a new acquaintance at first sight than years of
converse. "How seriously you look at life," Alan cried at last, in
answer to one of Herminias graver thoughts. "I wonder what makes
you take it so much more earnestly than all other women?"
"It came to me all at once when I was about sixteen," Herminia
answered with quiet composure, like one who remarks upon some
objective fact of exernal nature. "It came to me in listening to a
sermon of my father's,--which I always look upon as one more
instance of the force of heredity. He was preaching on the text,
'The Truth shall make you Free,' and all that he said about it
seemed to me strangely alive, to be heard from a pulpit. He said
we ought to seek the Truth before all things, and never to rest
till we felt sure we had found it. We should not suffer our souls
to be beguiled into believing a falsehood merely because we
wouldn't take the trouble to find out the Truth for ourselves by
searching. We must dig for it; we must grope after it. And as he
spoke, I made up my mind, in a flash of resolution, to find out the
Truth for myself about everything, and never to be deterred from
seeking it, and embracing it, and ensuing it when found, by any
convention or preconception. Then he went on to say how the Truth
would make us Free, and I felt he was right. It would open our
eyes, and emancipate us from social and moral slaveries. So I made
up my mind, at the same time, that whenever I found the Truth I
would not scruple to follow it to its logical conclusions, but
would practise it in my life, and let it make me Free with perfect
freedom. Then, in search of Truth, I got my father to send me to
Girton; and when I had lighted on it there half by accident, and it
had made me Free indeed, I went away from Girton again, because I
saw if I stopped there I could never achieve and guard my freedom.
From that day forth I have aimed at nothing but to know the Truth,
and to act upon it freely; for, as Tennyson says,--
'To live by law
Acting the law we live by without fear,
And because right is right to follow right,
Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence.'"
She broke off suddenly, and looking up, let her eye rest for a
second on the dark thread of clambering pines that crest the down
just above Brockham. "This is dreadfully egotistical," she cried,
with a sharp little start. "I ought to apologize for talking so
much to you about my own feelings."
Alan gazed at her and smiled. "Why apologize," he asked, "for
managing to be interesting? You, are not egotistical at all. What
you are telling me is history,--the history of a soul, which is
always the one thing on earth worth hearing. I take it as a
compliment that you should hold me worthy to hear it. It is a
proof of confidence. Besides," he went on, after a second's pause,
"I am a man; you are a woman. Under those circumstances, what
would otherwise be egotism becomes common and mutual. When two
people sympathize with one another, all they can say about
themselves loses its personal tinge and merges into pure human and
abstract interest."
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