The Impregnable Women, page 11
‘But, Eliot...’
‘What can we do? That’s what you’re going to say, isn’t it? Well, I say: stop it!’
He had thrust himself upright again, and his face, sharpened by late nearness to death and animated again by excitement, was lighted by the bright northern sky. Lysistrata was half taken by his enthusiasm, and half afraid of it. Leaning forward she put a restraining hand on his shoulder, and tried gently to make him lie down.
But he pushed away her hand, and exclaimed, ‘It’s life that’s making me talk like this. Life coming back to my demi-carcase. And life can’t do me any harm... Stop it, Lysistrata! Stop this damned farce before the whole world is a shambles, and even the grass is poisoned.’
‘But who am I, Eliot? How can I do anything? Half the world’s at war, and nobody thinks of anything else. What can I do to stop it? You might sooner expect a mouse to stop a charging lion.’
‘There’s a fable of a mouse that set free a captive lion. You could do it, Lysistrata. You’re clever and beautiful and your husband loves you. Tony is a person of importance, and you, because of yourself and because of him, would have a lot of influence if you cared to use it. But the question is, do you really want the war to be stopped?’
Lysistrata got up and went to the far-sighted window that still rattled in the sash when the wind beat on it. Between the bright feathers of the clouds were patches of dancing blue, and the pale green lands beyond the Forth were gilded with the stormy sun. The world was renewing itself. The fields were quickening and the twisted hedges putting on their leaves to shelter a quire of birds. The earth was burgeoning, and the wind was a blast of trumpets crying that man’s chief end was to glorify God for his creation and enjoy it for evermore. But war that shattered the limbs of tall young soldiers and left them in the mud to die was blasphemy and the bitter end of folly.
‘Do you honestly want to stop it?’ said Eliot.
‘Yes,’ she answered.
‘Then listen,’ he said, and lying back on his pillow began to talk in a reasonable, calm, and surprising fashion.
Lysistrata grew angry. She could not believe that he was serious, and her mood was ill-suited to a joke. Then by her repeated questions and his simple uncompromising answers, she was unwillingly persuaded that he must be in earnest; and became yet more sceptical, for what he proposed was fantastic and preternatural. It was a plan that by its very simplicity appeared outrageous, and was indeed more drastic than any precept of the most violent and radical of political revolutions.
‘But it’s impossible,’ she said at last.
‘It’s the only way,’ said Eliot.
‘But it’s farcical. No one would take it seriously.’
‘The war is a farce. The most huge and imbecile farce that ever was, because it enlists the strength of all the world to destroy what all the world most dearly values. And hundreds of millions of people are taking it seriously.’
‘But that’s different.’
‘It is indeed. Because war can achieve nothing, and what I propose may bring sanity and happiness.’
‘It’s impossible,’ she said again. ‘It wouldn’t work. No one would ever believe it could work.’
‘Try it and see. Or submit to the mass-suicide that will continue unless you put an end to it.’
Insistent in a mind still bewildered by an outrageous suggestion – a suggestion that she could not yet take quite seriously – was the thought that if she did what Eliot urged her to do, she would be betraying Tony. So at one moment swung the balance, and the next tipped over to the other side when she thought of the hatred gathering about him because he won his battles with so great a loss of men. If the war were stopped he would be saved from hatred and perhaps disgrace. And then with the buoyancy of her strong vitality the thought sprang up that it would be glorious to rebel against the folly of the world and the hateful forces that threatened Tony: to lead rebellion, to bring to their knees, so simply and with certitude, the bull-headed, arrogant, dull men who were destroying the world and themselves. Rebellion was a fine breath-taking thought, but its very splendour made her cooler self mistrustful of it.
She was excited, and her mind was confused with emotion and reason struggling somewhere for a foothold, when she said good-bye to Eliot and left him. Not thinking where she was going, she turned to the right, down a long corridor that led her away from the officers’ wing into a noisier and more crowded part of the hospital, where the wards were full of wounded soldiers who philosophically endured the close company of death, gangrene, and the high spirits of convalescence. She passed a wax-faced boy who was being wheeled on a trolley into the operating-theatre; a high-coloured, tall, and bustling nurse; a couple of cheerful blue-coated men on crutches; a sergeant of the Royal Army Medical Corps with a file of papers in his hand and a pen behind his ear; a whistling youth with an empty sleeve – and came into the entrance-hall, where the air more coldly circulated with an odd smell of soap and poverty and carbolic acid.
To the right of the hall was a waiting-ropm. The door was open, and Lysistrata could see half a dozen women sitting on benches. They sat motionless, prisoners to dread or fearful hope. They were silent, and their faces would have seemed lifeless had they not been so tired. Their clothes were poor, but all held tightly a few flowers or a little paper parcel.
Stopping for a moment by the open door, Lysistrata felt compassion like a blow, and with it a burning anger. She wanted to go in and put her arms about them. But what real comfort could she give? There was only one way to help them, one thing that would put an end to the fear in which all women lived.
She heard steps behind her, slow shuffling steps, and a sound of dismal weeping. A small, thin, oldish woman, her eyes red, her cheeks furrowed with grief, her body drooping, was supported by the arm of another woman hardly taller than herself but thick-set on short fat legs, whose own round face was incongruously chap-fallen. Both were dressed in shabby black clothes, that looked older and dirtier than they were by contrast with the white starching of the hospital Sister beside them.
She looked into the waiting-room and said, ‘We can’t take her there. We’ll go to Matron’s room – it’s just round the corner – and she can stay there till she’s feeling a bit better.’
The stout woman lugubriously agreed, but the other with a wailing cry slid from her grasp, and crouching on the stone floor as though to escape an unseen enemy, rocked to and fro in the extremity of her sorrow. Lysistrata with a protesting cry against the horror of such grief, stooped quickly and pulled her to her feet. She seemed no heavier than an old coat.
The Sister, sympathetic but worried by the knowledge of other duties that waited for her, led them to a small sparsely furnished room, and Lysistrata, half-carrying the little woman, made her lie down on a leather couch.
‘Her son or her husband?’ she asked.
‘Her son,’ said the Sister. ‘The second in three months, she says. She’s a widow, and they were all she had.’
The stout woman, kneeling clumsily beside her stricken neighbour, turned her sorrowful moonface and said, ‘I lost my own boy six weeks ago.’
Her stupid eyes filled with tears, and her lower lip everted, down-drawn and quivering like a child’s. ‘It’s a pity all those Generals and Prime Ministers can’t do their own fighting, instead of leaving it to us and ours,’ she sobbed.
There was nothing to redeem such grief as theirs, no grandeur or beauty or assurance that loss would bring some ultimate reward. Their sorrow was absolute. They had had so little wealth of life, and ail had been taken. They were ugly in their loss, and infinitely pitiable. Lysistrata knelt and kissed the thin woman’s tear-salt cheek. Her own tears fell on it.
She had made up her mind. This desolation of the innocent and brutal robbery could not go on. No matter how, the war must be’ stopped, and dignity was a little thing to sacrifice for such an end. She would be ridiculed and hated and conscious of naked impropriety. But what did that matter? War was an outrage, and outrageously she would put an end to it. If poor and wretched women could breed soldiers, then women could bring soldiers to their knees.
II
Three weeks later Lysistrata stood at one end of Lady Oriole’s drawing-room in Heriot Row, and confronted a close-packed audience of more than a hundred women. It was a remarkable gathering. The least susceptible of male observers could not have failed to remark, and be moved by, the beauty of all but a few of the assemblage; and a moderately discerning witness would have perceived that the company had been drawn from widely disparate classes of society. There were women whose manner and appearance – their insolent bienséance and quotidian elegance – showed long familiarity with the world of fashion, with the attention of press photographers, and the flattering discipline of royal courts. There were others, no less soignées and at least as lovely, who by their demeanour in contiguity with such neighbours betrayed a more modest experience of provincial society and the suburban skating-rink. A few – Rose Armour was one of them – exhibited at once a livelier composure, a happier knowledge of pre-eminence and welcome in any circle, than even the youngest of the fashionable ladies; and there was a score of ingenuous or semi-ingenuous beauties whose remarkable charm of figure, features, and complexion must have been the delight and despair of a multitude of postmen, sailors, sergeants, policemen, and other humble but virile citizens. The small minority undistinguished by physical virtue were patently influential by reason of their social position or force of character.
Lysistrata stood like a storied queen as she addressed them. Standing alone, her height was exaggerated, and in repose her face had a masterful nobility. Under the spell of enthusiasm or other emotion – friendship made all its lines easier, her eyes lambent – her aspect would change to a thrusting fierceness or a lovely intimacy, for her lips were mobile and apt in smiling. She used no gesture except, at rare intervals, an odd fluttering movement of her long hands, raising them only waist high, and with so small a movement giving the impression of great strength with difficulty controlled.
‘Till a few weeks ago,’ she said, ‘I believed with all my heart and mind that our duty was to win the war. But I have changed my mind. I do not apologize for that. A mind that cannot be changed, when facts reveal that its position is untenable, is only a dead mind. I say now that our duty is to stop the war, and I speak as a woman to other women, for we can bring it to an end.
‘I do not want to talk of politics. Politics are a male invention. When men have interests that must be defended, they contrive a screen of words which they call a policy, and if they can persuade a few simpler people that their screen is of general value, then they are ranked as politicians. But we are women, and our concern is not the defence of any clique or faction or vested interest. It is the defence and happiness of all humanity. A man may have many interests in life, and never know which is the greatest. But a woman, though she has as many interests as any man, always knows that her chief concern is with the preservation and reproduction of life itself, and with happiness, which is the only justification for life. We can be politicians, but only in our spare time. We can be theorists, but only in our leisure moments. We are fundamentally and always, by reason of our nature and constitution, humanitarians and realists.’
There was a little rather puzzled applause. Lady Oriole, sitting beside Lysistrata, clapped vigorously; and a dozen or so in the audience followed suit – Rose Armour because she was warm-hearted and loved to be applauded herself, and the motherly Mrs Graham because she heartily approved what Lysistrata was saying. But the majority were lukewarm. The lovely young women of the upper classes felt that any display of reason and sincerity was probably subversive; the beautiful frequenters of the skating-rink and the provincial drawing-room were willing enough to agree with Lady Lysistrata, but naturally cautious about committing themselves to any definite opinion; and the exquisite servant-girls, barmaids, and cinema attendants hadn’t the faintest notion what she was talking about.
‘Nobody can deny,’ Lysistrata continued, ‘that war is an evil thing. But many people, perhaps most people, believe that it is a necessary evil, and we have to put up with it. Well, to my mind that is simply defeatism. Many things combine to create a war, and perhaps the most powerful of them all is stupidity. And when a war has been started, it is allowed to continue only because everybody gets more and more stupid the longer it lasts. We lose the habit of thinking for ourselves; we take a distorted view of things; we become inured to evil and callous about human misery; we accept words like loyalty and patriotism as something holy and compulsive, and never stop to ask ourselves the proper object of loyalty, or the true path of patriotism; we forget what we really want, and believe what our leaders tell us we ought to want. – But is it necessary to behave so foolishly? Is our stupidity really incurable? I don’t believe it is. I believe it can be cured, and now is the time to cure it. To effect a real and lasting and radical cure. And you are the people who can do it.
‘I want you, for the next few minutes, to be thoroughly selfish. To think only of what the war means to you, and what it will mean to you for the rest of your lives. But if you’re going to be truly selfish, you must be absolutely honest. You must acknowledge your real feelings, and confess your strongest, your innermost desires. Well, what do we all want from life? Will anyone here deny that her dearest and most constant wish is for happiness? But we are women – most of us are young women – and what we most often mean by happiness is love. We want a home and babies and the tenderness of a husband. It is right and proper that this should be so. Our whole nature was so designed that a man’s love and the love of children should be our crying need and our deepest thought. But what is the war doing to our husbands and the fathers of our children? It’s killing them. They’re being mutilated, and ruined in health, and killed.
‘In the last war there were more than a million British casualties. But that was not all. As well as the million dead, there were hundreds of thousands of young men whose health and strength were destroyed, whose nerves were shattered, whose sanity was undermined. And so, when the war was over, there were countless women cordemned to a loveless barren existence, and countless others whose lives were ruined because the war had wrecked the mind or body of the men they married. The agony of the dead soldiers was unspeakable, but it lasted only a little time. But the misery of the women, condemned by their death to hunger and loneliness, lasted all their lives. That was the legacy of the old war. And now, a generation later, we are in the midst of another war at least as destructive, a war that may last as long as the old one, a war that will leave another legacy of bitterness and starvation. The men are suffering today, but we shall suffer tomorrow. We are young, and our lives are before us. But how shall we endure them if we are to be robbed of all that makes life dear to us? The men who are being killed are our lovers, and the fathers of our children. It is our happiness that is being thrown away on every battlefield. Our leaders say there can be no peace without victory. But every victory means that thousands of women are being condemned to barren misery, to wasted years, to jealousy of their neighbours, to life unwarmed by love and the children their bodies demand, to a lonely and unwanted old age. Is any victory worth such a price as that? Are you yourselves prepared to pay that price? Or will you join together to bring the wickedness of war for ever to an end?’
There was a good deal of applause as Lysistrata sat down, but most of it was still doubtful. Some of the more ingenuous young women of humble station were openly weeping, but many of the betitled and much be-photographed beauties in front were hostile or sceptical; while the loveliness of the middle-classes had been somewhat upset by Lysistrata’s frank reference to the nature of the female constitution and their private aspirations. They had been impressed and frightened, but they were as yet hardly willing to admit, by open applause, that their feelings were indeed so natural.
Lady Oriole, leaning towards Lysistrata, whispered her congratulations and suggested that this was the time for her to say a few words. But before Lysistrata could reply, a tall and remarkably beautiful girl in the middle of the room rose and began to speak in an accent of uncertain refinement and a mood of obvious defiance. Her appearance was striking, and Lysistrata, searching her memory, suddenly remembered where she had seen her before. It was in the New Carlton Hotel in Blackpool, on the night before Eliot went to Germany. She had been with a stout brutal-looking man who had behaved badly and made a great nuisance of himself.
Miss Ivy FitzAubrey had no lack of confidence. ‘I don’t want to say anything against what Lady Lysistrata has been saying,’ she declared, ‘because everybody is entitled to their own opinions. But I would like to ask her what does she mean by saying that the war is wicked? A gentleman-friend of mine, who happens to be in a very important position, was telling me only the other day that it was a very stimulating thing to happen, which brought out all the best in everybody, and didn’t leave any time for selfishness or unnoble thoughts. Well, that’s what it seems to me, because I’ve been doing war work myself for quite a long time now. And what’s more, it isn’t true to say that everyone has a boy-friend who’s in the army, and so is likely to get killed. Because the gentleman-friend of who I was talking is much too important to ever get sent to the front, so that changes a girl’s point of view, doesn’t it? I mean, there isn’t any fear of things happening the same as Lady Lysistrata said they would happen, and a good lot of us have decided not to have any babies anyway, because there are other things in life besides, and it takes so much out of a girl who isn’t as strong as other girls are. I mean, you’ve got to allow for what everyone thinks herself, haven’t you?’
