The Impregnable Women, page 13
All these warring governments were in their nature evil. They had imprisoned their people and diminished their humanity by giving to a whole nation the likeness and single purpose of a machine. They had made, of communities that delighted in creation, machines that were capable only of destruction. They had forbidden the telling of the truth, and diligently commanded the teaching of lies. They lauded murder, and made mercy a thing of shame. Having suborned their clergy to announce that God was their stay and companion, they had blackened God’s face by making him their confederate in spreading falsehood, doing murder, and wasting his creation. They had robbed both strangers and their own people of decency and happiness and life; and they made a virtue of their resolution to continue a policy of spiritual destruction and corporal death.
Nor could the common people do anything against their governments, or resist their evil doing; because their governments were part of themselves. However it had been nominated and elected, in Russia and Britain, in France and Germany and Yugoslavia, the government was a piece of the whole nation and represented it; and the evil done by the governments was evil extracted, as though by a centrifuge, from all mankind.
IV
‘But how could we tell them? How could we talk to men about anything like that?’
Red as a peony, and furious with her own embarrassment, a little neat pretty woman hurled her angry questions at Lysistrata; and in the babble of other questions, expostulation, and indignant comment, they disappeared like pebbles tossed into the loud and ceaseless billows of the Atlantic sea.
Lysistrata’s plan had raised a storm. Nearly everybody was opposed to it, and most of them were very violently opposed.
‘It wouldn’t be right!’ exclaimed a tall dark girl with the sinuous grace and the wild eye of a black swan. ‘My husband’s coming home on leave next month, and how – how could I treat him like that?’
‘No, it wouldn’t be right!’
‘And I couldn’t do it! Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t do it!’ The new speaker was tearful, and amid little sniffs dabbed her eyes, and now her nose, with a small wet kerchief. Her hair was pale gold, her eyes like hyacinths, and her chin was inconspicuous. ‘I’vealways been so warm-hearted,’ she sobbed.
Infected by her example, another young woman began to weep, and fumbling in her bag – which carried badge of the Royal Artillery – she let fall a gold powder-box decorated with the crest of the Gloucestershire Regiment, and found at last her handkerchief under a cigarette-case with the inscription, HMS Valiant. ‘I’m sure nobody could have a warmer heart than mine,’ she averred.
‘You can’t deny them anything when they come home on leave,’ protested an ox-eyed barmaid with dewy lips and a bosom of oriental luxury.
‘And even if you did...’
‘It wouldn’t do any good, would it? She doesn’t know my Tom, or what he’s like if he’s only been away for a week.’
‘And think of your own feelings. We’re human too, aren’t we?’
The tumult increased, and then, having risen to a ragged height, subsided with strange celerity to a muttering quietude that was almost silence. Many of the ladies who had given loudest vent to their feelings were now a little ashamed of themselves, and by coughing in a small artificial way, and looking round them with haughty curiosity as if to see who had been making all the noise, they tried to wipe away their consciousness of having been startled into a very vulgar display of emotion; while others with greater candour considered their appearance in small mirrors and deliberately repaired their smirched complexions.
A young woman in the front row, one of the small minority that had heard Lysistrata’s proposal without obvious dismay, took advantage of the quietness to offer an unpopular criticism. She was as calmly and exactly beautiful as a drawing by Ingres, and her voice had the clear cool sound of a convent bell.
‘The real difficulty,’ she said, ‘is that none of us can be trusted. You may persuade us to adopt your plan, though it doesn’t seem likely at the moment, but put us in a position to keep our promises, and we’d either honestly forget or find a dozen excuses for breaking them. No woman was ever bound by a promise, and no woman in the same room with her lover is going to give two thoughts to common sense or the common weal. Forgive my putting it so crudely, but all your prettifying won’t conceal the fact that we’re selfish, shallow, and quite untrustworthy.’
This brutal denigration of the female character aroused even greater, because more homogeneous, opposition than Lysistrata’s proposal; and the Botticellian young woman, who had previously made so brave an appeal for altruism, got up and cried with a sweet disarming passion, ‘That’s a shameful thing to say! Any woman worthy of the name is true and thoughtful of others. When I first heard Lady Lysistrata’s plan, I didn’t like it, because I – well, it seemed rather immodest, though really, of course, it’s just the opposite – but now I see how necessary it is, and when my fiancé comes home...’
‘You’ll go down like a ninepin,’ said the young woman who might have been drawn by Ingres.
Lysistrata rose hurriedly and began to speak. ‘We have been told that no woman can keep a promise,’ she exclaimed, with rhetorical indignation. ‘Do you accept that statement, or do you reject it?’
‘Reject it!’
‘It isn’t true!’
‘It’s men who are liars...’
With various phraseology and general agreement the allegation was rejected.
‘We have also been told that women are utterly selfish, and take no thought for the future, no thought for their neighbours. That women, like animals, are ruled only by their appetites. Is that true or false?’
‘False, false!’
‘Then I can rely on you, and we will stop the war!’
Diverse incertitude and numerous doubt, like the smoke of a wetted pentecost, descended again upon her audience; but very earnestly Lysistrata continued.
‘You will be surprised,’ she said, ‘by the ease with which we shall win our victory. Only be resolute, and the future is ours, our happiness secure! For a little while give up the joy of love, and you will make love safe for ever. I know that for many of you it will not be easy, because your husbands and your sweethearts will plead with you, and you will find it hard to deny them. But for their own sakes you must! Not only your happiness, but their lives, depend on your steadfastness and determination. You must be strong – but you mustn’t show your strength till the proper time. Make yourselves as lovely and attractive as you can. Wear your prettiest clothes. Use every aid to beauty, and all the graces. Be glamorous, alluring, irresistible. And then, then draw back, and make your denial! Then be strong and refuse your love till the war’s over and peace has come again. Tell your husbands and your sweethearts they must choose between love and war. Have strength and courage for a little while, and whether you are married or single, be cold as icicles to proffered love, and flaunt your chastity like a banner!’
Miss Ivy FitzAubrey rose to put a question: ‘Wouldn’t it be more fair if it was only girls who are already married who were asked to disappoint their husbands? Because I mean, it’s going to cause a lot of hardship to girls who want to go on pleasing their gentlemen-friends, and if they don’t please them will perhaps wake up to find themselves in the soup. I myself am very anxious to help Lady Lysistrata, because I feel she’s made it ever so clear that people don’t fully realize the importance of we women. But I think that when it comes to deliberately making an enemy of your gentleman-friend, then a married girl is in a much stronger position than the rest of us.’
Lysistrata gravely answered that such discrimination would, she feared, invalidate their whole campaign.
Then a tall gipsy-looking girl, with dusky eyelids and a sulky mouth, after much whispering with her friends at the back of the room, inquired in a sing-song Scots voice, ‘What do we do if he’ll no’ tak’ no for an answer?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘What do we do if he’ll no’ tak’ no for an answer?’
‘You mean your husband?’ Lysistrata inquired.
‘Ay. Or your lad.’
‘If your manner is really determined and obviously resolute, I don’t think that any husband is likely to be so insistent as to cause you physical anxiety.’
A protestant murmuration at the back of the room showed there were some who did not share Lysistrata’s facile optimism. A snort of laughter, a scornful remark half-heard, and a derisive giggle angered her, and warmly she exclaimed: ‘Though by sheer physical strength you may be compelled to acquiesce – but I think it highly improbable – you can still maintain a most discouraging attitude, and pointedly show your displeasure. In which circumstances the incident is not likely to recur.’
Over many a lovely face there appeared to settle a kind of film, of thin ice or transparent wax, that gave to those who wore it a lifeless look, and so advertised their utter detachment from the sort of existence with which the gipsy-looking girl and her friends were so unhappily familiar. It was Lady Oriole who first saw the spreading of this protective indifference, and realized its danger. If these charming frail creatures turned cold and frigid, then the meeting was a failure, and their crusade was finished before it had begun. Hurriedly she got up, and with a manner compounded of easy friendship, worldly wisdom, and the truculent confidence of a racing tipster, she began to exhort, bully, and cajole her difficult audience.
She got them presently into a high-hearted mood, and made them think that abstinence from love would be a gay adventure. She made the modest smile, and put the brazen on their mettle. She laughed half a dozen pretty hypocrites to shame, and stiffened the backbone of ten shy but honest creatures. Then Mrs Graham delivered herself, not without difficulty, of a speech that was full of sterling good sense and candid passion; and made a great impression. But in the end it was Rose Armour who brought the still uncovenanted to the very edge of agreement, to all-but-unanimity and the shedding of penultimate reluctance. Rose Armour spoke simply as before, and because she was an artist, her simplicity was more compulsive than rhetoric. She could be as sentimental as a Christmas card, speak platitudes worn smooth as a pebble; but she made her sentiments echo like cunning arguments, her platitudes gleam anew. She took the stubborn remnant of her audience to the threshold of consent, but there they stuck and no one had the power to push them over or the wit to lure them.
Then the cynical girl who might have been drawn by Ingres –and who had said that no woman could be trusted – got up, and with two or three vigorous puffs lighted a cigarette from the red stump of another, and said abrupuy; ‘I may have been wrong. Or rather, I may have got the wrong notion of how you mean to go about this chastity business. Are we expected to be chaste in comparative solitude, and privately, or with plenty of publicity and in whole battalions? If it’s chastity en masse that you’re thinking of, then I dare say we might make something of it. But you’ll have to give us more details before I’m going to commit myself.’
‘I can reassure you on that point,’ said Lysistrata. ‘Our campaign will include both action en masse, and individual guerrilla warfare. But for the latter we shall ask for volunteers. We intend to start the campaign with an act of open aggression in which I want about three thousand women to participate.’
‘Yes, that should be enough,’ said the cynical girl. ‘To keep an eye on each other, I mean.’
‘Then if we are now all in agreement, I can explain in detail what we propose to do. . . .’
Chapter Four
The Shock
I
The College of St Cecilia, in Hatton in the county of Kent, was the creation of an English king whose life had otherwise been remarkably free from sentimentality. It was founded by Richard III in honour of his mother, and the original establishment consisted of a provost, fourteen priests, four clerks, six choristers, a schoolmaster, ten poor scholars, and a like number of bedesmen. Becoming wholly secular after the Reformation, the College had rapidly grown in size, and its endowment was doubled by the Elizabethan Chancellor, Sir Christopher Hat-ton, presumably by command of his royal mistress, for his nature when unprompted was parsimonious. His compulsory beneficence was unexpectedly rewarded, for there began a popular tendency to identify the College – situated as it was in a townlet of his name – with its newest patron rather than the holy person to whom it had been dedicated; and by the late seventeenth century, and always thereafter, it was universally briefly known as Hatton College. As such it increased from year to year in glory and good report.
From the Restoration its supremacy in the scholastic life and public esteem of England was unchallenged, and for nearly a century it had been pretty generally accepted as the most famous school in the world. The Prime Minister of Great Britain – unless he happened to have been born in poverty or Scotland – was always educated at Hatton, and so were most of his Cabinet. The eldest sons of European monarchs were sent there, with the favourite offspring of Oriental despots; and though many of its pupils had of course no such authoritarian background, the majority soon acquired the air and manner of it. The College set its mark on them, a sigil of authority, so that a great number on leaving immediately took to ruling over negroes, Asiatics, or – what was easiest – their fellow-countrymen.
That the public ceremonies of the College, and in particular the Annual Dinner of the Old Hattonian Society, should become occasions of national, or even international interest, was inevitable. Membership of the Society, restricted as it was to the most eminent of Old Hattonians, was one of the most coveted of all distinctions, and the elder statesman who was invited to speak at the Annual Dinner regularly found it an opportunity to make some announcement of policy or opinion that would capture the attention of a much wider audience than the one he was addressing, and promote in them a favourable impression of his prescience or wise humanity.
In this year of far-spread war the Dinner was smaller than usual, and robbed of a little splendour by the absence of European monarchs and Oriental potentates; but its importance was enhanced by the circumstances of the time, and there was a general feeling that those present were truly the inspiration and the leaders of Britain in arms: the acknowledged and legitimate patres conscripti of their people.
Because the seat of Government was in Edinburgh, the Dinner also was held there, under the dignified roof of the New Club, whose members had been proud to lend it for such a purpose. It was the first of July. The war had now been going on for nearly a year, and the end of it, after twelve months of fighting, seemed more improbable and remote than ever. But the Old Hattonian patres showed no sign of perturbation or distress. They were on the contrary, the image of calm assurance, the pattern of untroubled dignity, the unshaken though slightly withered flower of English civilization.
More than half of them were quite old. Their heads were smoothly, pinkly bald, or thatched with a tenuous bright silver and their colour was either pale – a legal pallor of new parchment, a yellowish Indian hue – or red with good living and the air of many autumns spent in pursuit of the fox or awaiting the pheasant. The minority of young men there were all making a name for themselves in the Foreign Office, or rising politicians who looked more like members of the Guards Club than of the House of Commons, and among those of middle life were several distinguished soldiers. Many of the soldiers were of handsome appearance – their small heads, cavalry moustaches, and well-drilled shoulders contributed to the effect, but regular features also appeared to be characteristic of the military temperament – and many of the oldest men had an appearance of great benignity that was somewhat invalidated by the stony look of their eyes.
But all the many differences, of complexion and the curve of a nostril, were slight in comparison with the strange obvious alikeness – the almost massive similarity – that bound together these notable two hundred Old Hattonians. The lawyers, it might be, had a more ascetic look than the bishops; the bishops, perhaps, had less noble noses than the soldiers; the soldiers, within the limits of correctitude, were better dressed than the representatives of the Foreign Office: and the young Conservative politicians were clearly twice as clever as the Elder Statesmen: these, it is true, were differences, and worthy to be noted. But this, on the other hand, was their alikeness: that all were marked with the knowledge of their authority and responsibility, the sigil of their school. They were the rulers of the land, the almost-hereditary senate, and had some hidden observer – sensitive, intelligent, and not of their class – been present to see them, he must have felt not only natural awe, but something of fear because on this night Great Britain was so vulnerable; for here, in one room together, were all its leaders, its principal and irreparable eggs – so to speak – in a single basket.
