saying that the finest men were like women, and women were nobler than men—for example, one couldn’t imagine a woman like Lillah Harrison thinking a mean thing or having anything base about her.
“How I’d like you to know her!” she exclaimed.
She was becoming much calmer, and her cheeks were now quite dry. Her eyes had regained their usual expression of keen vitality, and she seemed to have forgotten Alfred and Sinclair and her emotion. “Lillah runs a home for inebriate women in the Deptford Road,” she continued. “She started it, managed it, did everything off her own bat, and it’s now the biggest of its kind in England. You can’t think what those women are like—and their homes. But she goes among them at all hours of the day and night. I’ve often been with her.… That’s what’s the matter with us.… We don’t do things. What do you do?” she demanded, looking at Rachel with a slightly ironical smile. Rachel had scarcely listened to any of this, and her expression was vacant and unhappy. She had conceived an equal dislike for Lillah Harrison and her work in the Deptford Road, and for Evelyn M. and her profusion of love affairs.
“I play,” she said with an affection of stolid composure.
“That’s about it!” Evelyn laughed. “We none of us do anything but play. And that’s why women like Lillah Harrison, who’s worth twenty of you and me, have to work themselves to the bone. But I’m tired of playing,” she went on, lying flat on the bed, and raising her arms above her head. Thus stretched out, she looked more diminutive than ever.
“I’m going to do something. I’ve got a splendid idea. Look here, you must join. I’m sure you’ve got any amount of stuff in you, though you look—well, as if you’d lived all your life in a garden.” She sat up, and began to explain with animation. “I belong to a club in London. It meets every Saturday, so it’s called the Saturday Club. We’re supposed to talk about art, but I’m sick of talking about art—what’s the good of it? With all kinds of real things going on round one? It isn’t as if they’d got anything to say about art, either. So what I’m going to tell ’em is that we’ve talked enough about art, and we’d better talk about life for a change. Questions that really matter to people’s lives, the White Slave Traffic, Women Suffrage, the Insurance Bill, and so on. And when we’ve made up our mind what we want to do we could form ourselves into a society for doing it.… I’m certain that if people like ourselves were to take things in hand instead of leaving it to policemen and magistrates, we could put a stop to—prostitution”—she lowered her voice at the ugly word—“in six months. My idea is that men and women ought to join in these matters. We ought to go into Piccadilly and stop one of these poor wretches and say: ‘Now, look here, I’m no better than you are, and I don’t pretend to be any better, but you’re doing what you know to be beastly, and I won’t have you doing beastly things, because we’re all the same under our skins, and if you do a beastly thing it does matter to me.’ That’s what Mr. Bax was saying this morning, and it’s true, though you clever people—you’re clever too, aren’t you?—don’t believe it.”
When Evelyn began talking—it was a fact she often regretted—her thoughts came so quickly that she never had any time to listen to other people’s thoughts. She continued without more pause than was needed for taking breath.
“I don’t see why the Saturday club people shouldn’t do a really great work in that way,” she went on. “Of course it would want organisation, some one to give their life to it, but I’m ready to do that. My notion’s to think of the human beings first and let the abstract ideas take care of themselves. What’s wrong with Lillah—if there is anything wrong—is that she thinks of Temperance first and the women afterwards. Now there’s one thing I’ll say to my credit,” she continued; “I’m not intellectual or artistic or anything of that sort, but I’m jolly human.” She slipped off the bed and sat on the floor, looking up at Rachel. She searched up into her face as if she were trying to read what kind of character was concealed behind the face. She put her hand on Rachel’s knee.
“It is being human that counts, isn’t it?” she continued. “Being real, whatever Mr. Hirst may say. Are you real?”
Rachel felt much as Terence had felt that Evelyn was too close to her, and that there was something exciting in this closeness, although it was also disagreeable. She was spared the need of finding an answer to the question, for Evelyn proceeded, “Do you believe in anything?”
In order to put an end to the scrutiny of these bright blue eyes, and to relieve her own physical restlessness, Rachel pushed back her chair and exclaimed, “In everything!” and began to finger different objects, the books on the table, the photographs, the freshly leaved plant with the stiff bristles, which stood in a large earthenware pot in the window.
“I believe in the bed, in the photographs, in the pot, in the balcony, in the sun, in Mrs. Flushing,” she remarked, still speaking recklessly, with something at the back of her mind forcing her to say the things that one usually does not say. “But I don’t believe in God, I don’t believe in Mr. Bax, I don’t believe in the hospital nurse. I don’t believe—” She took up a photograph and, looking at it, did not finish her sentence.
“That’s my mother,” said Evelyn, who remained sitting on the floor binding her knees together with her arms, and watching Rachel curiously.
Rachel considered the portrait. “Well, I don’t much believe in her,” she remarked after a time in a low tone of voice.
Mrs. Murgatroyd looked indeed as if the life had been crushed out of her; she knelt on a chair, gazing piteously from behind the body of a Pomeranian dog which she clasped to her cheek, as if for protection.
“And that’s my dad,” said Evelyn, for there were two photographs in one frame. The second photograph represented a handsome soldier with high regular features and a heavy black moustache; his hand rested on the hilt of his sword; there was a decided likeness between him and Evelyn.
“And it’s because of them,” said Evelyn, “that I’m going to help the other women. You’ve heard about me, I suppose? They weren’t married, you see; I’m not anybody in particular. I’m not a bit ashamed of it. They loved each other anyhow, and that’s more than most people can say of their parents.”
Rachel sat down on the bed, with the two pictures in her hands, and compared them—the man and the woman who had, so Evelyn said, loved each other. That fact interested her more than the campaign on behalf of unfortunate women which Evelyn was once more beginning to describe. She looked again from one to the other.
“What d’you think it’s like,” she asked, as Evelyn paused for a minute, “being in love?”
“Have you never been in love?” Evelyn asked. “Oh no—one’s only got to look at you to see that,” she added. She considered. “I really was in love once,” she said. She fell into reflection, her eyes losing their bright vitality and approaching something like an expression of tenderness. “It was heavenly!—while it lasted. The worst of it is it don’t last, not with me. That’s the bother.”
She went on to consider the difficulty with Alfred and Sinclair about which she had pretended to ask Rachel’s advice. But she did not want advice; she wanted intimacy. When she looked at Rachel, who was still looking at the photographs on the bed, she could not help seeing that Rachel was not thinking about her. What was she thinking about, then? Evelyn was tormented by the little spark of life in her which was always trying to work through to other people, and was always being rebuffed. Falling silent she looked at her visitor, her shoes, her stockings, the combs in her hair, all the details of her dress in short, as though by seizing every detail she might get closer to the life within.
Rachel
