Mrs. Ames

by E. F. Benson

  Instinctively she had drawn back a little, when she saw he did not advance to meet her, and spoke as if chess and the pathos of her dumbness to express friendship were things of equal moment. There was no calculation about it: it was the expression of one type, the eternal feminine attracted and wishing to attract. Her descent to these commonplaces restored his confidence; the room was a trap no longer, but the pleasant drawing room he knew so well, with its charming mistress seated by him. It was almost inevitable that he should contrast the hot plushes and saddle-bag cushions of his own, its angular chairs and Axminster carpets with the cool chintzes here, the lace-shrouded windows, the Persian rugs. More marked was the contrast between the mistresses of the two houses. Amy had been writing at her davenport a good deal lately, and her short, stiff back had been the current picture of her. Here was a woman, dim in the half light, wanting to talk to him, to make timid confidences, to make him realize how much his friendship meant to her. His confidence returned with disarming completeness.

  ‘Well, I’m sure I should find it dismal enough at home,’ he said, ‘if I hadn’t somewhere to go to, knowing I should find a welcome. Mind you, I don’t blame Amy. For years now, when we’ve been alone in the evening, she has done her work, and I have read the paper, and I daresay we haven’t said a dozen words till Parker brought in the bedroom candles, or sometimes we play picquet - for love. But now evenings spent like that seem to me very prosy and dismal. Perhaps it’s Harrogate that has made me a bit more supple and youthful, though I’m sure it’s ridiculous enough that a tough old campaigner like me should feel such things - ’

  Mrs Evans put forward her chin, raising her face towards him.

  ‘But why ridiculous?’ she asked. ‘You must be so much younger than dear Cousin Amy. I wonder - I wonder if she feels that too?’

  There was there a very devilish suggestion, the more so because, in proportion to the suggestion, so very little was stated. It succeeded admirably.

  ‘Poor dear Amy!’ said he.

  He had said that once before, when Cleopatra-Amy was contrasted with Cleopatra-Millie. But there was a significance in the repetition of it. Once the assumed identity of character had suggested the comment, now there was no assumed character. It concerned Millie and Amy themselves.

  Mrs Evans put back her chin.

  ‘I am sure Cousin Amy ought to be very happy,’ she said softly. ‘You are so devoted to her, and all. I almost think you spoil her, Lyndhurst. It is all so romantic. Fancy being a woman, and as old as Cousin Amy, and yet having a young man so devoted. Harry, too!’

  Again a billow of confidence tinged with self-appreciation surged over Major Ames. After all, his wife was much older than him, for he was still a young man, and his youth was being expanded on sweet peas and the garden roller. And he was stirred into a high flight of philosophical conjecture.

  ‘My God, what a puzzle life is!’ he observed.

  She rose to this high-water mark.

  ‘And it might be so simple,’ she said. ‘It should be so easy to be happy.’

  Then Major Ames knew where he was. In one sense he was worthy of the occasion, in another he did not feel up to all that it implied. He rose hastily.

  ‘I had better go,’ he said rather hoarsely.

  But he had smoked five cigarettes since lunch. The hoarseness might easily have been the result of this indulgence.

  She did not attempt to keep him, nor did she make it incumbent on him to give her a kiss, however cousinly. She did not even rise, but only looked up at him from her low chair as she gave him her hand, smiling a little secretly, as Mona Lisa smiles. But she felt quite satisfied with their talk; he would think over it, and find fresh signals and private beckonings in it.

  ‘Come and see me again,’ she said. There was a touch of imperativeness in her tone.

  She looked through the lace curtain and saw him go out into the street. There was something in the gutter of the roadway which he inquired into with the end of his stick. It looked like a withered bunch of dusty chrysanthemums.

  Mrs Ames, meantime, had lunched at home, and gone off immediately afterwards, as her husband had conjectured, to a meeting. In the last month the membership of her league had largely increased, and it was no longer possible to convene its meetings in her own drawing room, for it numbered some fifty persons, including a dozen men of enlightened principles. Even at first, as has been seen, she had welcomed (thereby incurring Mrs Altham’s disapproval) several ladies with whom she did not usually associate, and now the gathering was entirely independent of all class distinctions. The wife of the station master, for instance, was one of the most active members and walked up and down the platform with a large rosette of Suffragette colours selling current copies of the Clarion. And no less remarkable than this growth of the league was the growth of Mrs Ames. She was neither pompous nor condescending to those persons whom, a couple of months ago, she would have looked upon as being barely existent, except if they were all in church, when she would very probably have shared a hymn book with any of them, the ‘Idea’ for which they had assembled galvanizing them, though strictly temporarily, into the class of existent people. Now, the idea which brought them together in the commodious warehouse, kindly lent and sufficiently furnished by Mr Turner, had given them a permanent existence, and they were not automatically blotted out of her book of life the moment these meetings were over, as they would have been so short a time ago in church, when the last ‘Amen’ was said. The bonds of her barren and barbaric conventionality were bursting; indeed, it was not so much that others, not even those of ‘her class’, were becoming women to her, as that she was becoming a woman herself. She had scarcely been one hitherto; she had been a piece of perfect propriety. And how far she had travelled from her original conception of the Suffragette movement as suitable to supply a novelty for the autumn that would eclipse the memory of the Shakespearean ball, may be gathered from the fact that she no longer took the chair at these meetings, but was an ordinary member. Mr Turner had far more experience in the duties of a chairman: she had herself proposed him and would have seconded him as well, had such a step been in order.

  Today the meeting was assembled to discuss the part which the league should take in the forthcoming elections. The Tory Government was at present in power, and likely to remain in office, while Riseborough itself was a fairly safe seat for the Tory member, who was Sir James Westbourne. Before polemical or obstructive measures could be decided on, it had clearly been necessary to ascertain Sir James’ views on the subject of votes for women, and today his answer had been received and was read to the meeting. It was as unsatisfactory as it was brief, and their ‘obedient servant’ had no sympathy with, and so declined to promise any support to, their cause. Mr Turner read this out, and laid it down on his desk.

  ‘Will ladies or gentlemen give us their views on the course we are to adopt?’ he said.

  A dozen simultaneously rose, and simultaneously sat down again. The chairman asked Mrs Brooks to address the meeting. Another and another succeeded her, and there was complete unanimity of purpose in their suggestions. Sir James’ meetings and his speeches to his constituents must not be allowed to proceed without interruption. If he had no sympathy with the cause, the cause would show a marked lack of sympathy with him. Thereafter the league resolved itself into a committee of ways and means. The President of the Board of Trade was coming to support Sir James’ candidature at a meeting the date of which was already fixed for a fortnight hence, and it was decided to make a demonstration in force. And as the discussion went on, and real practical plans were made, that strange fascination and excitement at the thought of shouting and interrupting at a public meeting, of becoming for the first time of some consequence, began to seethe and ferment. Most of the members were women, whose lives had been passed in continuous self-repression, who had been frozen over by the narcotic ice of a completely conventional and humdrum existence. Many of them were unmarried and already of middle age; their
natural human instincts had never known the blossoming and honey which the fulfilment of their natures would have brought. To the eagerness and sincerity with which they welcomed a work that demanded justice for their sex, there was added this excitement of doing something at last. There was an opportunity of expansion, of stepping out, under the stimulus of an idea, into an experience that was real. In kind, this was akin to martyrs, who rejoiced and sang when the prospects of persecution came near; as martyrs for the sake of their faith thought almost with glee of the rack and the burning, so, minutely, the very prospect of discomfort and rough handling seemed attractive, if, by such means, the cause was infinitesimally advanced. To this, a sincere and wholly laudable desire, was added the more personal stimulus. They would be doing something, instead of suffering the tedium of passivity, acting instead of being acted on. For it is only through centuries of custom that the woman, physically weak and liable to be knocked down, has become the servant of the other sex. She is fiercer at heart, more courageous, more scornful of consequences than he; it is only muscular inferiority of strength that has subdued her into the place that she occupies, that, and the periods when, for the continuance of the race, she must submit to months of tender and strong inaction. There she finds fruition of her nature, and there awakes in her a sweet indulgence for the strange, childish lust of being master, of parading, in making of laws and conventions, his adventitious power, of the semblance of sovereignty that has been claimed by man. At heart she knows that he has but put a tinsel crown on his head, and robed himself in spangles that but parody real gold. She lays a woman’s hand on his childhead, and to please him says, ‘How wise you are, how strong, how clever.’ And the child is pleased, and loves her for it. And there is her weakness, for the most dominant thing in her nature is the need of being loved. From the beginning it must have been so. When Adam’s rib was taken from him in sleep, he lost more than was left him, and woke to find all his finer self gone from him. He was left a blundering bumblebee: to the rib that was taken from him clung the courage of the lioness, the wisdom of the serpent, the gentleness of the dove, the cunning of the spider, and the mysterious charm of the firefly that dances in the dusk. But to that rib also clung the desire to be loved. Otherwise, in the human race, the male would be slain yearly like the drone of the hive. But the strange thing that grew from the rib, like flowers from buried carrion, desired love. There was its strength and its weakness.

  It desired love, and in its desire it suffered all degradation to obtain it. And no leanness of soul entered into the gratification of its desire. Only when its desire was pinched and rationed, or when, by the operation of civilized law, all fruit of desire was denied it, so that the blossom of sex was made into one unfruitful bud, did revolt come. Long generations produced the germ, long generations made it active. At length it swam up to sight, from subaqueous dimnesses, feeble and violent, conscious of the justice of its cause and demanding justice. But what helped to make the desire for justice so attractive was the violence, the escape from self-repression that the demand gave opportunity for, to many who, all their lives, had been corked or wired down in comfort, which no woman cares about, or sealed up in spinster-hood and decorous emptiness of days. There was justice in the demand, and hysterical excitement in demanding.

  To others, and in this little league of Riseborough there were many such, the prospect of making those demands was primarily appalling, and to none more than to poor Mrs Ames, when the plan of campaign was discussed, decided on, and entrusted to the members of the league. It required almost more courage than the idea was capable of inspiring to face, even in anticipation, the thought of shouting ‘Votes for Women’ when good-humoured Cousin James rose and said ‘Ladies and gentlemen!’ Very possibly, as had often happened in Cousin James’ previous candidatures, Lyndhurst would wish his wife to ask him and the President of the Board of Trade to dinner before the meeting, an occasion which would warrant the materialization of the most sumptuous of all the dinners tabulated on the printed menu cards, while sherry would be given with soup, hock with fish, and a constant flow of champagne be kept up afterwards, until port time. In that case Cousin James would certainly ask them to sit on the platform, and they would roll richly to the town hall in his motor, all blazing with Conservative colours, while she, in a small bag, would be surreptitiously conveying there her great Suffragette rosette, and a small steel chain with a padlock. She would be sitting probably next to the Mayor, who would introduce the speakers, and no doubt refer to ‘the presence of the fair sex’ who graced the platform. During this she would have to pin her colours on her dress, chain herself up like Andromeda, snap the patent spring lock of the padlock, and when Sir James rose … her imagination could not grapple with the picture: it turned sickly away, refusing to contemplate. And this to a cousin and a guest, who had just eaten the best salt, so to speak, of her table, from one who all her life had been so perfect a piece of propriety! She felt far too old a bottle for such new wine. Sitting surrounded by fellow-crusaders, and infected by the proximity of their undiluted enthusiasm, it would be difficult enough, but that she should chain herself, perhaps, to the very leg of the table which Cousin James would soon thump in the fervour of his oratory, as he announced all those Tory platitudes in which she so firmly believed, and which she must so shrilly interrupt, while sitting solitary in the desert of his sleek and staid supporters, was not only an impossible but an unthinkable achievement. Whatever horrors fate, that gruesome weaver of nightmares, might have in store for her, she felt that here was something that transcended imagination. She could not sit on the platform with Lyndhurst and Cousin James and the Mayor and Lady Westbourne, and do what was required of her, for the sake of any crusade. Curfew, so to speak, would have to ring that night.

  She and Lyndhurst were dining alone the evening after this meeting of ‘ways and means’, he in that state of mind which she not inaptly described as ‘worried’ when she felt kind, and ‘cross’ when she felt otherwise. He had come home hot from his walk, and, having sat in his room where there was no fire, when evening fell chilly, had had a smart touch of lumbago. Thus there were clearly two causes for complaint against Amy, and a third disturbing topic, for there was no shadow of doubt that it was his bouquet of chrysanthemums that he had found in the road outside Dr Evans’ house, and even before the lumbago had produced its characteristic pessimism, he had been unable to find any encouraging explanation of this floral castaway.

  ‘I’m sure I don’t know what was the good of my spending all August,’ he said, ‘in that filthy hole of a Harrogate, at no end of expense, too, if I’m to be crippled all winter. But you urged me to so strongly: should never have thought of going there otherwise.’

  ‘My dear, you have only been crippled for half an hour at present,’ she observed. ‘It is a great bore, but if only you will take a good hot bath tonight, and have a very light dinner, I expect you will be much better in the morning. Parker, tell them to see that there is plenty of hot water in the kitchen boiler.’

  ‘It’ll be the only warm thing in the house, if there is,’ said he. ‘My room was like an ice house when I came in. Positively like an ice house. Enough to give a man pneumonia, let alone lumbago. Soup cold, too.’

  ‘My dear, you should take more care of yourself,’ said Mrs Ames placidly. ‘Why did you not light the fire instead of being cold? I’m sure it was laid.’

  ‘And have it just burning up at dinnertime,’ said he, ‘when I no longer wanted it.’

  It was still early in the course of dinner.

  ‘Light the fire in the drawing room, Parker,’ said Mrs Ames. ‘Let there be a good fire when we come out of dinner.’

  ‘Get roasted alive,’ said Major Ames, half to himself, but intending to be heard.

  But Mrs Ames’ mind had been feasting for weeks past on things which had a solider existence than her husband’s unreasonable strictures. Since this new diet had been hers, his snaps and growls had produced no effect: they often annoy
ed her into repartee, and as likely as not, a few months ago, she would have said that his claret seemed a very poor kind of beverage. But tonight she felt not the smallest desire to retort. She was very sorry for his lumbago, but felt no inclination to carry the war into his territories, or to tell him that if people, perspiring freely, and of gouty habit, choose to sit down without changing, and get chilly, they must expect reprisal for their imprudence.

  ‘Then we will open the window, dear,’ she said, ‘if we find we are frizzling. But I don’t think it will be too hot. Evenings are chilly in October. Did you have a pleasant lunch, Lyndhurst? Indeed, I don’t know where you lunched. I ordered curry for you. I sat down at a quarter to two as you did not come in.’

  It was all so infinitesimal … yet it was the mental diet which had supported her for years. Perhaps after dinner they would play picquet. The garden, the kitchen, for years, except for gossip infinitely less real, these had been the topics. There had been no joy for him in the beauty of the garden, only a pleased sense of proprietorship, if a rare plant flowered, or if there were more roses than usual. For her, she had been vaguely pleased if Lyndhurst had taken two helpings of a dish, and both of them had been vaguely disquieted if Harry quoted Swinburne.

  ‘I lunched with the Evanses,’ he said. ‘By the way, I met your cousin James Westbourne this afternoon, when I was on my walk. Extraordinarily cordial he gets when there’s business ahead that brings him into Riseborough, and he wants to cadge a dinner or two. It’s little notice he takes of us the rest of the year, and I’m sure it’s a couple of years since he so much as sent you a brace of pheasants, and more than that since he asked me to shoot there. But as I say, when he wants to pick up a dinner or two in Riseborough, he’s all heartiness, and saying he doesn’t see half enough of us. He doesn’t seem to strain himself in trying to see more, and there’s seldom a weekend when he and that great guy of a wife of his don’t have the house packed with people. I suppose we’re not smart enough for them, except when it’s convenient to dine in Riseborough. Then he’s not above drinking a bottle of my champagne.’