by Grant Allen
Gradually Herminia got work to her mind; work enough to support her in the modest way that sufficed her small wants for herself and her baby. In London, given time enough, you can live down anything, perhaps even the unspeakable sin of having struck a righteous blow in the interest of women. And day by day, as months and years went on, Herminia felt she was living down the disgrace of having obeyed an enlightened conscience. She even found friends. Dear old Miss Smith-Waters used to creep round by night, like Nicodemus — respectability would not have allowed her to perform that Christian act in open daylight, — and sit for an hour or two with her dear misguided Herminia. Miss Smith-Waters prayed nightly for Herminia’s “conversion,” yet not without an uncomfortable suspicion, after all, that Herminia had very little indeed to be “converted” from. Other people also got to know her by degrees; an editor’s wife; a kind literary hostess; some socialistic ladies who liked to be “advanced;” a friendly family or two of the Bohemian literary or artistic pattern. Among them Herminia learned to be as happy in time as she could ever again be, now she had lost her Alan. She was Mrs. Barton to them all; that lie she found it practically impossible to fight against. Even the Bohemians refused to let their children ask after Miss Barton’s baby.
So wrapt in vile falsehoods and conventions are we. So far have we travelled from the pristine realities of truth and purity. We lie to our children — in the interests of morality.
After a time, in the intervals between doing her journalistic work and nursing Alan’s baby, Herminia found leisure to write a novel. It was seriously meant, of course, but still it was a novel. That is every woman’s native idea of literature. It reflects the relatively larger part which the social life plays in the existence of women. If a man tells you he wants to write a book, nine times out of ten he means a treatise or argument on some subject that interests him. Even the men who take in the end to writing novels have generally begun with other aims and other aspirations, and have only fallen back upon the art of fiction in the last resort as a means of livelihood. But when a woman tells you she wants to write a book, nine times out of ten she means she wants to write a novel. For that task nature has most often endowed her richly. Her quicker intuitions, her keener interest in social life, her deeper insight into the passing play of emotions and of motives, enable her to paint well the complex interrelations of every-day existence. So Herminia, like the rest, wrote her own pet novel.
By the time her baby was eighteen months old, she had finished it. It was blankly pessimistic, of course. Blank pessimism is the one creed possible for all save fools. To hold any other is to curl yourself up selfishly in your own easy chair, and say to your soul, “O soul, eat and drink; O soul, make merry. Carouse thy fill. Ignore the maimed lives, the stricken heads and seared hearts, the reddened fangs and ravening claws of nature all round thee.” Pessimism is sympathy. Optimism is selfishness. The optimist folds his smug hands on his ample knees, and murmurs contentedly, “The Lord has willed it;” “There must always be rich and poor;” “Nature has, after all, her great law of compensation.” The pessimist knows well self-deception like that is either a fraud or a blind, and recognizing the seething mass of misery at his doors gives what he can, — his pity, or, where possible, his faint aid, in redressing the crying inequalities and injustices of man or nature.
All honest art is therefore of necessity pessimistic. Herminia’s romance was something more than that. It was the despairing heart-cry of a soul in revolt. It embodied the experiences and beliefs and sentiments of a martyred woman. It enclosed a lofty ethical purpose. She wrote it with fiery energy, for her baby’s sake, on waste scraps of paper, at stray moments snatched from endless other engagements. And as soon as it was finished, she sent it in fear and trembling to a publisher.
She had chosen her man well. He was a thinker himself, and he sympathized with thinkers. Though doubtful as to the venture, he took all the risk himself with that generosity one so often sees in the best-abused of professions. In three or four weeks’ time “A Woman’s World” came out, and Herminia waited in breathless anxiety for the verdict of the reviewers.
For nearly a month she waited in vain. Then, one Friday, as she was returning by underground railway from the Strand to Edgeware Road, with Dolores in her arms, her eye fell as she passed upon the display-bill of the “Spectator.” Sixpence was a great deal of money to Herminia; but bang it went recklessly when she saw among the contents an article headed, “A Very Advanced Woman’s Novel.” She felt sure it must be hers, and she was not mistaken. Breathlessly she ran over that first estimate of her work. It was with no little elation that she laid down the number.
Not that the critique was by any means at all favorable. How could Herminia expect it in such a quarter? But the “Spectator” is at least conspicuously fair, though it remains in other ways an interesting and ivy-clad mediaeval relic. “Let us begin by admitting,” said the Spectatorial scribe, “that Miss Montague’s book” (she had published it under a pseudonym) “is a work of genius. Much as we dislike its whole tone, and still more its conclusions, the gleam of pure genius shines forth undeniable on every page of it. Whoever takes it up must read on against his will till he has finished the last line of this terrible tragedy; a hateful fascination seems to hold and compel him. Its very purity makes it dangerous. The book is mistaken; the book is poisonous; the book is morbid; the book is calculated to do irremediable mischief; but in spite of all that, the book is a book of undeniable and sadly misplaced genius.”
If he had said no more, Herminia would have been amply satisfied. To be called morbid by the “Spectator” is a sufficient proof that you have hit at least the right tack in morals. And to be accused of genius as well was indeed a triumph. No wonder Herminia went home to her lonely attic that night justifiably elated. She fancied after this her book must make a hit. It might be blamed and reviled, but at any rate it was now safe from the ignominy of oblivion.
Alas, how little she knew of the mysteries of the book-market! As little as all the rest of us. Day after day, from that afternoon forth, she watched in vain for succeeding notices. Not a single other paper in England reviewed her. At the libraries, her romance was never so much as asked for. And the reason for these phenomena is not far to seek by those who know the ways of the British public. For her novel was earnestly and sincerely written; it breathed a moral air, therefore it was voted dull; therefore nobody cared for it. The “Spectator” had noticed it because of its manifest earnestness and sincerity; for though the “Spectator” is always on the side of the lie and the wrong, it is earnest and sincere, and has a genuine sympathy for earnestness and sincerity, even on the side of truth and righteousness. Nobody else even looked at it. People said to themselves, “This book seems to be a book with a teaching not thoroughly banal, like the novels-with-a-purpose after which we flock; so we’ll give it a wide berth.”
And they shunned it accordingly.
That was the end of Herminia Barton’s literary aspirations. She had given the people of her best, and the people rejected it. Now she gave them of her most mediocre; the nearest to their own level of thought and feeling to which her hand could reduce itself. And the people accepted it. The rest of her life was hack-work; by that, she could at least earn a living for Dolores. Her “Antigone, for the Use of Ladies’ Schools” still holds its own at Girton and Somerville.
XIV.
I do not propose to dwell at any length upon the next ten or twelve years of Herminia Barton’s life. An episode or two must suffice; and those few told briefly.
She saw nothing of her family. Relations had long been strained between them; now they were ruptured. To the rest of the Bartons, she was even as one dead; the sister and daughter’s name was never pronounced among them. But once, when little Dolores was about five years old, Herminia happened to pass a church door in Marylebone, where a red-lettered placard announced in bold type that the Very Reverend the Dean of Dunwich would preach there on Sunday. It flashed across her mi
nd that this was Sunday morning. An overpowering desire to look on her father’s face once more — she had never seen her mother’s — impelled Herminia to enter those unwonted portals. The Dean was in the pulpit. He looked stately and dignified in his long white hair, a noticeable man, tall and erect to the last, like a storm-beaten pine; in spite of his threescore years and ten, his clear-cut face shone thoughtful, and striking, and earnest as ever. He was preaching from the text, “I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling.” And he preached, as he always did, eloquently. His river of speech flowed high between banks out of sight of the multitude. There was such perfect sincerity, such moral elevation in all he said, that Herminia felt acutely, as she had often felt before, the close likeness of fibre which united her to him, in spite of extreme superficial differences of belief and action. She felt it so much that when the sermon was over she waited at the vestry door for her father to emerge. She couldn’t let him go away without making at least an effort to speak with him.
When the Dean came out, a gentle smile still playing upon his intellectual face, — for he was one of the few parsons who manage in their old age to look neither sordid nor inane, — he saw standing by the vestry door a woman in a plain black dress, like a widow of the people. She held by the hand a curly-haired little girl of singularly calm and innocent expression. The woman’s dark hair waved gracefully on her high forehead, and caught his attention. Her eyes were subtly sweet, her mouth full of pathos. She pressed forward to speak to him; the Dean, all benignity, bent his head to listen.
“Father!” Herminia cried, looking up at him.
The Dean started back. The woman who thus addressed him was barely twenty-eight, she might well have been forty; grief and hard life had made her old before her time. Her face was haggard. Beautiful as she still was, it was the beauty of a broken heart, of a Mater Dolorosa, not the roundfaced beauty of the fresh young girl who had gone forth rejoicing some ten years earlier from the Deanery at Dunwich to the lecture-rooms at Girton. For a moment the Dean stared hard at her. Then with a burst of recognition he uttered aghast the one word “Herminia!”
“Father,” Herminia answered, in a tremulous voice, “I have fought a good fight; I have pressed toward the mark for the prize of a high calling. And when I heard you preach, I felt just this once, let come what come might, I must step forth to tell you so.”
The Dean gazed at her with melting eyes. Love and pity beamed strong in them. “Have you come to repent, my child?” he asked, with solemn insistence.
“Father,” Herminia made answer, lingering lovingly on the word, “I have nothing to repent of. I have striven hard to do well, and have earned scant praise for it. But I come to ask to-day for one grasp of your hand, one word of your blessing. Father, father, kiss me!”
The old man drew himself up to his full height, with his silvery hair round his face. Tears started to his eyes; his voice faltered. But he repressed himself sternly. “No, no, my child,” he answered. “My poor old heart bleeds for you. But not till you come with full proofs of penitence in your hands can I ever receive you. I have prayed for you without ceasing. God grant you may repent. Till then, I command you, keep far away from me, and from your untainted sisters.”
The child felt her mother’s hand tremble quivering in her own, as she led her from the church; but never a word did Herminia say, lest her heart should break with it. As soon as she was outside, little Dolly looked up at her. (It had dwindled from Dolores to Dolly in real life by this time; years bring these mitigations of our first fierce outbursts.) “Who was that grand old gentleman?” the child asked, in an awe-struck voice.
And Herminia, clasping her daughter to her breast, answered with a stifled sob, “That was your grandpa, Dolly; that was my father, my father.”
The child put no more questions just then as is the wont of children; but she treasured up the incident for long in her heart, wondering much to herself why, if her grandpa was so grand an old gentleman, she and her mamma should have to live by themselves in such scrubby little lodgings. Also, why her grandpa, who looked so kind, should refuse so severely to kiss her mammy.
It was the beginning of many doubts and questionings to Dolores. A year later, the Dean died suddenly. People said he might have risen to be a bishop in his time, if it hadn’t been for that unfortunate episode about his daughter and young Merrick. Herminia was only once mentioned in his will; and even then merely to implore the divine forgiveness for her. She wept over that sadly. She didn’t want the girls’ money, she was better able to take care of herself than Elsie and Ermyntrude; but it cut her to the quick that her father should have quitted the world at last without one word of reconciliation.
However, she went on working placidly at her hack-work, and living for little Dolly. Her one wish now was to make Dolly press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling she herself by mere accident had missed so narrowly. Her own life was done; Alan’s death had made her task impossible; but if Dolly could fill her place for the sake of humanity, she would not regret it. Enough for her to have martyred herself; she asked no mercenary palm and crown of martyrdom.
And she was happy in her life; as far as a certain tranquil sense of duty done could make her, she was passively happy. Her kind of journalism was so commonplace and so anonymous that she was spared that worst insult of seeing her hack-work publicly criticised as though it afforded some adequate reflection of the mind that produced it, instead of being merely an index of taste in the minds of those for whose use it was intended. So she lived for years, a machine for the production of articles and reviews; and a devoted mother to little developing Dolly.
On Dolly the hopes of half the world now centred.
XV.
Not that Herminia had not at times hard struggles and sore temptations. One of the hardest and sorest came when Dolly was about six years old. And this was the manner of it.
One day the child who was to reform the world was returning from some errand on which her mother had sent her, when her attention was attracted by a very fine carriage, stopping at a door not far from their lodgings. Now Dolly had always a particular weakness for everything “grand;” and so grand a turn-out as this one was rare in their neighborhood. She paused and stared hard at it. “Whose is it, Mrs. Biggs?” she asked awe-struck of the friendly charwoman, who happened to pass at the moment, — the charwoman who frequently came in to do a day’s cleaning at her mother’s lodging-house. Mrs. Biggs knew it well; “It’s Sir Anthony Merrick’s,” she answered in that peculiarly hushed voice with which the English poor always utter the names of the titled classes. And so in fact it was; for the famous gout doctor had lately been knighted for his eminent services in saving a royal duke from the worst effects of his own self-indulgence. Dolly put one fat finger to her lip, and elevated her eyebrows, and looked grave at once. Sir Anthony Merrick! What a very grand gentleman he must be indeed, and how nice it must seem to be able to drive in so distinguished a vehicle with a liveried footman.
As she paused and looked, lost in enjoyment of that beatific vision, Sir Anthony himself emerged from the porch. Dolly took a good stare at him. He was handsome, austere, close-shaven, implacable. His profile was clear-cut, like Trajan’s on an aureus. Dolly thought that was just how so grand a gentleman ought to look; and, so thinking, she glanced up at him, and with a flash of her white teeth, smiled her childish approval. The austere old gentleman, unwontedly softened by that cherub face, — for indeed she was as winsome as a baby angel of Raphael’s, — stooped down and patted the bright curly head that turned up to him so trustfully. “What’s your name, little woman?” he asked, with a sudden wave of gentleness.
And Dolly, all agog at having arrested so grand an old gentleman’s attention, spoke up in her clear treble, “Dolores Barton.”
Sir Anthony started. Was this a trap to entangle him? He was born suspicious, and he feared that woman. But he looked into Dolly’s blue eyes of wonder, and all doubt fled from him. Was it bl
ood? was it instinct? was it unconscious nature? At any rate, the child seemed to melt the grandfather’s heart as if by magic. Long years after, when the due time came, Dolly remembered that melting. To the profound amazement of the footman, who stood with the carriage-door ready open in his hand, the old man bent down and kissed the child’s red lips. “God bless you, my dear!” he murmured, with unwonted tenderness to his son’s daughter. Then he took out his purse, and drew from it a whole gold sovereign. “That’s for you, my child,” he said, fondling the pretty golden curls. “Take it home, and tell your mammy an old man in the street gave it to you.”
