"Oh won"t it!" I e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, with the turned-up eyes of rapture.
"Tell me one thing," I said to Charlotte as we walked slowly along the sands towards the cliff and the beechwood; "why, since you took me for a stranger, were you so--well, so gracious to me in the water?"
Gertrud had gone back to the hotel laden with both our bathing-things.
"She may as well take mine up at the same time," Charlotte had remarked, piling them on Gertrud"s pa.s.sive arms. Undeniably she might; and accordingly she did. But her face was wry, and so had been the smile with which she returned Charlotte"s careless greetings. "You still keep that old fool, I see," said Charlotte. "It would send me mad to have a person of inferior intellect for ever fussing round me."
"It would send me much madder to have a person of superior intellect b.u.t.toning my boots and scorning me while she does it," I replied.
"Why was I so gracious to you in the water?" repeated Charlotte in answer to my inquiry, made not without anxiousness, for one likes to know one"s own cousin above the practices of ordinary bath-guests. "I"ll tell you why. I detest the stiff, icy way women have of turning their backs if they don"t know each other."
"Oh they"re not very stiff," I remarked, thinking of past bathing experiences, "and besides, in the water----"
"It is not only unkind, it is simply wicked. For how shall we ever be anything but tools and drudges if we don"t co-operate, if we don"t stand shoulder to shoulder? Oh my heart goes out to all women! I never see one without feeling I must do all in my power to get to know her, to help her, to show her what she must do, so that when her youth is gone there will still be something left, a so much n.o.bler happiness, a so much truer joy."
"Than what?" I asked, puzzled.
Charlotte was looking into my eyes as though she were reading my soul.
She wasn"t, whatever she might have thought she was doing. "Than what she had before, of course," she said with some asperity.
"But perhaps what she had before was just what she liked best."
"But if it was only the sort of joy every woman who is young and pretty gets heaped on her, does it not take wings and fly away the moment she happens to look haggard, or is low-spirited, or ill?"
It was as I had feared. Charlotte was strenuous. There was not a doubt of it. And the strenuous woman is a form of the s.e.x out of whose way I have hitherto kept. Of course I knew from the pamphlets and the lectures that she was not one to stay at home and see the point of purring over her husband"s socks; but I had supposed one might lecture and write things without bringing the pamphlet manner to bear on one"s own blood relations.
"You were very jolly in the water," I said. "Why are you suddenly so serious?"
"The water," replied Charlotte, "is the only place I am ever what you call jolly in. It is the only place where I can ever forget how terribly earnest life is."
"My dear Charlotte, shall we sit down? The bathing has made me tired."
We did sit down, and leaning my back against a rock, and pulling my hat over my eyes, I gazed out at the sunlit sea and at the flocks of little white clouds hanging over it to the point where they met the water, while Charlotte talked. Yes, she was right, nearly always right, in everything she said, and it was certainly meritorious to use one"s strength, and health, and talents as she was doing, trying to get rid of mouldy prejudices. I gathered that what she was fighting for were equal rights and equal privileges for women and men alike. It is a story I have heard before, and up to now it has not had a satisfactory ending.
And Charlotte was so small, and the world she defied was so big and so indifferent and had such an inconsequent habit of a.s.sociating all such efforts--in themselves nothing less than heroic--with the ridiculousness of cropped hair and extremities clothed in bloomers. I protest that the thought of this brick wall of indifference with Charlotte hurling herself against it during all the years that might have been pleasant was so tragic to me that I was nearly tempted to try to please her by offering to come and hurl myself too. But I have no heroism. The hardness and coldness of bricks terrifies me. What, I wondered, could her experiences with her great thinker have been, to make her turn her back so absolutely on the fair and sheltered land of matrimony? I could not but agree with much that she was saying. That women, if they chose, need not do or endure any of the things against which those of them who find their voice cry out has long been clear to me. That they are, on the whole, not well-disposed towards each other is also a fact frequently to be observed. And that this secret antagonism must be got over before there can be any real co-operation may, I suppose, be regarded as certain. But when Charlotte spoke of co-operation she was apparently thinking only of the co-operation of those whom years, in place of the might of youth, have provided with the sad sensibleness that comes of repeated disappointments--the co-operation, that is, of the elderly; and the German elderly in the immense majority of cases remains obscurely in her kitchen and does not dream of co-operating. Has she not got over the conjugal quarrels of the first married years? Has she not filled her nurseries and become indefinite in outline? And do not these things make for content? If thoughts of rebellion enter her head, she need only look honestly at her image in the gla.s.s to be aware that it is not her kind that will ever wring concessions from the other s.e.x. She is a _brave Frau_, and a _brave Frau_ who should try to do anything beyond keeping her home tidy and feeding its inmates would be almost pathetically ridiculous.
"You shouldn"t bother about the old ones," I murmured, watching a little white steamer rounding the Gohren headland. "Get the young to co-operate, my dear Charlotte. The young inherit the earth--Teutonic earth certainly they do. If you got all the pretty women between twenty and thirty on your side the thing"s done. No wringing would be required.
The concessions would simply shower down."
"I detest the word concession," said Charlotte.
"Do you? But there it is. We live on the concessions made us by those beings you would probably call the enemy. And, after all, most of us live fairly comfortably."
"By the way," she said, turning her head suddenly and looking at me, "what have you been doing all these years?"
"Doing?" I repeated in some confusion. I don"t know why there should have been any confusion, unless it was a note in Charlotte"s voice that made her question sound like a stern inquiry after that one talent which is death to hide lodged with me useless. "Now, as though you didn"t very well know what I have been doing. I have had a row of babies and brought it up quite nicely."
"_That_ isn"t anything to be proud of."
"I didn"t say it was."
"Your cat achieves precisely the same thing."
"My dear Charlotte, I haven"t got a cat."
"And now--what are you doing now?"
"You see what I am doing. Apparently exactly what you are."
"I don"t mean that. Of course you know I don"t mean that. What are you doing now with your life?"
I turned my head and gazed reproachfully at Charlotte. How pretty she used to be. How prettily the corners of her mouth used to turn up, as though her soul were always smiling. And she had had the dearest chin with a dimple in it, and she had had clear, hopeful eyes, and all the lines of her body had been comely and gracious. These are solid advantages that should not lightly be allowed to go. Not a trace of them was left. Her face was thin, and its expression of determination made it look hard. There was a deep line straight down between her eyebrows, as though she frowned at life more than is needful. Angles had everywhere taken the place of curves. Her eyes were as bright and intelligent as ever, but seemed to have grown larger. Something had completely done for Charlotte as far as beauty of person goes; whether it was the six Bernhards, or her actual enthusiasms, or the unusual mixture of both, I could not at this stage discover; nor could I yet see if her soul had gained the beauty that her body had lost, which is undoubtedly what the rightly cared-for soul does do. Meanwhile anything more utterly unlike the wife of a famous professor I have never seen. The wife of an aged German celebrity should be, and is, calm, comfortable, large, and slow.
She must be, and is, proud of her great man. She attends to his bodily wants, and does not presume to share his spiritual excitements. In their common life he is the brain, she the willing hands and feet. It is perfectly fair. If there are to be great men some one must be found to look after them--some one who shall be more patient, faithful, and admiring than a servant, and unable like a servant to throw up the situation on the least provocation. A wife is an admirable inst.i.tution.
She is the hedge set between the precious flowers of the male intellect and the sun and dust of sordid worries. She is the flannel that protects when the winds of routine are cold. She is the sheltering jam that makes the pills of life possible. She is buffer, comforter, and cook. And so long as she enjoys these various roles the arrangement is perfect. The difficulties begin when, defying Nature"s teaching, which on this point is luminous, she refuses to be the hedge, flannel, jam, buffer, comforter, and cook; and when she goes so far on the sulphuric path of rebellion as to insist on being clever on her own account and publicly, she has, in Germany at least, set every law of religion and decency at defiance. Charlotte had been doing this, if all I had heard was true, for the last three years; therefore her stern inquiry addressed to a wife of my sobriety struck me as singularly out of place. What had I been doing with my life? Looking back into it in search of an answer it seemed very s.p.a.cious, and sunny, and quiet. There were children in it, and there was a garden, and a spouse in whose eyes I was precious; but I had not done anything. And if I could point to no pamphlets or lectures, neither need I point to a furrow between my eyebrows.
"It is very odd," Charlotte went on, as I sat silent, "our meeting like this. I was on the verge of writing to ask if I might come and stay with you."
"Oh were you?"
"So often lately I have thought just you might be such a help to me if only I could wake you up."
"Wake me up, my dear Charlotte?"
"Oh, I"ve heard about you. I know you live stuffed away in the country in a sort of dream. You needn"t try to answer my question about what you have done. You can"t answer it. You have lived in a dream, entirely wrapped up in your family and your plants."
"Plants, my dear Charlotte?"
"You do not see nor want to see farther than the ditch at the end of your garden. All that is going on outside, out in the great real world where people are in earnest, where they strive, and long, and suffer, where they unceasingly pursue their ideal of a wider life, a richer experience, a higher knowledge, is absolutely indifferent to you. Your existence--no one could call it life--is quite negative and unemotional.
It is as negative and as unemotional as----" She paused and looked at me with a faint, compa.s.sionate smile.
"As what?" I asked, anxious to hear the worst.
"Frankly, as an oyster"s."
"Really, my dear Charlotte," I exclaimed, naturally upset. How very unfortunate that I should have hurried away from Gohren. Why had I not stayed there two or three days, as I had at first intended? It was such a safe place; you could get out of it so easily and so quickly. If I were an oyster--curious how much the word disconcerted me--at least I was a happy oyster, which was surely better than being miserable and not an oyster at all. Charlotte was certainly nearer being miserable than happy. People who are happy do not have the look she had in her eyes, nor is their expression so uninterruptedly determined. And why should I be lectured? When I am in the mood for a lecture, my habit is to buy a ticket and go and listen; and when I have not bought a ticket, it is a sign that I do not want a lecture. I did not like to explain this beautifully simple position to Charlotte, yet felt that at all costs I must nip her eloquence in the bud or she would keep me out till it was dark; so I got up, cleared my throat, and said in the balmy tone in which people on platforms begin their orations, "_Geehrte Anwesende_."
"Are you going to give me a lecture?" she inquired with a surprised smile.
"In return for yours."
"My dear soul, may I not talk to you about anything except plants?"
"I really don"t know why you should think plants are the only things that interest me. I have not yet mentioned them. And, as a matter of fact, you are the last person with whom I would share my vegetable griefs. But that isn"t what I wished to say. I was going to offer you, _geehrte Anwesende_, a few remarks about husbands."
Charlotte frowned.
"About husbands," I repeated blandly, in a voice of milk and honey.
"_Geehrte Anwesende_, in the course of an uneventful existence I have had much leisure for reflection, and my reflections have led me to the conclusion, erroneous perhaps, but fixed, that having got a husband, taken him of one"s own free will, taken him sometimes even in the face of opposition, the least one can do is to stick to him. Now, Charlotte, where is yours? What have you done with him? Is he here? And if not, why is he not here, and where is he?"
Charlotte got up hastily and brushed the sand out of the folds of her dress. "You haven"t changed a bit," she said with a slight laugh. "You are just as----"