The Woman Who Did

Chapter 9

Alan Merrick strode from his father's door that day stung with a

burning sense of wrong and injustice. More than ever before in

his life he realized to himself the abject hollowness of that

conventional code which masquerades in our midst as a system of

morals. If he had continued to "live single" as we hypocritically

phrase it, and so helped by one unit to spread the festering social

canker of prostitution, on which as basis, like some mediaeval

castle on its foul dungeon vaults, the entire superstructure of our

outwardly decent modern society is reared, his father no doubt

would have shrugged his shoulders and blinked his cold eyes, and

commended the wise young man for abstaining from marriage till his

means could permit him to keep a wife of his own class in the way

she was accustomed to. The wretched victims of that vile system

might die unseen and unpitied in some hideous back slum, without

touching one chord of remorse or regret in Dr. Merrick's nature.

He was steeled against their suffering. Or again, if Alan had sold

his virility for gold to some rich heiress of his set, like Ethel

Waterton--had bartered his freedom to be her wedded paramour in a

loveless marriage, his father would not only have gladly

acquiesced, but would have congratulated his son on his luck and

his prudence. Yet, because Alan had chosen rather to form a

blameless union of pure affection with a woman who was in every way

his moral and mental superior, but in despite of the conventional

ban of society, Dr. Merrick had cast him off as an open reprobate.

And why? Simply because that union was unsanctioned by the

exponents of a law they despised, and unblessed by the priests of a

creed they rejected. Alan saw at once it is not the intrinsic

moral value of an act such people think about, but the light in

which it is regarded by a selfish society.

Unchastity, it has been well said, is union without love; and Alan

would have none of it.

He went back to Herminia more than ever convinced of that spotless

woman's moral superiority to every one else he had ever met with.

She sat, a lonely soul, enthroned amid the halo of her own perfect

purity. To Alan, she seemed like one of those early Italian

Madonnas, lost in a glory of light that surrounds and half hides

them. He reverenced her far too much to tell her all that had

happened. How could he wound those sweet ears with his father's

coarse epithets?

They took the club train that afternoon to Paris. There they slept

the night in a fusty hotel near the Gare du Nord, and went on in

the morning by the daylight express to Switzerland. At Lucerne and

Milan they broke the journey once more. Herminia had never yet

gone further afield from England than Paris; and this first glimpse

of a wider world was intensely interesting to her. Who can help

being pleased, indeed, with that wonderful St. Gothard--the crystal

green Reuss shattering itself in white spray into emerald pools by

the side of the railway; Wasen church perched high upon its

solitary hilltop; the Biaschina ravine, the cleft rocks of Faido,

the serpentine twists and turns of the ramping line as it mounts or

descends its spiral zigzags? Dewy Alpine pasture, tossed masses of

land-slip, white narcissus on the banks, snowy peaks in the

background--all alike were fresh visions of delight to Herminia;

and she drank it all in with the pure childish joy of a poetic

nature. It was the Switzerland of her dreams, reinforced and

complemented by unsuspected detail.

One trouble alone disturbed her peace of mind upon that delightful

journey. Alan entered their names at all the hotels where they

stopped as "Mr. and Mrs. Alan Merrick of London." That deception,

as Herminia held it, cost her many qualms of conscience; but Alan,

with masculine common-sense, was firm upon the point that no other

description was practically possible; and Herminia yielded with a

sign to his greater worldly wisdom. She had yet to learn the

lesson which sooner or later comes home to all the small minority

who care a pin about righteousness, that in a world like our own,

it is impossible for the righteous always to act consistently up to

their most sacred convictions.

At Milan, they stopped long enough to snatch a glimpse of the

cathedral, and to take a hasty walk through the pictured glories of

the Brera. A vague suspicion began to cross Herminia's mind, as she

gazed at the girlish Madonna of the Sposalizio, that perhaps she

wasn't quite as well adapted to love Italy as Switzerland. Nature

she understood; was art yet a closed book to her? If so, she would

be sorry; for Alan, in whom the artistic sense was largely

developed, loved his Italy dearly; and it would be a real cause of

regret to her if she fell short in any way of Alan's expectations.

Moreover, at table d'hote that evening, a slight episode occurred

which roused to the full once more poor Herminia's tender

conscience. Talk had somehow turned on Shelley's Italian wanderings;

and a benevolent-looking clergyman opposite, with that vacantly

well-meaning smile, peculiar to a certain type of country rector,

was apologizing in what he took to be a broad and generous spirit of

divine, toleration for the great moral teacher's supposed lapses

from the normal rule of tight living. Much, the benevolent-looking

gentleman opined, with beaming spectacles, must be forgiven to men

of genius. Their temptations no doubt are far keener than with most

of us. An eager imagination--a vivid sense of beauty--quick

readiness to be moved by the sight of physical or moral

loveliness--these were palliations, the old clergyman held, of much

that seemed wrong and contradictory to our eyes in the lives of so

many great men and women.

At sound of such immoral and unworthy teaching, Herminia's ardent

soul rose up in revolt within her. "Oh, no," she cried eagerly,

leaning across the table as she spoke. "I can't allow that plea.

It's degrading to Shelley, and to all true appreciation of the

duties of genius. Not less but more than most of us is the genius

bound to act up with all his might to the highest moral law, to be

the prophet and interpreter of the highest moral excellence. To

whom much is given, of him much shall be required. Just because

the man or woman of genius stands raised on a pedestal so far above

the mass have we the right to expect that he or she should point us

the way, should go before us as pioneer, should be more careful of

the truth, more disdainful of the wrong, down to the smallest

particular, than the ordinary person. There are poor souls born

into this world so petty and narrow and wanting in originality that

one can only expect them to tread the beaten track, be it ever so

cruel and wicked and mistaken. But from a Shelley or a George

Eliot, we expect greater things, and we have a right to expect

them. That's why I can never quite forgive George Eliot--who knew

the truth, and found freedom for herself, and practised it in her

life--for upholding in her books the conventional lies, the

conventional prejudices; and that's why I can never admire Shelley

enough, who, in an age of slavery, refused to abjure or to deny his

freedom, but acted unto death to the full height of his principles."

The benevolent-looking clergyman gazed aghast at Herminia. Then he

turned slowly to Alan. "Your wife," he said in a mild and

terrified voice, "is a VERY advanced lady."

Herminia longed to blurt out the whole simple truth. "I am NOT his

wife. I am not, and could never be wife or slave to any man. This

is a very dear friend, and he and I are travelling as friends

together." But a warning glance from Alan made her hold her peace

with difficulty and acquiesce as best she might in the virtual

deception. Still, the incident went to her heart, and made her

more anxious than ever to declare her convictions and her practical

obedience to them openly before the world. She remembered, oh, so

well one of her father's sermons that had vividly impressed her in

the dear old days at Dunwich Cathedral. It was preached upon the

text, "Come ye out and be ye separate."

From Milan they went on direct to Florence. Alan had decided to

take rooms for the summer at Perugia, and there to see Herminia

safely through her maternal troubles. He loved Perugia, he said;

it was cool and high-perched; and then, too, it was such a capital

place for sketching. Besides, he was anxious to complete his

studies of the early Umbrian painters. But they must have just one

week at Florence together before they went up among the hills.

Florence was the place for a beginner to find out what Italian art

was aiming at. You got it there in its full logical development--

every phase, step by step, in organic unity; while elsewhere you

saw but stages and jumps and results, interrupted here and there by

disturbing lacunae. So at Florence they stopped for a week en

route, and Herminia first learnt what Florentine art proposed to

itself.

Ah, that week in Florence! What a dream of delight! 'Twas pure

gold to Herminia. How could it well be otherwise? It seemed to

her afterwards like the last flicker of joy in a doomed life,

before its light went out and left her forever in utter darkness.

To be sure, a week is a terribly cramped and hurried time in which

to view Florence, the beloved city, whose ineffable glories need at

least one whole winter adequately to grasp them. But failing a

winter, a week with the gods made Herminia happy. She carried away

but a confused phantasmagoria, it is true, of the soaring tower of

the Palazzo Vecchio, pointing straight with its slender shaft to

heaven; of the swelling dome and huge ribs of the cathedral, seen

vast from the terrace in front of San Miniato; of the endless

Madonnas and the deathless saints niched in golden tabernacles at

the Uffizi and the Pitti; of the tender grace of Fra Angelico at

San Marco; of the infinite wealth and astounding variety of

Donatello's marble in the spacious courts of the cool Bargello.

But her window at the hotel looked straight as it could look down

the humming Calzaioli to the pierced and encrusted front of

Giotto's campanile, with the cupola of San Lorenzo in the middle

distance, and the facade of Fiesole standing out deep-blue against

the dull red glare of evening in the background. If that were not

enough to sate and enchant Herminia, she would indeed have been

difficult. And with Alan by her side, every joy was doubled.

She had never before known what it was to have her lover

continuously with her. And his aid in those long corridors, where

bambinos smiled down at her with childish lips, helped her

wondrously to understand in so short a time what they sought to

convey to her. Alan was steeped in Italy; he knew and entered into

the spirit of Tuscan art; and now for the first time Herminia found

herself face to face with a thoroughly new subject in which Alan

could be her teacher from the very beginning, as most men are

teachers to the women who depend upon them. This sense of support

and restfulness and clinging was fresh and delightful to her. It

is a woman's ancestral part to look up to the man; she is happiest

in doing it, and must long remain so; and Herminia was not sorry to

find herself in this so much a woman. She thought it delicious to

roam through the long halls of some great gallery with Alan, and

let him point out to her the pictures he loved best, explain their

peculiar merits, and show the subtle relation in which they stood

to the pictures that went before them and the pictures that came

after them, as well as to the other work of the same master or his

contemporaries. It was even no small joy to her to find that he

knew so much more about art and its message than she did; that she

could look up to his judgment, confide in his opinion, see the

truth of his criticism, profit much by his instruction. So well

did she use those seven short days, indeed, that she came to

Florence with Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, mere names;

and she went away from it feeling that she had made them real

friends and possessions for a life-time.

So the hours whirled fast in those enchanted halls, and Herminia's

soul was enriched by new tastes and new interests. O towers of

fretted stone! O jasper and porphyry! Her very state of health

made her more susceptible than usual to fresh impressions, and drew

Alan at the same time every day into closer union with her. For

was not the young life now quickening within her half his and half

hers, and did it not seem to make the father by reflex nearer and

dearer to her? Surely the child that was nurtured, unborn, on

those marble colonnades and those placid Saint Catherines must draw

in with each pulse of its antenatal nutriment some tincture of

beauty, of freedom, of culture! So Herminia thought to herself as

she lay awake at night and looked out of the window from the

curtains of her bed at the boundless dome and the tall campanile

gleaming white in the moonlight. So we have each of us thought--

especially the mothers in Israel among us--about the unborn babe

that hastens along to its birth with such a radiant halo of the

possible future ever gilding and glorifying its unseen forehead.