The Woman Who Did

Chapter 7

The next six months were the happiest time of her life, for

Herminia. All day long she worked hard with her classes; and often

in the evenings Alan Merrick dropped in for sweet converse and

companionship. Too free from any taint of sin or shame herself

ever to suspect that others could misinterpret her actions,

Herminia was hardly aware how the gossip of Bower Lane made free in

time with the name of the young lady who had taken a cottage in the

row, and whose relations with the tall gentleman that called so

much in the evenings were beginning to attract the attention of the

neighborhood. The poor slaves of washer-women and working men's

wives all around, with whom contented slavery to a drunken, husband

was the only "respectable" condition,--couldn't understand for the

life of them how the pretty young lady could make her name so

cheap; "and her that pretends to be so charitable and that, and

goes about in the parish like a district visitor!" Though to be

sure it had already struck the minds of Bower Lane that Herminia

never went "to church nor chapel;" and when people cut themselves

adrift from church and chapel, why, what sort of morality can you

reasonably expect of them? Nevertheless, Herminia's manners were

so sweet and engaging, to rich and poor alike, that Bower Lane

seriously regretted what it took to be her lapse from grace. Poor

purblind Bower Lane! A life-time would have failed it to discern

for itself how infinitely higher than its slavish "respectability"

was Herminia's freedom. In which respect, indeed, Bower Lane was

no doubt on a dead level with Belgravia, or, for the matter of

that, with Lambeth Palace.

But Herminia, for her part, never discovered she was talked about.

To the pure all things are pure; and Herminia was dowered with that

perfect purity. And though Bower Lane lay but some few hundred

yards off from the Carlyle Place Girl's School, the social gulf

between them yet yawned so wide that good old Miss Smith-Waters

from Cambridge, the head-mistress of the school, never caught a

single echo of the washerwomen's gossip. Herminia's life through

those six months was one unclouded honeymoon. On Sundays, she and

Alan would go out of town together, and stroll across the breezy

summit of Leith Hill, or among the brown heather and garrulous

pine-woods that perfume the radiating spurs of Hind Head with their

aromatic resins. Her love for Alan was profound and absorbing;

while as for Alan, the more he gazed into the calm depths of that

crystal soul, the more deeply did he admire it. Gradually she was

raising him to her own level. It is impossible to mix with a lofty

nature and not acquire in time some tincture of its nobler and more

generous sentiments. Herminia was weaning Alan by degrees from the

world; she was teaching him to see that moral purity and moral

earnestness are worth more, after all, than to dwell with purple

hangings in all the tents of iniquity. She was making him

understand and sympathize with the motives which led her stoutly on

to her final martyrdom, which made her submit without a murmur of

discontent to her great renunciation.

As yet, however, there was no hint or forecast of actual martyrdom.

On the contrary, her life flowed in all the halo of a honeymoon. It

was a honeymoon, too, undisturbed by the petty jars and discomforts

of domestic life; she saw Alan too seldom for either ever to lose

the keen sense of fresh delight in the other's presence. When she

met him, she thrilled to the delicate fingertips. Herminia had

planned it so of set purpose. In her reasoned philosophy of life,

she had early decided that 'tis the wear and tear of too close daily

intercourse which turns unawares the lover into the husband; and she

had determined that in her own converse with the man she loved that

cause of disillusion should never intrude itself. They conserved

their romance through all their plighted and united life. Herminia

had afterwards no recollections of Alan to look back upon save

ideally happy ones.

So six months wore away. On the memory of those six months Herminia

was to subsist for half a lifetime. At the end of that time, Alan

began to fear that if she did not soon withdraw from the Carlyle

Place School, Miss Smith-Waters might begin to ask inconvenient

questions. Herminia, ever true to her principles, was for stopping

on till the bitter end, and compelling Miss Smith-Waters to dismiss

her from her situation. But Alan, more worldly wise, foresaw that

such a course must inevitably result in needless annoyance and

humiliation for Herminia; and Herminia was now beginning to be so

far influenced by Alan's personality that she yielded the point with

reluctance to his masculine judgment. It must be always so. The man

must needs retain for many years to come the personal hegemony he

has usurped over the woman; and the woman who once accepts him as

lover or as husband must give way in the end, even in matters of

principle, to his virile self-assertion. She would be less a woman,

and he less a man, were any other result possible. Deep down in the

very roots of the idea of s*x we come on that prime antithesis,--the

male, active and aggressive; the female, sedentary, passive, and

receptive.

And even on the broader question, experience shows one it is always

so in the world we live in. No man or woman can go through life in

consistent obedience to any high principle,--not even the willing

and deliberate martyrs. We must bow to circumstances. Herminia

had made up her mind beforehand for the crown of martyrdom, the one

possible guerdon this planet can bestow upon really noble and

disinterested action. And she never shrank from any necessary

pang, incidental to the prophet's and martyr's existence. Yet even

so, in a society almost wholly composed of mean and petty souls,

incapable of comprehending or appreciating any exalted moral

standpoint, it is practically impossible to live from day to day in

accordance with a higher or purer standard. The martyr who should

try so to walk without deviation of any sort, turning neither to

the right nor to the left in the smallest particular, must

accomplish his martyrdom prematurely on the pettiest side-issues,

and would never live at all to assert at the stake the great truth

which is the lodestar and goal of his existence.

So Herminia gave way. Sadly against her will she gave way. One

morning in early March, she absented herself from her place in the

class-room without even taking leave of her beloved schoolgirls,

whom she had tried so hard unobtrusively to train up towards a

rational understanding of the universe around them, and sat down to

write a final letter of farewell to poor straight-laced kind-hearted

Miss Smith-Waters. She sat down to it with a sigh; for Miss

Smith-Waters, though her outlook upon the cosmos was through one

narrow c***k, was a good soul up to her lights, and had been really

fond and proud of Herminia. She had rather shown her off, indeed, as

a social trump card to the hesitating parent,--"This is our second

mistress, Miss Barton; you know her father, perhaps; such an

excellent man, the Dean of Dunwich." And now, Herminia sat down with

a heavy heart, thinking to herself what a stab of pain the avowal

she had to make would send throbbing through that gentle old breast,

and how absolutely incapable dear Miss Smith-Waters could be of ever

appreciating the conscientious reasons which had led her,

Iphigenia-like, to her self-imposed sacrifice.

But, for all that, she wrote her letter through, delicately,

sweetly, with feminine tact and feminine reticence. She told Miss

Smith-Waters frankly enough all it was necessary Miss Smith-Waters

should know; but she said it with such daintiness that even that

conventionalized and hide-bound old maid couldn't help feeling and

recognizing the purity and nobility of her misguided action. Poor

child, Miss Smith-Waters thought; she was mistaken, of course, sadly

and grievously mistaken; but, then, 'twas her heart that misled her,

no doubt; and Miss Smith-Waters, having dim recollections of a

far-away time when she herself too possessed some rudimentary

fragment of such a central vascular organ, fairly cried over the

poor girl's letter with sympathetic shame, and remorse, and

vexation. Miss Smith-Waters could hardly be expected to understand

that if Herminia had thought her conduct in the faintest degree

wrong, or indeed anything but the highest and best for humanity, she

could never conceivably have allowed even that loving heart of hers

to hurry her into it. For Herminia's devotion to principle was not

less but far greater than Miss Smith-Waters's own; only, as it

happened, the principles themselves were diametrically opposite.

Herminia wrote her note with not a few tears for poor Miss

Smith-Waters's disappointment. That is the worst of living a life

morally ahead of your contemporaries; what you do with profoundest

conviction of its eternal rightness cannot fail to arouse hostile

and painful feelings even in the souls of the most right-minded of

your friends who still live in bondage to the conventional lies and

the conventional injustices. It is the good, indeed, who are most

against you. Still, Herminia steeled her heart to tell the simple

truth,--how, for the right's sake and humanity's she had made up her

mind to eschew the accursed thing, and to strike one bold blow for

the freedom and unfettered individuality of women. She knew in what

obloquy her action would involve her, she said; but she knew too,

that to do right for right's sake was a duty imposed by nature upon

every one of us; and that the clearer we could see ahead, and the

farther in front we could look, the more profoundly did that duty

shine forth for us. For her own part, she had never shrunk from

doing what she knew to be right for mankind in the end, though she

felt sure it must lead her to personal misery. Yet unless one woman

were prepared to lead the way, no freedom was possible. She had

found a man with whom she could spend her life in sympathy and

united usefulness; and with him she had elected to spend it in the

way pointed out to us by nature. Acting on his advice, though

somewhat against her own judgment, she meant to leave England for

the present, only returning again when she could return with the

dear life they had both been instrumental in bringing into the

world, and to which henceforth her main attention must be directed.

She signed it, "Your ever-grateful and devoted HERMINIA."

Poor Miss Smith-Waters laid down that astonishing, that incredible

letter in a perfect whirl of amazement and stupefaction. She didn't

know what to make of it. It seemed to run counter to all her

preconceived ideas of moral action. That a young girl should venture

to think for herself at all about right and wrong was passing

strange; that she should arrive at original notions upon those

abstruse subjects, which were not the notions of constituted

authority and of the universal slave-drivers and obscurantists

generally,--notions full of luminousness upon the real relations and

duties of our race,--was to poor, cramped Miss Smith-Waters

well-nigh inconceivable. That a young girl should prefer freedom to

slavery; should deem it more moral to retain her divinely-conferred

individuality in spite of the world than to yield it up to a man for

life in return for the price of her board and lodging; should refuse

to sell her own body for a comfortable home and the shelter of a

name,--these things seemed to Miss Smith-Waters, with her

smaller-catechism standards of right and wrong, scarcely short of

sheer madness. Yet Herminia had so endeared herself to the old

lady's soul that on receipt of her letter Miss Smith-Waters went

upstairs to her own room with a neuralgic headache, and never again

in her life referred to her late second mistress in any other terms

than as "my poor dear sweet misguided Herminia."

But when it became known next morning in Bower Lane that the

queenly-looking school-mistress who used to go round among "our

girls" with tickets for concerts and lectures and that, had

disappeared suddenly with the nice-looking young man who used to

come a-courting her on Sundays and evenings, the amazement and

surprise of respectable Bower Lane was simply unbounded. "Who

would have thought," the red-faced matrons of the cottages

remarked, over their quart of bitter, "the pore thing had it in

her! But there, it's these demure ones as is always the slyest!"

For Bower Lane could only judge that austere soul by its own vulgar

standard (as did also Belgravia). Most low minds, indeed, imagine

absolute hypocrisy must be involved in any striving after goodness

and abstract right-doing on the part of any who happen to

disbelieve in their own blood-thirsty deities, or their own vile

woman-degrading and prostituting morality. In the topsy-turvy

philosophy of Bower Lane and of Belgravia, what is usual is right;

while any conscious striving to be better and nobler than the mass

around one is regarded at once as either insane or criminal.