Sally Bishop Part 39

"There is no settlement. Why should there be?"

"Why? Well, for every reason in the world, I should think."

"There is none, then."

"You haven't even suggested it?"

"No!"

She rose, turning away from the bed where she had been sitting, with the tears smarting in her eyes. Janet looked after her, an expression of contemplation pursing her features, wrinkling her forehead.

"I think I'll go and see Mr. Traill," she said slowly.

Sally wheeled round, her heel a pivot to the motion.

"What for?" she asked.

"I think he'd better be told that he can't play indiscriminately with women like you."

"He's not playing," Sally retorted violently. "You're cruel, Janet.

If you do go to him, I'll never speak to you again."

"That's quite possible; I should expect that," Janet replied imperturbably. "Whenever one tries to arrange the affairs of people who cannot arrange them themselves, one must antic.i.p.ate that sort of treatment."

"Ah, but you don't understand," Sally pleaded piteously. "He would hate any interference of that sort. He would hate me through it. We don't look at the thing in the same light that you do. You make a business of it. Do you think if I had ever seen it in that light, I could have done what I have done? You know I couldn't. I should loathe myself too. I tell you, we love each other. There can be no question of settlement in such a case as that."

Janet looked at her with pity. It was hard for her to say all that she intended; but the mind of the revolutionary, however wasted its cause, has kindred with the mind of G.o.d. Justice and truth before all things is the cry of it, and let suffering be a means rather than a hindrance to the end.

"Never drown sorrow," Janet had once said from her pinnacle of enthusiasm, "the dripping ghost of it'll haunt you. Don't drown it--save it, learn of it."

Now, with a steady hand, she carried that precept into practice. It might make a rent in Sally's heart; it might bring separation between them; but she did not hesitate at that. The cause of justice and the desire for truth have no need of sentiment.

"And how long do you think that love is going to last?" she asked.

"Always; why not?"

"With you, perhaps; but with him?"

Sally looked out of the window across the river. The night that Mr.

Arthur had proposed to her--offering her marriage--danced flauntingly across her memory. He had been ready to bind himself to her for the rest of his life. She let the memory go on, with its mincing steps, back into the dreary darkness of the river from whence it had come; but she said nothing.

"You can't answer for him?" suggested Janet.

"Yes, I can," she replied impetuously. "Why not always with him?

He'll never marry. He's always said so."

"Yes, but you didn't answer at once. Sally--" Janet put a hand on her shoulder, "I believe you think you're as good as married. The way you answered Mrs. Thing-um-i-bob downstairs--Mrs. Hewson--when she asked you, what we'd both agreed to tell her--that made me begin to wonder. But you're not married, Sally. He's only your master--that's all, and if I were you, I'd see that I got my settlement. He might want to leave you any day."

Sally moved herself free of the detaining hand and laughed, with a bitter absence of merriment.

"That shows how little you understand," she said. "He's told me over and over again that he never thought he would find any one who fitted in so perfectly to his life as I do."

"Most any pretty woman fits into a man's life when he wants, and so long as he wants her," Janet remarked. "It's only women like myself--ugly little devils like me--who have to meet the difficulty of finding a niche that'll hold them for more than the latter part of an afternoon before the lights are turned up. You fit into his life--of course you do. I'm not suggesting that you don't. I'm only questioning how long you're going to do it--only trying to remind you that it won't be for always. Why will you insist on being so romantic? Why can't you look at life through a plain sheet of gla.s.s--if you must look at it through something--instead of choosing the red and the yellow and the purples--anything but the plain, the untinted reality. Go and get your settlement. Make him put it in black and white, and shove his name down at the bottom. Then you can look at it any way you like--forget about it--sit and nurse your romance all day long if you want to; but make sure of the reality first. He'll think twice as much of you if you do."

"You think that," said Sally. "You believe he'd think twice as much of me if I came to him in a mercenary spirit like that? And I thought you knew something about men."

"Mercenary!" Janet threw her head back and laughed. "You'd have to ask for a good deal more than that to seem mercenary, my dear child.

You! Why, you've worked two years and you never knew your own value all that time. I've seen your finger-nails worn square on that old typewriter you used to pound; but you never dreamed of thinking that you were worth more than your twenty-five or your twenty-seven s.h.i.+llings a week, however much they made you stay at that office overtime. Mercenary's about the last word that could be applied to you. I don't want to worry the life out of you, or make you miserable, but when I see you rus.h.i.+ng along--giving, giving, always giving, with both hands--"

"I'm not only giving," Sally exclaimed. "Do you think I get nothing in return? I've never been made so happy in my life before--never!

Is that receiving nothing for what I give?"

Janet looked at her, steadying her eyes.

"You don't understand the proportion of things," she said slowly.

"You don't realize the comparative ratio of one thing to another.

Any man can give happiness to a woman who loves him--but that's no bargain! He merely gives her happiness by taking his own. Do you call that a fair exchange? To you, drunk with romance, perhaps it is. But in reality it's robbery. He has to pay higher for his pleasures than that. Why, even the women in the streets, he pays and takes all risks inclusive? Then what do you think he owes a woman like you? Why, in the name of G.o.d, can't you sweep all this mist away, that's in front of your eyes, and see it as a transaction? Sign it, seal it, make a deed of it, and then forget it if you like; but insure yourself against the worst if it should ever come."

To suppose that this reasoning would appeal to Sally, to expect that she would a.s.similate Janet's point of view, adopt Janet's att.i.tude of mind, is beyond all imagination. The whole aspect that Janet had revealed, depressed her, weighed--a heavy drag--upon her spirits.

But she was not convinced.

To call things by their names--albeit that language has been evolved these many thousands of years, and during all that time human beings have sat in the dust and worked and played with its cunning symbols--is no easy matter. For the evolution of language has achieved two ends, and the perfection of it has accomplished the one as thoroughly as it has the other. With language we give expression of our feelings; but also with language we have learnt to hide feelings, cloak thoughts, and dissemble before the very eyes that know us best. Janet, demanding the truth in all things, seeking in words the very highest aim of the words themselves, was a far higher type than Sally.

To Sally, the only means by which she could follow the true bent of her inclinations, was by wrapping up the matter in a cunning tissue of words. Herein she is no great woman, loving greatly. She could not bring herself to think of her position as that of a mistress.

To still love and do that, was beyond her. And so she persisted in regarding herself as a woman who has faced-out conventionality, dared the opinion of the world, and chosen to live with a man as his wife without the condescending sanction of the Church.

It is all pardonable, all this. It is an occurrence as common in big cities as are the lofty chimneys, and besmirching haze which, on the horizon, herald the approach of a place where men and women are gathered closely together. But it is a position which, with the present conditions of tortured conventionality, is impossible, untenable. Either a woman is the wife of a man, or his mistress; and if the latter then, as Janet has said, she had better see to her settlement first and build her romance, if so she chose, upon its foundations. A man may keep closed the gates of matrimony until the last moment, but when he finds that only through them can he gain the woman he loves, then no amount of principle and no desire of freedom will hinder him from swinging them wide and following her through. On the other hand also, he will make but little attempt to unlock those very gates, so long as there is a shadow of the prospect within his mind that she will meet him outside.

To Sally, such reasoning as this would have robbed her of all romance--the shattering siege gun that thunders through a town, and tumbles the images from their altars in the little church.

Two ways there were in which to view the matter truly. If she were the great woman, she would have loved for the love of love itself--let it end where it might. If she were the revolutionary seeking truth, demanding freedom, then she would have loved the transaction for the transaction's sake--let it end to-morrow if it willed.

But Sally was neither. She took a middle course. She neither loved wholly for the sake of love, nor could she make her transaction and be proud of it. Like thousands of other women, she liked to think that she was loved in return and that it would never end. Like thousands of other women, she believed that what the man had taken, that he would keep, because in the eyes of G.o.d and all the other phrases of romantic sentimentalism, they were one.

But this is conventionality, and conventionality has to be thanked for it. So women have been brought up; and until that army, of which Sally now is a deserter, has forced its marches and driven its enemy from the field, women will so continue to think, so continue to act, so continue to be broken into dust, the grains of which any wind may carry into the west where the sun sets in deep crimson.

That night when Sally returned from Kew, Traill had noticed her depression.

"What's Miss Hallard been saying to you?" he asked. "Telling you that you're leading a terrible life, I suppose."

"No, why should she? Do you think I am, Jack?"

"Me? I should hope not, since I'm the cause of it. Do you feel you're doing anything very terrible? Here--put your arms round my neck--kiss me--G.o.d bless your little heart--you couldn't do anything terrible. Now, are we going to sit and mope, or shall we go out to supper?"

That meant that they were going to supper, and in half an hour she was as happy again as a child.

For the first of the three years they pa.s.sed through an incessant round of amus.e.m.e.nts, going abroad every few months, once bicycling all through France from North to South and then returning by train, spending a week in Paris. Their method of living was frugal, and Sally's demands amounted practically to nothing. For the whole of that year, Traill had sunned himself in the warm delight of her simplicity. The years when he was alone had brought with them a certain amount of cynicism, a definite trace of bitterness. But with Sally, he forgot all that--threw from his shoulders the years that solitude had added to his age and became the man of thirty-six who still looks youth in the eyes without question.

Then he had shaken himself and awakened to the broad responsibilities of life. A small case was offered him in the courts. Such cases he had refused before; now Sally urged him to accept it and he obeyed, looking rather to the future than her immediate prompting. So began the seriousness of his career as a barrister. The second year only brought one other small brief with it; but both cases were won. Then he began to specialize in divorce and finally, contact with a well-known solicitor which had come through the medium of journalism, brought him his first brief in the probate and divorce division. The case was rather a big one and he was not the leading counsel, but the a.s.sistance he gave was deemed of such value, that the next brief from the solicitor was given entirely to him.