The little lavatory with its long high window sending in the light from across the two sets of back to back tree-shaded Bloomsbury gardens, its little shabby open sink cupboard facing her with its dim unpolished taps and the battered enamel cans on its cracked and blistered wooden top became this morning one of her own rooms, a happy little corner in the growing life that separated her from Wimpole Street. There were no corners such as this in the beautiful clever Hampstead house; no remote shabby happy corners at all; nothing brown and old and at peace. Between him and his house were his housekeeper and servants; between him and his life was his profession … and the complex group of people with whom he must perpetually deal, with whom he dealt in alternations of intimacy and formality. He was still at his best in his practice. That was still his life. There was nothing more real as yet in his life than certain times and moments in his room at Wimpole Street. … Life had answered no other questions for him. … His thought-life and his personal life were troubled and dark and cold … in spite of his attachment to some of his family group … he could buy beautiful things, and travel freely in his leisure … perhaps that, those two glorious things, were sufficient compensation. But there was something wrong about them; they gave a false sense of power … the way all those people smiled at each other when they went about and bought things, picked up a fine thing at a bargain, or gave a price whose size they were proud of … thinking other people’s thoughts … apart from this worldly side of his life, he was entirely at Wimpole Street; the whole of him; an open book; there was nothing else in his life, yet … his holiday with those two men—even the soft-voiced sensuous one who would quote poetry and talk romantically and cynically about women in the evenings—would bring nothing else. Yet he was counting upon it so much that he could not help unbending about his boat and his boots and his filters … perhaps all that was the best of the holiday—men were never tired of talking about the way they did this and that … clever difficult things that made all the difference; but they missed all the rest. Even when they sat about smoking their minds were fussing. The women in their parties dressed, and smiled and appreciated. There would be no real happiness in such a party … except when the women were alone, doing the things with no show about them. Supposing I were able to go anywhere on this page … Ippington … 295 m.; pop. 760 … trains to Tudworth and thence two or three times daily … Spray Bay Hotel. … A sparrow cheeped on the window sill and fluttered away. The breath of happiness poured in at the high window; all the places in the railway guide told over their charms; mountains and lakes and rivers, innumerable strips of coast, village streets to walk along for the first time, leading out … going, somewhere, in a train. Standing on tiptoe she gazed her thoughts across the two garden spaces towards the grimed backs of the large brown houses. Why was one allowed to be so utterly happy? There it was … happily here and happily going away … away.
XXIV
“There; how d’ye like that, eh? A liberal education in twelve volumes with an index. Read them when ye want to. See?” …
They looked less set up like that in a row than when they had lain about on the floor of the den … taking up Dante and Beethoven at tea time.
“Books posted? I wonder I’m not more rushed. I say—v’you greased all Hancock’s and the Pater’s instruments?”
He knows I’m slacking … he’ll tell the others when they come back. …
Mr. Leyton’s door shut with a bang. He would be sitting reading the newspaper until the next patient came. The eternal sounds of laughter and dancing came up from the kitchen. The rest of the house was perfectly still. Her miserable hand reopened the last page of the Index. There were five or six more entries under “Woman.”
If one could only burn all the volumes; stop the publication of them. But it was all books, all the literature in the world, right back to Juvenal … whatever happened, if it could all be avenged by somebody in some way, there was all that … the classics, the finest literature—“unsurpassed.” Education would always mean coming in contact with all that. Schoolboys got their first ideas. … How could Newnham and Girton women endure it? How could they go on living and laughing and talking?
And the modern men were the worst … “we can now, with all the facts in our hands sit down and examine her at our leisure.” There was no getting away from the scientific facts … inferior; mentally, morally, intellectually and physically … her development arrested in the interest of her special functions … reverting later towards the male type … old women with deep voices and hair on their faces … leaving off where boys of eighteen began. If that is true everything is as clear as daylight. “Woman is not undeveloped man but diverse” falls to pieces. Woman is undeveloped man … if one could die of the loathsome visions …
