“That won’t help you, thank you. If anything I am my mother’s son.”
“Ah—ah, what is this, you are a son. Do you see?”
“That’s a piece of English feudalism.”
“The demands of feudalism do not explain a woman’s desire for sons.”
“That is another question. She hopes they will give her the understanding she never had from their father. In that I am my mother’s son forever. If there’s a future life, all I care for is to meet her. If I could have her back for ten minutes I would gladly give up the rest of my life. … Is heredity really crisscross? Is it proved?”
“Substantially.”
“Oh yes. Of course. I know. To prevent civilisation going ahead too fast! I’ve seen that somewhere. Very flattering to men. But it proves there’s no separate race of men and women.”
“Exactly.”
“Then how have men the face to go on with their generalisations about women?”
“You yourself have a generalisation about women.”
“That’s different. It’s not about brains and attainments. I can’t make you see. I suppose it’s Christianity.”
“What is Christianity? You think Christianity is favourable to women? On the contrary. It is the Christian countries that have produced the prostitute and the most vile estimations of women in the world. It is only in Christian countries that I find the detestable spectacle of men who will go straight from association with loose women into the society of innocent girls. That I find unthinkable. … With Jews womanhood has always been sacred. And there can be no doubt that we owe our persistence as a race largely to our laws of protection for women; all women. Moreover in the older Hebrew civilisation women stood very high. You may read this. Today there is a very significant Jewish wit which says that women make the best wives and mothers in the world.”
“There you are. No Englishman would make a joke like that.”
“Because he is a hypocrite.”
“No. He may, as you say, think one thing and say another; but long long ago he had a jog. It was Christianity. Something happened. Christ was the first man to see women as individuals.”
“You speak easily of Christianity. There is no Christianity in the world. It has never been imagined, save in the brain of a Tolstoy. And he has shown that if the principles of Christianity were applied, civilisation as we know it would at once come to an end.”
“There may not be much Christianity. But Christianity has made a difference. It has not given things to women that were not there before. Nothing can do that. But it has shed a light on them which the best women run away from. Never imagine I am speaking of myself. I’m as much a man as a woman. That’s why I can’t help seeing things. But I’m not really interested. Not inside myself. Now look here. You prefer Englishwomen to Jewesses. I can’t bear Jewesses, not because they are not really like other women, but because they reflect the limitations of the Jewish male. They talk and think the Jewish man’s idea of them. It has nothing to do with them as individuals. But they are waiting for the light to go up.”
“I speak always of these assimilated and half-assimilated English Jewesses. Certainly to me they are most inimical.”
“More so than the Germans?”
“In a different way. They have here less social disabilities. But they are most absolutely terre-à-terre.”
“Why are Russian Jewesses different?”
“Many of them are idealist. Many live altogether by one or two ideas of Tolstoy.”
“Why do you smile condescendingly?”
“These ideas can lead only to revolution. I am not a revolutionary. While I admire everywhere those who suffer for their ideals.”
“You admit that Tolstoy has influenced Russian Jewesses. He got his ideas from Christ. So you say. I did not know he was religious.”
“It is a later development. But you remember Levin. But tell me, do you not consider that wife and mother is the highest position of woman?”
“It is neither high nor low. It may be anything. If you define life for women, as husbands and children, it means that you have no consciousness at all where women are concerned.”
“There is the evidence of women themselves. The majority find their whole life in these things.”
“That is a description, from outside, by men. When women use it they do not know what they say.”
XIII
It was strange that it should be the house that had always caught her eye, as she crossed the square; one of the spots that always made the years of her London life show as a continuous communion with the rich brightness of the west-end. The houses round about it were part of the darker colour of London, creating even in sunlight the beloved familiar London atmosphere of dun-coloured mist and grime. But this house was a brilliant white, its windows fringed, during the season, with the gentle deep velvet pink of ivy-leaf geraniums and having, across the lower half of its façade, a fine close trellis of green painted wood, up which a green creeper clambered, neat and sturdy, with small bright polished leaves making a woodland blur across the diamond patterned mesh of white and green. There were other creepers in the square, but they hung in festoons, easily shabby, spoiled at their brightest by the thought of their stringy bare tendrils hung with shrivelled leaves. These small green leaves faded and dried and fell crisply, leaving a network of clean twigs to gleam in the rain, and the trellis bright green against the white house-front, suggesting summer all the year around.
She went eagerly towards this permanent summer created by wealth, warmed by the imagined voice of a power that could transform all difficulties, setting them in a beauty that lived by itself.
The little leaves, seen from the doorstep, shone like bright enamel in the misty twilight; but their beautiful wild clean-cut shapes, so near, suddenly seemed helpless, unable to escape, forced to drape the walls, life-fevered within, to
