cheaply pathetic tone which, it now seemed to her, she had used. Hating herself, and fearing the Director’s silence, she added, ‘But I suppose you will say I oughtn’t to have told you that.’
‘My dear child,’ said the Director, ‘you have been telling me that ever since your husband was mentioned.’
‘Does it make no difference?’
‘I suppose,’ said the Director, ‘it would depend on how he lost your love.’
Jane was silent. Though she could not tell the Director the truth, and indeed did not know it herself, yet when she tried to explore her inarticulate grievance against Mark, a novel sense of her own injustice and even of pity for her husband, arose in her mind. And her heart sank, for now it seemed to her that this conversation, to which she had vaguely looked for some sort of deliverance from all problem was in fact involving her in new ones.
‘It was not his fault,’ she said at last. ‘I suppose our marriage was just a mistake.’
The Director said nothing.
‘What would you–what would the people you are talking of–say about a case like that?’
‘I will tell you if you really want to know,’ said the Director.
‘Please,’ said Jane reluctantly.
‘They would say,’ he answered, ‘that you do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience.’
Something in Jane that would normally have reacted to such a remark with anger or laughter was banished to a remote distance (where she could still, but only just, hear its voice) by the fact that the word Obedience–but certainly not obedience to Mark–came over her, in that room and in that presence, like a strange oriental perfume, perilous, seductive and ambiguous…
‘Stop it!’ said the Director, sharply.
Jane stared at him, open mouthed. There were a few moments of silence during which the exotic fragrance faded away.
‘You were saying, my dear?’ resumed the Director.
‘I thought love meant equality,’ she said, ‘and free companionship.’
‘Ah, equality!’ said the Director. ‘We must talk of that some other time. Yes, we must all be guarded by equal rights from one another’s greed, because we are fallen. Just as we must all wear clothes for the same reason. But the naked body should be there underneath the clothes, ripening for the day when we shall need them no longer. Equality is not the deepest thing, you know.’
‘I always thought that was just what it was. I thought it was in their souls that people were equal.’
‘You were mistaken,’ said he gravely. ‘That is the last place where they are equal. Equality before the law, equality of incomes –that is very well. Equality guards life; it doesn’t make it. It is medicine, not food. You might as well try to warm yourself with a blue-book.’
‘But surely in marriage…?’
‘Worse and worse,’ said the Director. ‘Courtship knows nothing of it; nor does fruition. What has free companionship to do with that? Those who are enjoying something, or suffering something together, are companions. Those who enjoy or suffer one another, are not. Do you not know how bashful friendship is? Friends–comrades–do not look at each other. Friendship would be ashamed…’
‘I thought,’ said Jane and stopped.
‘I see,’ said the Director. ‘It is not your fault. They never warned you. No one has ever told you that obedience–humility –is an erotic necessity. You are putting equality just where it ought not to be. As to your coming here, that may admit of some doubt. For the present, I must send you back. You can come out and see us. In the meantime, talk to your husband and I will talk to my authorities.’
‘When will you be seeing them?’
‘They come to me when they please. But we’ve been talking too solemnly about obedience all this time. I’d like to show you some of its drolleries. You are not afraid of mice, are you?’
‘Afraid of what?’ said Jane in astonishment.
‘Mice,’ said the Director.
‘No,’ said Jane in a puzzled voice.
The Director struck a little bell beside his sofa which was almost immediately answered by Mrs Maggs.
‘I think,’ said the Director, ‘I should like my lunch now, if you please. They will give you lunch downstairs, Mrs Studdock –something more substantial than mine. But if you will sit with me while I eat and drink, I will show you some of the amenities of our house.’
Mrs Maggs presently returned with a tray, bearing a glass, a small flacon of red wine, and a roll of bread. She set it down on a table at the Director’s side and left the room.
‘You see,’ said the Director, ‘I live like the King in Curdie. It is a surprisingly pleasant diet.’ With these words he broke the bread and poured himself out a glass of wine.
‘I never read the book you are speaking of,’ said Jane.
They talked of the book a little while the Director ate and drank; but presently he took up the plate and tipped the crumbs off onto the floor. ‘Now, Mrs Studdock,’ he said, ‘you shall see a diversion. But you must be perfectly still.’ With these words he took from his pocket a little silver whistle and blew a note on it. And Jane sat still till the room became filled with silence like a solid thing and there was first a scratching and then a rustling and presently she saw three plump mice working their passage across what was to them the thick undergrowth of the carpet, nosing this way and that so that if their course had been drawn it would have resembled that of a winding river, until they were so close that she could see the twinkling of their eyes and even the palpitation of their noses. In spite of what she had said she did not really care for mice in the neighbourhood of her feet and it was with an effort that she sat still. Thanks to this effort she saw mice for the first time as they really are–not as creeping things but as dainty quadrupeds, almost, when they sat up, like tiny kangaroos, with sensitive kid-gloved forepaws and transparent ears. With quick, inaudible movements they ranged to and fro till not a crumb was left on the floor. Then he blew a second time on his whistle and with a sudden whisk of tails all three of them were racing for home and in a few seconds had disappeared behind the coal box. The Director looked at her with laughter in his eyes. (‘It is impossible,’ thought Jane, ‘to regard him as old.’) ‘There,’ he said, ‘a very simple adjustment. Humans want crumbs removed; mice are anxious to remove them. It ought never to have been a cause of war. But you see that obedience and rule are more like a dance than a drill–specially between man and woman where the roles are always changing.’
‘How huge we must seem to them,’ said Jane.
This inconsequent remark had a very curious cause. Hugeness was what she was thinking of and for one moment it had seemed she was thinking of her own hugeness in comparison with the mice. But almost at once this identification collapsed. She was really thinking simply of hugeness. Or rather, she was not thinking of it. She was, in some strange fashion, experiencing it. Something intolerably big, something from Brobdingnag was pressing on her, was approaching, was almost in the room. She felt herself shrinking, suffocated, emptied of all power and virtue. She darted a glance at the Director which was really a cry for help, and that glance, in some inexplicable way, revealed him as being, like herself, a very small object. The whole room was a tiny place, a mouse’s hole, and it seemed to her to be tilted aslant–as though the insupportable mass and splendour of this formless hugeness, in approaching, had knocked it askew. She heard the Director’s voice.
‘Quick,’ he said gently, ‘you must leave me now. This is no place for us small ones, but I am inured. Go!’
When Jane left the hill-top village of St Anne’s and came down to the station she found that, even down there, the fog had begun to lift. Great windows had opened in it, and as the train carried her on it passed repeatedly through pools of afternoon sunlight.
During this journey she was so divided against herself that one might say there were three, if not four, Janes in the compartment.
The first was a Jane simply receptive of the Director, recalling every word and every look, and delighting in them–a Jane taken utterly off her guard, shaken out of the modest little outfit of contemporary ideas which had hitherto made her portion of wisdom, and swept away on the flood tide of an experience which she did not understand and could not control. For she was trying to control it; that was the function of the second Jane. This second Jane regarded the first with disgust, as the kind of woman, in fact, whom she had always particularly despised. Once, coming out of a cinema, she had heard a little shop girl say to her friend, ‘Oh, wasn’t he lovely! If he’d looked at me the way he looked at her, I’d have followed him to the end of the world.’ A little, tawdry, made-up girl, sucking a peppermint. Whether the second Jane was right in equating the first Jane with that girl, may be questioned, but she did. And she found her intolerable. To have surrendered without terms at the mere voice and look of this stranger, to have abandoned (without noticing it) that prim little grasp on her own destiny, that perpetual reservation, which she thought essential to her status as a grown-up, integrated, intelligent person…the thing was utterly degrading, vulgar, uncivilised.
The third Jane was a new and unexpected visitant. Of the first there had been traces in girlhood, and the second was what Jane took to be her ‘real’ or normal self. But the third one, this moral Jane, was one whose existence she had never suspected. Risen from some unknown region of grace or heredity, it uttered all sorts of things which Jane had often heard before but which had never, till that moment, seemed to be connected with real life. If it had simply told her that her feelings about the Director were wrong, she would not have been very surprised, and would have discounted it as the voice of tradition. But it did not. It kept on blaming her for not having similar feelings about Mark. It kept on pressing into her mind those new feelings about Mark, feelings of guilt and pity, which she had first experienced in the Director’s room. It was Mark who had made the fatal mistake; she must, must, must be ‘nice’ to Mark. The Director obviously insisted on it. At the very moment when her mind was most filled with another man there arose, clouded with some undefined emotion, a resolution to give Mark much more than she had ever given him before, and a feeling that in so doing she would be really giving it to the Director. And this produced in her such a confusion of sensations that the whole inner debate became indistinct and flowed over into the larger experience of the fourth Jane, who was Jane herself and dominated all the rest at every moment without effort and even without choice.
This fourth and supreme Jane was simply in the state of joy. The other three had no power upon her, for she was in the sphere of Jove, amid light and music and festal pomp, brimmed with life and radiant in health, jocund and clothed in shining garments. She thought scarcely at all of the curious sensations which had immediately preceded the Director’s dismissal of her and made that dismissal almost a relief. When she tried to, it immediately led her thoughts back to the Director himself. Whatever she tried to think of led back to the Director himself and, in him, to joy. She saw from the windows of the train the outlined beams of sunlight pouring over stubble or burnished woods and felt that they were like the notes of a trumpet. Her eyes rested on the rabbits and cows as they flitted by and she embraced them in heart with merry, holiday love. She delighted in the occasional speech of the one wizened old man who shared her compartment and saw, as never before, the beauty of his shrewd and sunny old mind, sweet as a nut and English as a chalk down. She reflected with surprise how long it was since music had played any part in her life, and resolved to listen to many chorales by Bach on the gramophone that evening. Or else–perhaps–she would read a great many Shakespeare sonnets. She rejoiced also in her hunger and thirst and decided that she would make herself buttered toast for tea–a great deal of buttered toast. And she rejoiced also in the consciousness of her own beauty; for she had the sensation–it may have been false in fact, but it had nothing to do with vanity–that it was growing and expanding like a magic flower with every minute that passed. In such a mood it was only natural, after the old countryman had got out at Cure Hardy, to stand up and look at herself in the mirror which confronted her on the wall of the compartment. Certainly she was looking well: she was looking unusually well. And, once more, there was little vanity in this. For beauty was made for others. Her beauty belonged to the Director. It belonged to him so completely that he could even decide not to keep it for himself but to order that it be given to another, by an act of obedience lower, and therefore higher, more unconditional and therefore more delighting, than if he had demanded it for himself.
As the train came into Edgestow Station Jane was just deciding that she would not try to get a bus. She would enjoy the walk up to Sandown. And then–what on earth was all this? The platform, usually almost deserted at this hour, was like a London platform on a bank holiday. ‘Here you are, mate!’ cried a voice as she opened the door, and half a dozen men crowded into her carriage so roughly that for a moment she could not get out. She found difficulty in crossing the platform. People seemed to be going in all directions at once–angry, rough and excited people. ‘Get back into the train, quick!’ shouted someone. ‘Get out of the station, if you’re not travelling,’ bawled another voice. ‘What the devil?’ asked a third just beside her, and then a woman’s voice said, ‘Oh dear, oh dear! Why don’t they stop it!’ And from outside, beyond the station came a great roaring noise like the noise of a football crowd. There seemed to be a lot of unfamiliar lights about.
Hours later, bruised, frightened, and tired to death, Jane found herself in a street she did not even know, surrounded by NICE policemen and a few of their females, the Waips. Her course had been like that of a man trying to get home along the beach when the tide is coming in. She had been driven out of her natural route along Warwick Street–they were looting shops and making bonfires there–and forced to take a much wider circle, up by the Asylum, which would have brought her home in the end. Then even that wider circle had proved impracticable, for the same reason. She had been forced to try a still longer way round; and each time the tide had got there before her. Finally she had seen Bone Lane, straight and empty and still, and apparently her last chance of getting home that night at all. A couple of NICE police–one seemed to meet them everywhere except where the rioting was most violent–had shouted out, ‘You can’t go down there, Miss.’ But as they then turned their backs on her, and it was poorly lit, and because she was now desperate, Jane had made a bolt for it. They caught her. And that was how she found herself being taken into a lighted room and questioned by a uniformed woman with short grey hair, a square face, and an unlighted cheroot. The room was in disorder–as if a private house had been suddenly and roughly converted into a temporary police station. The woman with the cheroot took no particular interest until Jane had given her name. Then Miss Hardcastle looked her in the face for the first time. And Jane felt quite a new sensation. She was already tired and frightened, but this was different. The face of the other woman affected her as the face of some men–fat men with small greedy eyes and strange disquieting smiles–had affected her when she was in her teens. It was dreadfully quiet and yet dreadfully interested in her. And Jane saw that some quite new idea was dawning on the woman as she stared at her: some idea that the woman found attractive, and then tried to put aside, and then returned to dally with, and then finally, with a little sigh of contentment, accepted. Miss Hardcastle lit her cheroot and blew a cloud of smoke towards her. If Jane had known how seldom Miss Hardcastle actually smoked she would have been even more alarmed. The policemen and policewomen who surrounded her probably did. The whole atmosphere of the room became a little different.
‘Jane Studdock,’ said the Fairy. ‘I know all about you, honey. You’ll be the wife of my friend Mark.’ While she spoke she was writing something on a green form.
‘That’s all right,’ said Miss Hardcastle. ‘You’ll be able to see Hubby again now. We’ll take you out to Belbury tonight.
Now just one question, dear. What were you doing down here at this time of night?’
‘I had just come off a train.’
‘And where had you been, Honey?’
Jane said nothing.
‘You hadn’t been getting up to mischief while Hubby was away, had you?’
‘Will you please let me go?’ said Jane. ‘I want to get home. I am very tired and it’s very late.’
‘But you’re not going home,’ said Miss Hardcastle. ‘You’re coming out to Belbury.’
‘My husband has said nothing about my joining him there.’
Miss Hardcastle nodded. ‘That was one of his mistakes. But you’re coming with us.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s an arrest, Honey,’ said Miss Hardcastle, holding out the piece of green paper on which she had been writing. It appeared to Jane as all official forms always appeared–a mass of compartments, some empty, some full of small print, some scrawled with signatures in pencil, and one bearing her own name; all meaningless.
‘Oh!’ screamed Jane suddenly, overcome with a sensation of nightmare, and made a dash for the door. Of course she never reached it. A moment later she came to her senses and found herself held by the two police-women.
‘What a naughty temper!’ said Miss Hardcastle playfully. ‘But we’ll put the nasty men outside, shall we?’ She said something and the policemen removed themselves and shut the door behind them. As soon as they were gone Jane felt that a protection had been withdrawn from her.
‘Well,’ said Miss Hardcastle, addressing the two uniformed girls. ‘Let’s see. Quarter to one…and all going nicely. I think, Daisy, we can afford ourselves a little stand-easy. Be careful, Kitty, make your top grip under her shoulder just a little tighter. That’s right.’ While she was speaking Miss Hardcastle was undoing her belt, and when she had finished she removed her tunic and flung it on the sofa, revealing a huge torso, uncorseted (as Bill the Blizzard had complained), rank, floppy and thinly clad: such things as Rubens might have painted in delirium. Then she resumed her seat, removed the cheroot from her mouth, blew another cloud of smoke in Jane’s direction, and addressed her.
‘Where had you been by that train?’ she said.
And Jane said nothing, partly because she could not speak, and partly because she now knew beyond all doubt that these were the enemies of the human race whom the Director was fighting against and one must tell them nothing. She did not feel heroic in making this decision. The whole scene was becoming unreal to her; and it was as if between sleeping and waking that she heard Miss Hardcastle say, ‘I think, Kitty dear, you and Daisy had better bring her round here.’ And it was still only half real when the two women forced her round to the other side of the table, and she saw Miss Hardcastle sitting with her legs wide apart and settling herself in the chair as if in the saddle; long leather-clad legs projecting from beneath her short skirt. The women forced her on, with a skilled, quiet increase of pressure whenever she resisted, until she stood between Miss Hardcastle’s feet, whereupon Miss Hardcastle brought her feet together so that she had Jane’s ankles pinioned between her own. This proximity to the ogress affected Jane with such horror that she had no fears left for what they might be going to do with her. And for what seemed an endless time Miss Hardcastle stared at her, smiling a little and blowing smoke in her face.
‘Do you know,’ said Miss Hardcastle at last, ‘you’re rather a pretty little thing in your way.’
There was another silence.
‘Where had you been by that train?’ said Miss Hardcastle.
And Jane stared as if her eyes would start out of her head and said nothing. Then suddenly Miss Hardcastle leant forward and, after very carefully turning down the edge of Jane’s dress, thrust the lighted end of the cheroot against her shoulder. After that there was another pause and another silence.
‘Where had you been by that train?’ said Miss Hardcastle.
How many times this happened Jane could never remember. But somehow or other there came a time when Miss Hardcastle was talking not to her but to one of the women. ‘What are you fussing about, Daisy?’ she was saying.
‘I was only saying, Ma’am, it was five past one.’
‘How time flies, doesn’t it, Daisy? But what if it is? Aren’t you comfortable, Daisy? You’re not getting tired, holding a little bit of a thing like her?’