She was kind to Connie, and tried to worm into her woman’s soul with the sharp gimlet of her well-born observations.
“You’re quite wonderful, in my opinion,” she said to Connie. “You’ve done wonders for Clifford. I never saw any budding genius myself, and there he is, all the rage.” Aunt Eva was quite complacently proud of Clifford’s success. Another feather in the family cap! She didn’t care a straw about his books, but why should she?
“Oh, I don’t think it’s my doing,” said Connie.
“It must be! Can’t be anybody else’s. And it seems to me you don’t get enough out of it.”
“How?”
“Look at the way you are shut up here. I said to Clifford: If that child rebels one day you’ll have yourself to thank!”
“But Clifford never denies me anything,” said Connie.
“Look here, my dear child” – and Lady Bennerley laid her thin hand on Connie’s arm. “A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it. Believe me!” And she took another sip of brandy, which maybe was her form of repentance.
“But I do live my life, don’t I?”
“Not in my idea! Clifford should bring you to London, and let you go about. His sort of friends are all right for him, but what are they for you? If I were you I should think it wasn’t good enough. You’ll let your youth slip by, and you’ll spend your old age, and your middle age too, repenting it.”
Her ladyship lapsed into contemplative silence, soothed by the brandy.
But Connie was not keen on going to London, and being steered into the smart world by Lady Bennerley. She didn’t feel really smart, it wasn’t interesting. And she did feel the peculiar, withering coldness under it all; like the soil of Labrador, which his gay little flowers on its surface, and a foot down is frozen.
Tommy Dukes was at Wragby, and another man, Harry Winterslow, and Jack Strangeways with his wife Olive. The talk was much more desultory than when only the cronies were there, and everybody was a bit bored, for the weather was bad, and there was only billiards, and the pianola to dance to.
Olive was reading a book about the future, when babies would be bred in bottles, and women would be “immunized”.
“Jolly good thing too!” she said. “Then a woman can live her own life.” Strangeways wanted children, and she didn’t.
“How’d you like to be immunized?” Winterslow asked her, with an ugly smile.
“I hope I am; naturally,” she said. “Anyhow the future’s going to have more sense, and a woman needn’t be dragged down by her functions.”
“Perhaps she’ll float off into space altogether,” said Dukes.
“I do think sufficient civilization ought to eliminate a lot of the physical disabilities,” said Clifford. “All the love-business for example, it might just as well go. I suppose it would if we could breed babies in bottles.”
“No!” cried Olive. “That might leave all the more room for fun.”
“I suppose,” said Lady Bennerley, contemplatively, “if the love-business went, something else would take its place. Morphia, perhaps. A little morphine in all the air. It would be wonderfully refreshing for everybody.”
“The government releasing ether into the air on Saturdays, for a cheerful weekend!” said Jack. “Sounds all right, but where should we be by Wednesday?”
“So long as you can forget your body you are happy,” said Lady Bennerley. “And the moment you begin to be aware of your body, you are wretched. So, if civilization is any good, it has to help us to forget our bodies, and then time passes happily without our knowing it.”
“Help us to get rid of our bodies altogether,” said Winterslow. “It’s quite time man began to improve on his own nature, especially the physical side of it.”
“Imagine if we floated like tobacco smoke,” said Connie.
“It won’t happen,” said Dukes. “Our old show will come flop; our civilization is going to fall. It’s going down the bottomless pit, down the chasm. And believe me, the only bridge across the chasm will be the phallus!”
“Oh do! do be impossible, General!” cried Olive.
“I believe our civilization is going to collapse,” said Aunt Eva.
“And what will come after it?” asked Clifford.
“I haven’t the faintest idea, but something, I suppose,” said the elderly lady.
“Connie says people like wisps of smoke, and Olive says immunized women, and babies in bottles, and Dukes says the phallus is the bridge to what comes next. I wonder what it will really be?” said Clifford.
“Oh, don’t bother! let’s get on with today,” said Olive. “Only hurry up with the breeding bottle, and let us poor women off.”
“There might even be real men, in the next phase,” said Tommy. “Real, intelligent, wholesome men, and wholesome nice women! Wouldn’t that be a change, an enormous change from us? We’re not men, and the women aren’t women. We’re only cerebrating make-shifts, mechanical and intellectual experiments. There may even come a civilization of genuine men and women, instead of our little lot of clever-jacks, all at the intelligence-age of seven. It would be even more amazing than men of smoke or babies in bottles.”
“Oh, when people begin to talk about real women, I give up,” said Olive.
“Certainly nothing but the spirit in us is worth having,” said Winterslow.
“Spirits!” said Jack, drinking his whisky and soda.
“Think so? Give me the resurrection of the body!” said Dukes.
“But it’ll come, in time, when we’ve shoved the cerebral stone away a bit, the money and the rest. Then we’ll get a democracy of touch, instead of a democracy of pocket.”
Something echoed inside Connie: “Give me the democracy of touch, the resurrection of the body!” She didn’t at all know what it meant, but it comforted her, as meaningless things may do.
Anyhow everything was terribly silly, and she was exasperatedly bored by it all, by Clifford, by Aunt Eva, by Olive and Jack, and Winterslow, and even by Dukes. Talk, talk, talk! What hell it was, the continual rattle of it!
Then, when all the people went, it was no better. She continued plodding on, but exasperation and irritation had got hold of her lower body, she couldn’t escape. The days seemed to grind by, with curious painfulness, yet nothing happened. Only she was getting thinner; even the housekeeper noticed it, and asked her about herself. Even Tommy Dukes insisted she was not well, though she said she was all right. Only she began to be afraid of the ghastly white tombstones, that peculiar loathsome whiteness of Carrara marble, detestable as false teeth, which stuck up on the hillside, under Tevershall church, and which she saw with such grim painfulness from the park. The bristling of the hideous false teeth of tombstones on the hill affected her with a grisly kind of horror. She felt the time not far off when she would be buried there, added to the ghastly host under the tombstones and the monuments, in these filthy Midlands.
She needed help, and she knew it: so she wrote a little cri du cæur[40] to her sister, Hilda. “I’m not well lately, and I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”
Down posted Hilda from Scotland, where she had taken up her abode. She came in March, alone, driving herself in a nimble two-seater. Up the drive she came, tooting up the incline, then sweeping round the oval of grass, where the two great wild beech-trees stood, on the flat in front of the house.
Connie