Chapter XI: Book IV: Hadji Sadrä (1)

I

UPON Julia’s return to England in April of 1906 she was greeted with the news of the destruction of San Francisco by earthquake and fire. Nigel, to whom it had occurred to her to send a telegram from Flushing, met her at Queenboro’, and, his imagination fired by the great physical drama, it was the first piece of news he imparted. Julia, although she was looking straight into a pair of ardent handsome eyes (Nigel had recovered his looks, and the subtle marks of Time enhanced them), sent her mind on a flight of seven thousand miles to centre about the young American friend that she had so nearly forgotten.

“He must be—let me see—five- or six-and-twenty,” she announced.

“Who?” Nigel’s eyes flashed.

“A Californian I met when he was a boy—Mrs. Bode’s brother. You can’t mean that everybody was killed.”

“Let us hope not. First reports are always exaggerated. But the Californians in London are frantic—can’t get a penny on their letters of credit, either. Indeed, nothing outside of our own bailiwick has excited us as much as this in many a long day.”

“I felt some big earthquakes in India—”

“Oh, nothing like this,” said Nigel, who would brook no cheapening of the magnificent panorama in his mind. “With the possible exception of the eruption of Mont Pelée, this is the most dramatic thing that Nature has done in our time. Think of it! Not a second’s warning. The most important city on the Pacific Coast and its half million people wiped out. The earth rocking miles of blazing buildings for hours. Precipices along the coast plunging into the sea! The hills rolling like grain. Jupiter! What a sight from an airship! Would that I had been there to see.”

“I don’t fancy you would have seen much from an airship, if there was any smoke with the fire. Have you reconstructed all that from bald cablegrams?”

“The bald facts are enough—”

“To have made your imagination happy. I have always said that you would satisfy it yet with a work of pure romance. But I don’t mean to joke. It is too awful. I heard only a confused rumor on the train yesterday. Poor Dan! But I feel sure that he could take care of himself, and of a good many others—if there was any chance at all.”

“Possibly. But enough of horrors. I want to look at you.” (They had a compartment to themselves.) “You must have enjoyed yourself quite as well as you meant to do. I never saw any one so—well—improved, although that sounds banal. It never occurred to me that you could be prettier than when you first came to London, but you are. Your eyes—what is it?”

“Oh, my eyes have seen things. I have done a good deal more than enjoy myself.”

“Have you come back to be the high priestess of some cult?”

“Not I. I have sat at the feet of wise men in Benares and in Persia, and learned—a little. We Occidentals are never initiated into the deeper mysteries. They despise—or fear—us too much for that. But even a little of the wisdom of the East must widen our vision and prove an everlasting antidote to the modern spirit of unrest—about nothing.”

“And enable you to forget your friends for four years? We have each had three letters from you and three or four times as many post cards.”

“One secret of enjoying the East is to forget the West. And for at least a year I was intoxicated—drunk is more expressive—with its enchantments. The spell broke in Calcutta, where I spent a winter in society. Then I went to Benares to study.”

“You could have told me as much in a cablegram. What took you to Acca?”

“I went to see Abdul Baha Abbas, and investigate the new religion. My master told me of it in India, and I found that in Persia, after losing some twenty-five thousand by massacre, it had got the best of its enemies by converting the government. Even the women are receiving the higher education. So I went on to headquarters. Not that any religion could make a personal appeal to me, but I had an idea about this one. The idea proved to be reasonable, and, accordingly, I have brought you the Bahai religion as a present.”

“Brought me? What should I do with it?”

“Make use of it to your own glory and the benefit of the race. We have always agreed that Socialism would never prevail until it acquired a soul. That admirably constructed but unappealing machine needs the Bahai religion to give it light and fire; and the Bahai religion, sane and practical as it is, needs a good working medium. Combined, they will sweep the world. With your skill and enthusiasm, you will find the task congenial and not too difficult. Like Socialism, the new and practical sort, Bahaism must begin at the top and filter down, for it makes its appeal to the brain, to the advanced thinker, to those that feel the need of a religion, but have long since outgrown all the silly old dogmas, with their bathos and sentimentalities, primarily intended only for the ignorant. Unity in rights. Freedom of the political as well as the spiritual conscience. In other words, the elimination of all that provokes war; which means universal peace. Peace. Peace. Peace. That is the keynote of the Bahai religion, as love was intended to be of Christianity. All the best principles of the five prevailing religions are incorporated in this, all the barriers between them razed, and all the nonsense and narrow-mindedness left out. And the keynote of all this? Knowledge. True knowledge, intellectual as well as spiritual. The universal spread of science and the development of the arts, to war in men’s minds—the real battleground—against the greed of money which makes man so stunted, uninteresting, and miserable to-day. One language, one people, one faith. No hierarchy. Good morals and charitable deeds as a matter of course. The worship of one God, and the universal peace, to be founded in the centre of the civilized world. Unity and Peace! Then we are promised that the earthly world shall become heavenly. Not in our time. But it will be interesting to help start the ball rolling, and to watch it roll. Every man is supposed to have a latent desire for perfection. There is your cue. There lies the brain of this religion. What a subtle appeal to vanity, man’s primal and deathless weakness! Even greed only ministers to it. If I wrote fiction I should take this cue myself, but as it is I have brought it to you. Go to Acca, get it all at first hand, and write your immortal book.”

“So you did think of me that far?” Nigel stared at her, fascinated, but with his man’s ardor checked. In spite of her frank delight in greeting him, the spontaneous friendliness of her manner, she seemed to him incredibly remote. The eyes that looked straight into his had new and unfathomable depths, and he wondered if she had not learned more of Eastern lore than she had any intention of admitting.

“Of course,” she said, smiling. “And I have speculated a great deal about you. All I know is that you won the Nöbel Peace Prize—a wonderful book! I read it—and your last—in the colonial edition. But I know nothing else about you. Have you fallen in love with any one else?”

“No, I have not,” said Nigel, crossly, “and I am not so sure that I am still in love with you. I only know that you haunt my imagination and make all other women seem flat.”

“Ah! We could be the ideal friends. But hasn’t anything happened to you besides merely writing books and becoming a peer of the realm?”

“Oh, yes, I have been discovered by the United States of America.”

“They were long enough about it. But they always get hold of the little men first.”

“Well, I might be one of the little ones, judging by the fuss they are making over me. Reams of stuff in magazines and the Sunday newspapers—all about my ‘great’ works; in which I find myself credited with an assortment of philosophies no two men could carry; at least a hundred attitudes toward Life; and incredible designs upon the peace of the world—although still others maintain that I am merely a dilettante aristocrat playing with picturesque material. I am so bewildered that I hardly know what I am myself. Some of the adverse criticisms are so good that I forget the writer doesn’t in the least know what he is writing about. The only thing clear to me is that my income is trebled, and that I am offered unheard-of sums (from the modest European point of view) to write for their magazines and newspapers. I have even been invited to go over and lecture, and am promised a unique advertisement: ‘The Peer among Authors.’ Fancy trying to be original after that! I believe I have also a cult—and am making hay while the sun shines; for I am given to understand that crazes don’t last long over there. Each of us, as discovered,—sometimes a few of us at once,—is the ‘greatest of modern English authors.’ I should think their own authors would combine, capture the press, and train their guns on us, and their eloquence on their public: it would appear that the American public, in art matters, believes everything it is told long enough and loud enough. Far be it from me, however, to complain. It has enabled me to put a new roof on my old castle—as good as an American wife, without the bother—and buy a villa on the Riviera—which I am hoping you will consent to occupy with me.”

“Not I. You go to Acca, and I to my work here. If it hadn’t haunted me, assisted by indignant letters from Bridgit, I doubt if I ever should have left the East. But if the East is in my blood, some magnet in the West directed at my brain cells dragged me home. Besides, what have I developed myself for? Now is the time to find out.”

Nigel sighed. “The old order changeth. You women are not far off from getting all you want, no doubt about that, but you will lose more than you gain.”

“From your point of view. It is not what _you_ want. We shall get what _we_ want, which is more to the point.”

“Well, I can’t blame you,” said Nigel, honestly. “Man was bound to have his day of reckoning. For my part I hardly care, being a lover of change, and wanting to see all of this world’s progress it shall be possible to crowd into my own little span. And although you are far from all the old ideals, it would be the more interesting to live with you. I have always had a sneaking preference for polygamy—one wife for children and solid comfort, and one for companionship—to keep a man from roving abroad.”

To his surprise Julia colored and a look of distress and apprehension routed the bright composure of her face.

“I should like children!” she exclaimed. “They would not interfere with my work, either. Why should they?” Then she darted off the track of self. “Tell me of Ishbel. She is happy, I feel sure, and she has two dear little babies. I am the godmother of the first.”

“Yes, but she haunts that shop. It was running to seed without her, and she had no sooner taken hold again than the work microbe woke up. Dark doesn’t fancy it, but says there’s nothing for a sensible man to do these days but take woman as he finds her and chew his little cud in silence. He doesn’t forget how both Ishbel and Bridgit calmly shuffled off their husbands when they had no further use for them.”

“Work. I fancy that was the real magnet that brought me back. I revelled—revelled—but the reaction set in like a rising tide, and at last was quite as irresistible. I should have come back before this, but I wanted to remain in Acca until I was convinced that the Bahai religion was all it attempted to be. Go there at once. Abdul Baha has promised that you shall live in his house. Moreover, they want a big author to exploit it in the West before it has been misrepresented and cheapened by the swarm of little writers, always in search of what they call ‘copy.’”

“I should feel like a bally hypocrite. I’ve no more religion in me than you have. If God is in man, and self is God, then that atom we call self is what is given us to lean on without asking for more. To demand help outside of ourselves is a confession of failure.”

“Of course. But how many have penetrated the secrets that far? The majority must have a religion to talk about and lean on. When they get the right one, the world will be a far more comfortable place to live in. That, to my mind, is the whole point. You and I have useful brains, and it is our business to help the world along. In my inmost soul, I don’t care any more for the cause of woman or the rights of the working-class—save in so far as it gives me the horrors to think of any one being cold and hungry—than you care about religion; but I shall work just as hard for both as if I never had had a thought for anything else. Now tell me about Bridgit.”

II

NIGEL left her at the door of her hotel and did not see her again for two days. Little did he guess the reason. He carried away to his club (both resentfully and sadly) the picture of a new Julia, all intellect, poise, and mystery; a Julia from whom the impulsiveness, ingenuousness, and young enthusiasm had gone forever, left in that unfathomable East which gives knowledge and takes personality; a cold brilliant creature, with developed genius, no doubt, but with nothing left to beg unto a man’s heart and senses. And this, indeed, was one side of Julia, and the only one she purposed the world should see; because in time it was to be her whole self, and she a happy mortal.

When she shut the door of her sitting-room in the gloomy exclusive hotel in one of the quiet streets near Piccadilly, to which she had telegraphed for rooms, she subsided into the easiest chair and cried for half an hour; nor did she ascend from the slough of her despondency for the rest of the day. For the past four years she had lived virtually out of doors. As her angry frightened eyes looked back they recalled nothing but floods of golden light, an endless procession of Orientals, gleaming bronze or copper, turbanned, hooded, dressed in flowing robes of white or every primal hue; streets, crooked, latticed, balconied, sun-baked; gorgeous bazaars; life, color, beauty, romance (to Western eyes) everywhere. She was come to a London wrapped in its old familiar drizzle; huddled over the small grate, its cold penetrated her marrow; in the narrow street, dull, grimy, flat, there was rarely a sound. As she had entered the ugly entrance hall below she had been met by two solemn footmen, one of whom had conducted her slowly up three flights of stairs (there was no lift in this exclusive hostelry); another followed an hour later with her luncheon of good food cooked abominably. The butler stood in front of her like a statue and pretended not to observe her swollen eyes.

If she had been wise, she would have gone to the Carlton or the Ritz, where at least she could have descended at intervals into a very good similitude of luxury and magnificence, been able to fancy herself in the midst of “life”; she would have dined with brilliantly dressed and animated people, and, incidentally, been cheered by French cooking. But, like many others, she favored the small hotel where one was almost obliged to bring a letter of introduction, where one was supposed to be “at home” with personal servants; and where, indeed, one was as deeply immersed in privacy and silence as if quite at home in North Hampstead. Julia, who had been consoled for the loss of the dainty dishes of the East by the kaleidoscopic pleasures of the continent, choked over her shoulder of mutton, large-leaved greens, and hard round peas unseasoned, boiled potatoes, and pudding, wept once more after the remains and the butler had vanished, cursed women, and half determined to take the night train for Egypt and Syria.

She had not wanted to “be met,” shrinking from too prompt a reminder of the past. Now she wished that everybody she had ever known had crowded the platform at Victoria, and “rushed her about,” until she felt at home once more in this huge and dismal and overpowering mass of London. And as ill-luck would have it even her two best friends would be denied her for days, possibly for weeks. Ishbel was in Paris. Bridgit was in Cannes recovering from severe physical injuries incurred in the cause of woman. At one of the great Liberal meetings in the north, during the General Election, she had risen and demanded that the new Government declare its intentions regarding the enfranchisement of women. She had been pulled down, one man had held his hat before her face, and when she struggled to her feet again, protesting that she had the same right to interrupt the speaker with questions as any of the men that had gone unreproved, she had been dragged out by six stewards and plain-clothes detectives, with as much vigor as if she had been the six men and they the one dauntless female. They had mauled her, twisted her, pummelled her, and finally flung her with violence to the pavement. She had gathered herself up, although suffering from a broken rib, attempted to address the crowd in the streets, been arrested and swept off to the town hall. She had given a false name that she might be shown no favor, and the next morning, refusing to pay her fine, was sent to gaol for seven days. She had lain in a cold cell for nearly twenty-four hours unattended, in solitary confinement, and on a small allowance of food which she could not have eaten if well. At the gaol she asked to be sent to the hospital, but before her request was granted, a member of the new Government ascertained her name, and, horrified at the possible consequences to himself, paid her fine summarily, and sent her to a nursing home. Here she had lain until her broken rib had mended, and was now in the south of France assuaging a severe attack of intercostal neuralgia.

This story, told by Nigel, had filled Julia with an intense wrath, and struck the first real spark of enthusiasm in her for the cause of woman, but it burned low in these dull hours of loneliness and nostalgia, and she wished that her magnificent friend had remained as in the early days of their acquaintance, whole in bone and skin, and untroubled of mind.

But if Julia was acting much as the average woman acts during her first hours alone in an immense and inhospitable city, which the sun refuses to shine upon, a city that knows not of her existence and cares less, she was furious with herself, even before she recovered. Where was the poise, the serenity, the grand impersonal attitude, she had learned from her subtle masters in the East? Where the full calm determination with which she had returned to take up her self-elected duties, to gratify a long latent but now full-grown ambition to build a unique pedestal for herself in the world; in other words, to achieve fame and power? Out there it had been both easy and natural to plan, to dream, to vision herself at the head of womankind, burning with the enthusiasm of the artist, even if the cause itself left her cold. She had believed herself made over to that extent, at least; and now she dared not see Nigel Herbert lest she marry him off-hand, and insure herself a life companion and the common happiness of woman.

She denied him admittance, even refusing to go down to the telephone (such were the primitive arrangements of this exclusive hostelry), and vowed that once more, peradventure for the last time, she would wrestle with her peculiar problem and inspect her new armor at every joint.

For Julia, even during her first year in India, had learned lessons untaught by Eastern philosophers. She had no difficulty in recalling the moment when that green shoot had wriggled its head out of what she called the morass in the depths of her nature. She had been floating one moonlight night in a boat propelled by a turbanned silhouette, on a small lake surrounded by a park as dense as a jungle. From the head of the lake rose a marble palace of many towers and balconies, whose white steps were in the green waters. Just overhead was poised the full moon,—a crystal lantern lit with a white flame. A nightingale was pouring forth its love song. Warm, delicious odors were wafted across the lake from the gardens about the palace.

Julia, whose soul had been steeped in all this beauty, her senses swimming with pleasure, suddenly, with no apparent volition, sat upright and gasped with resentment. Why was she alone on such a night? Why, in heaven’s name, was not a man with her,—the most charming man the world held, of course (there never was anything moderate in Julia’s demands upon Life)? why was not this perfect mate, his own soul steeped, his senses swimming, even as were her own, sitting beside her, looking at her with eyes that proclaimed them as one and divinely happy? It was the night and the place for the very fullness of love, and she was alone. How incongruous! How inartistic! What a waste! Women have been known to feel like this in Venice. How much more so Julia, in the untravelled undesecrated depths of India, at night, with the moon and the nightingale and the heavy warm scents of Oriental trees, and shrubs, and flowers!

When Julia realized where her unleashed imagination had soared, she frowned, deliberately laughed, and opened her inner ear that she might enjoy the crash to earth. But she sat up all that night. From her room in the guest bungalow (her friends had provided her with many letters), she could look upon the white palace, gleaming like sculptured ivory against the black Eastern night, hear the waters lapping the marble steps. Strange sounds came out of the quarters devoted to the superfluous wives and their female offspring: passionate melancholy singing, sharp infuriated cries, monotonous string music, infinitely hopeless.

And she was free, free as the nightingale, free to love; young, beautiful, with the world at her feet. What a fool she was!

Although she had now been in India for nearly a year, this was the first time the sex within her had stirred, and she had been one with scenes lovelier than this, revelled from first to last in all the beauty and variety and mystery and color which she had craved so long in England. In spite of dirt and stench, of entomological bedfellows, bullock carts, and lack of every luxury in which the British soul delights, she was too young and too philosophical to have permitted the worst of these to interfere with her complete satisfaction. And it had, this wondrous East, absorbed and satisfied her until to-night. She had asked for nothing more. And now she wanted a lover.

Looking back upon her life with France, she discovered that she had practically forgiven him the moment she had been assured of his insanity. No doubt he had been irresponsible from the first. This admission had subconsciously wiped out his offences, and with them the memory of that whole odious experience. She still blamed her mother, but she had pitied France when she thought of him at all. The heavy noxious growth in her soul had withered and disappeared, the dark waters turned clear and sparkling. She was ready for love, for the rights and the glory of youth.

Kneeling there, gazing out at the enchanted palace, watching the moon sail over the misty tree-tops to disappear into the dark embrace of the Himalayas, her annoyance passed, she exulted in this new development, these vast and turbulent demands. She would find love and find it soon.

With Julia to think was to do. The next day she set out on her quest. To love any of these Indian princes was out of the question, even though she might live in marble palaces for the rest of her life. There was nothing for it but to go to Calcutta and present her letters to the viceroy and notable British residents. She found Calcutta the most ill-smelling city on earth, but its society was brilliant and industrious, and she met more charming men than in all her years in England. For some obscure reason Englishmen always are more charming, natural, and even original in the colonies and dependencies than on their own misty isle. Perhaps they are more adaptable than they think, more susceptible to “atmosphere” than would seem possible, bred as they are into formalities and mannerisms of a thousand years of tradition, too hide-bound for mere human nature to combat unassisted.

Moreover, in India they wear helmets, which are vastly becoming, and white linen or khaki, which wars with stolidity. Julia met them by the dozen and liked them all. She danced six nights out of seven, flirted in marble palaces whose steps were in the Ganges, on marble terraces vocal and scented. She had never been so beautiful before, she was quite happy, she was indisputably the belle of the winter, she had several proposals under the most romantic conditions (carefully arranged by herself), and she was wholly unable to fall in love.

At the end of the season she understood, and was aghast. She demanded the wholly impossible in man, a man that never will emerge from woman’s imagination and come to life; a man without common weaknesses, who was never absurd, who was a miracle of tenderness, passion, strength, humor, justice, high-mindedness, magnetism, intellect, cleverness, wit, sincerity, mystery, fidelity, provocation, responsiveness, reserve; who was gay, serious, sympathetic, vital, stimulating, always able to thrill, and never to bore; a being of light with no clay about him, who wooed like a god, and never looked funny when his feelings overcame him, and never perspired, even in India.

In short, Julia packed her trunks and went to Benares to study Hindu philosophy.

But although she was not long finding her balance (in which humor played as distinguished a part as her learned masters), she never wholly ceased to be haunted by the vision of the perfect lover and the complete happiness he must bestow upon a woman as yet not all intellect. There were times when she sat up in bed at night exclaiming aloud in tones of indignation and surprise, “_Where_ is my husband? Mine? He _must_ exist on this immense earth. Where is he?”

She knew that other women of humor and intellect, Ishbel, for instance, had ended by accepting the best that life purposed to offer them, and been quite happy, or happy enough. But she dared make no such experiment with herself. Genius of some sort she had, and she guessed that geniuses had best be content with dreams and make no experiments with mere mortal men. She knew that if she exiled herself to America, or the continent of Europe, with the most satisfactory man she had met in Calcutta, or even with Nigel Herbert, she ran the risk of hating him and herself before the honeymoon was out. Nevertheless, the woman in her laughed at intellect and went on demanding and dreaming.

But all this did not affect her will nor hinder her mental progress. While automatically hoping, she was hopeless, and bent all her energies toward accomplishing that ideal of perfection she had vaguely outlined the night at White Lodge when once more settling the fate of Nigel. Here in Benares, sitting at the feet of men that appeared to live in their marvellous intellects, and to be quite purged of earthly dross, it seemed simple enough to her strong will and brain. Of mysteries she was permitted more than one glimpse. She felt herself drawing from unseen, unfathomable sources a vital fluid which she chose to believe would in time restore in her that perfect balance of sex qualities, that unity in the ego, which had been the birthright of the man-woman who rose first out of the chaos of the universe, who was happy until clove in half and sent forth to wage the eternal war of sex, even while striving blindly for completion. She learned that in former solar systems, whose record is open only to those so profoundly versed in occult lore that their disembodied selves read at will the invisible tablets, that chosen women had attained this state of perfection, of absolute knowledge, of original sex, and with it immortality. Immortal women. Wonderful and haunting phrase! At certain periods of even earth’s history, they had reappeared in human form to accomplish their great and individual work. But their number so far had been few, and they were easily called to mind, these great women that stood out in history; indispensable, mysteriously powerful; disappearing when their work was done, and leaving none of their kind behind them.

Julia’s favorite teacher, an old Sufi Mohammedan named Hadji Sadrä, told her that the world, the Western world particularly, was ripe for them again, that now their numbers would be many, for modern conditions made their general supremacy possible for the first time in Earth’s history. There was no movement in the East or West that this old philosopher was not cognizant of, no tendency, no deep persistent stifled mutter; and although he had all the contempt of the ancient Oriental brain for the crude attempts of the Occident to think for itself, he had a growing respect for Western women, and told Julia that all conditions, both in the heavens and on the earth pointed to the coming reign of woman; led in the first place by those reincarnated immortal souls of whom he was convinced she was one, possibly the greatest. So he interpreted her horoscope, laughing at the narrow wisdom of the Western mind which could see naught but a ridiculous position in the peerage of Europe; the starry hieroglyphics plainly indicated that she was to rule her sex and lead it to victory.

All this was highly gratifying to Julia (to whom would it not be?), and feeling herself destined to greatness, found its spiritual part simpler of achievement than if the suggesting had been lacking. In this ideal of perfection there was no question of eliminating human nature, with its minor entrancing elements, its sympathy, tenderness, its power to love; merely the complete control of a highly trained mind over the baser desires, the contemptible faults, the foolish ambitions and temptations, which keep the average mind in a state of bondage, restless, vaguely aspiring, always dipping, and never happy. Nevertheless, love could be but an incident. The highest ideal was to stand alone. The greatest attributes of the masculine and female mind united in one mortal brain, the ability to obliterate the world at will and live in the contemplation of knowledge, the irresistible power which comes of absolute mastery of self and of living in self alone,—unity in the ego, independence of mortal conditions—here was the perfect ideal which Julia was bidden to attain, which few but Orientals have even formulated.

On this high flight had Julia been sustained during the following years. But, sitting in her gloomy, chill and tasteless London sitting-room, she looked back upon it as a fool’s paradise, and felt merely a dismal traveller in a strange city; but recalling a threat of Hadji Sadrä, dared not send for the man she still liked best in the world.

III

NIGHT came, and the night had no terrors for Julia. Her Hindu master had taught her the science of relaxation, and given her certain powerful suggestions, one being that she should fall asleep within half an hour of going to bed and not awaken for eight hours.

The morning, therefore, found her refreshed; and although she was still annoyed at the discovery that she had not made herself over once for all, she had no intention of rocking her feminine ego in her arms again for some time to come. Another lesson she had learned was to switch thought off and on; she relegated her femaleness to the depths, and turned her attention to the work that had drawn her to England. The monthly bulletins with which Mrs. Herbert had remorselessly pursued her, alone would have kept her informed on every phase of the Woman’s War, and she had heard somewhat of it elsewhere. She was satisfied that in this new and menacing demand for the ballot, women were prompted neither by vanity nor mere superfluous energy, but by an experience with poverty which had taught them that this great problem was their peculiar province. They were prepared to devote their lives to its solution, to court sacrifices such as man had never contemplated; and they had the time, the instinct, the practical knowledge, which would enable them, if armed with political power, to solve this hideous and disgraceful problem once for all.

Julia had driven through a famine district in India and felt her brain wither, her veins freeze, as she stared at mile after mile of starving skeletons, lying or huddled by the roadside, feebly begging with eyes that seemed to accuse the Almighty for multiplying the superfluous of earth. What to do for these wretches, dying by the million, she had no more idea than Great Britain herself; but if it was beyond human power to grapple with the question of starving millions in a season of drought in India, so much the more reason to attack the less desperate but no less abominable question in a land where the poor were the result of the callousness of man. In dealing with this complicated problem many lessons would be learned that might later be applied to poverty on the grand scale.

The ballot, therefore, was but a means to an end, and to assist in winning it she had returned; meaning to devote to it all her time, her energies, and her talents. But must she join this new “militant movement”? She frowned with distaste. As to many at that date, it seemed both foolish and vulgar. Moreover, like all fastidious women that wish for fame, she shrank from notoriety, from figuring in any sort of public mess. However! She should soon be given her rôle, and whatever it might be, she was resolved to play it to a finish, and without protest.

Meanwhile she was eating her breakfast, the one appetizing meal in England, and when she was further refreshed, she opened the newspaper on the tray, remembering the disaster in San Francisco. The news was more encouraging. The city was still burning, but the loss of life had been comparatively small, and the inhabitants were either escaping in droves to the towns across the bay or camping on the hills behind San Francisco. Once more Julia’s thoughts flew to Daniel Tay, and she conceived the idea of writing to him. Surely an old friend could do no less, and now if ever he would be grateful for remembrance.

Therefore, as soon as she was dressed, she went to the desk in the drawing-room and committed the most momentous act of her life. She wrote to Tay a long and lively letter, full of feminine sympathy, of concern for his welfare and for that of his city. There were many allusions to their brief but unforgotten friendship (she had almost forgotten it!), references to his boyish sympathy, and assurances that she was now well, happy, free, and full of interest in life. “Do write to me,” she concluded. “That is, if you ever receive this; and tell me all about your life in the past ten years. Did you go on your ten-thousand-dollar spree? Have you made your great fortune? Are you ruling the destinies of your city? I have always felt sure you would never stop at being merely a rich man. And Mrs. Bode? And Ella?” (alas!) “I do hope they have not suffered too much in this terrible disaster. If you like, if you have not wholly forgotten me all these years, I’ll write you of my life in the East these past four, and much else. I remember how freely I used to talk to you, dear little boy that you were, and I don’t think I have ever talked so freely to any one else. It would be rather exciting to correspond with you. But if you have quite lost interest in me, at least remember that I have not in you,—no! not for one moment—and long to hear how you have weathered this frightful calamity.”

Now, why do women lie like that? Julia was as truthful as any mortal who is a component part of that complicated organism known as society may be, but she wrote these lines without flinching, quite persuaded for the moment, indeed, that she meant every word of them. Perhaps here lies the explanation, in so much as all memories are alive in the subconsciousness, and leap to the mind the instant their slumbers are disturbed by the essential vibration; there to assume full and dazzling control. Let it go at that.

Julia, as a matter of fact, looked somewhat dubiously at the last paragraph of her letter. It was not in the least Oriental. She was also astonished at the length of the letter itself. She had long since discovered, however, that there are some people to whom one can write, and many more to whom one cannot. Oddly enough Nigel Herbert was of the last. He wrote a colorless letter himself, never striking that spark which fires the epistolary ardor; but Julia reflected that she could write for hours on end to Daniel Tay; she felt as if embarked on some vital current which leaped direct from London to San Francisco, no less than seven thousand miles. She sealed the letter.

Then she discovered that the sun was out and remembered that she had an aunt. Her feelings for her only relative in England were not of unmixed cordiality, but it would be something at least to bask for a little in the presence of one so entirely satisfied with herself. Moreover, she wanted news of her mother; and this duty was inevitable in any case.

She determined to walk the short distance to Tilney Street as she wished to post the letter herself. Still exhilarated at the writing of it, she ignored the mud of the streets, sniffed the old familiar grimy air, with some abatement of nostalgia for the East, and even found amusement in the windows of Bond Street.

When she came to the first pillar box and applied her letter to its yawning mouth, she paused suddenly, assailed by one of those subtle feminine presentiments which her long residence in the Orient had not taught her to despise. She withdrew the letter and walked on, smiling, but disturbed. She even passed two more boxes, but at the fourth shot the letter in. Her planets had long since made a fatalist of her, more or less. And she had adventurous blood.

She found Mrs. Winstone risen, groomed, coifed, with even her smile on, and seated before her desk in the front ell of the drawing-room, answering notes and cards of invitation.

“Ah, Julia!” she said casually, as she rose and offered her cheek. “Home again? How nice. But that coat and skirt, my dear! Quite old style.”

“Rather!” said Julia, making herself comfortable. “I took them out with me. Who’s your tailor now?”

“Oh, a new man. A duck. I’ll take you to him this afternoon. Just left one of the big houses, so his prices are quite possible—at present. Glad you’ve kept your complexion. How is it you don’t sunburn?”

“I don’t fancy people born in the tropics ever do. Glad you haven’t grown fat.”

“I’d put on a bit if it weren’t the fashion to look like a plank back and front. I’ve got to the age where I’d look better filled out. ’Fraid I’m really gettin’ on. Beaux are younger every year.”

“You look quite unchanged to me,” said Julia, politely. “How’s the duke?”

“Quite fit, I believe. They’re still at Bosquith. Margaret broke her leg huntin’.”

“Have you heard from my mother lately? I have not, for several months. I had hoped to find a letter here.”

“I got her usual quarterly page the other day. She seems well enough. I’ve been to Nevis since you left. Nerves got rackety, and the doctor told me to go where I’d really be quiet. I was! But I shouldn’t wonder if I went again some day. Never looked so well in my life as when I came back. Simply vegetated.”

“And how does my mother look? I cannot imagine her changed—but—it is a good many years!”

“She looks exactly the same. Ain’t you ever goin’ back?”

“Not until she sends for me. I can’t help feeling that she doesn’t want me,—prefers not to be actively reminded of the last and most tragic disappointment of her life. I sometimes wonder that she writes to me. Her letters are even briefer than those to you.”

“Perhaps you are right. She hasn’t forgiven you—or herself. I tried to tell her some of your charmin’ experiences with Harold,—there was so little to talk about, I thought it might be interestin’ to see how she took it,—but she wouldn’t listen!”

“Poor mother! What a life! I wonder if she would let me have Fanny?”

“Fanny?”

“Yes, I am quite alone, you know. I could do for her nicely, and it would almost be like having a child of my own.”

“I detest Fanny,” said Mrs. Winstone, with some show of human emotion. “She’s a minx. Jane will have her hands full three or four years from now.”

“She was such a dear little thing.”

“Well, she’s a little devil now. I don’t say she mightn’t be halfway decent if she’d led a life like other children, but she’s never played with a white child, and rules those pic’nies like a she-dragon—she’s not too unlike Jane in some things. Her only companion is a washed-out middle-aged governess, who might as well try to manage a hurricane. Jane vows she shall never marry. Her mistake in France seems to have fixed her hatred of man once for all, and although Fanny bores her, she’s of no two minds as to her duty toward the brat. She is never to meet a young man of her own class, if you please, and as soon as she is old enough is to be trained in all the duties relating to the estate. Nice time Jane’ll have preventin’ Fanny meetin’ men if only one sets foot on the island; and there’s talk of rebuildin’ Bath House. She’s overcharged with vitality, that child, she’s a will of iron, and she’s already an adept at deceivin’ her grandmother—no mean accomplishment! And she’ll get worse instead of better in that ghastly life. I wouldn’t trust her across the street three years from now.”

“Oh, the poor little thing! She must be rescued. Surely if my mother doesn’t care for her she’ll be the more willing to give her up. But she must, a little. She was strict with me, but always kind and even affectionate.”

“She’s not to Fanny. She looks upon her as a plague; and with good reason, for a noisier or more messy child I never saw. But she’ll do her duty as she sees it.”

“I believe Fanny is really adorable. I shall write at once and beg for her.”

“You won’t get her, and you needn’t regret it. I’m no fool where my sex is concerned: Fanny’s the sort that’s put into the world to make trouble. What are your plans? Shall you take a flat in town?”

“It will depend.” Julia paused a moment and then hurled her bomb. “I’ve come back to enroll in the Woman’s War.”

“What?” Mrs. Winstone looked about to faint; then her expression became stony. “Why, women are disgracin’ their sex, makin’ perfect fools of themselves! Bridgit Herbert must have gone mad. All her friends will cut her. A woman of her class fightin’ men and sleepin’ in prison! She deserved all she got, and so will you if you’ve anything to do with these tatterdermalion females shriekin’ for notoriety. That’s all they’re after. Forcin’ their way into the House of Commons! No wonder the men are disgusted. It’s a middle-class movement, anyhow. You! That’s the reason, I suppose, you don’t mind wearin’ a coat and skirt four years old.”

“Oh, but I do mind! I hope you’ll take me to your tailor this very day.”

“There! I knew you were jokin’. I should simply retire if I had a suffragette in the family. Come down to luncheon and then we’ll go out and shop.”

IV

DURING the early weeks of this same year, Christabel Pankhurst had established in London a branch of the Woman’s Social and Political Union founded in Manchester in 1903 by Mrs. Pankhurst. The rooms were in Park Walk, Chelsea, and here were the headquarters of that “Militant Movement” so execrated by the National Union of Woman’s Suffrage Societies, and by Society in general. Their numbers were few, their funds were almost nil, their years, with one or two exceptions, absurdly young, they were thrown entirely upon one another for sympathy and approval, a goodly proportion had already been severely pummelled by men twice their size, and in the proportion of three or more to one, and several were still in hospital, injured, perhaps for life. But they had made all England talk about them, and a few, a very few, farsighted men had apprehended them as a definite and permanent factor in the politics of the twentieth century.

Of these was Nigel Herbert, and it was from him that Julia learned all that she did not know already of their history. Bridgit had sent her clippings from newspapers containing references to the opening of the campaign by Miss Pankhurst and Annie Kenny, at the first great Liberal meeting of the General Election in October, which resulted in their arrest and imprisonment. At Acca she had heard the movement discussed by English pilgrims; and in English newspapers, read in continental reading-rooms, she had come across many comments—indignant, sarcastic, infuriate—upon the performances of these outrageous females. But from Bridgit she had not heard since a few days before that lady’s own battle royal, and it was to Nigel that she turned for unimpassioned information. He had told her something in the train, and he gave a concise history of the new movement as soon as he was permitted once more to sun himself in her presence.

“They’re here to stay,” he said. “I know six or eight of them personally; been making a study of them, although they don’t know it. They’re like no other women under the sun—nor any sun that has ever shone. They’ve a new group of brain cells, and something new and big is coming out of it. The only historical analogy I know of is those old martyrs that died in the cause of some new departure in religion; those that make such excellent subjects for stained-glass windows. They’ve got the same look those old leader-martyrs had when chained up to the stake and waiting for the faggot. The same grim patient mouths, the same clairvoyant eyes, as if looking straight at the unborn millions liberated by the martyrdom of the few. Their enthusiasm is cold—and eternal. They are as deliberate as death. There are no better brains in the world. Precious few as good. They never take a step that isn’t calculated beforehand, and they never take a step backward. Discouragement and fear are sensations they have never experienced. When they are hurt they don’t know it. They fear injury or death no more than they fear the brutes that maul them. In short, they’re a new force let loose into the world; and the geese outside put them down as hysterical females. But if this silly old world had always been quick to see and wise to act we’d have no history. So there you are.”

And the next day Julia accepted this estimate without reserve. Having introduced herself at headquarters, registered, and paid her dues, she sat for a time listening to a quick incisive debate upon all steps to be taken in the House of Commons, on the night of the 25th, in case the Woman’s Suffrage Resolution, for which Mr. Kier Hardie had secured a place, should be talked out by its enemies.

After a time Julia forgot to listen, being quite convinced that they would act as they purposed to act, and make no misstep. Their looks interested her far more than their words. With possibly two exceptions, whose flesh gave them a superficially conventional appearance, they did not look like women at all. They looked pure brain, sexless, selfless, ruthless. Most of them had as little flesh as it is possible to carry and live, as if Nature herself had sent them into the world trained and hardened for fight and for no other purpose whatever. Julia saw not the slightest evidence of personal ambition in those grim set faces, with eyes that were preternaturally keen in debate, and, to use Nigel’s word, clairvoyant in repose; merely that stern inflexible purpose which has been the equipment of martyrs since Society emerged out of chaos; but directed by a mental power, a modern balance, that saved them from the stupidities of fanaticism. That they were ready to go to the stake, or the hangman, she did not doubt, and it was possible that some of them would, unless the enemy came to its senses in time; but that they would fail in their purpose ultimately was as unthinkable as that they would ever lay down their arms. Truly a new force unleashed. Were these the immortal women?

Julia felt thrilled, exalted. All the iron in her nature, a gift of inheritance which had saved her from degradation and melancholy and the common foolishness of women; which, in a word, had made her stronger than life, rose from its long sleep and exulted. Here was a career, and here were associates worth while. The cause of woman in the abstract had left her cold, but when she realized the immense brain power, the unqualified courage, the unhuman endurance, imperative to put the right sort of new life into a great but long moribund cause, and sweep it to a triumphant finish, she felt on fire with enthusiasm; the abilities she had so long played with crystallized suddenly and leapt at their opportunity. Some day she should command these women, or their successors, and to do that would be as great a feat as to lead them to victory. She was more than willing to consecrate her personal ambition to the future of her sex, but that she never could lose sight of it would but give her an additional power. She could become as grim, as relentless, as indomitable as they, but she doubted she could ever be as selfless, or if she wished to be. For a moment she envied as much as she admired them, but the personality she once had believed murdered by her husband had long since revived with a double vitality, and the time was not yet when it could dissolve in the crucible of a cause.

When the meeting broke up she asked to be given active work to do, being well aware that one must serve before fit to command. They had been taught to expect her by Mrs. Herbert, and her offer of service as well as her donation was thankfully accepted. One of their number was told off to instruct her, and she was ordered to hold herself in readiness to go to the Midlands and take part in a by-election, working to defeat the liberal candidate if he persisted in his attitude of hostility to woman’s demand for the vote. She and her present instructor, Mrs. Lime, should heckle him when he spoke, canvass, distribute suffrage literature, and speak against him in the market-place, or at any corner where they could gather a crowd.