Mrs. Warren's Daughter Part 2

Honoria after her father's death left Cambridge and moved her mother from Harley Street to Queen Anne's Mansions so that with her shattered nerves and loss of interest in life she might have no household worries, or at any rate nothing worse than remonstrating with the still-room maids on the twice-boiled water brought in for the making of tea; or with the culinary department over the monotonous character of the savouries or the tepid ice creams which dissolved so rapidly into fruit-juice when they were served after a house-dinner.[1] Honoria herself, mistress of a clear two thousand pounds a year, and more in prospect, carried out plans formed while still at Newnham after her brother's death. She, like Vivien Warren, her three-years-younger friend and college-mate, was a great mathematician--a thing I never could be and a status I am incapable of understanding; consequently one I view at first with the deepest respect. I am quite astonished when I meet a male or female mathematician and find they require food as I do, are less quick at adding up bridge scores, lose rather than win at Goodwood, and write down the "down" train instead of the "up" in their memorabilia. But there it is. They have only to apply sines and co-sines, tangents and logarithms to a stock exchange quotation for me to grovel before their superior wisdom and consult them at every turn in life.

[Footnote 1: This, of course, was twenty, years ago.--H.H.J.]

Honoria had resolved to turn her great acquirements in Algebra and the Higher Mathematics to practical purposes. Being the ignoramus that I am--in this direction--I cannot say how it was to be done; but both she and Vivie had grasped the possibilities which lay before exceptionally well-educated women on the Stock Exchange, in the Provision markets, in the Law, in Insurance calculations, and generally in steering other and weaker women through the difficulties and pitfalls of our age; when in nine cases out of thirteen (Honoria worked out the ratio) women of large or moderate means have only dishonest male proficients to guide them.

Moreover Honoria's purpose was two-fold. She wished to help women in their business affairs, but she also wanted to find careers for women. She, like Vivien Warren, was a nascent suffragist--perhaps a born suffragist, a reasoned one; because the ferment had been in her mother, and her grandmother was a friend of Lydia Becker and a cousin of Mrs. Belloc. John's death had been a horrible numbing shock to Honoria, and she felt hardly in her right mind for three months afterwards. Then on reflection it left some tarnish on her family, even if the memory of the dear dead boy, the too brilliant boy, softened from the poignancy of utter disappointment into a tender sorrow and an infinite pity and forgiveness.

But the tragedy turned her thoughts from marriage to some mission of well-doing. She determined to devote that proportion of her inheritance which would have been John's share to this end: the liberation and redemption of women.

She was no "anti-man," like Vivie. She liked men, if truth were told, a tiny wee bit more than women. But she wished in the moods that followed her brother's death in 1894 to be a mother by adoption, a refuge for the fallen, the bewildered, the unstrung. She helped young men back into the path of respectability and wage-earning as well as young women. She was even, when opportunity offered, a matchmaker.

Being heiress eventually to 4,000 a year (a large income in pre-war days) and of attractive appearance, she had no lack of suitors, even though she thought modern dancing inane, and had little skill at ball-games. I have indicated her appearance by some few phrases already; but to enable you to visualize her more definitely I might be more precise. She was a tall woman rather than large built, like the young Juno when first wooed by Jove. Where she departed from the Junonian type she turned towards Venus rather than Minerva; in spite of being a mathematician. You meet with her sisters in physical beauty among the Americans of Pennsylvania, where, to a stock mainly Anglo-Saxon, is added a delicious strain of Gallic race; or you see her again among the Cape Dutch women who have had French Huguenot great grandparents. It is perhaps rather impertinent continuing this a.n.a.lysis of her charm, seeing that she lives and flourishes more than ever, twenty years after the opening of my story; not very different in outward appearance at 48, as Lady Armstrong--for of course, as you guess already, she married Major--afterwards Sir Petworth--Armstrong--than she was at twenty-eight, the partner, friend and helper of Vivien Warren.

Being in comfortable circ.u.mstances, highly educated, handsome, attractive, with a mezzo-soprano voice of rare beauty and great skill as a piano-forte accompanyist, she had not only suitors who took her rejection without bitterness, but hosts of friends. She knew all the nice London people of her day: Lady Feenix, who in some ways resembled her, Diana Dombey, who did not _quite_ approve of her, being a little uncertain yet about welcoming the New Woman, all the Ritchies, married and unmarried, Lady Brownlow, the d.u.c.h.ess of Bedford (Adeline), the Michael Fosters, most of the Stracheys (she liked the ones I liked), the Hubert Parrys, the Ripons (how she admired Lady Ripon, as who did not!), Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton, Miss Lena Ashwell, the Bernard Shaws, the Wilfred Meynells, the H.G.

Wellses, the Sidney Webbs; and--leaving uninstanced a number of other delightful, warm-blooded, pleasant-voiced, natural-mannered people--the Rossiters.

Or at least, Michael Rossiter. For although you could tolerate for his sake Mrs. Rossiter, and even find her a source of quiet amus.e.m.e.nt, you could hardly say you liked her--not in the way you could say it of most of the men and women I have specified. Michael Rossiter, who comes into this story, ought really if there were a discriminating wide-awake, up-to-date Providence--which there is not--to have met Honoria when she was twenty. (At nineteen such a woman is still immature; and moreover until she was twenty, Honoria had not mastered the Binomial Theorem.) Had he married her at that period he would himself have been about twenty-seven which is quite soon enough for a great man of science to marry and procreate geniuses. But as a matter of fact, when he came down to Cambridge in--? 1892--to deliver a course of Vacation lectures on embryology, he was already two years married to Linda Bennet, an heiress, the daughter and niece (her parents died when she was young and she lived with an uncle and aunt) of very rich manufacturers at Leeds.

So, though his eye, quick to discern beauty, and his brain tentacles ready to detect intelligence combined with a lovely nature, soon singled out Honoria Fraser, amongst a host of less attractive girl-graduates, he had no more thought of falling in love with her than with a princess of the blood-royal. He might, long since, within a month of his marriage have found out his Linda to be a pretty little simpleton with a brain incapable of taking in any more than it had learnt at a Scarborough finis.h.i.+ng school; but he was too instinctive a gentleman to indulge in any flirtation, any deviation whatever from mental or physical monogamy. For he remembered always that it was his wife's money which had enabled him to pursue his great researches without the heart-breaking delays, limitations and insufficiencies involved in Government or Royal Society grants; and that Linda had not only endowed him with all her worldly goods--all but those he had insisted in putting into settlement--but that she had given him all her heart and confidence as well.

Still, he liked Honoria. She was eager to learn much else beyond the hard-grained muses of the square and cube; she was the daughter of a prosperous and boldly experimental physician, whose wife was a champion of women's rights. So he pressed Honoria to come with her mother and make the acquaintance of himself and Linda in Portland Place.

Why was Michael Rossiter wedded to Linda Bennet when he was no more than twenty-five, and she just past her coming of age? Because fresh from Edinburgh and Cambridge and with a reputation for unusual intuition in Biology and Chemistry he had come to be Science master at a great College in the North, and thus meeting Linda at the Philosophical Inst.i.tute of Leeds had caused her to fall in love with him whilst he lectured on the Cainozoic fauna of Yorks.h.i.+re. He was himself a Northumbrian of borderland stock: something of the Dane and Angle, the Pict and Briton with a dash of the Gypsy folk: a blend which makes the Northumbrian people so much more productive of manly beauty, intellectual vivacity, bold originality than the slow-witted, bulky, crafty Saxons of Yorks.h.i.+re or the under-sized, rugged-featured Britons of Lancas.h.i.+re.

Linda fell in love all in one evening with his fiery eyes, black beard, the Northumbrian burr of his p.r.o.nunciation, and the daring of his utterances, though she could scarcely grasp one of his hypotheses. Her uncle and aunt being narrowly pietistic she was bored to death with the Old Testament, and Rossiter's scarcely concealed contempt for the Mosaic story of creation captured her intellect; while the physical attraction she felt was that which the tall, handsome, resolute brunet has for the blue-eyed fluffy little blonde. She openly made love to him over the tea and coffee served at the "soiree" which followed the lecture. Her slow-witted guardian had no objection to offer; and there were not wanting go-betweens to urge on Rossiter with stories of her wealth and the expanding value of her financial interests. He wanted to marry; he was touched by her ill-concealed pa.s.sion, found her pretty and appealingly childlike. So, after a short wooing, he married her and her five thousand pounds a year, and settled down in Park Crescent, Portland Place, so as to be near the Zoo and Tudell's dissecting rooms, to have the Royal Botanic gardens within three minutes' walk, and the opportunity of turning a large studio in the rear of his house into a well-equipped chemical and dissecting laboratory. One of his close pursuits at that time was the a.n.a.lysis of the Thyroid gland and its functions, its over or under development in British statesmen, dramatic authors and East End immigrants.

CHAPTER III

DAVID VAVASOUR WILLIAMS

It is in the spring of 1901. A fine warm evening, but at eight o'clock the dusk is already on the verge of darkness as Honoria emerges from the lift at her Chancery Lane Office (near the corner of Carey Street), puts her latch-key into the door of the partners'

room, and finds herself confronting the silhouette of a young man against the western glow of the big window.

_Norie_ (inwardly rather frightened): "Hullo! Who are _you_ and what are you doing here?"

_Vivie_ (mimicking a considerate, cringing burglar): "Sorry to startle you, lidy, but I don't mean no 'arm. I'll go quiet. Me name's D.V. Williams..."

_Norie_: "You absurd creature! But you shouldn't play such pranks on these respectable premises. You gave me a _horrid_ start, and I realized for the first time that I've got a heart. I really must sit down and pant."

_Vivie_: "I am sorry, dearest. I had not the slightest notion you would be letting yourself into the office at this hour--8 o'clock--and I was just returning from my crammers..."

_Norie_: "I came for those Cranston papers. Mother is ill. I may have to sit up with her after Violet Hunt goes, so I thought I would come here, fetch the bundle of papers and plans, and go through them in the silent watches of the night, _if_ mother sleeps. But do you mean to say you have already started this masquerade?"

_Vivie_: "I do. You see Christabel Pankhurst has been turned down as a barrister. They won't let her qualify for the Bar, because she's a woman, so they certainly won't let _me_ with my pedigree; just as, merely because we are women, they won't let us become Chartered Actuaries or Incorporated Accountants. After we had that long talk last June I got a set of men's clothes together, a regular man's outfit. The suit doesn't fit over well but I am rectifying that by degrees. I went to a general outfitter in Cornhill and told a c.o.c.k-and-bull story--as it was an affair of ready cash they didn't stop to question me about it. I said something about a sea-faring brother, just my height, a trifle stouter in build--lost all his kit at sea--been in hospital--now in convalescent home--how I wanted to save him all the fatigue possible--wouldn't want more than reach-me-downs at present, etc., etc. They rather flummoxed me at first by offering a merchant service uniform, but somehow I got over that, though this serge suit has rather a sea-faring cut. I got so unnecessarily explanatory with the shopman that he began to pay me compliments, said my brother must be a good-looking young chap if he was at all like me. However, I got away with the things in a cab, and told the cab to drive to St. Paul's station, and on the way re-directed him here.

"Last autumn I began practising at night-time after all our familiars had left these premises. Purposely I did not tell you because I feared your greater caution and instinctive respectability might discourage me. Otherwise, n.o.body's spotted me, so far. I'd intended breaking it to you any day now, because I've gone too far to draw back, for weal or woe. But either we have been rushed with business, or you've been anxious about Lady Fraser--How is she?"

(Norie interpolates "Very poorly.") "So truly sorry!--I was generally just about to tell you when Rose or Lilian--tiresome things!--would begin most a.s.siduously pa.s.sing in and out with papers. Even now I mustn't keep you, with your mother so ill..."

_Norie_ (looking at her wrist-watch): "Violet has very kindly promised to stay with mother till ten.... I can give you an hour, though I must take a few minutes off that for the firm's business as I haven't been here much for three days..." (They talk business for twenty minutes, during which Norie says: "It's really _rather_ odd, how those clothes change you! I feel vaguely compromised with a handsome young man bending over me, his cheek almost touching mine!"--and Vivie retorts "Oh, _don't_ be an a.s.s!")

_Norie_: "So you really _are_ going to take the plunge?"

_Vivie_: "I really _am_. As soon as it suits your convenience, Vivie Warren will retire from your firm and go abroad. You must either replace her by Beryl Clarges or allow Mr. Vavasour Williams"

(Honoria interpolates: "_Ridiculous_ name! How did you think of it?") "to come and a.s.sist in the day-time or after office hours. You can say to the winds that he is Vivie's first cousin, remarkably like her in some respects.... Rose Mullet is engaged to be married and is only--she told me yesterday with many blushes--staying on to oblige us. Lilian Steynes said the other day that if we were making any changes in the office, much as she liked her work here, her mother having died she thought it was her duty to go and live with her maternal aunt in the country. The aunt thinks she can get her a post as a brewery clerk at Aylesbury, and she is longing to breed Aylesbury ducks in her spare time.--There is Bertie Adams, it's true. There's something so staunch about him and he is so useful that he and Praed and Stead are the three exceptions I make in my general hatred of mankind..."

_Norie_: "He will be very much cut up at your going--or seeming to go."

_Vivie_: "Just so. I think I shall write him a farewell note, saying it's only for a time: I mean, that I may return later on--dormant partners.h.i.+p--nothing really changed, don't you know? But that as Rose and Lilian are going, Mrs.--what does she call herself, Claridge?"--(Norie interpolates: "Yes, that was her idea: she doesn't want to blazon the name of Clarges as the symbol of Free Love, 'cos of the dear old Dean; yet Claridge will not be too much of a surrender and is sure to invoke respectability, because of the Hotel")--"Mrs. Claridge, then, is coming in my stead--He's to help her all he can--and my cousin, who is reading for the Bar, will also look in when you are very busy. I shall, of course, see about rooms in one of the Inns of Court--the Temple perhaps. I have been stealthily watching Fig Tree Court. I _think_ I can get chambers there--a man is turning out next month--got a Colonial appointment--I've put my new name down at the lodge and I shall have to rack my brains for references--you will do for one--or perhaps not--however that I can work out later. Of course I won't take the final plunge till I have secured the rooms. Meantime I will use my bedroom here but promise you I will be awfully prudent..."

_Norie_: "I couldn't possibly have Beryl 'living in,' with a child hanging about the place; so I think if you _do_ go I shall turn your bedroom into an apartment which Beryl and I can use for toilet purposes but where we can range out on book-shelves a whole lot of our books. Just now they are most inconveniently stored away in boxes. It's rather tiresome about Beryl. I believe she's going to have _another_ child. At any rate she says it may be four months before she can come to work here regularly. I asked her about it the other day, because if mother gets worse I may be hindered about coming to the office, and I didn't want you to get overworked,--so I said to Beryl.... That reminds me, she referred to the coming child and added that its father was a policeman. Quite a nice creature in his private life. Of course she's only kidding. I expect it's the architect all the time. You know how she delighted in shocking us at Newnham. I wish she hadn't this kink about her. P'raps I'm getting old-fas.h.i.+oned already--You used to call me 'the Girondist.' But if the New Woman _is_ to go on the loose and be unmoral like the rabbits, won't the cause suffer from middle-cla.s.s opposition?"

_Vivie_: "Perhaps. But it may gain instead the sympathies of the lower and the upper cla.s.ses. Why do you bother about Beryl? I agree with you in disliking all this s.e.xuality..."

_Norie_: "Does one _ever_ quite know why one likes people? There is _something_ about Beryl that gets over me; and she _is_ a worker.

You know how she grappled with that Norfolk estate business?"

_Vivie_: "Well, it's fortunate she and I have not met since Newnham days. You must tip her the story that I am going away for a time--abroad--and that a young--young, because I look a mere boy, dressed up in men's clothes--a young cousin of mine, learned in the law, is going to drop in occasionally and do some of the work..."

_Norie_: "I'm afraid I'm rather weak-willed. I _ought_ to stop this prank before it has gone too far, just as I ought to discourage Beryl's babies. Your schemes sound so stagey. Off the stage you never take people in with such flimsy stories and weak disguises--you'll tie yourself up into knots and finally get sent to prison.... However.... I can't help being rather tickled by your idea. It's vilely unjust, men closing two-thirds of the respectable careers to women, to bachelor women above all..." (A pause, and the two women look out on a blue London dotted with lemon-coloured, straw-coloured, mauve-tinted lights, with one cold white radiance hanging over the invisible Piccadilly Circus)--"Well, go ahead!

Follow your star! I can be confident of one thing, you won't do anything mean or disgraceful. Deceiving Man while his vile laws and restrictions remain in force is no crime. Be prudent, so far as compromising our poor little firm here is concerned, because if you bring down my grey hairs with sorrow to the grave we shall lose a valuable source of income. Besides: any public scandal just now in which I was mixed up might kill my mother. Want any money?"

_Vivie_: "You generous darling! _Never, never_ shall I forget your kindness and your trust in me. You have at any rate saved one soul alive." (Honoria deprecates grat.i.tude.) "No, I don't want money--yet. You made me take and bank 700 last January over that Rio de Palmas coup--heaps more than my share. Altogether I've got about 1,000 on deposit at the C. and C. bank, the Temple Bar branch. I've many gruesome faults, but I _am_ thrifty. I think I can win through to the Bar on that. Of course, if afterwards briefs don't come in--"

_Norie_: "Well, there'll always be the partners.h.i.+p which will go on unaltered. I shall pretend you are only away for a time and your share shall be regularly paid in to your bank. Of course I shall meet Mr. Vavasour Williams now and again and I can tell him things and consult with him. If we think Beryl, after she is installed here as head clerk--of course I shan't make her a partner for _years_ and _years_--not at all if she remains flighty--if we think she is unsuspicious, and Bertie Adams likewise, and the new clerks and the housekeeper and her husband, there is no reason why you should not come here fairly often and put in as much work as you can on our business."

_Vivie_: "Yes. Of course I must be careful of one predicament. I have studied the regulations about being admitted to the English Bar. They are very quaint and medieval or early Georgian. You mayn't be a Chartered Accountant or Actuary--the Lord alone knows why! I suppose some Lord Chancellor was done in the eye in Elizabeth's reign by an actuary and laid down that law. Equally you mayn't be a clergyman. As to that we needn't distress ourselves.

It's rather piteous about the prohibiting Accountants, because as women we are not allowed to qualify in _any_ capacity as Accountants or Actuaries; and work here is only permissible by our not pretending to belong to any recognized body like the Inst.i.tute of Actuaries. So that in coming to work for you I must not seem to be in any way doing the business of Accountants or Actuaries. Indeed it might be awkward for my scheme if I was too openly a.s.sociated with Fraser and Warren.

"I already think of myself as Williams--I shall pose of course as a Welshman. My appearance _is_ rather Welsh, don't you think? It's the Irish blood that makes me look Keltic--I'm sure my father was an Irish student for the priesthood at Louvain, and certain sc.r.a.ps of information I got out of mother make me believe that _her_ mother was a pretty Welsh girl from Cardiff, brought over to London Town by some s.h.i.+p's captain and stranded there, on Tower Hill.

"However, I have still the whole scheme to work out and when I'm ready to start on it--which will be very soon--I'll let you know.

Now, though I'd love to discuss all the other details, I mustn't forget your mother will be wanting you--I wish _I_ had a mother to tend--I wonder" (wistfully) "whether I was too hard on mine?

"D'you mind posting these letters as you go out? I shall change back to Vivie Warren in a dressing gown, give myself a light supper, and then put in two hours studying Latin and Norman French. Good night, dearest!"

Two months after this conversation Vivie decided to pay a call on an old friend of her mother's, Lewis Maitland Praed, if you want his full name, a well-known architect, and one of the few male friends of Catherine Warren who had not also been her lover. Why, he never quite knew himself. When he first met her she was the boon companion, the mistress--more or less, and unattached--of a young barrister, a college friend of Praed's. Kate Warren at that time called herself Kitty Vavasour; and on the strength of having done a turn or two on the music halls considered herself an actress with a right to a professional name. It was in this guise that the "Revd."

Samuel Gardner met her and had that six months' infatuation for her which afterwards caused him so much disquietude; though it preceded the taking of his ordination vows by quite a year, and his marriage to his wife--much too good for him--in 1874. [The Revd. Sam, you may remember, was the father of the scapegrace Frank who nearly captured Vivie's young affections and had written from South Africa proposing marriage at the opening of this story.]

Kate Vavasour in 1872 was an exceedingly pretty girl of nineteen or twenty; showily dressed, and quick with her tongue. She was good-natured and jolly, and though Praed himself was the essence of refinement there was something about her reckless mirth and joy in life--the immense relief of having pa.s.sed from the sordid life of a barmaid to this quasi-ladyhood--that enlisted his sympathies. Though she was always somebody else's mistress until she developed her special talent as a manageress of high-cla.s.s houses of accommodation, "private hotels" on the Continent, chiefly frequented by English and American _roues_--Praed kept an eye on her career, and occasionally rendered her, with some cynicism, un.o.btrusive friendly services in disentangling her affairs when complications threatened. He was an art student in those days of the 'seventies, possessed of about four hundred a year, beginning to go through the aesthetic phase, and not decided whether he would emerge a painter of pictures or an architect of grandiose or fantastic buildings. To his studio Miss Kitty Vavasour or Miss Kate Warren would often come and pose for the head and shoulders, or for some draped caryatid wanted for an ambitious porch in an imaginary millionaire's house in Kensington Palace Gardens. When in 1897, Vivie had learnt about her mother's "profession," she had flung off violently from all her mother's "friends," except "Praddy." She even continued to call him by this nickname, long ago bestowed on him by her mother. At distant intervals she would pay him a visit at his house and studio near Hans Place; when Honoria's advice and a.s.sistance did not meet the case of some grave perplexity.

So one afternoon in June, 1901, she came to his little dwelling with its large studio, and asked to have a long talk to him, whilst his parlour-maid--he was still a bachelor--denied him to other callers.

They had tea together and Vivie plunged as quickly as possible into her problem.

"You know, Praddy dear, I want to be a Barrister. But as a female they will never call me to the Bar. So I'm going to send Vivien Warren off for a long absence abroad--the few who think about me will probably conclude that money has carried the day and that I've gone to help my mother in her business--and in her absence Mr.