A Study In Shadows. William John Locke

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      She was standing before her glass one morning brushing her hair. She had shaken it back loose; it was fair, long, and thick, and she had taken up the brush languidly. She was not feeling well. Frau Schultz had unsuccessfully tried to provoke a quarrel the night before; a little graceful experiment in philanthropy that had engaged her attention of late had ignominiously failed; the rain was pouring in torrents outside; the day contained no hope; a crushing sense of the futility of things came over her like a pall. She had roused herself, given her hair a determined shake, and commenced to brush vigorously, looking at herself sideways in the glass. But a weak pity for the weary, delicate face she saw there filled her eyes with tears. Her arm seemed heavy and tired. She dropped the brush and sank down on a chair, and spreading her arms on the toilet-table, buried her face in them.

      “Oh I can't, I can't!” she cried, with a kind of moan. “What is the good? Why should I get up day after day and go through this weariness? Oh, my God! What a life! Some day it will drive me mad! I wish I were dead.”

      The sobs came and shook her shoulders, hidden by the spreading mass of hair. She could not help the pity for herself.

      Suddenly there was a knock at the door. She sprang to her feet, glanced hurriedly at the glass, and touched her face quickly with the powder-puff. In a moment she had recovered.

      Felicia entered in response to her acknowledgment of the knock. She had been out in the rain; her cheeks were glowing above the turned-up collar of her jacket.

      “Oh, you are only just dressing. I have been up and about for ages. See, I have brought you some flowers. Where shall I put them?”

      Katherine felt gladdened by the little act of kindness. She thanked Felicia, and went about the room collecting a few vases.

      “Arrange them for me, dear, whilst I finish my hair.”

      She returned to the looking-glass, and Felicia remained by the table busy with the flowers.

      “I went as far as the library with Mr. Chetwynd,” said Felicia. “I told him he ought not to go out to-day, but he would go. When 'Raine,' as he calls him, comes, I shall have to talk to him seriously about his father.”

      “The son has definitely settled to come, then?” asked Katherine, with a hair-pin between her lips.

      “Oh, yes. Mr. Chetwynd can talk of nothing else. He will be here quite soon.”

      “It will be a good thing,” said Katherine.

      “Yes; it will do the dear old man good.”

      Ordinarily Katherine would have smiled at the ingenuousness of the reply; but this morning her nerves were unstrung.

      “I wasn't thinking of him. I was thinking of ourselves—us women.”

      “I wonder what he'll be like,” said Felicia.

      “What does it matter? He will be a man.”

      “Oh, it does matter. If he is not nice—”

      “My dear child,” said Katherine, wheeling round, “it does not signify whether he has the face of an ogre and the manners of a bear. He will be a man; and it is a man that we want among us!”

      The girl shrank away. To look upon mankind as necessary elements in life had never before occurred to her. She would have been quite as excited if a nice girl had been expected at the pension.

      “But surely—” she stammered.

      Katherine divined her thought; but she was too much under the power of her mood to laugh it away.

      “No!” she cried, with a scorn that she felt to be unjust—and that very consciousness made her accent more passionate.

      “We don't want a man to come so that one of us can marry him by force! God forbid! Most of us have had enough of marrying and giving in marriage. Heaven help me, I am not as bad as that yet, to throw myself into the arms of the first man who came, so that he could carry me away from this Aceldama. But we want a man here to make us feel ashamed of the meannesses and pettinesses that we women display before each other, and to make us hide them, and appear before each other as creatures to respect. Women are the lesser race; we cannot exist by ourselves; we become flaccid and backboneless and small—oh, so small and feeble! I get to despise my sex, to think there is nothing, nothing in us; no reserve of strength, nothing but a mass of nerves and soft, flabby flesh. Oh, my dear child, you don't know it yet—let us hope you never will know it—this craving for a man, the self-contempt of it, to crave for nothing more but just to touch the hem of his garment to work the miracle of restoring you to the dignity of your womanhood. Ah!”

      She waved her arms in a passionate gesture and walked about the room with clenched hands. Felicia arranged the flowers mechanically. These things were new to her philosophy. She felt troubled by them, but she kept silent. Katherine continued her parable, the pent-up disgusts and wearinesses of months finding vehement expression.

      “Yes, a man, a man. It is good that he is coming. A being without jangling nerves, and with a fresh, broad mind that only sees things in bulk and does not dissect the infinitely little. He will come here like a sea breeze. It is a physical need among us, a man's presence now and then, with his heavy frame and deep voice and resonant laugh, his strength, his rough ways, his heavy tread, his great hands. Ah! you are young; you think I am telling you dreadful things; you may never know it. It is only women who live alone that can know what it is to yearn to have a man's strong arm, brother or father or husband, to close round you as you cry your poor weak woman's heart out, and the more humble, self-abasing longing, just to long for a man's voice. What does it matter what the man is like?”

      There was a few moments' silence. Katherine went on with her dressing. The words had relieved her heart, yet she felt ashamed at having spoken so bitterly before the young girl. Maxime debetur—. She thought of the maxim and bit her lip. But was she not young too? Were they so far apart in age that they could not meet on common grounds? She looked in the glass. Her charm had not yet gone. Yet she wished she had not spoken.

      Felicia finished arranging the flowers, and disposed the four little vases about the room. Then she went up to Katherine and put her arm round her waist.

      “I am sorry.”

      It was all the girl could say, but it made Katherine turn and kiss her cheek.

      “I expect Mr. Chetwynd is going to be very nice if he is anything like his father,” she said in her natural tones. “Forgive me for having been disagreeable. I woke up like it. Sometimes this pension gets on one's nerves.”

      “It is frightfully dull,” assented Felicia. “But you are the busiest of anybody. You are always working or reading or going out to nurse poor sick people. I wish I did anything half as useful.”

      “Well, you have made me more cheerful than I was, if that is anything,” replied Katherine.

      A little later the old man announced to her the speedy arrival of his son Raine. Katherine listened, made a few polite inquiries, learned the functions of a college tutor, and the difference between a lecturer and a professor.

      “He is a great big fellow,” said the old man. “He would make about ten of me. So don't expect to see a thin, doubled up, elderly young man in СКАЧАТЬ