one of joan’s earliest recollections was the picture of herself standing before the high cheval glass in her mother’s dressing-room. her clothes lay scattered far and wide, falling where she had flung them; not a shred of any kind of covering was left to her. she must have been very small, for she could remember looking up and seeing high above her head the two brass knobs by which the glass was fastened to its frame. suddenly, out of the upper portion of the glass, there looked a scared red face. it hovered there a moment, and over it in swift succession there passed the expressions, first of petrified amazement, secondly of shocked indignation, and thirdly of righteous wrath. and then it swooped down upon her, and the image in the glass became a confusion of small naked arms and legs mingled with green cotton gloves and purple bonnet strings.
“you young imp of satan!” demanded mrs. munday—her feelings of outraged virtue exaggerating perhaps her real sentiments. “what are you doing?”
“go away. i’se looking at myself,” had explained joan, struggling furiously to regain the glass.
“but where are your clothes?” was mrs. munday’s wonder.
“i’se tooked them off,” explained joan. a piece of information that really, all things considered, seemed unnecessary.
“but can’t you see yourself, you wicked child, without stripping yourself as naked as you were born?”
“no,” maintained joan stoutly. “i hate clothes.” as a matter of fact she didn’t, even in those early days. on the contrary, one of her favourite amusements was “dressing up.” this sudden overmastering desire to arrive at the truth about herself had been a new conceit.
“i wanted to see myself. clothes ain’t me,” was all she would or could vouchsafe; and mrs. munday had shook her head, and had freely confessed that there were things beyond her and that joan was one of them; and had succeeded, partly by force, partly by persuasion, in restoring to joan once more the semblance of a christian child.
it was mrs. munday, poor soul, who all unconsciously had planted the seeds of disbelief in joan’s mind. mrs. munday’s god, from joan’s point of view, was a most objectionable personage. he talked a lot—or rather mrs. munday talked for him—about his love for little children. but it seemed he only loved them when they were good. joan was under no delusions about herself. if those were his terms, well, then, so far as she could see, he wasn’t going to be of much use to her. besides, if he hated naughty children, why did he make them naughty? at a moderate estimate quite half joan’s wickedness, so it seemed to joan, came to her unbidden. take for example that self-examination before the cheval glass. the idea had come into her mind. it had never occurred to her that it was wicked. if, as mrs. munday explained, it was the devil that had whispered it to her, then what did god mean by allowing the devil to go about persuading little girls to do indecent things? god could do everything. why didn’t he smash the devil? it seemed to joan a mean trick, look at it how you would. fancy leaving a little girl to fight the devil all by herself. and then get angry because the devil won! joan came to cordially dislike mrs. munday’s god.
looking back it was easy enough to smile, but the agony of many nights when she had lain awake for hours battling with her childish terrors had left a burning sense of anger in joan’s heart. poor mazed, bewildered mrs. munday, preaching the eternal damnation of the wicked—who had loved her, who had only thought to do her duty, the blame was not hers. but that a religion capable of inflicting such suffering upon the innocent should still be preached; maintained by the state! that its educated followers no longer believed in a physical hell, that its more advanced clergy had entered into a conspiracy of silence on the subject was no answer. the great mass of the people were not educated. official christendom in every country still preached the everlasting torture of the majority of the human race as a well thought out part of the creator’s scheme. no leader had been bold enough to come forward and denounce it as an insult to his god. as one grew older, kindly mother nature, ever seeking to ease the self-inflicted burdens of her foolish brood, gave one forgetfulness, insensibility. the condemned criminal puts the thought of the gallows away from him as long as may be: eats, and sleeps and even jokes. man’s soul grows pachydermoid. but the children! their sensitive brains exposed to every cruel breath. no philosophic doubt permitted to them. no learned disputation on the relationship between the literal and the allegorical for the easing of their frenzied fears. how many million tiny white-faced figures scattered over christian europe and america, stared out each night into a vision of black horror; how many million tiny hands clutched wildly at the bedclothes. the society for the prevention of cruelty to children, if they had done their duty, would have prosecuted before now the archbishop of canterbury.
of course she would go to hell. as a special kindness some generous relative had, on joan’s seventh birthday, given her an edition of dante’s “inferno,” with illustrations by doré. from it she was able to form some notion of what her eternity was likely to be. and god all the while up in his heaven, surrounded by that glorious band of praise-trumpeting angels, watching her out of the corner of his eye. her courage saved her from despair. defiance came to her aid. let him send her to hell! she was not going to pray to him and make up to him. he was a wicked god. yes, he was: a cruel, wicked god. and one night she told him so to his face.
it had been a pretty crowded day, even for so busy a sinner as little joan. it was springtime, and they had gone into the country for her mother’s health. maybe it was the season: a stirring of the human sap, conducing to that feeling of being “too big for one’s boots,” as the saying is. a dangerous period of the year. indeed, on the principle that prevention is better than cure, mrs. munday had made it a custom during april and may to administer to joan a cooling mixture; but on this occasion had unfortunately come away without it. joan, dressed for use rather than show, and without either shoes or stockings, had stolen stealthily downstairs: something seemed to be calling to her. silently—“like a thief in the night,” to adopt mrs. munday’s metaphor—had slipped the heavy bolts; had joined the thousand creatures of the wood—had danced and leapt and shouted; had behaved, in short, more as if she had been a pagan nymph than a happy english child. she had regained the house unnoticed, as she thought, the devil, no doubt, assisting her; and had hidden her wet clothes in the bottom of a mighty chest. deceitfulness in her heart, she had greeted mrs. munday in sleepy tones from beneath the sheets; and before breakfast, assailed by suspicious questions, had told a deliberate lie. later in the morning, during an argument with an active young pig who was willing enough to play at red riding hood so far as eating things out of a basket was concerned, but who would not wear a night-cap, she had used a wicked word. in the afternoon she “might have killed” the farmer’s only son and heir. they had had a row. in one of those sad lapses from the higher christian standards into which satan was always egging her, she had pushed him; and he had tumbled head over heels into the horse-pond. the reason, that instead of lying there and drowning he had got up and walked back to the house howling fit to wake the seven sleepers, was that god, watching over little children, had arranged for the incident taking place on that side of the pond where it was shallow. had the scrimmage occurred on the opposite bank, beneath which the water was much deeper, joan in all probability would have had murder on her soul. it seemed to joan that if god, all-powerful and all-foreseeing, had been so careful in selecting the site, he might with equal ease have prevented the row from ever taking place. why couldn’t the little beast have been guided back from school through the orchard, much the shorter way, instead of being brought round by the yard, so as to come upon her at a moment when she was feeling a bit short-tempered, to put it mildly? and why had god allowed him to call her “carrots”? that joan should have “put it” this way, instead of going down on her knees and thanking the lord for having saved her from a crime, was proof of her inborn evil disposition. in the evening was reached the culminating point. just before going to bed she had murdered old george the cowman. for all practical purposes she might just as well have been successful in drowning william augustus earlier in the day. it seemed to be one of those things that had to be. mr. hornflower still lived, it was true, but that was not joan’s fault. joan, standing in white night-gown beside her bed, everything around her breathing of innocence and virtue: the spotless bedclothes, the chintz curtains, the white hyacinths upon the window-ledge, joan’s bible, a present from aunt susan; her prayer-book, handsomely bound in calf, a present from grandpapa, upon their little table; mrs. munday in evening black and cameo brooch (pale red with tomb and weeping willow in white relief) sacred to the memory of the departed mr. munday—joan standing there erect, with pale, passionate face, defying all these aids to righteousness, had deliberately wished mr. hornflower dead. old george hornflower it was who, unseen by her, had passed her that morning in the wood. grumpy old george it was who had overheard the wicked word with which she had cursed the pig; who had met william augustus on his emergence from the pond. to mr. george hornflower, the humble instrument in the hands of providence, helping her towards possible salvation, she ought to have been grateful. and instead of that she had flung into the agonized face of mrs. munday these awful words:
“i wish he was dead!”
“he who in his heart—” there was verse and chapter for it. joan was a murderess. just as well, so far as joan was concerned, might she have taken a carving-knife and stabbed deacon hornflower to the heart.
joan’s prayers that night, to the accompaniment of mrs. munday’s sobs, had a hopeless air of unreality about them. mrs. munday’s kiss was cold.
how long joan lay and tossed upon her little bed she could not tell. somewhere about the middle of the night, or so it seemed to her, the frenzy seized her. flinging the bedclothes away she rose to her feet. it is difficult to stand upon a spring mattress, but joan kept her balance. of course he was there in the room with her. god was everywhere, spying upon her. she could distinctly hear his measured breathing. face to face with him, she told him what she thought of him. she told him he was a cruel, wicked god.
there are no victoria crosses for sinners, or surely little joan that night would have earned it. it was not lack of imagination that helped her courage. god and she alone, in the darkness. he with all the forces of the universe behind him. he armed with his eternal pains and penalties, and eight-year-old joan: the creature that he had made in his own image that he could torture and destroy. hell yawned beneath her, but it had to be said. somebody ought to tell him.
“you are a wicked god,” joan told him. “yes, you are. a cruel, wicked god.”
and then that she might not see the walls of the room open before her, hear the wild laughter of the thousand devils that were coming to bear her off, she threw herself down, her face hidden in the pillow, and clenched her hands and waited.
and suddenly there burst a song. it was like nothing joan had ever heard before. so clear and loud and near that all the night seemed filled with harmony. it sank into a tender yearning cry throbbing with passionate desire, and then it rose again in thrilling ecstasy: a song of hope, of victory.
joan, trembling, stole from her bed and drew aside the blind. there was nothing to be seen but the stars and the dim shape of the hills. but still that song, filling the air with its wild, triumphant melody.
years afterwards, listening to the overture to tannhäuser, there came back to her the memory of that night. ever through the mad satanic discords she could hear, now faint, now conquering, the pilgrims’ onward march. so through the jangled discords of the world one heard the song of life. through the dim aeons of man’s savage infancy; through the centuries of bloodshed and of horror; through the dark ages of tyranny and superstition; through wrong, through cruelty, through hate; heedless of doom, heedless of death, still the nightingale’s song: “i love you. i love you. i love you. we will build a nest. we will rear our brood. i love you. i love you. life shall not die.”
joan crept back into bed. a new wonder had come to her. and from that night joan’s belief in mrs. munday’s god began to fade, circumstances helping.
firstly there was the great event of going to school. she was glad to get away from home, a massive, stiffly furnished house in a wealthy suburb of liverpool. her mother, since she could remember, had been an invalid, rarely leaving her bedroom till the afternoon. her father, the owner of large engineering works, she only saw, as a rule, at dinner-time, when she would come down to dessert. it had been different when she was very young, before her mother had been taken ill. then she had been more with them both. she had dim recollections of her father playing with her, pretending to be a bear and growling at her from behind the sofa. and then he would seize and hug her and they would both laugh, while he tossed her into the air and caught her. he had looked so big and handsome. all through her childhood there had been the desire to recreate those days, to spring into the air and catch her arms about his neck. she could have loved him dearly if he had only let her. once, seeking explanation, she had opened her heart a little to mrs. munday. it was disappointment, mrs. munday thought, that she had not been a boy; and with that joan had to content herself. maybe also her mother’s illness had helped to sadden him. or perhaps it was mere temperament, as she argued to herself later, for which they were both responsible. those little tricks of coaxing, of tenderness, of wilfulness, by means of which other girls wriggled their way so successfully into a warm nest of cosy affection: she had never been able to employ them. beneath her self-confidence was a shyness, an immovable reserve that had always prevented her from expressing her emotions. she had inherited it, doubtless enough, from him. perhaps one day, between them, they would break down the barrier, the strength of which seemed to lie in its very flimsiness, its impalpability.
and then during college vacations, returning home with growing notions and views of her own, she had found herself so often in antagonism with him. his fierce puritanism, so opposed to all her enthusiasms. arguing with him, she might almost have been listening to one of his cromwellian ancestors risen from the dead. there had been disputes between him and his work-people, and joan had taken the side of the men. he had not been angry with her, but coldly contemptuous. and yet, in spite of it all, if he had only made a sign! she wanted to fling herself crying into his arms and shake him—make him listen to her wisdom, sitting on his knee with her hands clasped round his neck. he was not really intolerant and stupid. that had been proved by his letting her go to a church of england school. her mother had expressed no wish. it was he who had selected it.
of her mother she had always stood somewhat in fear, never knowing when the mood of passionate affection would give place to a chill aversion that seemed almost like hate. perhaps it had been good for her, so she told herself in after years, her lonely, unguided childhood. it had forced her to think and act for herself. at school she reaped the benefit. self-reliant, confident, original, leadership was granted to her as a natural prerogative. nature had helped her. nowhere does a young girl rule more supremely by reason of her beauty than among her fellows. joan soon grew accustomed to having her boots put on and taken off for her; all her needs of service anticipated by eager slaves, contending with one another for the privilege. by giving a command, by bestowing a few moments of her conversation, it was within her power to make some small adoring girl absurdly happy for the rest of the day; while her displeasure would result in tears, in fawning pleadings for forgiveness. the homage did not spoil her. rather it helped to develop her. she accepted it from the beginning as in the order of things. power had been given to her. it was her duty to see to it that she did not use it capriciously, for her own gratification. no conscientious youthful queen could have been more careful in the distribution of her favours—that they should be for the encouragement of the deserving, the reward of virtue; more sparing of her frowns, reserving them for the rectification of error.
at girton it was more by force of will, of brain, that she had to make her position. there was more competition. joan welcomed it, as giving more zest to life. but even there her beauty was by no means a negligible quantity. clever, brilliant young women, accustomed to sweep aside all opposition with a blaze of rhetoric, found themselves to their irritation sitting in front of her silent, not so much listening to her as looking at her. it puzzled them for a time. because a girl’s features are classical and her colouring attractive, surely that has nothing to do with the value of her political views? until one of them discovered by chance that it has.
“well, what does beauty think about it?” this one had asked, laughing. she had arrived at the end of a discussion just as joan was leaving the room. and then she gave a long low whistle, feeling that she had stumbled upon the explanation. beauty, that mysterious force that from the date of creation has ruled the world, what does it think? dumb, passive, as a rule, exercising its influence unconsciously. but if it should become intelligent, active! a philosopher has dreamed of the vast influence that could be exercised by a dozen sincere men acting in unity. suppose a dozen of the most beautiful women in the world could form themselves into a league! joan found them late in the evening still discussing it.
her mother died suddenly during her last term, and joan hurried back to attend the funeral. her father was out when she reached home. joan changed her travel-dusty clothes, and then went into the room where her mother lay, and closed the door. she must have been a beautiful woman. now that the fret and the restlessness had left her it had come back to her. the passionate eyes were closed. joan kissed the marble lids, and drawing a chair to the bedside, sat down. it grieved her that she had never loved her mother—not as one ought to love one’s mother, unquestioningly, unreasoningly, as a natural instinct. for a moment a strange thought came to her, and swiftly, almost guiltily, she stole across, and drawing back a corner of the blind, examined closely her own features in the glass, comparing them with the face of the dead woman, thus called upon to be a silent witness for or against the living. joan drew a sigh of relief and let fall the blind. there could be no misreading the evidence. death had smoothed away the lines, given back youth. it was almost uncanny, the likeness between them. it might have been her drowned sister lying there. and they had never known one another. had this also been temperament again, keeping them apart? why did it imprison us each one as in a moving cell, so that we never could stretch out our arms to one another, except when at rare intervals love or death would unlock for a while the key? impossible that two beings should have been so alike in feature without being more or less alike in thought and feeling. whose fault had it been? surely her own; she was so hideously calculating. even mrs. munday, because the old lady had been fond of her and had shown it, had been of more service to her, more a companion, had been nearer to her than her own mother. in self-excuse she recalled the two or three occasions when she had tried to win her mother. but fate seemed to have decreed that their moods should never correspond. her mother’s sudden fierce outbursts of love, when she would be jealous, exacting, almost cruel, had frightened her when she was a child, and later on had bored her. other daughters would have shown patience, unselfishness, but she had always been so self-centred. why had she never fallen in love like other girls? there had been a boy at brighton when she was at school there—quite a nice boy, who had written her wildly extravagant love-letters. it must have cost him half his pocket-money to get them smuggled in to her. why had she only been amused at them? they might have been beautiful if only one had read them with sympathy. one day he had caught her alone on the downs. evidently he had made it his business to hang about every day waiting for some such chance. he had gone down on his knees and kissed her feet, and had been so abject, so pitiful that she had given him some flowers she was wearing. and he had sworn to dedicate the rest of his life to being worthy of her condescension. poor lad! she wondered—for the first time since that afternoon—what had become of him. there had been others; a third cousin who still wrote to her from egypt, sending her presents that perhaps he could ill afford, and whom she answered about once a year. and promising young men she had met at cambridge, ready, she felt instinctively, to fall down and worship her. and all the use she had had for them was to convert them to her views—a task so easy as to be quite uninteresting—with a vague idea that they might come in handy in the future, when she might need help in shaping that world of the future.
only once had she ever thought of marriage. and that was in favour of a middle-aged, rheumatic widower with three children, a professor of chemistry, very learned and justly famous. for about a month she had thought herself in love. she pictured herself devoting her life to him, rubbing his poor left shoulder where it seemed he suffered most, and brushing his picturesque hair, inclined to grey. fortunately his eldest daughter was a young woman of resource, or the poor gentleman, naturally carried off his feet by this adoration of youth and beauty, might have made an ass of himself. but apart from this one episode she had reached the age of twenty-three heart-whole.
she rose and replaced the chair. and suddenly a wave of pity passed over her for the dead woman, who had always seemed so lonely in the great stiffly-furnished house, and the tears came.
she was glad she had been able to cry. she had always hated herself for her lack of tears; it was so unwomanly. even as a child she had rarely cried.
her father had always been very tender, very patient towards her mother, but she had not expected to find him so changed. he had aged and his shoulders drooped. she had been afraid that he would want her to stay with him and take charge of the house. it had worried her considerably. it would be so difficult to refuse, and yet she would have to. but when he never broached the subject she was hurt. he had questioned her about her plans the day after the funeral, and had seemed only anxious to assist them. she proposed continuing at cambridge till the end of the term. she had taken her degree the year before. after that, she would go to london and commence her work.
“let me know what allowance you would like me to make you, when you have thought it out. things are not what they were at the works, but there will always be enough to keep you in comfort,” he had told her. she had fixed it there and then at two hundred a year. she would not take more, and that only until she was in a position to keep herself.
“i want to prove to myself,” she explained, “that i am capable of earning my own living. i am going down into the market-place. if i’m no good, if i can’t take care of even one poor woman, i’ll come back and ask you to keep me.” she was sitting on the arm of his chair, and laughing, she drew his head towards her and pressed it against her. “if i succeed, if i am strong enough to fight the world for myself and win, that will mean i am strong enough and clever enough to help others.”
“i am only at the end of a journey when you need me,” he had answered, and they had kissed. and next morning she returned to her own life.
