Before you is a room whose innocence of toy or draping holds it with the figures within it in subtle sympathy. Within it are some women who in some way stay your glance; who carry in their bearing some suggested discord with convention—a something of greater than the common earnestness and ease. Those who are laughing give unchecked heart to their laughter. The one who is distributing cups of some beverage, does it as the unobtrusive service of a comrade.
The scene has a meaning which marks it a scene of its day. It is the common room of the teaching staff in a college for women.
The dispenser of the beverage is crossing the room with movements of easy briskness. She is a woman of forty, older at a glance; with a well-cut, dark - skinned face, iron - grey hair whose waving is conquered by its drawing to the knot in the neck, and dark eyes keen under thick, black brows. That is Miss Cliff, the lecturer in English literature.
The companion to whom she is handing a cup—the lecturer in classics, Miss Butler,—and who takes it with a word in a vein of pleasantry, is a small, straight woman, a few years younger; whose parted hair leaves the forehead fully shown, and whose hazel eyes have humour in their rapid glancing.
“I cannot but see it as ungenerous to brew the coffee with such skill,” she is saying; “in purposed contrast to my concoction of last week.”
“A meanly revengeful comment on my general manner of brewing it,” said Miss Cliff. “Well, you may put its success down to my being out of practice. It is the only reason I can think of for it.”
“I remember the last time you made it,” said a genial, guttural voice at the side of Miss Butler—the voice of Miss Dorrington, the lecturer in German, and a strong illustration of the power of moral attractiveness over the physical opposite; which in her case depended on uncouth features, an eruptive skin, and general ungainliness. “It was that week when you kept getting ill, and at the end I had to make it for you.”
“Hoist with your own petard?” said Miss Butler, smiling at Miss Cliff.
“I think it is a great accomplishment to make good coffee,” said Miss Cliff, in a consciously demure tone; “a very seemly, womanly accomplishment. I cannot feel justified in relaxing my efforts to acquire it, if you will all be generous. Cookery, you know, is the greatest attainment for a woman.”
A short, quaint - looking, middle - aged lady, with a pathetic manner which somehow was comical in its union with her calling of mathematical teacher, looked up with a slow smile. “I fear we are but a boorish set, if that be true,” she said.
“Oh, I know it is true, Miss Greenlow,” said Miss Cliff, meeting Miss Butler’s eyes. “I read it in a book, so of course it was true.”
“Of course,” said Miss Dorrington, in her breathless guttural, no genial quality unsuggested in her face and voice.
“Do any of you remember when you first realised that things in books need not be true?” said Miss Cliff, with the half - philosophising interest in her kind, which was one of her characteristics. “Do you remember feeling the ground you were used to walk upon, slipping from under your feet, and a mist of scepticism rising around you?”
A lady who was standing apart came forward to join in the talk. She was a Frenchwoman, over fifty, with a sallow, clever face, and sad brown eyes which lighted with her smile; who had led a difficult life in the land of her forced adoption, and lived with its daughters, feeling that she owed it no gratitude.
“I imagine most of us had that experience at an early stage for such power of metaphor to be born,” she said.
“I did not mean the metaphors to be quoted from childish reflections,” said Miss Cliff. “I was putting a childish experience into unchildish language. But I remember the experience itself so well. It marks off a chapter in my life for me.”
“Yes; we have so much faith as children,” said the remaining member of the band. “I daresay we could all mark off the chapters in our lives by loss of faith in something. We have to guard against losing faith in too many things.”
The speaker was Miss Adam, the lecturer in history—younger than the others, and young for her youth; with her zeal for the world where she had her life, not untempered by a wistfulness on the world outside, and her faith in the creed of her nurture as untouched by any of the usual shattering forces, as by her special knowledge of its growth.
“It seems we can mark age by steps in scepticism,” said Miss Lemaître. “It would be a help to our curiosity on both, to remember they correspond.”
“It would be a very good way of guessing people’s ages,” said Miss Greenlow, with her inappropriate plaintiveness. “We should simply have to start some disputed topics; and having discovered the doubted points, calculate the chapters marked off.”
“We shall have to warn people to be wary in conversing with Miss Greenlow,” said Miss Cliff.
“She always has told us that all things can be reduced to mathematics, if enough is known about them,” said Miss Butler.
“Well, perhaps we are abusing flippancy,” said Miss Cliff, observing Miss Adam’s silence. “I suppose it is true, after all, that the youngest-natured people are those who keep their beliefs in things; and we should try to keep youthful in nature, I suppose.”
“Youthfulness of nature does not depend upon convictions, surely, speaking seriously,” said Miss Lemaître. “Convictions are a matter of intellect; and our intellects have little to do with our characters.”
“That is a little dogmatic, is it not? “said Miss Butler, who was not very fond of Miss Lemaître. “Our intellects must influence our ways of looking at things and people, and our apprehension of them.”
“Yes, yes; I think they must,” said Miss Cliff; “and our ways of looking at people especially. In our dealings with each other, faith is often another word for charity.”
“Yes, very often,” said Miss Adam; “and charity for faith.”
“That is coming rather near to heresy, I am afraid,” said Miss Lemaître. “Is not the relative value of those qualities settled for us? I am not sure that their interchangeability is doctrinal.”
“No,” said Miss Greenlow, shaking her head; “it smells badly of schism.”
“Miss Adam meant the word ‘faith’ to be understood in a general, not a particular sense,” said Miss Butler.
“I should not have supposed that any of us meant anything,” said Miss Lemaître.
“It is rather a philosophic subject for so soon after luncheon,” said Miss Dorrington.
“I know that the time of day is said to breed mental inertia,” said Miss Cliff; “but I am constrained to the dubious course of spending it in reading essays. You must excuse my desertion of my post: my pupils have increased. Miss Dorrington, you will succeed me, I am sure?”
“Deplorable irregularity on the part of one in office!” said Miss Butler, as Miss Dorrington changed her position willingly and clumsily.
“The students are increasing very quickly,” said Miss Greenlow. “I don’t know what the opponents of women’s higher education would say to it.”
“I imagine that class has resigned its delusion, that anything can be said for its view,” said Miss Butler, with the casual manner which covers strong feeling; while Miss Cliff, arrested by the subject, paused with her hand on the door.
“Oh no, they cling to it,” said Miss Lemaître, carelessly. “I was listening to two old clergymen talking the other day; and they were agreeing that learning unfitted women for the sphere for which they were fitted by nature and their life through the centuries, with all things included—I believe to the corroboration of Genesis.”
“It is such a quaint argument—that women must not do a thing, because they have not done it before,” said Miss Dorrington, who had yet to take of a subject an other than genial view.
“We are not to try the water till we have learned to swim,” Miss Butler said, in a slightly different spirit.
“Oh, well, they were old,” said Miss Adam. “People can hardly be expected to give up the notions they were bred up in, at the end of their lives.”
“And parsons as well,” said Miss Lemaître; which further light upon the insufficiency shown, Miss Adam gave no sign of accepting.
“But I suppose there is something in the argument, that women must be what the development of ages has made them,” she resumed.
“I think very little,” said Miss Butler. “You see, women are not descended only from women. Their heritage is from their fathers as much as their mothers. The development of one sex does not bear only upon that sex.”
“A very good point,” said Miss Cliff from the door; “and one that is not made enough of.”
“Yes, there is truth in that,” said Miss Adam. “But does not the life of one sex, carried on through generations, influence that sex? Do not some qualities go down in the female line and others in the male? In the evolution of any creature, is not that so?”
“The historian looks across the ages, as the heir of all of them,” said Miss Butler, taking refuge in jest where she found it hard to keep cool. “Now I think of it, the lioness does not carry a mane in spite of her shaggy forefathers.”
“She may owe much to her forefathers, nevertheless,” said Miss Cliff. “We must not confuse the physical attributes of one sex, with the mental and moral part which is transmitted from both to both, and which the others hardly bear upon. We have known women like their fathers, though they did not carry beards. But to leave the sphere of science—to our brothers, if Miss Adam wills,—and take a practical view; the women of civilised countries outnumber the men; and as a proportion cannot marry, there must be a class of self-supporting women.”
“Unless polygamy becomes an institution,” said Miss Greenlow, the union of her manner and matter producing general hilarity.
“And even if they do marry,” said Miss Butler, “why should learning unfit them for domestic duties? I suppose people think, if we heard a child screaming, we should wait to rub up Aristotle on the training of the young, before going to see what was troubling it. I have never seen evidence that learning has that effect. I am sure my cousin, Professor Butler, is the most erudite person, in mind and appearance, I have known; but to see his antics before his baby daughter, when she is at the point of decision between crying and not crying, is to lose faith for ever in the theory, that learning is prejudicial to domestic ability.”
There was a general moving amid the laughter; and the little band dispersed down the corridor.
In her first treading of the same corridor, unpitiedly silent in a chattering stream, Dolores met the old, youthful experience of the earnest academic novice. On the brink of the student world, where the schooling was no longer a childhood’s need, she felt the sense of her child’s achievements fade into an older humbleness before better of her kind—saw it of a sudden a world of rushing generations, and quailed under youth’s clear knowledge of the transience of things. The principal’s greeting—the welcome accorded as part of another’s duty, strengthened in its formal well-wishing the sense of being a one where the many only was significant. The next hours passed as a dream—the setting in order of the narrow student chambers, the wandering in the corridors barren of the messages of memory. It was only the awakening that lingered. Returning from the evening meal, in the common hall, which seemed a sea of voices, she came upon a student standing in the corridor alone—turning from right to left with an air which marked her a novice.
“Are you perplexed about anything?” said Dolores, pausing. “You are a newcomer, as I am, I suppose?”
“Yes, that is what I am,” said the other; “and an unfortunate thing it seems to be. I am sure I wish I had arranged to be something else.”
Dolores looked at the short, plump figure; and met an expression on the face, which brought a smile to her own.
“Is there anything you want to find?” she said.
“Nothing to matter. Only the rooms where I live. I do not know why you should trouble. I had come to the conclusion, that I was not a thing to be taken into account.”
“I had come to the same conclusion,” smiled Dolores. “Perhaps we could find your rooms between us.”
“Thank you very much,” said the other, following with a rollicking gait, which seemed to fit her. “It must seem presumptuous in me to feel a need. But it is embarrassing to odds and ends to be left about.”
“Were they on this corridor?” said Dolores, as the short, quick sentences ceased. “I suppose your name will be on the doors.”
“Why, yes, now I think of it, there are names on all the doors. But I am sure it was natural, if I expected to be known simply by a number. My name is Murray—Felicia Murray; if I am worthy of such an appendage.”
“Felicia?” said Dolores, smiling. “Your meaning is the opposite of mine. And it fits you, does it not?”
“I have not thought. I am ashamed that I have ever felt interest in myself. Oh, here is the name on a door. This is where I am kept, then. Will you tell me your name before you go? Do you know, I believe all the people here have names? Is it not thoughtless, when there are a hundred? May I look out for you in the morning?”
Dolores found that the word with a fellow had somehow cleared her path. Her own rooms, with their narrow bareness, already had a certain welcome. The sense of living and working amongst many with her life and work was gathering a charm. The academic spirit was weaving its toils.
It was not till the morning that she took a real survey of the hundred student - maidens. The nicety of the novice drew her with the earliest in the direction of the chapel bell; and as she stood with those, who followed her in promptness in coming and eagerness of glance, the faces that were appearing around her drew her eyes. Young faces she saw them, not carrying less of youth that they carried things hardly youthful. Here and there, in signs of waning girlhood, she read of the teacher whose early way had been vexed.
When the hundred in the order of their standing had filed from the chapel, the hall laid out for the morning meal was the stage of an intricate drama. Silent, except for response to courtesy or question, but watching the easy actions of all, as they passed in and out at will, she felt the pervading spirit of effective freedom. When the hall was deserted, and she followed in the general wake, she found herself standing in a corner of the corridor, where written notices covered the walls; and a voice struck strangely on her ear as familiar.
“Oh, here you are! I had lost you. Not that that is a thing to call attention to. I have lost myself three times this morning. I see by the lists that you are to read classics. You are short-sighted? How proud you must be! I read it was a mark of high civilisation. We are to interview Miss Butler at twelve. Advantages are already to be ours. You know she has edited a Greek play. It is easy to see in her face that she has. She looks at you as if she could read your soul. I hope she will not read my soul; and know that I better my mind simply because I must earn my bread, or go to the workhouse. I have an old nurse there. She told me she felt in her heart we should meet again. Do you suppose Miss Butler will ask us what classics we have read? I will go and decide what I have read. Have you such a book as ‘Ideal synopsis of works to form a basis for classical scholarship’?”
Dolores knew, as she watched the little round figure rollick away, that the ground was laid for a student friendship. Three hours later she learned the meaning of Felicia’s judgment of Miss Butler. The eyes under which the new-coming students dispersed to desks, had certainly no lack of insight. The little waste of manners and minutes seemed in keeping with their survey. The words to be said were said with precision and clearness, and said but once. The nature and hours of lectures were given; and a word of general advice was offered, in whose hinted severity of tone Dolores detected a tempering of nervousness. A student stammering a doubt was gently answered; another disposed to quibble on a point that was passed, quelled with a touch of sharpness as marked as courtesy permitted.
“I always thought souls were private,” said Felicia with a sigh, as they mingled in the stream that poured to the hall for the midday meal. “It was all a waste of time, preparing that ideal synopsis. There is no good in precautions with people who can read souls.”
The meal in the common hall was what was already familiar. The students entered and left at will; easiness of action was the feature of the whole. But to Dolores, no longer silent and alone amongst many, the sameness was less than the difference. Felicia found a place at her side, and poured out prattle; and Miss Butler passed to her seat with a smile already accepted as a thing of price. The remaining hours of the day were hours as those before them. But the comprehension of their spirit of striving self-government was not all that they carried. They were filling with the human interest, which to Dolores was the greatest thing the hours could give. As other days followed, bringing other such hours, she found herself with a place and purposes in a passionless, ardent little world—a world of women’s friendships; where there lived in a strange harmony the spirits of the mediaeval convent and modern growth.
Walking one day in the cloisters of the college, she came upon a figure standing in the shadow of a pillar, which arrested her scrutiny. It was the figure of a man—a visiting professor, as she knew from his gown, and the trencher lying at his feet,—in seeming buried in pondering; for he stood unmoving, with his eyes gazing before him, and his hands folded in his garments. His aspect was grotesque at a glance; for his massive body and arms were at variance with stunted lower limbs, and his shoulders were twisted. His face was dark and rugged of feature; his eyes piercing, but unevenly set, and so small and buried in rising flesh beneath them as hardly to be seen; his clothes and hair unkempt. An uncomely figure Dolores confessed him, as she left him to his musings. On reaching the doorway, and turning for a further glance, she was startled by the sight. He was standing with his feet set apart, his body swaying and his head and limbs working to contortion. She stood and watched him; and was startled anew when he ceased his gestures, picked up his cap with a lightning-like movement, and went his way. That evening, seated at table next to Miss Cliff, she spoke of the experience.
“Oh,” said Miss Cliff, “that was Mr Claverhouse. Have you been startled? You will soon get used to seeing him about.”
“Claverhouse?” said Dolores, with a sudden awakening of thoughts. “Any relation of Claverhouse, the dramatist?”
“The dramatist himself,” said Miss Cliff. “It is pleasant to hear his name so ready. He comes here to lecture.”
“Comes here to lecture?” said Dolores. “Why, what does he lecture on? His own plays?”
“Oh, no,” said Miss Cliff. “He lectures in classics—usually on the Greek drama. He is a classical scholar apart from his writing. You will be numbered in his pupils yourself in your last year. His plays would hardly be suited to academic purposes.”
“Would they not?” said Dolores, smiling. “I should have thought they would bear elucidation.”
“You have read them?” said Miss Cliff, with surprise. “Yes; they are obscure, as you say.
“And very profound, are they not?” said Dolores.
“Yes, yes, very profound. Read as they should be read, they take one very deep.”
“I wonder if they will ever be produced,” said Dolores.
“They would hardly bear production, would they?” said Miss Cliff. “There is so much that would not carry across the footlights. It is his ambition that they shall be read.”
“He talks about them then?” said Dolores, with an instinctive feeling of surprise.
“No, no,” said Miss Cliff, half smiling; “indeed he does not. He never comes out of himself. His only friend is a cousin of mine; or he would be a mystery to me as much as to you. He lives in Oxford with his mother; and supports her by private coaching, and by giving lectures here. His story is the old one of struggle with poverty and publishers, made bearable by the sense that he is giving his art his best.”
“I suppose what I saw was the visible part of the process,” said Dolores, covering with lightness a sense of being more deeply moved than was natural. “I must have seen him in the clutch of the creative spirit.”
“No doubt of it,” said Miss Cliff. “His habits would become a genius.”
“I suppose a few would say, they do become one,” said Dolores.
“Yes,” said Miss Cliff; “and there will be many more.”
“He must be a very fine man,” said a student who was sitting next to Dolores.
“I hardly think the words ‘fine man’ give him,” said Miss Cliff. “His personality is too strange, to be fitted by such a current description. He wants something that goes deeper, and is not so wholly complimentary.”
“But the eccentricities of the great do not take from them, do they? I have known a good many remarkable people, and I have always loved their quaintnesses,” said the student with smile-begetting naïveté.
“No, no, I daresay not,” said Miss Cliff. “I only meant, they should be suggested in a full description.”
“I really think that genius is enhanced by superficial eccentricities,” went on the student, with a short, quick utterance which seemed intended to suggest, that her words covered more than appeared. “Would Socrates’ personality mean so much to us, if he had not been like a Silenus?”
“What do you think, Miss Hutton?” said Miss Cliff.
“I should think it would,” said Dolores, with a strange sensation in the remembrance, that she had heard the last words before from the same lips. “We should just associate the other attributes with him, instead of those of a Silenus. There is not much in external attributes themselves, is there?”
“Is there not? I don’t know,” said the other, slightly shaking her head.
“Well, I will leave you to convince Miss Hutton, Miss Kingsford,” said Miss Cliff, turning with a smile at Dolores to her neighbour on the other side. “I feel quite inspirited by having met some one, who reads Mr Claverhouse’s plays so young.”
“Why, his plays must be read by any one at any age, might they not? I should think so myself from what I know of them,” said the student, addressing Dolores, but failing to disguise that her words were spoken for Miss Cliff.
Dolores looked at the speaker—a student of her own standing with whom she was barely familiar; and felt her sense of being jarred yielding to a spirit of pardon. She knew that Perdita Kingsford knew nothing of the plays; but as she met the liquid eyes in the face that changed with the moments, the knowledge lost its estranging power. There was that in Dolores which yielded to womanhood’s spells. She hardly judged of women as a woman amongst them; but as something sterner and stronger, that owed them gentleness in judgment. From the first hour to the last of their years of friendship, she read Perdita as an open page; and loved her with a love that grew, though its nurture was not in what she read.
“It is very inspiring to be brought into contact with a great, neglected life,” said Perdita, as they left the hall. “So many great lives have been unrecognised; and in a way they grow greater from the very neglect. One feels one would give or do anything for a chance of smoothing one of them; and that if one were brought into touch with it, one’s own interests would not count.”
These words were heard and forgotten, as other words, as they fell. But a time was to come when Dolores recalled them. This day which brought Perdita and Claverhouse into her life, was to gather significance in its twofold bringing of change. The change grew daily, widening and deepening along its threads. But at the first it widened and deepened slowly; and at the close of the term, we may watch her with the two who had come through her into friendship, without meeting any token that her life was not as theirs.
“Well, I am glad the term has an end,” said Felicia. “Things might have become monotonous if it had not had one. It will be cheering to join one’s family, and find oneself a recognised item of something.”
“I never understand you when you talk like that,” said Perdita. “I felt myself recognised from the first. Did not you, Dolores?”
“Perhaps at the first,” said Dolores. “For a few hours I clung to interest in myself, and thought it natural that others should share it; but soon I hardly included myself in my own survey of life. I agree with Felicia that the change is painful.”
“Happily it is quick,” said Felicia.” In my case its climax was reached on the first morning; when the lecturers’ enclosed pew struck me as a convenient hiding-place in chapel; and I was ushered into general view—hard treatment when the floor is recognised as the only congenial passage of the embarrassed.”
“Well, they say that suffering is the truest education,” said Dolores. “A foundation like this is right to accord its advantages early. Were any of them in the pew? If so, they would understand you to take them for your own kind.”
“I did not think of that,” said Felicia. “To think that I wasted gratification that the pew was empty! But Miss Butler came in, as I slunk out; and looked at me with a twinkle in her eyes. You know my view of Miss Butler’s eyes. I am growing accustomed to violating truth beneath their scrutiny.”
“Violating truth?” said Dolores. “I find they have the opposite influence.”
“It is the questions she asks, while she uses them,” said Felicia. “She asked me this morning, whether I did not find that classics had a growing fascination.”
“Ànd what did you say?” said Perdita.
“I said ‘yes,’” said Felicia, turning a grave face to the laughter of the others.
“But, seriously, I don’t think one can study a subject without feeling its fascination,” said Perdita. “My way of looking at my work is quite different from what it was. I can’t help feeling and knowing it.”
“And I can’t help feeling and knowing that mine is the same,” said Felicia;—” the view natural in the daughter of a parson with eleven children; brought up on the principle, that life is a time for becoming qualified to teach, and then teaching; resolving itself into week-days devoted to secular studies, and Sundays to scriptural.”
“Are not scriptural studies postponed till the day of scriptural instruction?” said Dolores. “To remember them longer than is needful seems sheer prodigality of brains—extravagance in a scarce luxury, that is unbecoming in daughters of parsons with families.”
“But when Saturday’s studies are postponed to the Sunday, there is little difference,” said Felicia. “Things just move on.”
“As the daughter of a parson myself, I should regard Saturday’s studies as contraband on Sunday,” said Dolores.
“Yes,” said Felicia, smiling. “A memory lives with me of a Sunday of my youth, when my father brought a clerical brother ‘to see me doing my scripture;’ and it wasn’t scripture.”
“What did they say?” said Perdita.
“Little at the time,” said Felicia. “But my father said things afterwards. But I must be about my business. I have some books of Miss Butler’s, that she lent me a month ago; and I feel the cutting of their leaves a seemly step to returning them.”