Delia Blanchflower by Mrs. Humphry Ward (top 10 most read books in the world TXT) 📖

temple; thick penthouse brows, and beneath them a pair of greyish eyes which had already made him friends with the children and the dogs and half the grown-ups in the place. The Swedish lady admitted--but with no cordiality--that human kindness could hardly speak more plainly in a human face than from those eyes. Yet the mouth and chin were thin, strong and determined; so were the hands. The man's whole aspect, moreover, spoke of assured position, and of a keen intelligence free from personal pre-occupations, and keeping a disinterested outlook on the world. The woman who observed him had in her handbag a book by a Russian lady in which Man, with a capital, figured either as "a great comic baby," or as the "Man-Beast," invented for the torment of women. The gentleman before her seemed a little difficult to fit into either category.

But if she was observing him, he had begun to question her.

"Will you forgive me if I ask an impertinent question?"

"Certainly. They are the only questions worth asking."

He laughed.

"You are, I think, from Sweden?"

"That is my country."

"And I am told you are a writer?" She bent her head. "I can see also that you are--what shall I say?--very critical of your sex--no doubt, still more of mine! I wonder if I may ask "--

He paused, his smiling eyes upon her.

"Ask anything you like."

"Well, there seems to be a great woman-movement in your country. Are you interested in it?"

"You mean--am I a feminist? Yes, I happen to dislike the word; but it describes me. I have been working for years for the advancement of women. I have written about it--and in the Scandinavian countries we have already got a good deal. The vote in Sweden and Norway; almost complete equality with men in Denmark. Professional equality, too, has gone far. We shall get all we want before long?" Her eyes sparkled in her small lined face.

"And you are satisfied?"

"What human being of any intelligence--and I am intelligent," she added, quietly,--"ever confessed to being 'satisfied'? Our shoe pinched us. We have eased it a good deal."

"You really find it substantially better to walk with?"

"Through this uncomfortable world? Certainly. Why not?"

He was silent a little. Then he said, with his pleasant look, throwing his head back to observe her, as though aware he might rouse her antagonism.

"All that seems to me to go such a little way."

"I daresay," she said, indifferently, though it seemed to him that she flushed. "You men have had everything you want for so long, you have lost the sense of value. Now that we want some of your rights, it is your cue to belittle them. And England, of course, is hopelessly behind!" The tone had sharpened.

He laughed again and was about to reply when the band struck up Brahm's Hungarian dances, and talk was hopeless. When the music was over, and the burst of clapping, from all the young folk especially, had died away, the Swedish lady said abruptly--

"But we had an English lady here last year--quite a young girl--very handsome too--who was an even stronger feminist than I."

"Oh, yes, we can produce them--in great numbers. You have only to look at our newspapers."

His companion's upper lip mocked at the remark.

"You don't produce them in great numbers--like the young lady I speak of."

"Ah, she was good-looking?" laughed Winnington. "That, of course, gave her a most unfair advantage."

"A man's jest," said the other dryly--"and an old one. But naturally women take all the advantage they can get--out of anything. They need it. However, this young lady had plenty of other gifts--besides her beauty. She was as strong as most men. She rode, she climbed, she sang. The whole hotel did nothing but watch her. She was the centre of everything. But after a little while she insisted on leaving her father down here to over-eat himself and play cards, while she went with her maid and a black mare that nobody but she wanted to ride, up to the _Jagd-huette_ in the forest. There!--you can see a little blue smoke coming from it now"--

She pointed through the window to the great forest-clothed cliff, some five thousand feet high, which fronted the hotel; and across a deep valley, just below its topmost point, Mark Winnington saw a puff of smoke mounting into the clear sky.

--"Of course there was a great deal of talk. The men gossipped and the women scoffed. Her father, who adored her and could not control her in the least, shrugged his shoulders, played bridge all day long with an English family, and would sit on the verandah watching the path--that path there--which comes down from the _Jagd-huette_ with a spy-glass. Sometimes she would send him down a letter by one of the Jager's boys, and he would send a reply. And every now and then she would come down--riding--like a Brunhilde, with her hair all blown about her--and her eyes--_Ach_, superb!"

The little dowdy woman threw up her hands.

Her neighbour's face shewed that the story interested and amused him.

"A Valkyrie, indeed! But how a feminist?"

"You shall hear. One evening she offered to give an address at the hotel on 'Women and the Future.' She was already of course regarded as half mad, and her opinions were well known. Some people objected, and spoke to the manager. Her father, it was said, tried to stop it, but she got her own way with him. And the manager finally decided that the advertisement would be greater than the risk. When the evening came the place was _bonde_; people came from every inn and pension round for miles. She spoke beautiful German, she had learnt it from a German governess who had brought her up, and been a second mother to her; and she hadn't a particle of _mauvaise honte_. Somebody had draped some Austrian and English flags behind her. The South Germans and Viennese, and Hungarians who came to listen--just the same kind of people who are here to-night--could hardly keep themselves on their chairs. The men laughed and stared--I heard a few brutalities--but they couldn't keep their eyes off her, and in the end they cheered her. Most of the women were shocked, and wished they hadn't come, or let their girls come. And the girls themselves sat open-mouthed--drinking it in."

"Amazing!" laughed the Englishman. "Wish I had been there! Was it an onslaught upon men?"

"Of course," said his companion coolly. "What else could it be? At present you men are the gaolers, and we the prisoners in revolt. This girl talked revolution--they all do. 'We women _intend_ to have equal rights with you!--whatever it cost. And when we have got them we shall begin to fashion the world as _we_ want it--and not as you men have kept it till now. _Gare a vous!_ You have enslaved us for ages--you may enslave us a good while yet--but the end is certain. There is a new age coming, and it will be the age of the free woman!'--That was the kind of thing. I daresay it sounds absurd to you--but as she put it--as she looked it--I can tell you, it was fine!"

The small, work-worn hands of the Swedish lady shook on her knee. Her eyes seemed to hold the Englishman at bay. Then she added, in another tone.

"Some people of course walked out, and afterwards there were many complaints from fathers of families that their daughters should have been exposed to such a thing. But it all passed over."

"And the young lady went back to the forest?"

"Yes,--for a time."

"And what became of the black mare?"

"Its mistress gave her to an inn-keeper here when she left. But the first time he went to see the horse in the stable, she trampled on him and he was laid up for weeks."

"Like mistress, like mare?--Excuse the jest! But now, may I know the name of the prophetess?"

"She was a Miss Blanchflower," said the Swedish lady, boggling a little over the name. "Her father had been a governor of one of your colonies."

Winnington started forward in his chair.

"Good heavens!--you don't mean a daughter of old Bob Blanchflower!"

"Her father's name was Sir Robert Blanchflower."

The tanned face beside her expressed the liveliest interest.

"Why, I knew Blanchflower quite well. I met him long ago when I was staying with an uncle in India--at a station in the Bombay presidency. He was Major Blanchflower then"--

The speaker's brow furrowed a little as though under the stress of some sudden recollection, and he seemed to check himself in what he was saying. But in a moment he resumed:--

"A little after that he left the army, and went into Parliament. And--precisely!--after a few years they made him governor somewhere--not much of a post. Then last year his old father, a neighbour of mine in Hampshire, quite close to my little place, went and died, and Blanchflower came into a fortune and a good deal of land besides. And I remember hearing that he had thrown up the Colonial Service, had broken down in health, and was living abroad for some years to avoid the English climate. That's the man of course. And the Valkyrie is Blanchflower's daughter! Very odd that! I must have seen her as a child. Her mother"--he paused again slightly--"was a Greek by birth, and gloriously handsome. Blanchflower met her when he was military attache at Athens for a short time.--Well, that's all very interesting!"

And in a ruminating mood the Englishman took out his cigarette-case.

"You smoke, Madame?"

The Swedish lady quietly accepted the courtesy. And while the too insistent band paused between one murdered Wagnerian fragment and another, they continued a conversation which seemed to amuse them both.

* * * * *

A little later the Englishman went out into the garden of the hotel, meaning to start for a walk. But he espied a party of young people gathered about the new lawn-tennis court where instead of the languid and dishevelled trifling, with a broken net and a wretched court, that was once supposed to attract English visitors, he had been already astonished to find Austrians and Hungarians--both girls and boys--playing a game quite up to the average of a good English club. The growing athleticism and independence, indeed, of the foreign girl, struck, for Winnington, the note of change in this mid-European spectacle more clearly than anything else. It was some ten years since he had been abroad in August, a month he had been always accustomed to spend in Scotch visits; and these young girls, with whom the Tyrol seemed to swarm, of all European nationalities other than English, still in or just out of the schoolroom; hatless and fearless; with their knapsacks on their backs, sometimes with ice-axes in their hands; climbing peaks and passes with their fathers and brothers; playing lawn-tennis like young men, and shewing their shapely forms sometimes, when it was a question of attacking the heights, in knicker-bocker costume, and at other times in fresh white dresses and bright-coloured jerseys, without a hint of waist; these young Atalantas, budding and bloomed, made the strongest impression upon him, as of a new race. Where had he been all these years? He felt himself a kind of Rip van Winkle--face to