it is a suggestive thought that the characteristic effects of our execrable climate have nowhere shown themselves more forcibly than in the atmosphere of the london suburbs. that these suburbs are in some subtle respects the results of our melancholy grey skies no one can doubt. even the raw red terraces scattered among the dingier and more chastened rows of depressed houses, betray a futile and rather boisterous attempt to introduce a butcher-boy cheerfulness into a world of smuts and rain. the older, sadder houses have taken the tint of their surroundings. they have been poised all these years between the moil and fog of the city, and a countryside that was never theirs, a countryside that is often pictured as wrapped in eternal june, but which for nine months out of the twelve knows grey gloom, mud, and rain.
their activities alone must have given the modern english such cheerfulness as they possess, while the climate has made them a nation of grumblers. perhaps the industrial revolution saved us from our weather.
coal and power came and gave us something to do. for what has been the history of england, but the watering of the blood of those who came to dwell in her. it is not necessary to thank the roman rule for the decadence of the britons, when their saxon conquerors in turn sank into sodden, boorish ignorance. the normans brought red blood and wine to the grey island, but by the fifteenth century the blend had become coarse, cruel, and poor. with the elizabethans, half the world rushed into new adventure and romance, and england revived. but once again the grey island damped down the ardour, the enthusiasms and the energies of the people. during the first half of the eighteenth century, the population was stagnant, the country poor, coarse and apathetic. then king coal arose, and lit a fire for us, and a few great men were born. we found big things to do, and were renewed, in spite of our climate. yet the question suggests itself, will these subtle atmospheric influences reassert themselves and damp us down once more in the centuries that are to come?
eve carfax had elected to live in a london suburb, and had chosen highbury, perhaps because of childish recollections of pleasant half holidays spent there with a friend of her mother’s, afternoons when muffins and fancy cakes had made bread and butter superfluous, and a jolly old lady had discovered occasional half-crowns in her purse. eve had taken two rooms in a little red house in bosnia road. why it should have been called bosnia road she could not imagine. each house had a front door with stained glass and a brass letter box, a tiny strip of front garden faced with a low brick wall topped by an iron railing, an iron gate, and a red tiled path. all the houses looked exactly alike. most of them had a big china bowl or fern pot on a table or pedestal in the window of the ground floor room. there was no originality either in the texture or the draping of the curtains. none of the houses in bosnia road had any of that sense of humour possessed by the houses in a village street. there were no jocular leerings, no rollicking leanings up against a neighbour, no expressive and whimsical faces. they were all decently alike, respectably uniform, staring at each other across the road, and never moved to laughter by the absurd discovery that the architect had unconsciously perpetrated a cynical lampoon upon the suburban middle classes.
when one is fighting for the bare necessities of life, one is not conscious of monotony. for eve, as an adventuress, it had been a question of gaining a foothold and a grip on a ledge with her fingers, and her energies had been concentrated on hanging to the vantage she had gained. she had had good luck, and the good luck had been due to kate duveen.
kate duveen was an old friend, and eve had hunted her out in her bloomsbury lodgings on the third day of her coming to london. they had been at school together before the carfaxes had taken a cottage in surrey. kate duveen was a brown, lean, straight-backed young woman, with rather marked eyebrows, firm lips, and shrewd eyes. she was a worker, had always been a worker, and though more than one man had wanted to marry her, she had no desire either for marriage or for children. she was a comrade rather than a woman. there was no colour either in her face or in her dress, and her one beauty was her hair. she had a decisive, unsentimental way with her, read a great deal, attended, when possible, every lecture given by bernard shaw, and managed to earn about two hundred pounds a year.
it was kate duveen who had introduced eve into miss champion’s establishment.
miss champion’s profession was somewhat peculiar, though not unique. her offices were in a turning off oxford street, and were situated on the first floor. she was a kind of universal provider, in the sense that she supplied by means of her female staff, the various needs of a cultured and busy public. she equipped men of affairs and politicians with secretaries and expert typists. there were young women who could undertake mechanical drawing or architects’ plans, illustrate books, copy old maps and drawings, undertake research work in the british museum, design fashion plates, supervise entertainments, act as mistress of the revels at hydros and hotels. miss champion had made a success of the venture, partly because she was an excellent business woman, and partly because of her personality. snow-white hair, a fresh face, a fine figure. these points had helped. she was very debonair, yet very british, and mingled an aristocratic scent of lavender with a suggestion of lawn sleeves. her offices had no commercial smell. her patrons were mostly dilettanti people with good incomes, and a particular hobby, authorship, public affairs, china, charities. miss champion had some imagination, and the wisdom of a “foresight.” good form was held sacred. she was very particular as to that old-fashioned word “deportment.” her gentlewomen had to be gentlewomen, calm, discreet, unemotional, neat looking lay figures, with good brains and clever hands.
kate duveen had introduced eve to miss champion, and miss champion happened to have a vacancy that eve could fill. a patron was writing a book on mediæval hunting, and wanted old pictures and woodcuts copied. another patron was busy with a colour-book called “ideal gardens,” and was asking for fancy plates with plenty of atmosphere. there was some hack research work going begging, and designs for magazine covers to be submitted to one or two art editors, and eve was lucky enough to find herself earning her living before she had been two weeks in town.
the day’s routine did not vary greatly. she breakfasted at a quarter to eight, and if the weather was fine she walked a part or even the whole of the way to miss champion’s, following upper street and pentonville road, and so through bloomsbury, where she picked up kate duveen. if it was wet she trammed, but she detested the crush for a seat, being a sensitive individualist with a hatred of crowds, however small. some days she spent most of her time in the museum reading-room, making notes and drawings which she elaborated afterwards at her desk at miss champion’s. if she had nothing but illustrating to do or plates to paint she spent all the day at the office. they were given an hour for lunch, and eve and kate duveen lunched together, getting some variety by patronising lyons, the aerated bread company, and the express dairy in turn. after these very light lunches, and much more solid conversations, came four or five hours more work, with half an hour’s interval for tea. eve reached bosnia road about half past six, often glad to walk the whole way back after the long sedentary hours. at seven she had meat tea, the meat being represented by an egg, or three sardines, or two slices of the very smallest tongue that was sold. her landlady was genteel, florid, and affable, with that honeyed affability that is one of the surest signs of the humbug. she was a widow, and the possessor of a small pension. her one child, a gawk of a youth, who was an under-clerk somewhere in the city, had nothing to recommend him. he was a ripening “nut,” and advertised the fact by wearing an enormous collar, a green plush homburg hat, a grey suit, and brown boots on the sabbath. some time ago he had bought a banjo, but when eve came to bosnia road, his vamping was as discordant and stuttering as it could be. he had a voice, and a conviction that he was a comedian, and he could be heard exclaiming, “put me among the girls,” a song that always moved eve to an angry disgust. now and again he met her on the stairs, but any egregious oglings on his part were blighted before they were born.
“she’s a suffragette! i know ’em.”
that was what he said to his mother. had he been put among such girls, his little, vain georgy porgy of a soul would have been mute and awed.
eve’s evenings were very lonely. sometimes kate duveen came up from bloomsbury, but she was a busy woman, and worked and read most nights. if it was fine, eve went out and walked, wandering round outside highbury fields, or down the quiet canonbury streets, or along upper street or holloway road. it was very dismal, and these walks made her feel even more lonely than the evenings spent in her room. it seemed such a drifting, solitary existence. who cared? to whom did it matter whether she went out or stayed at home? as for her sitting-room, she could not get used to the cheap red plush suite, the sentimental pictures, the green and yellow carpet, the disastrous ornaments, the pink and green tiles in the grate. her own workaday belongings made it a little more habitable, but she felt like iolanthe in a retired licensed victualler’s parlour.
the nights when kate duveen came up from bloomsbury were full of intelligent relief. they talked, argued, compared ambitions and ideals, and trusted each other with intimate confessions. several weeks passed before eve gave kate duveen some account of that summer at fernhill, and kate duveen looked stiff and hard over it, and showed canterton no mercy.
“it always seems to be a married man!”
eve was up in arms on the other side.
“he was different.”
“oh, yes, i know!”
“kate, i hate you when you talk like this.”
“hate me as much as you like, my dear, you will see with my eyes some day. i have no patience with men.”
eve softened her passionate partisanship, and tried to make her friend understand.
“till one has gone through it one does not know what it means. after all, we can’t stamp out nature, and all that is beautiful in nature. i, for one, don’t want to. it may have made me suffer. it was worth it, just to be loved by that child.”
“children are not much better than little savages. don’t dream sentimental dreams about children. i remember what a little beast i was.”
“there will always be some part of me that you won’t understand, kate.”
“perhaps. i’ve no patience with men—selfish, sexual fools. let’s talk about work.”
