London (England) -- Fiction; Satire; Suffragists -- Fiction
“All the same,” said the gardener, “you are an incendiary, not exactly a
woman. Can’t two friends, an incendiary and a horticultural expert, go
on a voyage of exploration together? Mutual exploration?”
“One can be alone in couples,” thought the suffragette. “It would be
studying loneliness from a new angle. My life has been a lifeless thing,
run on the world’s principles; I shall try a new line, and run it on my
own principles.”
But, as I may have mentioned, she was a woman, so she said: “What is to
prevent my going back to that house in the woods now, and burning it
down—if I ever meant to do it?”
“Me,” said the gardener.
“But you can’t sit there with your eyes pinned to me until the boat
sails.”
“Unless you give me your word as a World’s Worker that you will not
leave the hotel, I shall stay here, and so will you.”
For quite a long time the suffragette’s upbringing wrestled with all
comers, but it was a hopeless fight from the first. There is no strength
in the principles created out of a lifeless past. Besides, the woman of
six-and-twenty was very much flattered and fluttered, whatever the
militant suffragette might be.
“I will come with you on your exploration tour,” she said, and her voice
sounded like the voice of the conqueror rather than the conquered. “I
will give my word as a—woman without principles that I will not leave
Southampton except to go on board the _Caribbeania_.”
The gardener left her, he felt innocently drunk. He made his way out of
the amethyst light of electricity, into the golden light of the
outskirts of the town, and thence into the silver light of the
uncivilised moon. On the beach the tide was receding, despite the
groping, grasping hands of the sea, which contested every inch of the
withdrawal. The gardener stumbled upon the soft solidity of the sand
above high-water mark, and slept the sleep of the thoroughly confused.
He dreamt of a pearl-and-pink sea, and of unknown islands.
I need hardly say, after all this preamble, that the suffragette and the
gardener sailed next day on the _Caribbeania_ for Trinity Islands.
Mr. Samuel Rust, for some time before the boat started, was conspicuous
for a marked non-appearance on the wharf’s edge.
The gardener, who had a vague feeling that tears should be shed in
England on his departure, stood feeling a little cold at heart on the
starboard side of the main deck, looking at the tears that were being
shed for other people.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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