Women -- Suffrage -- Great Britain -- Fiction; World War, 1914-1918 -- Great Britain -- Fiction
John was safe. You could depend on him to keep out of trouble. He had no
genius for adventure. He would never strike out for himself any strange
or dangerous line. He had settled down at Cheltenham; he had settled
down at Oxford.
And Dorothea had settled down.
The Women's Franchise Union was now in the full whirl of its revolution.
Under the inspiring leadership of the Blathwaites it ran riot up and
down the country. It smashed windows; it hurled stone ginger-beer
bottles into the motor cars of Cabinet Ministers; it poured treacle into
pillar-boxes; it invaded the House of Commons by the water-way, in
barges, from which women, armed with megaphones, demanded the vote from
infamous legislators drinking tea on the Terrace; it went up in balloons
and showered down propaganda on the City; now and then, just to show
what violence it could accomplish if it liked, it burned down a house or
two in a pure and consecrated ecstasy of Feminism. It was bringing to
perfection its last great tactical manoeuvre, the massed raid followed
by the hunger-strike in prison. And it was considering seriously the
very painful but possible necessity of interfering with British
sport--say the Eton and Harrow Match at Lord's--in some drastic and
terrifying way that would bring the men of England to their senses.
And Dorothea's soul had swung away from the sweep of the whirlwind. It
would never suck her in. She worked now in the office of the Social
Reform Union, and wrote reconstructive articles for _The New
Commonwealth_ on Economics and the Marriage Laws.
Frances was not afraid for her daughter. She knew that the revolution
was all in Dorothea's brain.
When she said that Michael was being drawn in she meant that he was
being drawn into the vortex of revolutionary Art. And since Frances
confused this movement with the movements of Phyllis Desmond she judged
it to be terrible. She understood from Michael that it was _the_ Vortex,
the only one that really mattered, and the only one that would ever
do anything.
And Michael was not only in it, he was in it with Lawrence Stephen.
Though Frances knew now that Lawrence Stephen had plans for Michael, she
did not realize that they depended much more on Michael himself than on
him. Stephen had said that if Michael was good enough he meant to help
him. If his poems amounted to anything he would publish them in his
_Review_. If any book of Michael's poems amounted to anything he would
give a whole article to that book in his _Review_. If Michael's prose
should ever amount to anything he would give him regular work on
the _Review_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account