Down London Road Free Epub 17
Shanae Maerz
Shall we lay the blame on the war? When the guns fired in August 1914,did the faces of men and women show so plain in each other's eyes thatromance was killed? Certainly it was a shock (to women in particularwith their illusions about education, and so on) to see the faces of ourrulers in the light of the shell-fire. So ugly they looked--German,English, French--so stupid. But lay the blame where one will, on whomone will, the illusion which inspired Tennyson and Christina Rossetti tosing so passionately about the coming of their loves is far rarer nowthan then. One has only to read, to look, to listen, to remember. Butwhy say "blame"? Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe,whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in its place? Fortruth... those dots mark the spot where, in search of truth, I missedthe turning up to Fernham. Yes indeed, which was truth and which wasillusion, I asked myself? What was the truth about these houses, forexample, dim and festive now with their red windows in the dusk, but rawand red and squalid, with their sweets and their bootlaces, at nineo'clock in the morning? And the willows and the river and the gardensthat run down to the river, vague now with the mist stealing over them,but gold and red in the sunlight--which was the truth, which was theillusion about them? I spare you the twists and turns of my cogitations,for no conclusion was found on the road to Headingley, and I ask you tosuppose that I soon found out my mistake about the turning and retracedmy steps to Fernham.
Be that as it may, I could not help thinking, as I looked at the worksof Shakespeare on the shelf, that the bishop was right at least in this;it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman tohave written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare. Let meimagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happenedhad Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let ussay. Shakespeare himself went, very probably,--his mother was anheiress--to the grammar school, where he may have learnt Latin--Ovid,Virgil and Horace--and the elements of grammar and logic. He was, it iswell known, a wild boy who poached rabbits, perhaps shot a deer, andhad, rather sooner than he should have done, to marry a woman in theneighbourhood, who bore him a child rather quicker than was right. Thatescapade sent him to seek his fortune in London. He had, it seemed, ataste for the theatre; he began by holding horses at the stage door.Very soon he got work in the theatre, became a successful actor, andlived at the hub of the universe, meeting everybody, knowing everybody,practising his art on the boards, exercising his wits in the streets,and even getting access to the palace of the queen. Meanwhile hisextraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home. She wasas adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. Butshe was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar andlogic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book nowand then, one of her brother's perhaps, and read a few pages. But thenher parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stewand not moon about with books and papers. They would have spoken sharplybut kindly, for they were substantial people who knew the conditions oflife for a woman and loved their daughter--indeed, more likely than notshe was the apple of her father's eye. Perhaps she scribbled some pagesup in an apple loft on the sly, but was careful to hide them or set fireto them. Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was to bebetrothed to the son of a neighbouring wool-stapler. She cried out thatmarriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by herfather. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her instead not to hurthim, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage. He would give hera chain of beads or a fine petticoat, he said; and there were tears inhis eyes. How could she disobey him? How could she break his heart? Theforce of her own gift alone drove her to it. She made up a small parcelof her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summer's night andtook the road to London. She was not seventeen. The birds that sang inthe hedge were not more musical than she was. She had the quickestfancy, a gift like her brother's, for the tune of words. Like him, shehad a taste for the theatre. She stood at the stage door; she wanted toact, she said. Men laughed in her face. The manager--a fat, loose-lippedman--guffawed. He bellowed something about poodles dancing and womenacting--no woman, he said, could possibly be an actress. He hinted--youcan imagine what. She could get no training in her craft. Could she evenseek her dinner in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight? Yet hergenius was for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives ofmen and women and the study of their ways. At last--for she was veryyoung, oddly like Shakespeare the poet in her face, with the same greyeyes and rounded brows--at last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pityon her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so--who shallmeasure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught andtangled in a woman's body?--killed herself one winter's night and liesburied at some cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop outside theElephant and Castle.
However, the majority of women are neither harlots nor courtesans; nordo they sit clasping pug dogs to dusty velvet all through the summerafternoon. But what do they do then? and there came to my mind's eye oneof those long streets somewhere south of the river whose infinite rowsare innumerably populated. With the eye of the imagination I saw a veryancient lady crossing the street on the arm of a middle-aged woman, herdaughter, perhaps, both so respectably booted and furred that theirdressing in the afternoon must be a ritual, and the clothes themselvesput away in cupboards with camphor, year after year, throughout thesummer months. They cross the road when the lamps are being lit (for thedusk is their favourite hour), as they must have done year after year.The elder is close on eighty; but if one asked her what her life hasmeant to her, she would say that she remembered the streets lit for thebattle of Balaclava, or had heard the guns fire in Hyde Park for thebirth of King Edward the Seventh. And if one asked her, longing to pindown the moment with date and season, but what were you doing on thefifth of April 1868, or the second of November 1875, she would lookvague and say that she could remember nothing. For all the dinners arecooked; the plates and cups washed; the children sent to school and goneout into the world. Nothing remains of it all. All has vanished. Nobiography or history has a word to say about it. And the novels, withoutmeaning to, inevitably lie.
I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister;but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee's life of the poet. She diedyoung--alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibusesnow stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle. Now my belief is that thispoet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross-roads stilllives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are nothere to-night, for they are washing up the dishes and putting thechildren to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they arecontinuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us inthe flesh. This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within yourpower to give her. For my belief is that if we live another century orso--I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not ofthe little separate lives which we live as individuals--and have fivehundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit offreedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape alittle from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always intheir relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky,too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we look pastMilton's bogey, for no human being should shut out the view; if we facethe fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but thatwe go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and notonly to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come andthe dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body whichshe has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of theunknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, shewill be born. As for her coming without that preparation, without thateffort on our part, without that determination that when she is bornagain she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that wecannot expect, for that would be impossible. But I maintain that shewould come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in povertyand obscurity, is worth while.
45360ec4cc