Lesbia Newman (1889)/Chapter 43
CHAPTER XLIII.
Mr Mountjoy Gives Our Friends a Bit of His Mind.
‘Anything in the paper, Lesbia?’ asked Mr Bristley, as he came to their breakfast-table in the coffee-room of the Great Western Hotel, Paddington, where his niece had seated herself a few minutes before. It was the tenth day after the visit of the two girls to the cardinal. Friga had left for Ruddymere on the morrow of the visit, and Lesbia met her uncle, who had come up fora short stay, at their accustomed hotel.
‘News? yes indeed there is, Uncle Spines; what do you say to this?’ handing him the despatch sheet of the Times. Mr Bristley read, ‘The Catholic Crisis. Arrival of the Pope. The members of the papal court, with numerous foreign prelates, landed at Plymouth this morning after a smooth passage. They will probably proceed by an afternoon train to London, where preparations have been made for their entertainment.’
‘I suppose they'll reach this station after dark; and, of course, whatever train they come by, there’ll be a crowd to stare at them,’ he added. ‘Now you'll have a chance to close with them at head-quarters, Lesbie.’
‘No, Cardinal Power will do that for me, if it be not already done,’ she replied. ‘I can do nothing in this matter without his aid; should he need mine, which is not likely, he will write to me. My part is done, for the present; now about this other business; we had better call on Mr Mountjoy, if we want to get a place in the gallery next Sunday. I expect they'll be pretty full.’
‘Yes, we might go this morning; in the afternoon, he’s almost sure to be out.’
A little before noon they rang at Mr Mountjoy’s door in Northbourne Terrace, and were shown into his study, where he was sitting at a writing-table piled with MS. He rose with alacrity to receive his visitors.
‘Bless my soul Abdullam!—my dear Bristley, and Miss Newman—how you are developed! What an age it is since we met!’
‘Abdullam—is that what you call me?’ asked Mr Bristley, as they shook hands. ‘Ah, I twig; good, very good. A new set of the letters, eh! Not the Servant of the World, but the Father of Dulham. Very neat.’
‘Or if you read Adullam,’ said Mr Mountjoy, ‘then like the stream in the song, you go on for ever; at any rate, your work will. But I have another appellation for you two—Light and Leading.’
‘My light is undoubtedly due to my uncle’s leading, Mr Mountjoy,’ said Lesbia. ‘I have lately been trying to shed it in an important direction; a short time will show whether successfully or not. But it is your leading we are come about; we want tickets for the gallery next Sunday, if you have any to spare.’
‘You are just in time, I have these two left. But, Miss Newman, may I not hope to see you enshrined in the costume of the Sea-born, with some worthy suppliant at your feet? We work for the same ends, you know.’
‘You work for my ends,—the elevation of my sex, Mr Mountjoy?’ said Lesbia seriously. ‘Well, I thought you did; I was sure of it. But I should like to understand exactly how the Mylittic ritual is to elevate woman.’
‘If, Miss Newman,’ he replied, slowly and earnestly, ‘I were to reply, by putting an end to what is commonly called the social evil, you would tell me that I am a dreamer, and that my project is Utopia. You would say the hundred thousand women who nightly crowd the pavement of this vast metropolis are not to be diverted from their courses, be they good or bad, by a musical performance in a church, under a name taken from a Greek historian, and connected with the preaching of doctrines which, right or wrong, are ‘Greek’ to them. So be it. I am aware of that. But all movements for the amelioration of society have small beginnings; and it seems to me that the soundest of beginnings is example, example set by the classes who are supposed to have paid for and obtained a superior education. It is my belief that if the ladies, or some of them, whose influence over what is called ‘good society’ determines the moral code of the sphere wherein they habitually move—if these ladies can be induced to think, and to let the world know that they think, that the old code of morals as between the sexes is a mischievous error throughout, and that the right or wrong of these inclinations consists in their use or their abuse, their use for the elevation of woman in Divine Order—’
‘I am glad to hear you employ the right word, Mr Mountjoy,’ interrupted Mr Bristley.
‘Their use for her elevation,’ resumed the other, ‘their abuse for her degradation, then I contend that the world of fashion will soon shift its couches, and fall in with the newer and nobler mortality, and ‘a new heart and a new spirit’ will come to it, and it will recognise in enlightened women its true teachers, and will commit to the flames its old false and foolish notions, and the false religion upon which they rested.
‘Time they did!’ exclaimed Mr Bristley. ‘When I think of all the sickly twaddle hawked about by those blubberly old lubbers, I feel a thickening sensation in the toe of my boot.’
‘Not in thy soul, but in thy sole, harsh Jew,’ said Mr Mountjoy, laughing.
‘Yes, I confess it does raise the family porcupine in me,’ replied Mr Bristley. ‘Although, mind you, it is only fair to remember that the Christian morality, by its blundering monogamic theories, has done more, theoretically at least, for woman’s dignity than other creeds have.’
‘But about the social evil, Mr Mountjoy?’ said Lesbia.
‘Well, Miss Newman,’ he replied, ‘in the first place, why and in what sense is it an evil? It is an evil because, and in so far as, in its present conditions, it operates for the degradation of women. But under other conditions it need not do so. I am not now referring to the material uncleanness with which so much of it is mixed up, nor to the horrid plagues arising therefrom. Sanitary regulations, carefully organised and strictly enforced, can do away with all that. But when I speak of the degradation of women, I mean their moral degradation by means of being placed in false relations toward men. What is society’s present standard of female virtue? We have it in the words of Shakspeare; you remember that when Desdemona is accused of playing false to Othello and is called by a scurrilous name, she protests against it, saying that she keeps herself ‘for my lord, from any other foul unlawful touch.’ Now that sort of thing is what I complain of, and what I call the degradation of woman. Woman's dignity is in herself, not ‘for my lord.’ The false doctrine that woman’s place is to shine with borrowed lustre,—to be glorified by her good relations with man and not by her own inherent worth; the doctrine that her virtue consists in making her person the property of a man; this doctrine, I say, is the head and front of her degradation. No doubt the celibate life is the higher one for those women who are fitted for it by their temperament; but for those who are not, there is honour in the other walk, that of the matron. And I say that it is contrary to nature and to common sense that a matron should be bound to one man against her will. Nature indicates that if either sex ought to be bound, it is ours. Polygamy is unnatural as well as unjust; polyandry, whether unjust or not, is natural. Without going further into this, it is obvious to anyone whose understanding has not been abused, that to bind women by a false code of virtue, which outrages nature and tramples on common sense, is about the most deliberate crime of which society can be guilty.’
‘Slay and spare not,’ said Lesbia, smiling. ‘But still, Mr Mountjoy, what have your church services to do with all this?’
‘I am coming to that,’ he replied, ‘and in doing so I shall answer the question as to how the social evil degrades women. The degradation consists in the theological character which has been artificially impressed upon the whole question. That theological character is a perversion and a misrepresentation throughout. It is the devilry of the priestcraft of past ages. For, let it once be assumed—as those theocracies did assume—that woman is spiritually man’s inferior, and there is then no limit to the proprietary rights he may not claim over her on that false assumption. She becomes a marketable commodity in his hands.’
‘That’s very severe, Mr Mountjoy,’ said Lesbia. ‘I cannot but think you paint the world blacker than it is. And I still wait to hear how your services are to supply the remedy.’
‘They cannot do so directly and immediately, Miss Newman,’ he replied, ‘but they bear upon the matter in this way. They set up as an object of reverence those very things which have been the object of irreverent handling by those who indulge in them, and of insensate abuse by those who do not. The force of example, I have already said, is that to which I look as the remedy for the evil character of the social evil. When a certain number of women in high social circles shall have made it clear that they have discarded the old false teaching, and that they intend to make the religious element in human nature not the enemy, but the servant, of their affections and desires, you may depend upon it that other classes will see their opening, and will combine to insist upon religion being pressed into their service also. In short, we intend to show that Hedonism must be the religion of the future. That is my remedy, Miss Newman, and when it has worked, society will look back upon the state of things in which we now live complacently as belonging to an era of barbarism and abomination, even as we of to-day look back upon cannibalism or the torture. But the initiative lies with us, the more cultivated and influential classes; and that is why I consider that every lady who is brave enough to enter my church as a Mylittist, is a champion of her sex’s right in the most thorough and effective way, because her presence amounts to a formal claim that henceforward woman, and not man, shall lay down the law in the matter of woman’s morality.’
‘Provided, you mean, that her line of life is the matron’s and not the maiden’s,’ suggested Lesbia.
‘In either or any case,’ he answered.
‘Well, we shall judge for ourselves on Sunday, Mountjoy,’ said Mr Bristley. ‘Now we must be going, and thanks for the tickets.’