Edith Ayrton Zangwill's The Call

A New Scholarly Edition

Edith Ayrton Zangwill, Stephanie J. Brown, Stephanie J. Brown

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350064782
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Collections littéraires de femmes auteures

Edith Ayrton Zangwill's 1924 novel The Call is widely regarded as one of the most important suffrage novels of the early 20th century. Including authoritative notes and commentary throughout, this is the first comprehensive scholarly edition of the novel. The Call tells the story of a young chemist, Ursula Winfield, who comes of age in the years before the start of the First World War. Confronted by the gross injustices faced by women and the working class in early 20th-century Britain, she is drawn inexorably and with increasing militancy into the suffragette movement. The story charts the conflict between her political commitments and her personal life as the Great War approaches. Alongside the definitive text of the novel, this edition also includes contextual historical documents – from contemporary reviews of the novel to newspaper coverage of the suffragette movement – and critical chapters by leading scholars exploring the world of the novel.

CHAPTER ONE

No. 57 Lowndes Square was a typical West End house of the more fashionable sort, with its freshly painted front, its spotless steps, its shining brass door-furniture, its window-boxes filled under a yearly contract and now displaying pink ivy-leaf geraniums and marguerites. It was the sort of house that inspired trust in tradespeople and caused the socialist to fulminate. Passing hansom cabmen raised inquiring whips to anyone who issued from it, and the secretaries of charitable societies coveted its drawing-rooms for afternoon meetings. As the humbler caller drove up, she was discreetly thankful for her hired landau with man in livery half-a-crown extra, while the newly arriving servant felt with satisfaction that this was probably a “good place” with not too much to do and plenty to waste.

The interior, as revealed by a fat-faced butler of concentrated respectability, was in exact harmony with the exterior. The hall was light and fairly wide without being spacious, and was fitted with the usual hall appurtenances. There was a large and handsome dining-room containing a large and handsome mahogany table, a large and handsome sideboard, and a suite of handsome leather chairs. Behind this lay a smaller room known as the library, although no one ever read in it; indeed there were hardly any books.

It served, however, as a useful cloak-room at dinnerparties and receptions. Still further back was Colonel Hibbert’s snuggery, a little room of epicurean armchairs and blank outlook. At one side was the writingtable—again a figure of speech, for the gallant colonel never wrote anything but cheques. A portrait of Mrs. Hibbert, a fair, pretty little woman with china blue eyes and fluffy hair, held the place of honour over the mantelpiece while pictures of race-horses and one or two mess groups hung round the walls. In a corner stood a bag of golf clubs, while a cigar box, a silver lighter, and a stand of spirit decanters, with attendant siphon and glasses, were ranged on a little table conveniently to hand. Literature was represented by the Field, the Sketch, the Sporting Times, and Country Life. Indeed the whole room succinctly displayed the Colonel’s three tastes in life—good living, sport, and his wife.

On the next floor Mrs. Hibbert reigned supreme. Here was the large white and gold double drawingroom with its so-called Louis Seize furniture, in which the blue ribbon of social distinction had been won, for Royalty had honoured Mrs. Hibbert’s “little parties,” as she termed her recurring annual crushes. The mistress of the house was still further revealed by her boudoir that opened off the half landing. Whatever might be the season, this room was bright and charming, if a trifle artificial, with its hot-house flowers, its Dresden China groups and its little tables laden with silver knick-knacks. There were a quantity of photographs about, chiefly of good-looking young men, but among them stood conspicuously one of condescending Royalty, still more condescendingly autographed. This showed a gentleman already portly and middle-aged, although it was dated some ten years earlier, when in his irresponsible “Welsh” days, the Hibbert circle saw much of “the dear Prince.”

Above these reception-rooms—for the house agent’s phrase most fittingly described them—naturally came the bedrooms. Colonel and Mrs. Hibbert’s spacious chamber was again exactly what would have been expected, from the lace bedspreads on the twin Sheraton bedsteads to the tortoise-shell backed brushes with gold monograms on the dressing-table—silver toilet articles had become so impossibly common, Mrs. Hibbert complained. The only point of divergence from the usual housing of the smart set was the fact of the matrimonial chamber being in the singular. With regard to the other bedrooms on this floor, they also were luxurious and characterless, and evidently but seldom used. The next story was given over to the servants. From this point the wide staircase with its deep-piled Wilton carpet dwindled into a straight, narrow, felt-covered flight.

On the topmost landing, where the felt finally terminated, came the first unusual note. A door was ajar, and from the room within came a curious fizzling sound and a faint but still more curious odour. Some demented domestic appeared to be frying a late and unsavoury lunch in her bedroom. On pushing open the door, it was seen that the room was not a bedroom, neither was the girl standing there a domestic—no servant in that house would have condescended to a shapeless, blue-cotton overall and, still less, to hideous, dark goggles made still more disfiguring by side-flaps. A laboratory bench with its porcelain sink, gas taps and hooded fume cupboard proclaimed the nature of the apartment, but all was dominated for the moment by a hissing jet of flame that darted out between two small, dark objects held in metal clamps which stood on a table in front of the girl. This rushing flame was thrown in to still greater prominence by the fact of the window-blinds having been lowered, doubtless to keep out the hot glare of the July sun. Indeed, in consequence, a curious violet light was thrown on all the other objects around, the small sector-shaped metal boxes, the littered coils of thick black wire, the large dark case with metal knobs and little windows, and, most noticeably, on the girl’s face and on her hands palely busied at the metal stands. She seemed to be adjusting screws, presumably to make the flaring jet of flame behave in a more subdued fashion.

Presently she was successful. The flame ceased to thrust itself out and played steadily upwards with a stable brilliancy, bathing the base of the upper of the two small, dark objects, which one now realized were electric light carbons, while the hissing sound became duller and more regular. The girl, though still wearing the concealing glasses, was better seen in this steadier light, and one could notice that she had brown, curling hair and good, well-marked features, but the light of the arc still tinged her skin with a bluish pallor. She had turned to a large frame of resistance coils standing some two feet high on the floor at her side, when suddenly the flame again rushed on with its former vehemence. “Bother!” The ejaculation was energetic. At least this girl was human!

She straightened herself and began once more working at the screws in the metal holders. There was a knock at the door, and, without waiting for an answer, with a swish of silken skirts a little lady rustled in. She stopped short, giving a cry of horror and shielding her eyes with her hands. “My dear Ursula! What an appalling light! What a smell!”

“All right, Mother.” The girl had already switched off the arc. Now she pulled off her spectacles revealing rather beautiful dark eyes, and then went and drew up the window-blinds. “The sun was shining in so,” she explained. “But the windows are all open; the smell will soon go off. What has brought you up, Mummy? It’s months since you honoured my lab.”

“You know that you are only too glad not to have it honoured,” Mrs. Hibbert laughed. The remark showed more sense than her rather fluffy prettiness would have suggested. “Even now I have come in fear and trembling lest you should snap off my head. But don’t you ever sit down like a Christian? Do give me a chair.”

Ursula obediently pulled forward a couple of the high laboratory stools, but although Mrs. Hibbert perched herself on one, her tiny shoes with their Louis Seize heels and gold buckles dangling far off the ground, the girl herself did not use the other. As her mother said, she had got out of the habit of sitting.

“You needn’t talk as though I were an ogre,” she now observed, referring to the earlier remark. “When did I ever snap off your head?”

“Ah, but you don’t know yet what I’ve come about. That smell hasn’t gone yet. Are you sure the gas isn’t escaping?” Mrs. Hibbert eyed the Bunsen burner uneasily.

“Quite sure, Mum; but to satisfy you—” Ursula struck a match.

“My dear, how dangerous!” Mrs. Hibbert had blown it out with a little scream. “And you call yourself scientific! Even I know that you don’t look for gas escapes with lit matches. Why, when we first came to this house, one of the workmen did no end of damage like that; the servants’ hall had to be papered all over again.”

“But there’s no danger in looking for non-gas escapes with lit matches!” The girl laughed. “It’s all right, Mummy. The newsboys really won’t be calling out ‘A norrible tragedy in Lowndes Square.’” She struck another match.

“Well, it does seem to be all right.” Though reassured on this point, her daughter’s movements had drawn Mrs. Hibbert’s attention to another cause for agitation. “Ursula, what a dreadful state your hands are in! They’re positively grimed!”

“Oh, it will all come off.” Ursula gave them a rub on a duster.

“Yes, but it spoils your skin. And you have got a great black mark on your cheek as well. Why can’t you do your experimenting in gloves and a thick veil, as I have begged you again and again?”

“Oh, Mum, what a worry you are.” The words were good-natured, if disrespectful. “What does it matter about my hands or my face either? It isn’t as though I had a complexion to spoil. I can say with old Father William, ‘Now I am perfectly sure I have none, I do it again and again.’”

“What nonsense!” The maternal pride was up in arms. “Of course you are a brunette, but you would have a very nice complexion if you would only take the least care of it. Living in this horrible atmosphere with such a dreadful flaring light is enough to ruin anyone’s skin—it’s no wonder you are a little sallow. I thought it was like the infernal regions when I came in—with the added disadvantage of having to climb up to them. But when you get a colour, as you did the evening at the Colonial Soirée, you really look quite beautiful; everyone said so. Didn’t old Lord Spencer tell your stepfather that you were the handsomest girl present—a black pearl, he called you, and you know what a judge of women Lord Spencer is.”

“Well, I think it was fearful cheek. Anyway, the pearl isn’t going to be cast before Lord Spencer! But I believe the Colonel made the whole thing up! Your august spouse would swear that black was white to please you, so he certainly wouldn’t stick at calling my dingy-drab complexion pearl-like.” The girl had turned to her apparatus and was tentatively touching one of the carbons. “No, you are the beauty of this family, Mammykin,” she rattled on with half attention, “so don’t try and shuffle out of it. Now if you were to stain your little lily hands, that would be a different matter.”

Mrs. Hibbert gave a complacent glance at her tiny ringed fingers with their perfectly manicured pink nails. “How can you be so ridiculous, Ursula?” she protested fondly. The mother and daughter seemed to be good friends, although they were so amazingly different; indeed the relation between them was more that of an indulgent, busy husband to a pretty, emptyheaded wife. “It is a comfort though that you can still be silly when you are so clever.”

“Now, Mother, Mother, to what does all this lead?” Ursula assumed an air of mock severity. “Oh, I know your wiles, you wicked woman!” she had apparently concluded that her little carbon was cool enough to handle, for she now took it out of the metal clamp, and held it up, studying it earnestly. As she did so, the sunlight falling on her face revealed the fact that her eyes were dark blue and not hazel as most people imagined. “These are rotten carbons,” she murmured.

“Ursula, I do wish you would attend, after I have toiled up all these stairs to speak to you, instead of getting your hands worse than ever touching those dirty little sticks.” Mrs. Hibbert’s voice was aggrieved. “You know I have often told you that it really is not right the way you shut yourself up here away from everyone. You might have a hump or a hare lip!”

The girl had obediently laid down her carbon; now she went and sat on the other stool in an attitude of exaggerated attention. “Mother, Mother, is this the conduct of an honourable woman?” she asked jestingly, though with an undercurrent of irritation. “Didn’t you solemnly promise me that if I went to that Colonial function, you would leave me in peace for the rest of the season. I have told you I must re-write the paper that I am going to read at the British Association in Plymouth at the beginning of September—that leaves me barely two months. If I go out, I am good for nothing the next day. I simply cannot spare the time.”

“Well, I think you are most disagreeable, and it is very hard on me.” Poor little Mrs. Hibbert seemed on the verge of tears. “All other girls are only too pleased to be taken out and here you are nearly three and twenty and you have never been anywhere, and won’t even be presented! Think how it affects me. I have to go about alone year after year without a soul to speak to. I might as well not have a daughter!”

“Poor little Mum, it is a shame!” Ursula could not help smiling at the picture of her popular parent wandering through society in forlorn silence, but all the same, she gave the “lily” hand a sympathetic squeeze. “But, Mother, if I once started the social business, I’d have to go everywhere, or people would be offended. How could I do my work? And you have got the Colonel; you can’t need both of us.”

Mrs. Hibbert was not to be appeased. “Your stepfather is quite different. Besides, it is not only that I want you with me, but people are talking about your never putting in an appearance. Of course they can’t imagine that a girl can lock herself up in a hot, smelly attic all through the season for choice! I know that odious Mrs. d’Arcy Jenkins is telling everyone that I keep you in the background so as not to give away my age. ‘It is so hard to believe that you really have a grown up daughter, dear Mrs. Hibbert, especially when we never see her,’ she said the other day with her hateful laugh.”

“Cat! Never mind, Mammykin, it’s only because she is jealous of your figure. It was Mrs. d’Arcy Jenkins, wasn’t it, who sat near us at the Colonial Soiree supper?—a surging woman with an irrepressible ‘tum.’ Why, if I did go out with you, she’d only say you dragged me about as a foil. And so I should be! You know, Mummy”—Ursula put her arm affectionately around her mother’s shoulders—“as I get older, you seem to get steadily younger. I live in hope of one day being asked after my lovely daughter.”

“Don’t be so absurd.” In spite of the reproof the mother’s laugh sounded gratified. Ursula’s suggestion of inversion was, of course, ridiculous, but Mrs. Hibbert’s slight figure and fair, unlined face did give her the appearance of another girl. Even were a certain staleness noticed in her neck and hands, a certain faintly-faded expression in her china blue eyes, no one would have credited her with being the mother of the tall, dark-browed Ursula. “Oh, my dear, look!” the little lady now cried, jumping off the stool and holding out her arm with a tragic gesture. “My poor sleeve is ruined—black with dirt! Why don’t you have this room properly swept and dusted every morning?”

“I am so sorry, Mother.” Ursula apologetically came to the rescue. It was while she was on her knees delicately flicking the injured sleeve with her handkerchief that she at last heard the real reason of her mother’s unusual visit. “You know, Ursula, that I never ask you to do anything that interferes with your work,” Mrs. Hibbert observed with aggrieved reminiscence. “Why, I always want everybody to do exactly what pleases them best and not to consider me at all. You cannot say that I am selfish! But certainly I should have thought that a day on the river would have been the best thing in the world for your paper. It would freshen up your mind.”

“A whole day!” Ursula suppressed a groan. “Do you want me particularly, Mother? Isn’t the Colonel going?”

“No, that’s it—so tiresome!” Mrs. Hibbert’s face brightened. She felt that she had gained her point. Indeed, she always did. “Your stepfather has just got a horrid jury summons. Yes, I really believe those judges and people arrange it just in order to spite me, for why should they have picked out Thursday week more than any other day? And both the other times he has had to serve, it has been most inconvenient. There was the day of my first at home after we were married, you remember?—oh, no, you were at school—but it looked most marked for your stepfather not to be there. Well, about Henley—Thursday week is the first day you know, and I have asked two young men—”

Ursula was laughing infectiously. It lit up her face, which was a trifle heavy in repose. “So that is it,” she said. “You want me to come to Henley to play gooseberry? Oh, you abandoned female! I don’t know what matrons are coming to; they were very different in my young days. The modern mother is a terrible responsibility. All right, Mammykin, I’ll chaperone your two young men—little soldier boys, I suppose?”

“Yes, Captain Talbot and Mr. Cartwright.” Ursula’s guess had not shown any particular perspicacity, for nearly all her mother’s friends were in the army. Indeed, even in the first decade of this century, the military figured largely at the two extreme ends of the social scale, although they were almost unrepresented at the centre—the superior artisan looking upon a soldier in the family as a disgrace, while the professional man considered such a thing an impossible luxury. “I introduced you to Captain Talbot that solitary time you have condescended to appear at one of my Wednesday evenings,” Mrs. Hibbert now suggested.

“Oh, yes, I remember. A tall, heavy man, with an uneasy suspicion that his moustache might have dropped off since the last time he felt it. His stare of painful stupefaction when I told him I had never been to Ascot or the Oaks was quite pathetic. And when he heard that I worked at Chemistry, he just retained enough presence of mind to gasp out that ‘it must be deuced handy if anyone was ill, what?’”

“You are too critical, my dear. There is more in Captain Talbot than you think.” A touch of resentment was manifest in Mrs. Hibbert’s tone. She looked across at Ursula. “How like you are to your poor father!”

The remark seemed almost involuntary. Indeed, there was a distinct pause before Mrs. Hibbert added the orthodox sigh. The little lady had again perched herself on the high stool. She was thinking of the day when she had been seventeen, and Ursula’s father had swept her into matrimony by the overwhelming force of his passion. People had warned her that Andrew Winfield was eccentric, but she had never imagined that he would be so tiresome and incomprehensible as he had proved himself. And then he was always aggrieved that she did not possess all sorts of ideal qualities with which he had chosen to endow her! Certainly he had been comparatively nice during the hateful months before and after Ursula’s birth, but things had soon got just as bad again. Besides, they were poor, and she had always hated poverty. It was really a relief when Andrew had gone off to Australia; although it was like his silliness to work his way out before the mast, when he surely could have managed to borrow enough ...