Latter Day Helens

The Eighth of a Series of Impressions of Modern Feminine Types: Briseis—Fever

W. L. GEORGE

LORD MACAULAY once toyed with the fancy that, in a time to come, a New Zealander would sit on a broken arch of London Bridge and sketch the ruins of St. Paul's. Indeed the same tourist may also pause awhile over the remains of the Aquarium, on the spot which according to legend was once called Manhattan. If he is of romantic bent he will ask himself what manner of people lived in these places, and one wonders how he will reconstruct us. From our history books? Not if he wants the truth. From our newspapers ? That is a little safer. And what will he seek in our newspapers with which to figure us? Our stock lists? Our divorce cases? The speeches made at the unveiling of our national memorials? If he is wise he will seek the ghost of our period in the character of our women. For women are ideal samples of the time in which they live. Akin to the chameleon, they adopt protective colouring, and that is always the fashionable shade. They take the qualities of the day and erect them into virtues; the foibles of the time and make them into vices. They place a dot upon the i in the word "period."

Briseis could have been born in ancient Egypt, or as a friend of Pocahontas. She would have been very different, and she would have been just the same. Under Pocahontas she would have hunted the moose, varied the oiling of her black hair, been among the first to paint new totems on the tents, and received the white men with enthusiasm as a novelty.

Briseis' Unrest

IN the twentieth century she embodies the unrest which is blamed upon that period, as it was on all others; she is a square peg in a round hole, and had she been made round, she would, without doubt, have soon discovered a square orifice to misfit her. She is entirely a nice woman, a careful housewife, a good mother, and a fond wife. She would have been happier as a housewife to a bargain basement, as a good mother to a conger eel, and as a fond wife to Janus, who had two faces; that is not very much, but it is the best that mythology can do for her.

Briseis did not always seem to be just like that. In her early days she combined a passion for games with a passion for poetry; she visited slums and was very fond of the opera. This did not surprise anybody, for Briseis suffered at that time from the seriousness of youth, and took everything in earnest, even when it was worthy of respect. It was only during her later years, when the levity of middle age began to fall over her, that her true temperament defined itself. Briseis not only retained the intensities of youth, but she added to these the deplorable skittishness of the later years.

She had a second blooming at about twenty-eight, for second bloomings in those days were much in the air, and people were very proud of them. This was before the four years of war of the Peloponesians, during which a second blooming was not counted, but only a sixth led to a rise in credit. Briseis told everybody all about it. She was congratulated, envied, reproved. Several bloomings, which but for her would have stayed in the bud, came to their fullness in the columns of the newspapers which specialised in these questions. But what was interesting in the case of Briseis was that she did not wait until, one by one, the petals fell from the flower of passion. She obtained the requisite thrills; she felt the necessary emotions. Then, suddenly, she grew tired, for aeroplanes had recently been invented and she was writing poems to immaterial gods. So Briseis declared that men were unnecessary in the cosmos and indeed that they were merely the subsidiary sex. She was confirmed in this by the popularity of a book on the matriarchate, which at the time had a great circulation. In due course the circulation came to an end, and Briseis forgot all about it.

Briseis forgot because she had other preoccupations. Or perhaps she had preoccupations because she needed something to be preoccupied about. Just then the preoccupation took the form of an Indian sage who was inflaming the great city with lectures on the Margabarantha. This particular form of faith was the preaching of the withdrawal into one's karma by means of silence. As he had a very loud voice his lectures on silence were perfectly deafening. Briseis was very pleased; silence was the only form of recreation that had never occurred to her. So, for some time, through silence, she pursued serenity, Banausism, and the eternal om. What these things mean it is impossible to say, but Briseis learned to explain. At least she could explain for a little time, and would be explaining now, if house decoration had not spread over the world, swift and devouring as a cloud of locusts. Still, she derived a certain benefit from the Banausic Margabaranfha, because it enabled her to heal her elder son Phaeton when he had a cold. (She also called in the doctor, which was not quite in accord with Banausism, but Briseis liked to feel safe.)

House decoration provided Briseis with immense joys. She discovered that the black ebony furniture of the past was ugly, and so she painted her new furniture black. It was a great revolution. Scarlet wall-paper being notoriously out of date, she shifted the scarlet to the cushions, to say nothing of the chairs. In the course of these operations, a certain amount of scarlet was also shifted to the best clothes of her husband, who had rashly sat down upon the scheme. It was lovely: crimson, orange,' pink spot, and super white, invaded every recess of the house. She made the Russian ballet pale. She tiled the bathroom in emerald and leopard skins. Her little girls were sashed with rainbows.

Then, one day, the builder mixed the colours wrong, and in her despair, Briseis took up Lower Thought, which was then invading the highest circles. Lower Thought was very attractive as a method of life. It was the enemy of strain, and one had only to think very hard about it to go lower in tone and attune oneself to the revolution of the earth. It' was very nice. One felt in harmony. One did not have that hideous sense of discord, which oppressed one when one did not agree with the axis of the earth. Eventually, if one sank low enough, one might get into harmony with a rolling ship. Briseis did not sink as low as that, but she sank low enough to take an interest in art.

The temptation was there in those days, for Futurism had come to town, and after a while Briseis had herself painted in an advanced stage of decomposition (mathematical, of course, not material), and consorted exclusively with women who had their hair cut short and men who never had it cut at all. But Futurism did not last long, being unsuitable for the present, and very soon Briseis discovered that purity was the purest thing on earth, and that the time had come to restore the lily. She did not much care what she restored it to. She just restored it. And lilies began to droop in her drawing-room, where cushions once fierce were now covered with puritanic dimity.

A little later a great cocaine scandal engrossed the newspapers, and Briseis awoke with a start to realise that drugs were the latest. They made her very ill indeed; she tried hasheesh, but all that happened was, that her dressmaker, with a colossal bill, haunted her dream for four hours. She tried opium, and it made her so sleepy that she did not wake up in time to receive for dinner sixteen guests, who waited in the drawing-room and then went quietly away.

The Cubist Portrait

BY that time Futurism had given way to Cubism, and this time Briseis had herself painted as a hexagon. This produced a cold•ness between her and her husband, for he declared that the only angles to which the painter had not done justice were those of her elbows. If it had not been for the new development called Boulism, where every line took upon itself the likeness of a curve, peace would not have been restored in the household of Briseis. Peace, however, was assisted by the appearance of prohibition, which aroused in Briseis what she chose to call her serious side. She was rather puzzled to know what attitude to take up, and she would have been against prohibition if her husband had not been of the same mind. She had known him for a long time, and she knew that he was out of date, so for some weeks the serious side of Briseis manifested itself at various meetings where she advocated drought. In the end she discovered that her husband, who was a doctor, kept a specimen snake in a bottle filled with alcohol, quietly substituted for the infamous mixture water tinctured with cassia, and, her house being in order, at once gave herself over to Vorticism, which was then producing pictures composed entirely of dots.

They would make a long tale, the occupations of Briseis. She elected a President, while supporting his adversary; she has tried to make her husband sleep in improved sheets made of matting; she is learning to play tennis on horseback. She is in the movement, never mind what movement, THE movement. She will be in it as long as she can move. The movement may impose hardships upon her, such as polyandry, the parting of her hair at the back, the study of drains, or blue lip-salve. It is a pity, but one cannot move without paying. Briseis will pay, and Briseis will move.