The Threatening Eye - E. F. Knight

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reform under the genial influence of his hot spirits and water, as he had done dozens of times before—plans and resolutions that would evaporate from his brain as quickly as the alcoholic fumes that begat them, to be replaced by nerveless despair and sullen recklessness.

       Table of Contents

       Table of Contents

      Those secret societies, Nihilist or whatever else they may be called, whose aim is the subversion of all existing institutions, find their recruits chiefly among the discontented, those whose hopes have been dashed to the ground, whose lives have been failures. If to this quality of conscious failure be added a nature enthusiastic and dreamy, the very readiest material for the dangerous conspirator is presented. There are many men of this class in every civilized nation, and the ranks of the fraternities are full of them. As education spreads there will be still more; for the means of satisfying the ambitions and wants that education brings cannot increase in anything like proportion to those ever-multiplying wants.

      And if this be so with men, how much more is it so with women? women the dependant, whose happiness in life so much hangs on marriage, and of whom so many must be condemned to lives of single misery—women the dreamers, the emotional, and for whose ambitions there is no field.

      How many tens of thousands there must be that gnaw out their hearts in lives wasted and objectless, despised of men and happier sisters?

      Such women are ready to follow any crazed visionary.

      It is a necessity of a woman's nature to cling to the companionship of a Man, to lean on the stronger sex. Woman too must have a God, a religion. Without these her womanhood has not been perfected.

      A Man can stand alone, self-reliant. He can know no God, have no religion and yet not be over bad and certainly not unhappy. His life-work is enough religion for him. But a woman who has no religion, is on the way to becoming a fiend; she is an unnatural monster. Weak, unstable, she has no strength, no honour, no goodness by herself.

      Woman's goodness is as a delicate flower which, when brought into the foul air of the city, withers and dies at once. Man's goodness is of hardier growth. The Soul of Man can be soiled and yet remain half-angelic; but the Angel in Woman spreads its wings and goes off altogether when contamination comes, and straightway she is possessed of a devil.

      For these reasons the Woman that has no God, no love for which to sacrifice herself, is better than a man for the purpose of a secret society.

      Again, a Woman is more thorough-going than a Man. If she throws herself into a conspiracy, she throws her whole self. Weaker in nature than Man she is yet stronger, for the whole of that nature is concentrated on one object. The larger nature of a Man is divided among many objects. He has a mind that grasps many things together. If he is a lover he is not wholly a lover as a Woman would be. He still thinks of his business, of a hundred matters. He is selfish and wise; but a Woman in her love or hate is possessed by the emotion and can think of nothing else. As a conspirator a Man is not wholly a conspirator; he weighs the result to himself, to his family; he looks far ahead and around and behind; he reasons, so is more timid than the Woman. She as a conspirator is nothing else; she cannot consider all sides of a question; if she be won over by some wild Nihilistic theory or other mad scheme, she becomes a monomaniac; no arguments unfavourable to it can in the least prevail with her. She is blind to obstacles, reckless of consequences; so she is braver and more ready to act than Man, crueller more ruthless in the execution of her schemes.

      In Paris in revolution time, when the people come down to the streets, it is the Women that urge on the men to their mad excesses; it will ever be so.

      Those who know Woman best, who know what godlessness and lovelessness and failure combined can make of her, will not be much surprised that so many were found to join the Sisterhood, a meeting of which I am about to describe, although its objects were so horrible.

      Those scientific Ethics, which are so jubilantly preached by the optimists now-a-days, lead logically to the opinions professed by this sisterhood. The abominations which they contemplated are but the reductio ad absurdum of Utilitarianism, the Morality without a God.

      Catherine King was well past forty, a tall, pale, angular, hard-featured woman, with a strong obstinate narrow mind; that type of mind that has done more harm in the world than all the vicious temperaments. Had she been religious she would have been sternly Puritanical, fiercely intolerant, willing to cast her children into the flames if they differed from her own strict views.

      But Catherine King was not religious, neither was she a mother, so the intensity of the narrow zeal within her found another vent.

      What her past history had been, who she was, none of those who came across her knew. She had no intimates. All that could be said was that she must have been of respectable family, was well educated, and that she had a modest private income on which she contrived to exist comfortably enough.

      Catherine King had for some years taken interest in social questions. She became a fanatical Radical, a believer in the more violent Socialist schemes—the champion of the oppressed against the oppressors.

      I do not imagine that it was so much the tendency of a logical mind, still less genuine sympathy for the supposed oppressed, that caused her to take up this line, as it was the fever of her vehement temperament driving her to clutch at something in place of love or religion to satisfy its restlessness.

      Once having tried them, she became absorbed in these studies; she was enthusiastic, mad, in her hatred, of all that are in authority, of rank, power, law, morality. She had her dreams of the perfect State—a curious State, wherein the individual was considered of no account, was as a worm, to be trodden under foot beneath the progress of the mighty aggregate, the happy race; though how a race can be happy while its individuals are not so, was a question that troubled her as little as it does most other votaries of the religion of humanity, that car of Juggernaut to the fanatics of science.

      She became a monomaniac, and of that sort of which rulers of men are made.

      The strong-willed intolerant ones do not make leaders unless they have something more, though they make good followers. To rule a mob, one must be insane, as a crowd is ever insane; one must be crazed, full of mad inspirations, as of a Mænad. The false prophet must be a lunatic, and believe in himself as a prophet—at least sometimes, else he will not attract the multitude.

      Now, Catherine was just one of those half-insane zealots that can influence weak minds, that become Nihilist chiefs, founders of religions, queens of hysterical shakers, or generalissimos of street-perambulating fanatics, drunk with noise and folly.

      When addressing a meeting of political dreamers, her dark eyes flashed, her gestures were commanding, her mellow voice trembled with impassioned earnestness, the whole woman inspired respect, attention, and lastly conviction in those who listened to her.

      So it was that she gradually became more and more influential among certain strong-minded and certain silly women, who had (as they called it) enfranchised themselves—by which was meant that they had unsexed and so rendered themselves ridiculous to the outside world of common-place people.

      She became the president of a society of rather garrulous ladies. This society was open to any who cared to join, and pay the modest annual subscription which defrayed the expenses of two rooms in Bloomsbury.

      But this was nothing more than an ordinary Radical debating club, and so could not for long suffice the ambition and restlessness of Catherine King. Breaking away gradually from the less violent members, she with a few kindred spirits organized, with no little judgment, a secret society, whose objects were undeniably seditious, of which debate was by no means the sole business, actions as well as words being

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