Half Moon Street - Anne Perry [123]
“All of the pictures?” Pitt asked with the very faintest sarcastic edge to his voice, but he had to struggle to find it. “Some of them seemed blasphemous to me.”
“To you?” Her marvelous eyes widened. “My dear, pedestrian Superintendent. Blasphemous to you! What is blasphemy?”
He jammed his hands farther still into his pockets, straightening his arms. He could not allow her to intimidate him because she was beautiful and articulate and supremely sure of herself.
“I think it is jeering at other people’s beliefs,” he replied quietly. “Making them doubt the possibility of good and making reverence appear ridiculous. Whose God it is doesn’t matter. It isn’t a question of doctrine, it’s a matter of trying to destroy the innate idea we have of deity, of something better and holier than we are.”
“Oh . . . Superintendent.” She let her breath out in a sigh. “I think I have just been bested by a policeman! Please don’t tell anyone . . . I shall never live it down. I apologize. Yes, that is what blasphemy is . . . and I did not mean to commit it. I meant to make people question stereotypes and look again at us as individuals, every one different, never again say ‘She’s a woman, so she feels this . . . or that . . . and if she doesn’t, then she ought to. Or ‘He’s a priest, he must be good, what he says must be right, he doesn’t have this weakness, or that passion . . . if he does he’s wicked.” Her eyes widened. “Do you understand me?”
“Yes, I understand you, Miss Antrim.”
“But you disagree with me. I can see it in your face. You think I shock people, and it is painful. I am breaking something, and you hate breakage. You are here to keep order, to protect the weak, to prevent violent change, or any change that is not by consent of the masses.” She spread her hands wide—strong, beautiful hands. “But art must lead, Superintendent, not follow. It is my work to upset convention, to defy assumptions, to suggest that disorder out of which progress is born. If you were to succeed . . . entirely . . . we would not even have fire, let alone a wheel!”
“I am all for fire, Miss Antrim, but not for burning people. Fire can destroy as well as create.”
“So can everything that has real power,” she responded. “Have you seen A Doll’s House?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Ibsen! The play—A Doll’s House!” she repeated impatiently.
He had not seen it, but he knew what she was talking about. The playwright had dared to create a heroine who had rebelled against everything that was expected of her, most of all by herself, and in the end left her husband and home for a dangerous and lonely freedom. It had created a furor. It was condemned passionately by some as subversive and destructive of morality and civilization. Others praised it as honest and the beginning of a new liberation. A few simply said it was brilliant and perceptive art, most particularly since it was written with such sensitivity and insight of a woman’s nature—by a man. Pitt had heard Joshua praise it with almost the same burning enthusiasm as Cecily Antrim now showed.
“Well?” she demanded, the light in her face fading with exasperation as she began to believe she was confusing him.
“There are some differences,” he said tentatively. “One chooses to go to the theatre. These pictures are on sale to the public. What if young people are there . . . boys who know no better . . .”
She waved it aside. “There are always risks, Superintendent. There can be no gain without a certain cost. To be born at all is to risk being alive. Dare it! Shame the devil of the real death . . . the death of the will, of the spirit! Oh . . . and don’t bother to ask me who saw that picture. I would tell you if I could . . . I am deeply sorry Delbert Cathcart is dead—he was a great artist—but I can’t tell you because I haven’t the slightest idea!” And with that she turned and walked out of the door,