Men don't understand what mothers are. I am no different from other
women except in the wrong done me and the wrong I did, and my very heavy
punishments and great disgrace. And yet, to bear you I had to look on
death. To nurture you I had to wrestle with it. Death fought with me
for you. All women have to fight with death to keep their children.
Death, being childless, wants our children from us. Gerald, when you
were naked I clothed you, when you were hungry I gave you food. Night
and day all that long winter I tended you. No office is too mean, no
care too lowly for the thing we women love--and oh! how _I_ loved _you_.
Not Hannah, Samuel more. And you needed love, for you were weakly, and
only love could have kept you alive. Only love can keep any one alive.
And boys are careless often and without thinking give pain, and we always
fancy that when they come to man's estate and know us better they will
repay us. But it is not so. The world draws them from our side, and
they make friends with whom they are happier than they are with us, and
have amusements from which we are barred, and interests that are not
ours: and they are unjust to us often, for when they find life bitter
they blame us for it, and when they find it sweet we do not taste its
sweetness with them . . . You made many friends and went into their
houses and were glad with them, and I, knowing my secret, did not dare to
follow, but stayed at home and closed the door, shut out the sun and sat
in darkness. What should I have done in honest households? My past was
ever with me. . . . And you thought I didn't care for the pleasant things
of life. I tell you I longed for them, but did not dare to touch them,
feeling I had no right. You thought I was happier working amongst the
poor. That was my mission, you imagined. It was not, but where else was
I to go? The sick do not ask if the hand that smooths their pillow is
pure, nor the dying care if the lips that touch their brow have known the
kiss of sin. It was you I thought of all the time; I gave to them the
love you did not need: lavished on them a love that was not theirs . . .
And you thought I spent too much of my time in going to Church, and in
Church duties. But where else could I turn? God's house is the only
house where sinners are made welcome, and you were always in my heart,
Gerald, too much in my heart. For, though day after day, at morn or
evensong, I have knelt in God's house, I have never repented of my sin.
How could I repent of my sin when you, my love, were its fruit! Even now
that you are bitter to me I cannot repent. I do not. You are more to me
than innocence. I would rather be your mother--oh! much rather!--than
have been always pure . . . Oh, don't you see? don't you understand? It
is my dishonour that has made you so dear to me. It is my disgrace that
has bound you so closely to me. It is the price I paid for you--the
price of soul and body--that makes me love you as I do. Oh, don't ask me
to do this horrible thing. Child of my shame, be still the child of my
shame!--_A Woman of No Importance_.