It was no use wondering now whether or not Peacey had really murmured
"Good day, ma'am," as they parted at the door of the church after their
furtive marriage. She had certainly thought she had heard this ironic
respectfulness, and she had stared after him with a sudden dread that
under the cream of benignity there might after all be a ferment of
malign intention. But that gait, which was so light and brisk for such a
heavy man, had already taken him some distance from her, and he was now
entering the yew alley that was the private way from Torque Hall to the
churchyard. The sunlight falling through the interstices of the dark
mossy trees cast liver-coloured patches on his black coat. She had
turned and looked down, as she always did when human complexities made
her seek reassurance as to the worth of this world, on the shiny
mud-flats, blue-veined with the running tides, and green marshes where
the redshanks choired. Her misgiving had weakened at that beauty, for
with the logic of the young she thought that if the universe was
infinitely good it could not also be infinitely evil, and it had been
utterly dispelled by his considerate conduct during the following weeks.
He did not try to see her at all until a day or two before the birth of
her child was expected. Then he came at twilight. He would not let
Grandmother put a match to the lamp in the parlour, and Marion knew from
his quiet urgency that he was doing this so that she might continue to
wear the dusk as a cloak. He sat down by the window, his shoulders black
against the sunset, and his fat hands, with their appealing air of shame
at their own fatness, laid on the little table beside him an old; carved
coral rattle and a baby's dress precious with embroideries. These he had
bought, he said, up in London, where he had had to go for a day to do
business with the wine merchants. He had not seemed to listen to her
thanks. But his hunched shape against the primrose light and the
gleaming of his thick white fingers playing nervously with the fragile
gifts spoke of a passionate concern for her. No doubt that concern was
sincere. They told her after her confinement that during the day and
night through which her child was slowly torn from her he had not left
the house, and at her cries a sweat had run down his face. That was not
unnatural. An incomplete villainy would vex its designer as any
unfinished work of art vexes the artist. But she interpreted it in the
sense that he, knowing what delusions youth has regarding the human
capacity for love, had foreseen that she would.
She let him see her before anyone else, and he had made the most of that
ideal occasion when her being was so sensitive that it responded to
everything, and so well pleased at having safely borne her son that she
saw everything as evidence of creation's virtue. He had added stroke to
stroke with the modest confused smile with which he entered the room, as
if he felt his vast bulk ridiculous in this room of small rosebud
patterns; the uneasy laughter with which he disguised his embarrassment
when they could find no chair big enough for him; the shy wonder with
which he put out his hand and hooded the tiny black head with it, and
uncurled the little hand with his obese forefinger; the reticence with
which he checked his remark that he had always wanted to have a child of
his own. And he perfected the picture that he desired her to see by the
assurance he gave murmurously from the darkness of the open door. "Get
well soon.... You needn't be afraid of me. We made a bargain. I mean to
stick to it." He had caught the very tune that dogged sincerity plays on
the voice's chords. She lay happy after he had gone because she and her
child had so true a friend.
It was, of course, from no malice against her that he set out to deceive
her, but from the natural desire to protect his being from alterations
hostile to its quality. Long after, sitting with Richard in a café in
Rio de Janeiro, she had looked at the men who were taking the lovely
painted women to themselves, and she detected behind the gross mask that
the prospect of physical enjoyment set on the faces an expression of
harsh spiritual defensiveness; and thenceforward she had understood why
Peacey had practised this fraud on her. He had known, as all men know,
that there is a beneficent magic in the relationship between men and
women; the evil man, at war with all but himself, cannot but admit that
for his supremest pleasure he depends on one other than himself, and by
his gratitude to her is tainted with altruism and is no longer
single-minded in his war on others. Such men uphold prostitution because
it exorcises sex of that magic. It is not a device to save sensuality,
for love with a stranger is like gulping new spirit, and love with a
friend is drinking old wine. Its purpose is indeed this very
imperfection of the embraces that it offers, for they leave the soul as
it was.
Peacey, she understood in the light of this discovery, had desired her
with a passion that, uncircumvented, would have swept him on to love and
a life on which his laboriously acquired technique of villainy would
have been wasted, so it had been the problem set his virtuosity to
create a situation which would let him fulfil his body's hunger for her
and at the same time kill for ever all possibility of love between them.
She could imagine him seated under the little window in the butler's
pantry, polishing a silver teapot with paste and his own fingers, as
old-fashioned butlers do, for he was scrupulous in all matters of
craftsmanship; holding his fat face obliquely, so that it seemed as
unrelated to anything but space as a riding moon, save when he looked
down and smiled to see the blue square of the window and the elm top
shine upside down and distorted in the bulbous silver: thinking his
solution out to its perfect issue.
It had been quite perfect. By that visit, and by his abstention from any
later visit, he had induced in her just that mood of serenity and
confidence which would be most shocked by the irruption of his passion.
The evening when it all happened she had been so utterly given up to
happiness. She had taken the most preposterously long time to put
Richard to bed. He had had a restless day, and had been so drowsy when
she went to feed him in the evening that she had put him back in his
cradle in his day clothes, but about half-past eight he had awakened and
called her, and she found him very lively and roguish. She had stripped
him and then could not bear to put his night-clothes on, he looked so
lovely lying naked in her lap. He was not one of those babies who are
pieces of flesh that slowly acquire animation by feeding and sleeping;
from his birth he had seemed to be charged with the whole vitality of a
man. He was minute as a baby of three months is, he was helpless, he had
not yet made the amazing discovery that his hand belonged to him, but
she knew that when she held him she held a strong man. This babyhood was
the playful disguise in which he came into the world in order that they
might get on easy terms with one another and be perfect companions.
Never would he be able to feel tyrannous because of his greater
strength, for he would remember the time when she had lifted him in her
weak arms, and that same memory would prevent her from ever being
depressed into a sense of inferiority, so that they would ever move in
the happy climate of a sense of equality. And every moment of this
journey towards that perfect relationship was going to be a delight.
She bent over him, enravished by the brilliant bloom of his creamy skin
and the black blaze of his eyes, which had been black from birth, as
hardly any children's are; turned him over and kissed the delicate crook
of his knees and the straight column of his spine and the little square
wings of his shoulder-blades, and then she turned him back again and
jeered at him because he wore the phlegmatic, pasha-like smile of an
adored baby. She became vexed with love for him, and longed to clasp
him, to crush him as she knew she must not. She put on his
night-clothes, kissing him extravagantly and unsatedly, and when she
finished he wailed and nuzzled to her breast. "Oh, no, you greedy little
thing," she cried, for it was a quarter of an hour before he should have
been fed again, but a wave of love passed through her and she took him
to her. They were fused, they were utterly content with one another. He
finished, smacking his lips like an old epicure. "Oh, my darling love!"
she cried, and put him back into the cot and ran downstairs. If she
stayed longer she would keep him awake with her kisses and play. She was
brightened and full of silent laughter, like a girl who escapes from her
sweetheart.
Grandmother sat very quietly at her sewing and soon went upstairs.
Grandmother was getting very old. When she said "Good-night" she seemed
to be speaking out of the cavern of some preoccupation, and when she
went upstairs her shawl fell from her shoulders and trailed its corner
on the ground. Marion hoped that the old lady had not worn herself out
by worrying about her, and she pulled out the sewing that had been shut
up in the work-basket and meditated finishing it, but she was too tired.
Nowadays she knew a fatigue which she could yield to frankly, as it was
honourable to her organism, and meant that her strength was going into
her milk and not into her blood. She folded her arms on the table and
laid her head on them and thought of Richard. It was his monthly
birthday to-day. He was three months old. She grieved to think that she
could feed him for only six months more. How could she endure to be
quite separate from him? Sometimes even now she regretted that the time
had gone when he was within her, so that each of her heartbeats was a
caress to him, to which his little heart replied, and she would feel
utterly desolate and hungry when she could no longer join him to her
bosom. But she would always be able to kiss him. She imagined herself a
few years ahead, calling him back when he was running off to play,
holding his resistant sturdiness in her arms while he gave her hasty,
smudged kisses and hugged his ball for more loving. But she reflected
that, while the character of those kisses would amuse her, they would
not satisfy her craving for contact so close that it was unity with his
warm young body, and she must set herself to be the most alluring mother
that ever lived, so that he would not struggle in her arms but would
give her back kiss for kiss. She flung her head back, sighing
triumphantly because she knew she could do it, but as her eyes met her
image in the mirror over the mantelpiece she was horrified to see how
little like a mother she was looking. Lips pursed with these long
imaginary kisses were too oppressive for a child's mouth; she had lost
utterly that sacred, radiating lethargy which hushes a house so that a
child may sleep: on a child's path her emanations were beginning to cast
not light but lightning.
She called out to herself: "You fool! If you really love Richard you
will let him run out to his game when he wants to, that he shall grow
strong and victorious, and if you call him back it must be to give him
an orange and not a kiss!" But it seemed to her that this would be a
sacrifice until, staring into the glass, she noticed that she was now
more beautiful than she had ever been, and then she saw the way by which
she could be satisfied. Harry must come back; she knew he was coming
back, for they had intercepted his letter to her, and they would not
have done that if it had been unloving. After she had weaned Richard she
must conceive again and let another child lift from him the excessive
burden of her love: then her mind and soul could go on in his company
without vexing him with these demands that only the unborn or the
nursling could satisfy. Then this second child would become separate
from her, and she must conceive again and again until this intense life
of the body failed in her and her flesh ceased to be a powerful artist
exulting in the creation of masterpieces. It must be so. For Richard's
sake it must be so. Her love would be too heavy a cloak for one child,
for it was meant to be a tent under which many should dwell. Again as in
the wood she laid her hand on her body and felt it as an inexhaustible
treasure. Again she was instantly mocked.
There had come, then, a knock at the door. She had felt a little
frightened, for since her stoning in Roothing High Street she had felt
fear at any contact with the external world; she knew now that rabies is
endemic in human society, and that one can never tell when one may not
be bitten by a frothing mouth. But it was not late, and it was as likely
as not that this was Cousin Tom Stallybrass come to say how the Frisian
calf had sold at Prittlebay market, so she opened it at once.
Peacey stood there. He stood quite still, his face held obliquely, his
body stiff and jointless in his clothes, like a huge, fat doll. There
was an appearance of ceremony about him. His skin shone with the white
lacquer of a recent washing with coarse soap, he was dressed very neatly
in his Sunday broadcloth, and he wore a black-and-white check tie which
she had never seen him wear before, and his fingers looked like
varnished bulging pods in tight black kid gloves.
He did not speak. He did not answer her reluctant invitation that he
should enter. She would have thought him drunk had not the smell that
clung about him been so definitely that of soap. From the garden behind
him, which was quilted by a thick night fog, noises as of roosting birds
disturbed. His head turned on the thick hill of his neck, his lids,
with their fringe of long but sparse black lashes, blinked once or
twice. When the sound had passed, his face again grew blank and moonish
and he stepped within. He laid his bowler hat on the table and began to
strip off his gloves. His fleshy fingers, pink with constriction,
terrified her, and she clapped her hands at him and cried out: "Why have
you come?"
But he answered nothing. Speech is human, and words might have fomented
some human relationship between them, and he desired that they should
know each other only as animals and enemies. He continued to take off
his gloves, while round him fragments of fog that had come in with him
hung in the warm air like his familiar spirits, and then bent over the
lamp. She watched his face grow yellow in the diminishing glare, and
moaned, knowing herself weak with motherhood. Then in the blackness his
weight threshed down on her. Even his form was a deceit, for his vast
bulk was not obesity but iron-hard strength. All consciousness soon left
her, except only pain, and she wandered in the dark caverns of her mind.
Her capacity for sexual love lay dead in her. She saw it as a lovely
naked boy lying with blue lips and purple blood pouring from his side,
where it had been jagged by the boar who still snuffled the fair body,
sitting by with its haunches in a spring. She cried out to herself: "You
can rise above this! This is only a physical thing," but her own answer
came: "Yes, but the other also was only a physical thing. Yet it was a
sacrament and gave you life. There is white magic and black magic. This
is a black sacrament, and it will give you death." Her soul fainted into
utter nothingness.
She woke and heard Richard crying for her upstairs. She dragged herself
up at once, but remembered and fell grovelling on the floor and wept.
But Richard continued to call for her, and she struggled to her feet and
made her way up the stairs, clinging to the banisters. She looked over
her shoulder at the loathed room and was amazed to see that this mawkish
early morning light showed it much tidier than it had been by the glow
of the lamp the night before. It was evident that Peacey had set it in
order before he let himself out, and had even neatly folded the sewing
she had left crumpled on the table. At this manifestation of his
peculiar quality she flung her arm across her face and fled to her son's
room. But when she got there a sense of guilt overcame her and she was
ashamed to go to him, though she knew he needed her, and staggered first
to the window to look out at the sea and the shining plain, whose beauty
had through all previous agonies reassured her. But the eastern sky was
inflamed with such a livid scarlet dawn as she had never seen before,
and the full tide was milk streaked with blood, and the sails of the
barges that rode there were as rags that had been used to staunch
wounds. Unreasonably she took this as confirmation that there had
happened to her one of earth's ultimate evils, a thing that no thinking
on could make good. But turning to her child to still his crying, she
saw the tiny exquisite hands waving in rage and the dark down rumpled on
the monkeyish little skull, and the black eyes in which all the beauty
and high temper that were afterwards to be Richard were condensed, and
she ran to him. She caught him up in her arms and laughed into the
criminal face of the morning.
From that day on Marion and Richard lived together in the completest
isolation. She had meals with her family, she moved among them doing
what part of the household and dairy work that she had always done, but
she never spoke to them unless it was necessary; for she realised now
why Grandmother had been so preoccupied that she let the tail of her
shawl trail on the ground as she went upstairs that night, and why
Cousin Tom Stallybrass had not come in to tell how the calf had gone at
Prittlebay market. When one afternoon she came to the head of the stairs
and saw Aunt Alphonsine gesticulating in her tight _dame de compagnie_
black in the parlour below, stretching out her long lean neck like the
spout of a coffee-pot to Grandmothers' ear, she stood quite still,
staring at the two women and hating them till they saw her and fell
silent. She did not take her gaze from them until Aunt Alphonsine put up
her hand to cover her scar. Then she knew that this wretched woman was
at last afraid of her and would let her alone, and she turned
contentedly to the room where Richard was.
But later on a misgiving seized her lest her aunt might have come as
envoy from Peacey, and since she perceived that, her rage against the
world was so visibly written on her that she inspired fear; she thought
it best to give her boy into the charge of Peggy and to go over to
Torque Hall herself. She waited in the courtyard outside the servants'
quarters while they fetched him, and stood with her head high, so that
the faces peering at her from the windows should see nothing of her
torment, at the corner of the gardens that was visible through the
gracious Tudor archway. There was nothing showing save a few pale mauve
clots of Michaelmas daisies standing flank-high in the slanting dusty
shafts of evening sunshine, and the marble Triton, glowing gold in
answer to the sunset, with gold autumn leaves scattered on his pedestal.
But she knew very well how fair it all must be beyond, where she could
not see--the broad grass walk stretching between the wide, formal
flowerbeds, well tended but disordered with the lateness of the year, to
the sundial and the chestnut grove. How could Harry, who had loved her,
possess all this and not want to share it with her? She could have
sobbed like a child whose playmate is not kind, had not Peacey stood at
her elbow. "I want to give you warning that if ever you come near me
again I will kill you," she said. He looked sharply at her and she saw
that he was convinced and discomfited. But suddenly he smiled. She went
home, wondering uneasily why he should have smiled, but came to the
conclusion that this was simply one of his mystifications and that he
had simply been trying to cover his defeat. It was an extraordinary fact
that there never once occurred to her that possibility, the thought of
which, she afterwards realised, had made Peacey smile. The truth was
that she never thought directly of that night's horror, but, perhaps
because of that fantasy about the wounded youth which had vexed her
delirium, she always disguised it in her mind as an encounter with a
wild beast, and the expectation of human issue no more troubled her than
it would a woman who had been gored by a boar.
It was partly for this reason, and partly because of a certain ominous
peculiarity of her physical condition, that she did not know for some
months that she was going to have Peacey's child. It was indeed a rainy
December morning when she heard a knock at the door and knew it was
little Jack Harken, because he was whistling "Good King Wenceslas," as
he always did, and would not go to answer him, although she knew
Grandmother and Peggy were both in the dairy, because she was distraught
with her own degradation. Her encounter with Peacey had been like being
shown some picture from a foul book and being obliged to stare at it
till it was branded on her mind, so that whenever she looked at it she
saw it also, stamped on the real image like the superscription on a
palimpsest. But now she felt as if she herself had become a picture in a
foul book. And she was quite insane with a sense of guilt towards
Richard. This discovery had, of necessity, meant that she must wean him,
and her obsession interpreted their conflict between them that had
naturally followed as a wrangle between them as to her responsibility
for this evil. Now he was lying in his cot screaming with rage, his
clean frock and the sheets running with the rivulets of milk that he had
spat out and struck from the teat of the bottle she was forcing on him,
and she was sobbing, for this sort of thing had been going on for days,
"I can't help it, darling, I can't help it."
Then Jackie began to thump rhythmically on the door below, and she ran
down, maddened with so much noise, and snatched the letter he held out
to her. At the writing on the envelope her heart stood still. She
recanted all she had lately thought of Harry. Hatred and resentment fell
from her. The promise of her lover's near presence came on her like a
south wind blowing over flowers. At his message that he was waiting for
her on the marshes under the hillside she remembered what love is--a
shelter, a wing, a witty clemency that finds the perfect unguent for its
mate's hurt as easily as a wit finds jests, a tender alchemy that
changes the dark evil subsistence of the universe to bright, valuable
gold. In her light shoes, and with her black hair loose about her
shoulders, she ran out into the rainy yard, fled round the house quickly
so that none might see her and spy on them, and plunged down the
thaw-wet hillside, crying out with joy, even when she slipped and fell,
because her lover's arms would so soon be round her.
She was amazed, for she had not yet had leisure or the heart to look out
of the window, that beneath her the marshes crackled white with sunlit
snow, and a blue sea stretched to the rosy horizon that girdles bright
frosty days. Even as this beauty had lain unseen under her windows, so
had her happiness waited unsuspected. She did not see him till she was
close upon him, for he was striding up and down between the last two
trees of the elm hedge. Her heart ached when she saw him standing,
brilliantly lovely as the glistening snow-laden branches above him, for
it was plain from the confident set of his shoulders and the loose grip
of his hand on his stick that he was unaware that any situation existed
which was not easily negotiable. They had evidently told him nothing at
Torque Hall to destroy the impression she must have created by her last
letter to him in which she had described her acceptance of Peacey's
offer of a formal marriage. They had not dared, for they knew how
terrible he would be when he moved to avenge her. But he lifted his eyes
and ran to her and took her in his arms, and did not cease to kiss her
till she sobbed out what they had done to her. Then it was as if a wind
had blown and the snow had fallen from the branches, leaving them but
dark, gnarled wood.
"But why did you marry him?"
"The people stoned me in the street and I could get no peace at home."
"Couldn't you have tried to stand it?"
"I was afraid for the boy."
"Then why couldn't you have gone away?"
"How could I when I was so ill? Why did not you come back?"
"How could I leave the prince and princess?"
She was aghast to find them quarrelling, and while he drew a shuddering
breath between his teeth, she interrupted: "Oh, Richard is so lovely!
You must see him soon. Oh, such a boy!"
But he had paid no heed and shakingly poured out words since it was so
like the harmless spite of a child that beats young to old, her blood
from that of a loved girl to a hating woman. He found the situation, she
had thought at the time, and still thought after thirty years, far less
negotiable than a high love would have done. It did not occur to him
that he might take her away. He took it for granted that thereafter
they must be lost to each other. But save for his desire to blame her
for these mischances, which did not offend her, since it was so like the
harmless spite of a child that beats his racquet because it has sent his
ball into the next garden, he seemed not to be thinking of her part in
that loss at all. It was his extreme sense of his own loss that was
making him choke with tears. It appeared that love was not always a
shelter, a wing, a witty clemency, a tender alchemy. She stood half
asleep with shock until a sentence, said passionately in his delightful
voice which made one see green water running swiftly, and at first
refused admission to her mind by her incredulous love, confirmed itself
by reiteration. "Damn it all," he was saying, "you were unique!" At that
she cried out, "Oh, you are Peacey too! I will go back to Richard," and
turned and stumbled up the wet hillside.
It is true that Harry's desertion nearly killed her--that there was a
moment, as she breasted the hill-top and found herself facing the
malevolent red house where they had always told her that he did not
really love her, when she thought she was about to fall dead from excess
of experience and would have chosen to die so, if Richard had not waited
for her. Yet it was also true that for long she hardly ever thought of
Harry. Such fierce and unimagined passions and perplexities now filled
her, that the simple and normal emotions she felt for him became
imperceptible, like tapers in strong sunlight.
The day after their meeting she had found Aunt Alphonsine all a dry
frightened gibber, holding a whitefaced conference with Grandmother in
the parlour, and they had asked her if she had known that Peacey had
left Torque Hall that morning. She had shaken her head and given a
dry-mouthed smile, for she saw how terrified they were lest all that had
had a hand in her marriage were to be made to pay for it; but because
the child in her arms laughed, and the child in her womb had moved, she
was so torn between delight and loathing that she had no time to
speculate whether Harry had done this thing sweetly out of love for her
or cruelly out of bodily jealousy of Peacey. Nor, when a few weeks later
it was announced that for the first time in its history Torque Hall had
been let furnished, and that the family was going to spend the next
twelve months abroad and in London, did her heart ache to think he must
be sad to leave the grey, salt Essex which he loved. She thought of it,
indeed, but negligently. She could imagine well how he had walked with
his dogs among the dripping woods and had set his face against a
tree-trunk near some remembered place, and had wept (for like most very
virile men, he wept in sorrow); and when he had gone home, thick-lipped
and darkly flushed with misery, he had flung down his stick on the chest
in the hall and muttered, while frightened people watched from the
shadows of the armour or listened at doors held ajar, "I must get out of
this." No doubt it was very sad, but it was simple; it was brother to
the grief of the yard dog when she lost her puppies. It was not like her
agony. Nothing was simple there. Destiny had struck her being a blow
that had shivered it to fragments, and now all warred so that there was
confusion, and the best things were bad.
Her body was full of health and she was very beautiful. Richard, who was
beginning to take notice, took great pleasure in her. He used to point
his fingers at her great lustrous eyes as he did at flowers, and he
would roll his face against the smooth skin of her neck and shoulders;
and when he was naked after his bath he liked her to let down her hair
so that it hung round him like a dark, scented tent. But as she bent
forward, watching his little red gums shine in his laughing mouth, guilt
constricted her heart. For she knew that no woman who was going to have
a child had any right to be as well as she was. She knew that it meant
that she was giving nothing to the child, that the blood was bright in
her cheeks because she was denying every drop she could to the child,
that her flesh was nice for Richard to kiss because she was electric
with the force she should have spent in making nerves for the child. She
knew that she was trying to kill the thing to which she had been ordered
to give life; that the murder was being committed by a part of her which
was beyond the control of her will did not exonerate her. In these
matters, as she had learned in the moment when she had discovered that
her baby had conceived without the consent of her soul, the soul cannot
with honour disown the doings of the body. The plain fact was that she
was going to have a child, and that she was trying to kill it. Remorse
dragged behind her like a brake on the swift movements of her happy
motherhood; and at night she lay wide-eyed and whispered to some judge
to judge her and bring this matter to an end.
It was no wonder that even when a solicitor came to see her and told her
that Harry had settled on her and Richard a sum so large that she knew
he must be deeply concerned for her, since, like many men of his type,
he had such an abundant sense of the pleasures which can be bought with
money that to part with it unnecessarily was a real sacrifice, she
thought of him with only such casual pity as she had felt when the
yard-dog howled. Well, that had all been set right, long afterwards on
that day of which she had told nobody.
But she had cheered herself in all those nights that she would make up
for her body's defection by loving the child very much when it was born.
She knew she would have no passion for it as she had for Richard, but
she foresaw herself being consciously and slantingly tender over it,
like a primitive Madonna over the Holy Child. There was, of course, no
such solution of the problem. It became plain that there was not going
to be in that hour when she knew the unnatural horror of a painless
parturition. She had not been at all shocked by the violence she had
endured at Richard's birth. It had seemed magnificently consistent with
the rest of nature, and she had been comforted as she lay moaning by a
persistent vision of a harrow turning up rich earth. But contemplating
herself as she performed this act of childbirth without a pang was like
looking into eyes which are open but have no sight and realising that
here is blindness, or listening to one who earnestly speaks words which
have no meaning and realising that here is madness.
She was going through a process that should have produced life: but
because of the lack of some essence which works through pain, but
nevertheless is to the breeding womb what sight is to the eye or sanity
to the brain, it was producing something that was as much at variance
with life as death. The old women at her bedside chuckled and rubbed
their hands because she was having such an easy time, but that was
because they were old and had forgotten. If a young woman had been
there she would have stood at the other side of the room between the
windows, as far away from the bed as she could, and her lips would have
pursed, as if she felt the presence of uncleanness. So were her own,
when they showed her the pale child. She had indeed done an unclean and
unnatural thing when she had brought forth a child that lived yet was
unloved; who was born of a mother that survived and looked at it, and
who yet had no mother, since she felt no motion towards it, but a deep
shiver of her blood away from it; who aroused no interest in the whole
universe save her own abhorrence; who was, as was inevitable in one so
begotten and so born, intrinsically disgusting in substance.
"Well, I have Richard to help me bear this," she said to herself, but
her heart reminded her that though she had Richard, this child had no
one. Pitifully she put out her arms and drew it to her breast, but
detected for herself the fundamentally insincere kindness that a
stranger will show to a child, confident that before long it will be
claimed by its own kin.
She always remembered how good the little thing had been as it lay in
her arms, and how distasteful. Those were always to remain its silent
characteristics. It was so good. "As good," the nurses used to say, "as
if he were a little girl." It hardly ever cried, and when it did it
curiously showed its difference from Richard. He hated being a baby and
subject to other people's wills, and would lie in a cot and roar with
resentment; but this child, when it felt a need that was not satisfied,
did not rebel, but turned its face to the pillow and whined softly. That
was a strange and disquieting thing to watch. She would stand in the
shadow looking at the back of its little head, so repellently covered
with hair that was like fluff off the floor, and listening to the cry
that trailed from its lips like a dirty piece of string; and she would
wonder why it did this, partly because she really wanted to know, and
partly because it fended off the moment when she had to take it in her
arms. Perhaps, she reflected, it muted its rage because it knew that it
was unlovable and must curry favour by not troubling people. Indeed, it
was as unlovable as a child could be. It was not pleasant naked, for its
bones looked at once fragile and coarse, and its flesh was lax, and in
its clothes it was squalid, for it was always being sick or dribbling.
Then her heart reproached her, and she admitted that it cried softly
because it had a gentle spirit, and she would move forward quickly and
do what it desired, using, by an effort of will, those loving words that
fluttered to her lips when she was tending Richard. Time went on, but
her attitude to it never developed beyond this alternate recognition of
its hatefulness and its goodness.
She had called it Roger after her own father in a desperate effort to
bring it into the family, but the name, when she spoke it, seemed
infinitely remote, as if she were speaking of the child of some servant
in the house whom she had heard of but had never seen. When he was out
of her sight, she ejected the thought of him from her mind, so that when
her eyes fell on him again it was a shock. He did not become more seemly
to look at. Indeed, he was worse when he grew out of frocks, for
knickerbockers disclosed that he had very thin legs and large, knotty
knees. He had a dull stare, and there seemed always to be a ring of food
round his mouth. He had no pride. When she took the children on a
railway journey Richard would sit quite still in his seat and would
speak in a very low voice, and if any of the other passengers offered
him chocolates or sweets he would draw back his chin as an animal does
when it is offered food, and would shake his head very gravely. But
Roger would move about, falling over people's legs, and would talk
perpetually in a voice that was given a whistling sound by air that
passed through the gap between his two front teeth, and when he got
tired he would whine. He was unexclusive and unadventurous. He liked
playing on the sands at Prittlebay in summer when they were covered with
trippers' children. He hated Richard's passion for bringing the names of
foreign places into the games. When Richard was sitting on his engine
and roaring, "I'm the Trans-Andean express, and I don't half go at a
pace!" Roger would stand against the wall opposite and cry over and over
again in that whistling voice: "Make it the London, Tilbury and
Prittlebay train! Make it the London, Tilbury and Prittlebay train!"
When he felt happy he would repeatedly jump up in the air, bringing both
his feet down on the ground at once, but a little distance apart, so
that his thin legs looked horrible, and he would make loud, silly
noises. At these times Richard would sit with his back to him and would
take no notice. Always he was insolent to the other child. He would not
share his toys with him, though sometimes he would pick out one of the
best toys and give it to his brother as a master might give a present to
a servant. He was of the substance of his mother, and he knew all that
she knew, and he knew that this child was an intruder.
They clenched themselves against him. They were kind to him, but they
would silently scheme to be alone together. If they were all three in
the garden, she sitting with her needlework, Richard playing with his
engine and Roger making daisy-chains, there would come a time when she
would arise and go into the house. She would not look at Richard before
she went, for in externals she forced herself to be loyal to Roger. When
she got into the house she would linger about the rooms at factitious
operations, pouring out of the flower-glasses water that was not stale,
or putting on the kettle far too soon, until she heard Richard coming to
look for her, lightfootedly but violently, banging doors behind him,
knocking into furniture. He would halt at the door and stand for a
moment, twiddling the handle round and round, as if he had not really
been so very keen to come to her, and she would go on indifferently with
her occupation. But presently she would feel that she must steal a
glance at the face that she knew would be looking so adorable now,
peering obliquely round the edge of the door, the lips bright with
vitality as with wet paint and the eyes roguish as if he felt she were
teasing life by enjoying it so, and the dear square head, browny-gold
like the top of a bun, and the little bronze body standing so fresh and
straight in the linen suit. So her glance would slide and slide, and
their eyes would meet and he would run to her. If he had anything on his
conscience he would choose this moment for confession. "Mother, I told a
lie yesterday. But it wasn't about anything really important, so we
won't talk about it, will we?"
Then he would clamber over her, like a squirrel going up a tree-trunk,
until she tumbled into some big chair and rated him for being so
boisterous, and drew him close to her so that he revelled in her love
for him as in long meadow-grass. Even as she imagined that night before
Peacey came, he did not struggle in her arms but gave her kiss for kiss.
They would be sphered in joy, until they heard a sniff and saw the other
child standing at the open door, resting its flabby cheek on the handle,
surveying them with wild eyes. There would be a moment of dislocation.
Then she would cry, "Come along, Roger!" and Richard would slip from her
knee and the other child would come and very gratefully put its arms
round her neck and kiss her. It would go on kissing and kissing her, as
if it needed reassurance.
But she had always done her duty by Roger. That had not been so very
difficult a matter at first, for Grandmother had made a great fuss of
him and taken him off her hands for most of the day. Marion had never
felt quite at ease about this, for she knew that he was receiving
nothing, since the old woman was only affecting to find him lovable in
order that it might seem that something good had come of the marriage
which she had engineered. But the problem was settled when he was
eighteen months old, for then Grandmother died. Marion did not feel
either glad or sorry. God had dreamed her and her grandmother in
different dreams. It was well that they should separate. But it had the
immediate disadvantage of throwing her into perpetual contact with the
other child. She looked after it assiduously, but she always felt when
she had been with it for an hour or two that she wanted to go a great
distance and breathe air that it had not breathed. Perpetually she
marvelled at its contentedness and gentleness and unexigent hunger for
love, and planted seeds of affection for it in her heart, but they would
never mature.
The relationship became still more galling to her after yet another
eighteen months, when Harry came back to live with his family at Torque
Hall, who had returned there the year before. No communication passed
between them, but sometimes by chance he met her in the lanes when she
was out with the children. The first time he tried to speak to her, but
she turned away, and Richard said, "Look here, you don't know us," so
after that they only looked at one another. They would walk slowly past
each other with their heads bent, and as they drew near she would lift
her eyes and see him, beautiful and golden as a corn of wheat, and she
would know from his eyes that, dark for his fair, she was as beautiful,
and they would both look at Richard, who ran at her right side and was
as beautiful as the essence of both their beauties. It seemed as if a
band of light joined the bodies of these three, as if it were
contracting and pulling them together, as if in a moment they would be
pressed together and would dissolve in loving cries upon each other's
breasts. But before that moment came, Harry's eyes would stray to the
other child. Its socks would be coming down round its thin legs; it
would be making some silly noises in its squalid, whistling voice; its
features would be falling apart, unorganised into a coherent face by any
expression, as common children's do. The situation was trodden into the
mud. They would pass on--their hearts sunk deeper into dingy
acquiescence in their separation.
Nevertheless she did not fail in her duty towards Roger. So far as
externals went she was even a better mother to him than to Richard.
Frequently she lost her temper with Richard when he ran out of the house
into the fields at bedtime, or when he would not leave his tin soldiers
to get ready for his walk, but she was always mild with Roger, though
his habit of sniffing angered her more than Richard's worst piece of
naughtiness. She took Richard's illnesses lightly and sensibly. But when
Roger ailed--which was very often, for he caught colds easily and had a
weak digestion--she would send for the doctor at once, and would nurse
him with a strained impeccability, concentrating with unnecessary
intensity on the minutiæ of his treatment and diet as if she were
attempting to exclude from her mind some thought that insisted on
presenting itself at these times. When they came to her on winter
evenings and wet days and asked for a story, she would choose more often
to tell them a fairy-tale, which only Roger liked, rather than to start
one of the sagas which Richard loved, and would help to invent,
concerning the adventures of the family in some previous animal
existence, when they had all been rabbits and lived in a burrow in the
park at Torque Hall, or crocodiles who slooshed about in the Thames
mud, or lions and tigers with a lair on Kerith Island. She never gave
any present to Richard without giving one to Roger too; she dressed him
as carefully in the same woollen and linen suits, although in nothing
did he look well. Never had she lifted her hand against him.
As time went on she began to make light of her destiny and to declare
that there was no horror in this house at all, but only a young woman
living with her two children, one of whom was not so attractive as the
other. It was true that sometimes, when she was sewing or washing dishes
at the sink, she would find herself standing quite still, her fingers
rigid, her mind shocked and vacant, as if some thought had strode into
it and showed so monstrous a face that all other thoughts had fled; and
she would realise that she had been thinking of something about Roger,
but she could not remember what. Usually this happened after there had
arrived--as there did every six months--parcels of toys, addressed to
him and stamped with the Dawlish postmark and containing a piece of
paper scrawled "With love from father."
She would be troubled by such moments when they came, for she was
growing distantly fond of Roger. There was something touching about this
pale child, whose hunger for love was so strong that it survived and
struggled through the clayey substance of its general being which had
smothered all other movements of its soul; who was so full of love
itself that it accepted the empty sham of feeling she gave it and
breathed on it, and filled it with its own love, and was so innocent
that it did not detect that nobody had really given it anything, and
went on rejoicing, thus redeeming her from guilt. He would come and
stand at the door of any room in which she was sitting, and she would
pretend not to know he was there, so that she need caress him or say the
forced loving word; but when at length, irritated by his repeated
sniffs, she turned towards him, she would find the grey marbles of his
eyes bright with happiness, and he would cry out in his dreadful
whistling voice, "Ah, you didn't know I was watching you!" and run
across undoubtingly to her arms. There would be real gratitude in the
embrace she gave him. His trust in her had so changed the moment that
she need not feel remorse for it.
It had seemed quite possible that they could go on like this for ever,
until the very instant that all was betrayed. She had had a terrible
time with Richard, who was now seven years old. After their midday meal
he had asked permission to go and spend the afternoon playing with some
other boys on the marshes, and she had given it to him with a kiss,
under which she had thought he seemed a little sullen. When Roger and
she had nearly finished their tea he had appeared at the door, had stood
there for a minute, and then, throwing up his head, had said doggedly:
"I've had a lovely time at the circus." She had left the bread-knife
sticking in midloaf and sat looking at him in silence. This was real
drama, for she had refused to take them to the circus and forbidden him
to go by himself because there was a measles epidemic in the
neighbourhood. It flashed across her that by asking for permission to
play with the boys on the marshes when he meant to go to the circus he
had told her a lie. The foolish primitive maternal part of her was
convulsed with horror at his fault. Because he was more important than
anybody else, it seemed the most tremendous fault that anybody had ever
committed, and because he was her son it seemed quite unlike any other
fault and far more excusable. Her detached wisdom warned her that she
must check all such tendencies in him, since what would in other
children be judged a shortcoming natural to their age, would in him be
ascribed to the evil blood of his lawless begetting, and he would start
life under the powerful suggestion of a bad reputation. She resolved to
punish him. The core of her that was nothing but love for Richard, that
would have loved him utterly if they had not been mother and son, but
man and woman, or man and man, or woman and woman, cried out with
anguish that she should have to hurt him to guard against the destiny
which she herself had thrust upon him.
She said in a strained voice: "How dare you tell a lie to me and pretend
that you were going to the marshes?" He answered, his eyebrows meeting
and lying in straight, sullen bars: "I had to do that so's you wouldn't
worry about me not coming home. And I paid for myself with the sixpence
that was over from the five shillings Cousin Tom gave me at Christmas.
And you know it doesn't really matter about the measles, because I'm
strong and don't always go catching things like Roger does."
He made as if he were going to sit down at the table, but she said: "No,
you mustn't have any tea. Go to your room and undress. You've lied and
you've disobeyed. I'll have to whip you." Her heart was thumping so that
she thought she was going to faint. He lifted his chin a little higher
and said: "Very well, the circus was very good. It was quite worf this."
He marched out of the room and left her sick and quivering at her duty.
After she had heard him bang his door, she realised that Roger was
asking her again and again if he might have some more cherry jam, and
she answered, sighing deeply, "No, dear, it's too rich. If you have any
more you'll be ill," and she rose from the table and took the jar into
the larder. She decided to clear away tea first, but that only meant
carrying the tray backwards and forwards twice, and after a few moments
she found herself standing in the middle of the kitchen, shaking with
terror, while the other child whined about her skirts and stretched up
its abhorrent little arms. She pushed it aside, qualifying the harsh
movement with some insincere endearment, and went to Richard's room and
walked in blindly, saying: "I must whip you--you've broken the law, and
if you do that you must be punished." Out of the darkness before her
came the voice of the tiny desperado: "Very well. It was quite worf
this. Mother, I'm ready. Come on and whip me." She pulled down the
blinds and set herself to the horrid task, and kept at it hardly,
unsparingly, until she felt she had really hurt him. Then she said, with
what seemed to be the last breath in her heart-shattered body: "There,
you see, whenever you break the law people will hurt you like this. So
take notice." She moved about the room, leaving it as it should be left
for the night, opening the windows and folding up the counterpane, while
he lay face downwards on his pillow. Just as she was closing the door he
called softly:
"Mummie!"
She continued to close it, and he cried:
"Mummie!"
But she remained quite quiet so that he thought she had gone. After a
minute she heard him throw himself over in the bed and kick the clothes
and sob fiercely, "Gah! Why can't she come when I call her?"
She was back by his bedside in a second, and his arms were round her
neck and he was sobbing:
"Mummie, mummie, I know I've been naughty!" And as he felt the wetness
of her face he cried out, "Oh, mummie, have I made you cry? I will be
good! I will be good! I'll never make you cry again! I know I was a
beast to go 'cos you really were frightened of us getting measles, but
oh, mummie, I did so want to see a tiger!"
They clung to each other, weeping, and he said things into her neck that
were far more babyish than usual and yet fiercely manly, and they almost
melted into each other in the hot flow of loving tears.
"You were quite right to whip me," he told her. "I wouldn't have
believed you were really cross if you hadn't hurt me." Presently, when
he was lying quietly in her arms, all sticky sweetness like toffee, he
sighed, "Oh, darling, the circus was lovely! There were such clever
people. There was a Cossack horseman who picked up handkerchiefs off the
ground when he was riding at full speed, and there was a most beautiful
lady in pink satin. Mummie, you'd look lovely in pink satin!--and she'd
bells on her legs and arms, and she waggled them and it made a tune.
That was lovely, but I liked the animals best. Oh, darling, the lions!"
She rebuked him for his continued enjoyment of an illicit spectacle that
ought now to be regarded only as material for repentance, but he
protested: "Mummie, you are mean. Now you've whipped me for going,
surely I've a right to enjoy it." But he lay back and just gave himself
up to loving her. "Oh, you beautiful mummie. You've such lots and lots
of hair. If there were two little men just as big as my fingers, they
could go into your hair, one at each ear, and walk about it like people
do in the African forests, couldn't they? And they'd meet in your
parting, and one would say to the other, 'Mr. Livingstone, I presume?'"
They both laughed and hugged each other, and he presently fell asleep as
suddenly as children do.
She lingered over him for long, peering at him through the dusk to miss
nothing of his bloomy brownness. He curled up when he slept like a
little animal, and his breath drove through him deeply and more serenely
than any adult's. At last she felt compelled to kiss him, and, without
waking up, he shook his head about and said disgustedly, "Wugh!" as she
rose and left him.
Twilight was flooding the house, and peace also, and she moved happily
through the dear place where she lived with her dear son, her heart
wounded and yet light, because though she had had to hurt him, she knew
that henceforward he would obey whatever laws she laid upon him. He had
been subject to her when he was a baby; it was plain that he was going
to be subject to her now that he was a boy; she might almost hope that
she would never lose him. "I must make myself good enough to deserve
this," she said prayingly. As she went downstairs she looked through the
open front door into the crystalline young night, tinged with purple by
some invisible red moon and diluted by the daylight that had not yet all
poured down the sluice of the west, and resolved to go out and meditate
for a little on how she must live to be worthy of this happy motherhood.
She walked quickly and skimmingly about the dark lawns, exalted and
humble. In a gesture of joy she threw out her arms and struck a clump of
nightstock, and the scent rushed up at her. A nightingale sang in the
woods across the lane. These things seemed to her to be in some way
touchingly relevant to the beautiful destiny of her and her son, and her
eyes were filled with tears of gratitude for nature's sympathy. She went
round the house, walking softly, keeping close to the wall, to eavesdrop
on the lovely, drowsy, kindly world. The silence of the farmyard was
pulsed with the breath of many sleeping beasts. The dark doors and
windows of the cattle-sheds looked out under the thick brows of their
thatched eaves at the strange fluctuating wine-like light as if they
were consciously preserving their occupants from the night's magic. As
she walked to the garden's edge, the crickets chirped in the long grass
and the ballet of the bats drove back and forwards in long streaks. The
round red moon hung on the breast of a flawless night, whose feet were
hidden in an amethystine haze that covered the marshes and the sea, and
changed the lit liners going from Tilbury to floating opals; and within
the house was Richard. All was beauty.
Surely it would be given to her to deserve to be his mother? She stood
there in an ecstasy that was hardly at all excitement, until it blew
cold and she remembered that she had left the fire unmended, and went
back to the house.
She went in by the kitchen, and was amazed to see that the larder door
was open and giving out a faint ray of light. She pulled it open and saw
the other child standing on a chair and spooning cherry jam out of the
jar into his mouth. A candle, which it had put on the shelf below it,
threw on the ceiling an enormous shadow of its large, jerry-built skull.
It turned on her a pale and filthy face and dropped the jar, so that
gobs of jam fell on its pinafore, the paper-covered shelf, the chair,
the floor. She lifted the child down and struck it. It gave her the most
extraordinary pleasure to strike it. She struck it three times, and each
time it was as good as drinking wine. Then she fell forward on her knees
and covered her face with her hands. The child ceased to howl and put
its jammy arms forgivingly about her while she wept, but its touch only
reminded her how delicious it had been to beat it. Still, she submitted
to its embrace, and muttered in abasement: "Oh, lovey, mummy shouldn't
have done that!"
The child was puzzled, for it knew it ought not to have stolen the jam,
and as always, it was so full of love that it could not believe that
anybody had behaved badly to it. There was nothing to do but to give it
a kiss and take it off to bed. When she saw its horrid little body
stripped for the bath, heat ran through her throat, and she remembered
again how exquisite it had been to hurt him, and she speculated whether
very much force would be needed to kill it. All the time it knelt at her
knee saying its prayers she was wondering whether, when he was a little
older, he would not get caught by the tide out on the flats. "You vile
woman!" she exclaimed in amazement. "You murderess!" But that was merely
conversation which did not alter the established fact that her
profounder self still hated the child it had brought forth, as it had
done before he was born, and now, as then, was plotting to kill it, and
that some check which her consciousness had always exerted on that
hatred had for some reason been damaged, and that he was in active
danger from her.
All night she lay awake, and in the morning she went up to the bailiff's
office at Torque Hall and asked them to send for Harry. She waited in an
inner room, her heart quite calm with misery, and when Harry appeared in
the doorway she did not care one way or another that he was white and
shaken. Without delaying to greet him, she told him that she loathed
Peacey's child so much that it must be taken away from her, at least for
some time, and that she had wondered if she ought to give him a chance
of finding affection with his father, who had, after all, never stopped
sending him presents.
There was a silence, and she turned her eyes on him and found him
looking disapproving. Plainly he thought it very unnatural of her to
dislike her own child, and was daring to doubt if his own son was safe
with her. He--he of all men--who by his disloyalty had brought on her
this monstrous birth that had deformed her fate! She clenched her fists
and drew in a sharp breath and her eyes blazed. He moved forward
suddenly in his chair, and she saw that this display of her quality had
drawn him to her, as always the moon of her being had drawn the fluid
tides of his, and that he wanted to touch her. Nearly he desired her.
That also was insolence. Her acute hating glance recorded that whereas
desire had used to make his face hard and splendid like a diamond, like
a flashing sword, it now made it lax, and she realised with agony,
though, of course, without surprise, that he had been unfaithful to
their love times without number. But she looked into his eyes and found
them bereaved as her heart was. She turned aside and sobbed once, drily.
After that, they spoke softly, as if one they had both loved lay dead
somewhere close at hand. He told her that Peacey had set up for himself
in an inn, and that a widowed sister of his, named Susan Rodney, who
also had been in the Torques' service, was keeping house for him. She
was a really good sort, he declared, although she was Peacey's sister,
and very motherly; indeed, she had been terribly upset by the loss of
her only child, a little boy of nine, so she would doubtless welcome the
charge of Roger. At any rate, there would be no harm in letting the
child go to her for a three months' visit.
"I'll settle the whole thing," he said. "You'd better not write; he may
want to meet you."
With distaste she perceived that although he had never done anything
useful for her, he was still capable of being jealous of her, and she
abruptly rose to go. But she delayed for a moment to satisfy a curiosity
that had vexed her for years.
"Tell me," she asked. "How did you get rid of Peacey? Was it money?"
He shrugged his shoulders. "Not altogether. You see, I found out
something about him...."
She walked home slowly, with her head bent, wondering what blood she had
perpetuated.
So, a week later, Susan Rodney came. Her visit was a great humiliation.
She was a woman of thirty-five, strangely and reassuringly unlike her
brother, having a fair, sun-burned skin with a golden down on her upper
lip, and slow-moving eyes, the colour of a blue sky reflected in shallow
floods. She was as clean and useful as a scrubbed deal table. And
because she was wholesome in her soul, she abhorred this woman who was
sending away her own child. During the twenty-four hours she was at
Yaverland's End she ate sparingly, plainly because she felt reluctance
at accepting hospitality from Marion, and rose very early, as if she
found sleeping difficult in the air of this house. This might have been
in part due to the affection she evidently felt for her brother, which
was shown in the proud and grudging responses to Marion's enquiries as
to how he was getting on at Dawlish.
"He's doing ever so well, and he's made the place a picture," she would
begin volubly, and then would toss her head slowly like a teased heifer,
and decide that Marion did not deserve to hear tidings of the glorious
man she had slighted. But the greater part of her loathing was that
which a woman with a simple heart of nature must feel for one who hated
her child, which the sound must feel for the leprous.
Marion could have mitigated that feeling in a great part, not by
explaining, for that was impossible, but by simply showing that she had
suffered, for Susan was a kind woman. Instead she did everything she
could to encourage it. She told no lies, although by now her efforts to
win over the neighbourhood, so that she could get a servant easily and
be able to give her whole time to the children, had made her coldly sly
in her dealings with humanity. She liked Susan too much for that. Merely
she made no attempt to disguise her personality. After the children had
gone to bed she sat by the hearth and held her head high under the
other's ruminant stare, knowing that because of the times she had been
subject to love and to lust her beauty was lip-marked as a well-read
book is thumb-marked, and that that would seem a mark of abomination to
this woman in the salty climate of whose character passion could not
bloom. She knew, too, that to Susan, who every Sunday since her babyhood
had gone to church and prayed very hard, with her thick fair brows
brought close together, to be helped to be good, the pride of her
bearing would seem terribly wicked to a sinner who had broken one of the
Ten Commandments.
Marion kept down her eyes so that the other should not see that the
eyeballs were strained with agony, and should think that she was a loose
and conscienceless woman. She hated doing this. She liked Susan so much,
and she was terribly lonely. She would like to have thrown her arms
round Susan's neck and cried and cried, and told her how terribly
difficult she found life, and how she hated people being nasty to her,
and asked her if sometimes she did not long for a man to look after her.
But instead she sat there rigidly alienating her. For she had seen that
because Susan disliked her she was precipitating herself much more
impulsively than she would otherwise have done into affection for the
child whom she suspected was being maltreated by this queer woman in
this queer house. In any case she would have admitted Roger to her
heart, for it was plainly very empty since the loss of her son, whom she
had loved so dearly that she did not speak of him to Marion, but being
slow of movement she might have taken her time over it; and it was
necessary that these two should love each other at once. At any moment
Roger might understand his mummie hated him, and that would break his
poor little heart, which she knew was golden, unless he had some other
love to which to run. She was so glad when she found herself seeing them
off at Paddington, although it was a horrible scene. Susan had primly,
and with an air of refusing to participate in the spoils of vice,
declined to let Marion buy her a firstclass ticket, so the parting had
to take place in a crowded thirdclass compartment. Roger shrieked and
kicked at leaving her, and leaned howling from the window, while Marion
said over and over again, "Mummy's so sorry ... it's only that just now
she isn't well enough to look after you both ... and Richard's the
eldest, so he must stay ... and you'll be back ever so soon.... And
there's such lovely sands at Dawlish...."
All the people in the corner-seats had looked with distaste at this
plain, ill-behaved child and had cast commending glances on Richard, who
stood by her side on the platform, absorbedly watching the porters
wheeling their trucks along, but always keeping on the alert so that he
never got in anyone's way. She couldn't bear that. She wanted to scream
out: "How dare you look like that at this poor little soul who has been
sinned against from the moment of his begetting? Think of it, his mother
hates him!"
She looked wildly at Susan for some comfort, but found her pink with
grave anger. Well, it was better for Roger that Susan should feel thus
about her. So she went on with these murmurs, which she felt the child
might detect as insincere at any moment, until the green flag waved. She
watched the diminishing train with a criminally light heart. Richard
began to jump up and down. "Mummie! Won't it be lovely--just us two!"
It was lovely. It was iniquitously lovely. In the morning Richard ran
into her room and flung himself, all dewy after the night's long sleep,
into her bed and nuzzled into her and gave her endless love which did
not have to be interrupted because the other child was standing at the
head of the bed, its pale eyes asking for its share of kisses. When he
went to school, she stood at the door and watched him run along the
garden to the gate, flinging out his arms and legs quite straight as a
foal does, and was exultingly proud of being a mother as she had not
been when there ran behind him Roger on weak, ambling limbs. When he
returned, they had their meal together to the tune of happy laughter,
for there was now no third to spill its food or say it was feeling sick
suddenly or babble silly things. In the afternoon she had to drive him
out to go and play games with the other boys. Much rather would he have
stayed with her, and when she called him back for a last hug he did not
struggle in her arms but gave her back kiss for kiss. She always changed
her dress for tea, and arranged her hair loosely like a woman in a
picture, and went out into the garden to gather burning leaves and put
them in vases about the room, and when it fell dark she set lighted
candles on the table because they were kinder than the lamp to her
pain-flawed handsomeness and because they left corners of dusk in which
these leaves glowed like fire with the kind of beauty that she and
Richard liked. She would arrange all this long before he came in, and
sit waiting in a drowse of happiness, thinking that really she had lost
nothing by being cut off from the love of man, for this was much better
than anything she could have had from Harry. When Richard came in he
would hold his breath because it was so nice and forget to tell her
about the game from which he was still flushed; and after tea they would
settle down to a lovely warm, close evening by the fire, when they would
tell each other all the animal stories that Roger had not liked.
On Saturday afternoons they always went down to the marshes together,
and they were glad that now was the ebbing of the year, for both found
the beauty of bad weather somehow truer than the beauty of the sunshine.
They loved to walk under high-backed clouds that the wind carried
horizonwards in pursuance of some feud of the skies. They liked to see
Roothing Castle standing up behind a salt mist, pale and flat as if it
were cut out of paper. They liked to sit, too, at the point where there
met together the three creeks that divided Roothing Marsh, the Saltings,
and Kerith Island. That was good when the tide was out, and the
sea-walls rose black from a silver plain of mud, valleyed with channels
thin and dark as veins. They would wait until the winter sunset kindled
and they had to return home quickly, looking over their shoulders at its
flames.
Lovely it was to find that he liked all the things she did: loneliness
and the sting of rain on the face and the cry of the redshanks; and
lovely it was to find in watching his liking what a glorious being it
was that she had borne. The eyes of his soul glowed like the eyes of his
body. She had loved Harry's love for her because it made him quick and
unhesitant and unmuddied by half-thought thoughts and half-felt feelings
as ordinary people are, but this child was like that all the time. Pride
ruled his life, so that she never had to feel anxious about his
behaviour, knowing that he would pull himself up into uncriticisable
conduct just as he always held his head high, and all the forces of his
spirit were poured out into his passion for her. She had always known
these things, and now the knowledge of them was not balanced by the
knowledge that her faith held weight for weight of infamy and glory. For
now that Roger was not here there was nothing to remind her that the man
to whom she had given her virginity had not come to her help when she
was going to have his child and had left her to be trodden into the mud
by the fat man Peacey. Now she only knew that she was the beloved mother
of this splendid son. What had happened to the man with whom, according
to the indecent and ridiculous dispensation of nature, she had had to be
enmeshed in a net of hot excitements and undignified physical impulses
in order to obtain this child, mattered nothing at all. He had been so
much less splendid than his son.
She grew well with happiness. She became plumper, and there was colour
on her cheeks as well as in her lips. People ceased to treat her with
the hostility that the happy feel for the unhappy. Presently she knew
that she would soon regain complete self-control and would be able to
keep shut the trap-door of her hidden self, and that it would be quite
safe for her to have Roger back at the end of three months. She began to
speak of it to Richard. "Roger will be with us for Xmas," she used to
say. "We must think out some surprises for him...." To which Richard
would answer tensely, "I s'pose so." That always chilled her, and she
would drop the subject, feeling that after all there was no need to
speak of it just yet. But once, as the days passed into December, she
tried to have it out with him, and followed it up by saying: "You might
try to be a little more pleased about it. I do want you and Roger to be
nice to each other." He answered, looking curiously grown up, "Oh, Roger
will always be nice to me--you needn't worry about that."
As she heard the tone, with its insolent allusion to Roger's natural
slavishness, she realised why the vicar and the teachers in the village
school, and many of the other people with whom he came in contact,
disliked him. There was something terrifying about this cold-tempered
judgment coming from a child. She had wondered, looking at the beauty of
his contemptuous little face and at the extraordinary skill with which
his small brown hands were whittling a block of wood into a figure,
whether it was not a sound instinct on the part of the race to persecute
illegitimate children. Either they were conceived more lethargically
than other children, of women who yielded through feeble-wittedness or
need of money to men who did not love them enough to marry them, and so
were born below the average of the race, dullards that made life ugly,
or parasites that had to be kept on honest people's money in prisons or
workhouses. Or, like, Richard, they had been conceived more intensely
than other children, of love so passionate that it had drawn together
men and women separated by social prohibitions. So they were born to
rule like kings over the lawfully begotten, so that married folk raged
to see that, because they had known no more than ordinary pleasure,
their seed was to be penalised by servitude. Richard would always be
adored by all but the elderly and the impotent.
Because vitality itself had been kneaded into his flesh by his parents'
passion he would not die until he was an old, old man and needed rest
after interminable victories; and because it played through his mind
like lightning, he would always have power over men and material, and
even over himself. Since he had been begotten when beauty, like a strong
goddess, pressed together the bodies of his father and mother, she would
disclose more of her works to him than to other sons of men with whose
begetting she was not concerned. Even now, every time Marion let him
take her to the turn of the road past Roothing, where he could show her
the oak cut like a club on a playing-card and aflame with autumn that
stood on the hill's edge, against the far grey desolation of Kerith
Island and the sunless tides, he knew such joy as one would have thought
beyond a child's achievement. He would get as much out of life as any
man that ever lived. At the thought of the contrast between this heir to
everything and the other child, that poor waif who all his life long
would be sent round to the back door, tears rushed to her eyes, and she
cried indignantly, "Oh, I do think you might be nice to Roger." Richard
looked at her sharply. "What, do you really mind about it, mummie?" The
surprise in his tone told her the worst about her forced and mechanical
kindnesses to Roger. "Oh, more than anything," she almost sobbed. "Very
well, I'll be nice to him," he answered shortly, adding after a minute,
with a deliberate impishness, as if he hated the moment and wanted to
burlesque it, "After all, mums, I never do hit him...." But for the rest
of the evening the golden glow of his face was clouded with solemnity,
and when she was tucking him up that night he said, in an off-hand way,
"You know prob'ly Roger's got much older while he's been away, and I'll
be able to play with him more when he comes back." She laughed happily.
If he was going to help her to frustrate her unnatural hatred of Roger,
she would succeed.