'But when I became mature, I put away childish things.'
*CHAPTER XII*
At other times when I have settled down to write, the words have seemed
to hurry from my brain so fast that my pen has had to race along to
catch the thoughts before they passed into oblivion. But now--though
the desire to write consumes me like a fire, the words come haltingly.
I am afraid lest I should mar the beauty of _this_ thing I know about.
For I have found in marriage the loveliest experience of all.
For on my wedding day, when all the flowers and jewels and lace were
laid aside, and all the good-byes said; the last kiss given to my
father, and the farewells waved to all the loving village folk who were
gathered at the gates to watch me go, I felt a little lonely, and
wondered, as I drove away, if anywhere could ever be again so sweet as
that old home.
When the little journey to the coast was made, and the sun set in a glow
of splendour in the sea, the quiet night came down and the stars hung
softly like jewelled lamps about a purple sky. Out in the windless,
magical sea-scented night my husband caught and kissed me suddenly,--
'You can't send me away to-night, you little fluttering thing.'
But there was something in the quality of his kiss that frightened me,
something almost ruthless in the finality of the words, so that I fled
away upstairs in wild rebellion, because the summer's dalliance was
over. I might elude the man no more. I must say like all the other
women,--
'Meet, if thou require it
Both demands,
Laying flesh and spirit
In thy hands.'
Oh, if it only might be 'to-morrow, not to-night,' and when to-morrow
came? why then again--to-morrow. Thus Mother Eve passed on to me that
fear which caught her once when she, perhaps, was walking in the garden.
I went over to my window and leaned out. The sleeping world lay at my
feet. I looked across the cliffs to where the quiet beauty of the sky
met the wide splendour of the sea, and the great moon flooded the water,
luring me to adventure out upon that rippling, shining pathway, which
seemed to lead to God.
And as I looked I realised that all the natural world responded always
to the natural laws, and, because of that obedience, there was that
restfulness and harmony that had always soothed and quietened me, and
the old 'washed' feeling came and swept away rebellion. So--when that
time came that Michael shut the door, and there was no one in the room
but him and me--he found 'duty' waiting, and that primeval fear that Eve
passed down the ages to her daughter.
I suppose some of my thoughts were painted in my face, for I saw all
that was dogged and ruthless in the man rise up--directed against
himself, not me. I watched him beat down and back that ache and longing
that was in his eyes when he came in, till there was nothing left but a
vast, comprehending tenderness and the strength to wait, until such time
as that frightened look had passed from his ladye's eyes.
And in the quiet shelter of his arms I listened to the very perfect
things he chose to say. That by reason of the 'worship' he had sworn to
give me, there could be no 'demands,' only a lovely gift most urgently
desired if I could give a thing, so priceless, willingly.
And then at something wistful in his face, my love rose up and cast out
fear--that craven thing. And there was a little kiss upon my husband's
lips, so small and light, he hardly knew it there till it had gone--that
little first one that I ever gave him 'of my own accord.' He took my
hands and with the worship deepening in his eyes he asked,--
'Is my beloved mine?'
There flashed into my mind those words which, I suppose, express most
fully the completeness and the glory and perfection of our human love,
and which convey, so perfectly, the utter rest and peace and sweet
contentment which both should find in marriage, when they love.
So I leaned against my husband and he stooped to hear the whispered
words,--
'I am my beloved's, and his desire is towards me.'
So I gave. And in the old surrender of the woman to the man's exultant
mastery, I, too, found love's consummation--and lo!--there was bread and
wine--a chalice and a sacrament.
I have been married, really, such a very little while, yet in these
fifteen months in India I have learned that sometimes women do not give
ungrudgingly--that people speak and write of marriage as if its sweet
abandonment were a thing of which to be ashamed. But if it were, would
Christ have used it as a type of that other union--mystic and
wonderful--between His Church and Him?
And so it seems to me that first should come the 'marriage of the
minds.' If he 'demands' and she gives grudgingly or of necessity, or
with regret, as if for something spoiled--they too are 'wasteful' and
have 'cheapened Paradise.' They have not discerned the Sacrament, but
have
'Spoiled the bread, and spilled the wine
Which, spent with due respective thrift
Had made brutes men, and men divine.'
And, by the way, I'm sure it's time I got in all those other bits I know
about. Those poor birds of the South Pole, still waiting on the ice for
me to bring them fame! And then that other king, but oh! he was so
dull. He missed the best of everything in life: for William II., 1087,
never married; and so of course he never knew what we shall know in four
more weeks, that 'A child's kiss, set on thy sighing lips, shall make
thee glad.'
And when the labour and the travail are all done, and my baby rests in
my arms, I shall have more 'experience.' I shall be linked up with all
the other mothers of the world. Oh, dare I say it? Humbly I do. I
shall be linked up, faintly and far off, even with Mary.
*PART II*
*FOUR YEARS LATER*
*CHAPTER I*
'I start life on my own account and don't like it.'
Grammar is not my strong point, and I never could quote correctly, but
my geography is hopeless. I always remember, however, when I am at sea
that the earth revolves around the sun, and on its axis, too, for I can
feel the double motion in every fibre of my being.
Now that I am once more on dry land and the universe has ceased to rock
I have gone back to my childish and comfortable belief that the world is
a nice, firm, square thing fixed on four legs like a dining-room table.
I really am a shocking sailor, though 'the Gidger'[#]--my small
daughter--loves the sea. The stewardess was an angel of light to me,
yet she insisted on my turning out for all the boat drills. I felt I
would so much rather lie in my berth than bother about my place in a
boat if we were torpedoed, that it would be so much less exertion to go
down comfortably in the big ship than toss about in a small boat on the
chance of being saved. One great advantage of _mal de mer_ is that all
other sensations are obliterated. I was not conscious of the least fear
when the ship next to ours went down, and the fact that our own escaped
a like fate by a miracle left me cold. Even my loneliness and misery at
my first parting from Michael since our marriage were all
forgotten--swallowed up in one great desire to lie down flat and perhaps
take a little iced champagne, 'for my stomach's sake,' like poor darling
Timothy.
[#] _Re_ the nick-name Gidger, the first 'G' is pronounced as in Gideon
and the second 'g' as in German.
Over four whole years of life I've 'drawn a veil,' and, oh, so much has
happened since I finished the last chapter.
I've got to know my husband, that's one thing. A woman never really
knows a man when first she marries him. That old woman in our village
used to say 'the longer you live with a man, the less you like him,' and
she ought to know, she was 'thrice widowed.'
So I have discovered that mine is a very quaint person, with primitive,
old-world ideas, that make him ruthless with himself and other people
about 'work' and 'duty'; and because he never had a sister (and a mother
only for an hour), he's rather apt to think any woman who powders her
nose is of necessity a painted Jezebel! Shall I ever forget his face on
the steamer going out to India, when one of those dear, delicious,
natural, American women produced a small mirror and a powder puff in the
social hall and said to her friend,--
'Say, Sadie, why didn't you tell me I'd got a nose like a headlight?'
And his expression! when I told him that _of course_ I had the same
things in my pocket. Why, good gracious, is there any woman who doesn't
powder her nose, though I do agree with him that some of them put it on
thicker than they need.
Then, too, he can, and will, only talk upon subjects he understands.
Imagine the devastating dullness of a life lived on those lines. But
now. he says 'two in a family can't talk, there aren't enough words to
go round.' So my black beast (as I call him), has been content to adore
and bully me by turns, and fill his life with deeds, and leave the words
for other people and his wife. Consequently, I am not perfectly
positive yet how much less I like him.
One day, after the war had raged two years in France, he came and told
me that he was ordered to the Front, and I could see the soldier and the
lover struggling in his face.
'Oh, Meg, I'm going, so I shan't miss it after all, but how _can_ I
leave you?'
Other things besides the war have happened in those four years. Daddy
did not settle down in Devonshire, but his passion for men's souls has
driven him to one of the terrible places of the earth, where he lives
among natives, for whom he has always had a kind of abhorrence. He and
Porky wage war against the devil over an immense tract of country, for
daddy is on the Bench now, and his diocese is next to that of the Bishop
of Ligeria. They meet once a year, daddy and his old fag, both consumed
with a burning desire that men's bodies should be clean and their souls
washed white, both so muscular and so militant that they are utterly
unable to comprehend 'the church passive,' or to see why a man can't
shoot and ride and crack a joke as well as pray. But then, as Ross used
to say, 'Father is a man first and a parson afterwards.' I have
sometimes wondered, since I have learned to see things 'farther than my
nose,' whether the sentiment expressed so elegantly by my brother did
not contain an element of truth, _i.e._ 'that the chaps in the pews are
more likely to listen to what the chap in the pulpit is jawing about if
they know he's a good shot and rides as straight as they do.'
But the thrill of the years was Cousin Emily, who, without a word to any
one, let her house in Hampstead and turned up one day at daddy's
bungalow and announced that she had come to keep house for him and to
instil kindness to animals among the natives. My father (with that
mediaeval humour that made people in the Middle Ages put up gargoyles on
their churches) says 'Emily's parrot, Meg, has done more for the cause
than any missionary ever born will do. The natives simply love the
collect for the seventeenth Sunday after Trinity!'
At one of the annual meetings Porky asked Emily if he could borrow the
godly bird for _his_ diocese, but there was that in his eyes which made
her know he wanted her as well. So daddy married them, and they are now
like the parrot, 'continually given to all good works together!
The paralytic chaplain's health has given out. The strain of one of the
annual meetings (or else the climate) was too much for him, so he has
been sent home, and has a curacy in England and a wife now, who can lay
those 'snow-white flowers' against his hair! And talking of England
reminds me that while Michael wrestled with his packing in a kind of
sulphurous haze, I pulled strings. If you pull them hard enough in India
you can generally make the puppets work, so somehow I got a passage and
embarked for England three days after Michael sailed for France.
Captain Everard, a great friend of my brother, sailed in the same boat.
He was so kind when I felt sick and kept my small daughter amused.
When I got to Tilbury I was limper than Elizabeth Barrett Browning's
'damp rag hung over the back of a chair.' I don't know what I should
have done without the dear little stewardess to pack for me, and Captain
Everard to help me and the Gidger through the customs, and all the other
nightmare horrors of a landing in England in war time. I suppose I said
I was 'British' when the Aliens Officer asked me my nationality, but I
felt like a disembowelled spirit. (No, I don't mean disembodied!)
Captain Everard could not come to London with me, but got me a corner
seat in a carriage with only three men in it, nice chaps in the
Pioneers, one of whom Captain Everard knew slightly.
*CHAPTER II*
At last after an interminable and arctic journey, during which I passed
through every phase of land and sea sickness and might have died of cold
but for a timely dose of brandy from the Pioneers, the train glided into
the gloom of St Pancras station. Suddenly everything turned rose
colour. Such a delicious surprise! Waiting under one of the shaded
lamps was that wounded warrior--Ross. He looked so dear and big and
beautiful in his kilt. I flung myself and the Gidger, regardless of
life and limb, and the restraining hands of three Pioneers, out of the
carriage and into his arms almost before the train had stopped. Did you
ever know anything so delightful? He had coaxed the shipping company
for information about the boat and got leave from the hospital to meet
me. He enveloped us both in a huge hug with his one good arm. Oh, I
was pleased to see him after five years, my dear adorable twin brother.
I told him about the Pioneers, and he said,--
'Really, Meg, I think drinking spirits in a railway carriage with
strange soldiers is about the limit of anything even you've ever done!'
But he thanked them very nicely. He has such charming manners when he
chooses (he ought to have, I brought him up), he told them I was such a
bad traveller, and that he was much obliged to them for looking after
me. The Pioneers said it was a great relief to their minds that some
one had met me; so if it was to theirs you can imagine what it was to
mine.
The Gidger loved 'Uncle Woss' at once, and was deeply interested in his
M.C. ribbon and bandaged arm, and the admiration seemed mutual, for Ross
said,--
'Oh, what a Poppet, Meg.'