I
The hay was made and stacked when Mary returned to Yarningdale Farm.
They were thatching the day she arrived, wherefore there was none to
meet her. The old fly with its faded green and musty cushions brought
her over from the station. Those were long moments for contemplation as
they trundled down the country roads and turned into the lanes that led
ultimately to the farm.
The train had been too swift for arrested concentration of thought. In
the train she had not been alone. Here, as the iron-rimmed wheels
rumbled beneath her, crunching the grit upon the road with their
unvarying monotonous note, she felt at last she had come into her haven
and could turn without distraction into the thoughts of her being.
Had ever that old vehicle carried such burden before? With the things
Jane had said still beating up and down in the cage of memory, she
pictured some weeping servant girl dismissed her place, carrying her
burden away with her in shame and fearfulness to find a hiding place in
a staring, watchful world.
Looking out upon the fields as they passed, knowing them as property, to
whoever they might belong, again she felt how the right of possession
amongst men it was that had made shame of the right of creation amongst
women.
"Trespassers will be prosecuted," she read on a passing board that stood
out conspicuously in the hedge as they rolled by.
There it was! That was the law! Trespassers upon the rights of man!
The law would descend with all its force upon their heads. But had they
not trespassed upon the rights of women? Which was the greater? To
inherit and possess? To conceive and create? Did not the world reach
the utmost marches of its limitations in that grasping passion to
possess? Was that not the root of the evil of war, the ugliness of
crime, the stagnation of ideals? To possess and to increase his
possessions, to number Israel and to keep all he had got, were not these
the very letters of the law that held the world in slavery; were not
these the chains in which, like bondwomen, she and her sisters had
walked wearily through the years of their life?
The last lane they passed along led through a heavily timbered wood
before they reached the farm. Some children there were gathering fagots
into their aprons. She leant out of the window to watch them, her mind
set free for that moment of the encompassing sense of possession.
That was the spirit that should rule the world. She knew how hopeless
it was to think that it could be so. It was the spur of possession that
urged men to competition. The whip of competition in turn it was that
drove out idleness from the hearts of men. And yet, if women had the
forming of ideals in the children that were theirs, might they not
conceive some higher and more altruistic plane than this? Giving, not
keeping, might not this be the deep source of a new civilization other
than that which drove the whole world with the stinging lash of
distrust?
She was going to bring a child into the world that would have nothing it
could call its own, not even a name. The fagots of life it must gather.
The berries on the hedgerows which belong to all would be its food. So
she would train its heart to wish for only those things that belonged to
all. Never should it know the fretting passion of possession. Work was
man's justification, not ownership, and a workman he should be; one who
gave with the sweat of his brow and who, by the heart to give which she
would stir in him, would covet of none the things they called their own.
In this spirit--and little more it was in a grasping world than an
ecstasy of thought--Mary Throgmorton came to Yarningdale Farm.
She knew it was a dream she had had; a dream induced in her by the heat
of the day, the monotonous vibrations of that old vehicle she had ridden
in, the still quiet of the countryside through which she had passed.
Yet, nevertheless, for all its ecstasy, for all the dream it might be,
such a dream it was as any woman must surely have, so circumstanced as
she; so driven to rely upon what she alone could give her child for
walking staff to serve him on his journey. Knowing it was a dream, it
seemed no less real to her. Lying that night on the hard-mattressed
bed, in her little room beneath the eaves of the thatch, she took the
dream in purpose into her very soul. Give she must, and all she had,
and what else had she to give but this? For that moment and for all the
months to follow it could be given in the utmost fullness of her mind.
Was it not now and most of all when he was closer to her being than ever
it should so chance again, that she could give out of her heart the
spirit that should go to make him strong to face the world that lay
before him?
Dreams they might be, but such thoughts would she hold with all the
tenacity of her mind until, through external means alone, she was
compelled to feed him. For all those seven months to come, she herself
would work--work in the fields as he must work. The sweat should be on
her brow as it should be on his. Her limbs should ache as one day his
in happy fatigue of labor should ache as well.
It was thus she would make him while yet the time of creation was all
her own and then, when out of her breast he was to take his feed of
life, there would be ways by which she alone could train him to his
purpose.
So still she lay, thinking it all out with thoughts that knew no words
to hamper them, that when at last she fell asleep, it was as one passing
through the hanging of a curtain that just fell into its concealing
folds behind her as she went.