THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF HOME
Recalling for another moment or two the ancient affair of the heart
described in the last chapter, it may pertinently be added that James
Mesurier fulfilled his threat on that occasion, and had in fact written
to the "forward little girl's" parents. Could he have seen the rather
amused reception of his letter, he would have realised with sorrow that
an age of parental leniency, little short of degeneration, was in
certain quarters unmistakably supplanting the stern age of which he was
in a degree an anachronistic survival. That forward little girl's
parents chanced to know James Mesurier enough by sight and reputation to
respect him, while they smiled across to each other at his rather quaint
disciplinarianism. Could Henry Mesurier have seen that smile, he would
not only have felt reassured as to the fate of his little sweetheart,
but have understood that there were temperate zones of childhood, as
well as arctic, when young life waxed gaily to the sound of laughter
and other musical accompaniments.
This revelation, however, was deferred some few years, till he became
acquainted with the merry family of which Mike Laflin was the
characteristic expression. Old Mr. Laflin was a little, jolly,
bald-headed gentleman, bubbling over with mirth, who liked to have young
people about him, and in his quips and cranks was as young as, and much
cleverer than, any of them. It almost startled Henry on his first
introduction to this family of two daughters and two brothers, where the
father was rather like a brother grown prematurely bald, and the
stepmother supplied with monumental dignity that element of solemnity
without which no properly regulated household is complete, to notice the
_camaraderie_ which prevailed amongst them all. Jokes were flying about
from one to another all the time, and the father made a point of capping
them all. This was home in a liberal sense which the word had never
meant to Henry. Doubtless, it had its own individual restrictions and
censorships; but its surface was at all events debonair, and it was
serviceable to Henry as revealing the existence of more genial social
climates than that in which he had been nurtured--though in making the
comparison with his own atmosphere, he realised that this _bonhomie_ was
nothing more important than a grace.
Perhaps, nay, very surely, the seriousness, even the severity of, his
own training, had been among the very conditions needed to make him what
he some day hoped to be, though they had seemed so purposely inimical.
Had James Mesurier's religion been more free and easy, a matter less
personally assured and momentous, his son's almost oppressive sense of
the spiritual significance of existence had been less radiant and
constantly supporting. Life might have gained in superficial
liveableness; but it would have lost in intensity, in real importance,
and with that loss would have gone too Henry's chance of being a poet."
The poet in a golden clime was born!"--once and again, maybe, but more
often he comes from a land of iron and tears.
It is in the nature of things that Henry should begin to appreciate the
services of his home to his development at the moment when he was
leaving it. And the mere pang of the parting from it, when one day the
hour for parting had surely come, was much more deep and complicated
than he could have dreamed. As in our bodies we become conscious of
certain vital centres, certain dependencies of relation and harmony,
only when they have suffered shock, so often in life we may go along
unconscious of the vital dependencies of our human relationships, till
the moment comes to strain or sever them. Then a thousand hidden nerves
quiver at the discovering touch of the knife. Henry's leaving home,
though it had been originally the suggestion of violent feeling, was not
to be an actual severance. His father's "leave my house for ever" had
owed something to the rhetoric of anger, and the expulsion and cutting
off which it had implied had since been so softened as practically to
have disappeared. Henry was certainly not leaving his father's house for
ever, but merely going into lodgings with a friend, with full privileges
to visit his own home as often as he chose.
Still, he was, all the same, leaving home, and he was the first to leave
it. The mother, at all events, knew that this was the beginning of the
end, knew that, with her first-born's departure (desertion, she may have
called it), a new era had commenced for the home,--the era of
disintegration. For twenty years and more it had been all building and
building; now it would be all just pulling down again; and there was a
dreary sound as of demolition and wind-driven rain in her ears.
Oh, tragic love of mothers! Of no love is the final loss and doom so
inevitably destined. The husband may desert the wife, but the son is
sure to desert his mother--must, for nature demands the desertion. Put
not your trust in princes--and yet put it rather in princes, oh, fond
and doting parents, than in the blue-eyed flower of childhood for which
year after year, with labours infinite, you would buy all the sunshine
of the world.
Henry's pang at leaving home was mainly the pang of parting with his
mother. It seemed more than a mere physical parting. It was his
childhood that was parting from her for ever. When he came to see them
he would be something different,--a man, an independent being. As long
ago physically, now spiritually, the umbilical cord had been cut.
With Esther and Dot and Mat the parting was hardly a parting, as it was
rather a promise of their all meeting together some day in a new place
of freedom, which there was a sense of his going out to prepare for
them. Their way would be his way, as the mother's could not; for theirs
was the highway of youth, which, sooner or later, they would all take
together, singing in the morning sun.
The three younger sisters, the as yet unopened buds of the family
flower, took Henry's departure with the surface tears and the central
indifference of childhood. When a family is so large, it practically
includes two generations in itself; and these three girls were really to
prove a generation so different in characteristics from their four
elders as to demand a separate chronicle to themselves.
Thus as Henry drove away amid his trunks from the home of his father
(genealogical poverty denies us the romantic grandiloquence of the
plural), it was his mother's farewell arms and farewell tears, and his
farewell promises to her, of which he was mainly conscious. He had
promised "to take care of himself," and particularly to beware of damp
sheets, and then he too had burst into tears. Indeed, it was generally a
tearful business, after which everybody was glad to retire into corners
to subside privately and dry themselves.
Henry crouched in the corner of his cab with fully half his cry to
finish out; and, curiously, all the time a sad little story from an old
holiday in the country kept haunting him. It was at once a fact and a
fable concerning a happy little family of swallows, whose sudden tragedy
he had seen with his own boyish, pitying eyes.
In a little vinery attached to an old country house which the Mesuriers
had rented for a month or so for certain successive summers, two
swallows had built their nest, and, in due course, there were three
young swallows to keep them company. It was understood that the door of
the vinery must be left open, that the parent swallows might fly to and
fro for food; but by some accident it chanced that the door was one day
closed, and the vinery not visited again for several days. When at last
the door was opened again, the sight that met young eyes was one Henry
had never forgotten. Three little starved swallows, hardly bigger than
butterflies, lay upon the floor, and from the nest above hung the long
horse-hairs with which the parents had vainly sought to anchor them
safely to the home. But still sadder details were forthcoming, when the
children, who had been wondering what had become of the parents, had
suddenly discovered their wasted bodies in the grass a yard or two away
from the vinery door. A few days ago this had been a happy, thriving
home, and now it was absolutely desolated, done away with for ever. It
needed no exceptional imagination or sympathy to conceive the agonised
longing of the parents, as they had dashed themselves again and again
upon that cruel, unyielding door, hearing the piteous cries of their
young ones within, and the anguish in which their exhausted little lives
had at last gone out. The young swallows had died for lack of food; but
the old ones had died--for love. Had some other hand brought them food,
would the young ones have missed the old ones like that?