CHAPTER XI

He was saying, “We must go in. Can you go in?” She breathed, “I can.”

That dinner! That after-dinner in the drawing-room upstairs! It is a

nightmare to be imagined, not to be described. Imagine walking from the

darkness and the frightful secret of the passage into the blazing

dazzle and the glittering eyes of the resplendent dinner party! They, in

Harry’s absence, have been exchanging the last private nods and flashes.

“Soon! Soon!” they have been nodding to one another. Uncle Pyke, licking

his chops anticipatorily of his bath in his soup, has been licking them

also in relish of working off his daughter in this excellent match;

Aunt Belle, kind, kind Aunt Belle, with a last satisfied eye about the

appointments of the table, has patted her Laetitia’s hand and conveyed

to her, “Soon, soon, darling; soon, soon!” Beautiful Laetitia has given

a gentle, glad squeeze to the patting hand and smiled a lovely, happy,

certain smile. “Soon! Soon!” has gone the jolly signal--and it is not

going to be soon, nor late; it is never, never going to happen; and

worse than never happen!

Worse than never happen! That’s it. That is the awful knowledge of awful

guilt with which Rosalie sits there and freezes in guilty agony at every

pause in the conversation and could scream to notice how the pauses

grow longer and longer, more frequent and more frequent yet. There’s

a frightful constraint, a chilly, creepy dreadfulness steals about

the party. They go upstairs--Aunt Belle and Rosalie and beautiful

Laetitia--and the constraint goes with them. They sit and stare and

hardly a word said. Something’s up! What’s up? What’s the matter with

everything? Why is everything hanging like this! What’s up? And the men

come in--Uncle Pyke swollen with food, swollen with indigestion, swollen

with baffled perplexity and ferocious irritation; and Harry--she dare

not look at Harry--and the thing is worse, the awfulness more awful.

Glances go shooting round the awful silences--Uncle Pyke’s atrabilious

eye in the burning fiery furnace of his swollen face is a stupendous

note of interrogation directed upon Aunt Belle; Aunt Belle’s eyebrows

arch to scalp and appear likely to disappear into her scalp and remain

there in the effort to express, “I don’t know! I can’t imagine!”;

Laetitia--Laetitia’s eyes upon her mother are as a spaniel’s upon one

devouring meat at table.

Frightfulness more frightful, awfulness more awful; in Rosalie almost

now beyond control the desire to scream, or to burst into tears or

wildly into laughter. Then she knows herself upon her feet and hears

her voice: “Aunt Belle. I must go, I think. I think I am very tired

to-night.”

They suffer her to go.

That’s all a nightmare; but, when the door is closed upon them, like a

nightmare gone. She was alone upon the staircase and then down in the

hall--by those coats!--and, as though no ghastly interval had been, the

amazing and beloved moment was returned to her. Out of a nightmare into

a dream! She stood in her dream a moment--two moments--three--by

the hall door. Who till that evening never had thought of love,

astonishingly was invested with all love’s darling cunning. She felt

somehow he would see her again before she left; and love’s dear cunning

told her right. He came swiftly down the stairs. She never knew on what

pretext he had left the room. He came to her. Love loves these snatched

moments and always makes them snatched to breathlessness. She opened

the door and must be gone. She said to him, speaking first, “Oh, we were

vile in there! How vile we were!”

It was, the intimacy and the abruptness of it, the perfect comprehension

that their thoughts were shared, as if they had known and loved for

years.

He caught her hand. “My conspirator! My secret-sharer!”

She gave him her heart in her eyes.

He said, “To-morrow, I will come to you.”

She disengaged her hand.

He gave a swift look all about and caught her in his arms. “You must

tell me, my Rosalie. Tell me.”

She breathed, “You knew, before I knew, that I loved you.”

When she was home and got to her room she undressed, suffering her

clothes to lie as they slipped from her. She got into bed, moving there

and then lying there as one in trance.

Cataclysm! All she had been, all she had determined--all, all gone;

all nothing, surrendered all. At a touch, in a moment, without a cry,

without a shot, without a stroke, all her life’s habit swept away. All

she had been, all she’d designed, all she had built within herself

and walled about herself, all she had scorned, all that with a violent

antipathy she had shuddered from or with curled lip spurned away,--all,

all betrayed, breached, mined, calamitously riven, tumultously sundered,

burst away.

She turned her face to the pillow and began to cry--most frightfully.

It was very terrible for Rosalie.

PART THREE--HOUSE OF CHILDREN

CHAPTER I

There’s none so sick as, brought to bed, that robust he that ever

has scorned sickness; nor any sinner like a saint suddenly gone from

saintliness to sin; and there can be no love like love suddenly leapt

from repression into being.

Rosalie, that had abhorred the very name of love, now finding love was

quite consumed by love. She loved him so! Even to herself she never

could express how tremendous a thing to her their love was. She used

deliberately to call it to her mind (as the new, rapt possessor of a

jewel going specially to the case to peep and gloat again) and when she

called it up like that, or when, in the midst of occupation, her

mind secretly opened a door and she turned and saw it there, a surge,

physically felt, passed through her, and she would nearly gasp, her

breath taken by this new, this rapturous element, as the bather’s at his

first plunge in the cold, the splendid sea.

She loved him so! She looked at him with eyes, not of an inexperienced

girl blinded by love, but of one cynically familiar with the traits of

common men, intolerantly prejudiced, sharply susceptible to every note

or motion of displeasing quality; and her eyes told her heart, and what

is much more told her mind, that nothing but sheer perfection was here.

Harry was brilliantly talented, Harry was in face and form one that

took the eye among a hundred men. But she had known all that and freely

granted him all that before. What she found as she came to know him, and

when they were married what she continued to find, was simply, that he

was perfect. He was perfect in every way and there was no way in

which, inclining neither to the too much nor the too little, he was not

perfect.

The labour of a catalogue of her Harry’s virtues is thus discounted.

Name a virtue in a man and it was Harry’s. Declare too much perfection

is as ill to live with as too much fault, and it is precisely just

before too much is reached that Harry’s dowry stopped. Suggest she was

blind to defects, and it is to be answered that there was no man who

knew him that ever had a thought against him (except Uncle Pyke, Colonel

Pyke Pounce, R.E., who, justifiably, was warned by his physician never

to think upon the monster lest apoplexy should supervene) nor any fellow

man in his profession (and that is the supreme test) that ever grudged

him his success. Disgruntled barristers, morosely brooding upon the fall

of plums into other mouths than theirs, always said, when it was Harry’s

mouth: “Ah, Occleve; yes, but he’s different. No one grudges Harry

Occleve what he gets.”

Different! In Rosalie’s fond, fondest love for him she often used to hug

her love by making that catalogue of all his parts that has been shown

not to be necessary. And it was the little, tiny things wherein he

differed from common men that especially she cherished. By the deepest

part of her nature terribly susceptible to the grosser manifestations

of the male habit, it was extraordinarily wonderful and delicious to her

that Harry of these had none. In an age much given to easy freedom of

language it will not be appreciated, it perhaps will cause the pair

of them to be sneered at, but it demands mention as illuminating

a characteristic of hers (and of his), that she had, for instance,

especial delight in the fact that Harry never even swore. The impossible

test in the matter of self-command is when a man hits his thumb with

a hammer. What does a bishop say when he does that? But she saw Harry

catch his thumb a proper crack hanging a picture in the house they

took, and, “Mice and Mumps!” cried Harry, and dropped the hammer and

the picture, and jumped off the stepladder, and did a hop, and wrung his

hand, and laughed at her and wrung his hand and laughed again. “Mice and

Mumps!”

“Mice and Mumps!” It always seemed to her to characterise and to

epitomise him, that grotesque expression. It always made her laugh; and

the more serious the accident or the dilemma that brought it to Harry’s

lips, the more, by pathos, one was forced to laugh and the seriousness

thereby dissipated into an affair not serious at all. Yes, that was the

point of it and the reason it epitomised him. There was none of life’s

dilemmas--little dilemmas that irritate ordinary people or in which

ordinary people display themselves pusillanimous; or tragic dilemmas

that find ordinary people wanting and leave them in vacillation and

despair--there was none of any sort that Harry, receiving with his

comic, “Mice and Mumps! Mice and Mumps, old girl!” did not receive with

the assurance to her that, though this was a nuisance, he had metal and

to spare to settle such; that, though this was a catastrophe, a facer,

he’d too much courage, too much high, brave spirit for it to discommode

him; there was no fight in such, he was captain of such, trust him!

“One who never turned his back but marched breast forward.”

That was Harry!

“Mice and Mumps!” On the evening of the day following that astounding

betrothal of theirs, affianced as it were at a blow--a day spent

together in the park complete, without a break for food or thought of

occupation--on the evening of that day he must go, he de-clared, to the

horrific castle in Pilchester Square and break the awful news, proclaim

his villainy.

She was terrified. “They’ll kill you, Harry. Write.”

“No, no. I’ve been a howling cad. It’s true, a howling cad, not of

guile, but of these astounding things that have happened to us outside

ourselves, but nevertheless a howling cad as such conduct is judged,

and will be judged. So I must go through it. I must. That’s certain. I

couldn’t hide behind a letter. They are entitled to tell me to my face

what they think of me. They must have their right. Oh, yes, I’ve got to

give them that. To-night. Now.”

A howling cad, but of forces outside themselves (“Too quick for me,” he

had explained), not of guile.

He had explained, in those enchanted hours in the park, that it was

really by resolve to do the right thing, and not to do the caddish

thing, that he had presented himself the howling cad that they would

hold him. That night at the Sturgiss’s at Cricklewood had charged him

(“Oh, Rosalie, like bursting awake to breathe from suffocation in a

dream.”) what for many days, only looking at her, never speaking to

her, suffering her not veiled contempt, he had felt as one feels a

premonition that is insistent but that cannot be defined--that night

had charged him that he loved her. He was no way definitely committed

to poor Laetitia. Was he more wrong if, now knowing his heart was

otherwhere, he maintained and carried to its consummation the intimacy

between Laetitia and himself, or if he stopped while yet he had not gone

too far? He had decided to break while yet it might, be broken. There

was an invitation from Mrs. Pyke Pounce he had accepted. He wrote,

endeavouring to give a meaning to his words, excusing himself from it.

She murmured, “I remember.” (“Nothing in it, dear child; nothing in

it!”)

There came back a letter from Colonel Pyke Pounce in which Colonel Pyke

Pounce also had endeavoured to give a meaning to his words, and had

succeeded. Now Harry knew his problem of moral conduct in a fiercer

form; now, resolving to do what he told himself was the right thing and

not the caddish thing, he took the step that made him be the howling cad

that they would think him. (“But, Rosalie, gave me you!”)

He had resolved that he must accept the invitation, present himself at

the house--and let the hour decide. As the situation revealed itself

so he would accept it. If it was made clear to him, as the Pyke Pounce

letter much gave him to believe, that proposal for Laetitia’s hand was

expected of him, he would “do the right thing” and stand by what his

behaviour apparently had led them to expect; if the way still seemed

open, the door not shut behind him, he would very frankly explain to

Laetitia’s grisly father that he thought it best his visits to the house

from now should cease. The hour should decide! But there was in the

hour, when it came, one terrible, one lovely element that he never had

expected to be there. In all his visits to the house Rosalie never had

been met on any other day than Saturday. This dinner was on the Monday,

and arriving to face and carry through his ordeal, he was startled, he

was utterly shaken to see her there. (“To see my darling there.”)

O forces outside themselves! “When you had to pass me in the passage

nothing mattered then--except I could not let you pass.”

So it was that now, the right thing not having been done on that night,

the right thing in this new position must be done to-day. They were

entitled to tell him to his face what they thought of him and they must

have their right. That was his view and he would not abate it.

“They’ll kill you, Harry.”

They had come by this to the corner of Pilchester Square and there he

bade her wait. She said again, part laughing, most in fear, “They’ll

kill you.”

“I’ve got to give them the chance to do their best.”

And off he went, strongly, erect. One who never... but marched breast

forward.

Waiting for him, she really was terrified for him. Ferocious Uncle

Pyke! Terrific Aunt Belle! Swollen and infuriated Uncle Pyke! Bitter and

outraged Aunt Belle!

In twenty minutes came the crash of a slammed front door that clearly

and terribly was Uncle Pyke Pounce slamming it as if he would hurl it

through its portals and crash it on to Harry down the steps.

Harry reappeared, uncommonly grave.

She put out a hand to him, dreadfully anxious.

“Mice and Mumps!” said Harry. “Mice and Mumps!”

You couldn’t help laughing! But also, squeezing the strong arm beneath

which he tucked her hand, you felt, with such a thrill, from that

grotesque expression, and from his face as he said it, that this, like

every forward thing, had in it nothing that could discommode that high,

brave spirit: no fight in such; he was captain of such, trust him!

Thus also her delight in another form, and yet in the same form, in that

grotesque expression, when it was ejaculated as his sole expletive when

he caught his thumb that frightful crack while hanging a picture in what

was to be his study in their newly taken house.

Any other man in the world, even a bishop, would have sworn; would have

sworn no doubt harmlessly and with an honest heartiness to which the

most pious prude could not have taken exception. Agreed! But the point

was--that Harry didn’t!

She loved him so! She insisted she must bind up the thumb with her

pocket handkerchief, and did, Harry protesting; and for years, still

loving him with the old, first love, she often would be reminded by the

picture of the incident and of her joy in it.

Yes, the only expletive she ever heard him use; and, lo, in that very

room, years on, he seated beneath that very picture, she was to come to

him with news (and hers the guilt of it) that for the first time was to

strike him between the joints of his harness, visibly ageing him as she

spoke, and for the first time cause him to groan his pain. She was

to glance at the picture as she spoke and very terribly its merry

association to be recalled to her. She was to recall him young, gay,

tremendously splendid, wringing his damaged hand, laughing, “Mice and

Mumps!” She was to see him, grey ascendant upon the raven of his hair,

shrinking down in his seat, wilting as one slowly collapsing after a

stunning blow, and at her news (and hers the guilt of it) to hear

his voice go, not exclamatorily, but in a thick mutter, as one dazed,

bewildered, in a fog, “My God, my God, my God, my God!”

How could one ever have foreseen that?

CHAPTER II

She loved him so! On that first day together in the park she told

him everything about herself, about all her ideas and theories and

principles, particularly where these touched his sex, even about that

terrible fit of crying of hers in bed an hour after she had left him.

And Harry understood everything and agreed with her in everything. O

rapturous affinity!

They met early when business London was rushing to business. They stayed

late, with no thought of food or of their occupations, till business

London was returning, and night, in lamps below and stars above, was

setting out its sentinels.

She told him everything; and even if she had wished not to open all her

heart, there would have been the immense selection of everything--every

single thing about herself--from which to choose to tell him. For there

never had been such a betrothal as theirs; done at a blow with no single

intimate thing ever before passed between them! Her very first words to

him as they met, her greeting of him as they came together, showed how

preposterous and never-before-imagined was their affiancement. “You

know, it’s incredible,” she greeted him. “It’s incredible, it’s

grotesque, it’s flatly impossible--I’ve never before seen you except in

your dress clothes or at afternoon tea!”

Harry took both her hands in his. “But I think I’ve wanted you,” said

Harry, “ever since I was in long clothes. I know I’ve wanted you ever

since first I saw you.”

One knows another, in her place, would have bantered this off in that

modern attitude towards love which is a horror, boisterously expressed,

of admitting love as an emotion. Rosalie, that had scorned the very name

of love, and that, because betrayed by love, had turned her face to her

pillow and cried most frightfully, received it with a sound that was

between a sigh and a catching of her breath. She loved him so!

And then they talked; and the thing between them, that had come so

wonderfully, was so wonderful that they were as it were transfigured by

it, as awe and spirituality and mysticism would fill the dwellers in a

house visited by a miracle of God. So wonderful, that conversation, they

would have felt, was not possibly a word for all that occupied them in

those rapturous hours: not conversation, no,--a sublime engagement of

their spirits wherein (possessing the keys of all the wonders), seas,

continents and worlds of thoughts were traversed by them, in every clime

most exquisite affinity discovered.

As at a blow they had become affianced, so, with no stage between,

but in immediate sequence perfectly natural to them both, the natural

repercussion of the blow, they talked immediately of betrothal’s

consummation, of marriage, of their marriage.

About marriage Rosalie had immensely much to tell Harry. It was what she

had principally to say, and this is how and why and what she told him.

When from her first terrible dismay--that frightful crying, her face

turned to the pillow--she had recovered; when to the lovely ardour of

her love--stealing about her, soothing her, in the night; bursting upon

her, ravishing her, in the morning--she had passed on; she remembered

her second line of her defences and she fell back upon it. “If ever I

fell in love,” she had often said, alike to Keggo and to Miss Salmon,

“if such an impossible thing ever were to happen to me, I’d marry as

marriage should be. I’d enter a partnership. I would live my life; he

would live his life; together, when we wanted to, when we were off duty,

so to speak, we would live our life. A partnership, a mutually free and

independent partnership.”

The second line of her defences! Oh, strong and reassuring thought! Of

course, of course the first line, breached and swept away, had never

really mattered. Foolish to have wept for it! It was built against

love and she knew now, by her darling and her terrible experience, that

against love----! Nay, in that whelming admission’s very tide, sweeping

upon her from envisagement of Harry and bearing her deliciously upon its

flood, there had come a thought as strong with wine as that was sweet

with honey. Built against love! Why, in seeking to build against love,

to shut away love from her life, was she not perpetrating against

herself the very act--denial of anything a free life might have--that it

was her life’s first principle to oppose? A man’s place, a man’s part,

everything that a man by conventional dowry is given, hers should be as

freely as a man’s it is! That was her aim; that at once the basis of her

standpoint and the target of her shaft; and lo, at the very outset of

her independence, she had sought to deny herself that which (as now

she knew) was life’s most lovely gift. She was steadfast, and she was

caparisoned, to obtain and to possess the things that, of her sex,

commonly a woman might not have, and she was shutting herself from that

which, if it offers, not all the man-owned world can deny the woman

lowliest in office, heaviest in chains, deepest in servitude!

O senselessness! She could see, as looking upon an individuality not her

own, that foolish girl that for such had turned her face to her pillow

and cried out her heart; and at that very moment, and no other, of

smiling pity for that mistaken grief, there came to Rosalie a sudden

sense of womanhood attained; of much increase of years and wisdom; of

growth of stature; of transportation, as from one world to another, from

the character and the presence that had been hers to a personality and

a body that looked down upon that other as, tenderly, a mother upon the

innocence of her small child.

That poor, brave, foolish Rosalie that was! Did she protest, that

foolish girl, that she was right in what had been her attitude to love?

Did she with would-be bitterness recall those views laid down upon the

women in the boarding house--that they were derelicts precisely through

this love business, abandoned of men, relict of men, footsore and fallen

in pursuit of men?

Ah, small, misguided creature! The principles were right but all askew

the application. Love! Consider other attributes of life. Consider

learning; consider food. Learning and food--were they not bounties of

life’s treasure, to be absorbed and used for sustenance in order, by

their nourishment, to give to live this life more fully? Why, so with

love! Derelicts, those women, because receiving love (that loveliest

gift of all!) not as a means but as an end--the end of all: that

attained, everything attained; that won, all finished. That was it! That

the misapplication! Learning, or food, or love--the same with all! How

dead the life that only lived in scholarship; how gross the life that

only lived to eat; how derelict that she that only lived to love, to

marry--then ceased to live!

And equally, O small, misguided girl, how starved the life that has no

books; how weak the frame that has no food; ah, dear (thus smiled she to

herself), how dead the life that knows not love!

The second line of her defences! Nay, as now through this mature and

happy cogitation she saw it, the first and last and only line! In her

aloneness, in that girl’s single life, there had been nothing against

which to defend. She had fought phantoms, that girl; resisted shadows.

Now was the necessity, now the test; and now, because with Harry,

because she loved him so, because he was every way and in all things

perfect, now should be the triumphant exposition.

And she told Harry: marriage that should be a partnership--not an

absorption by the greater of the less; not one part active and the other

passive; one giving, the other receiving; one maintaining, the other

maintained; none of these, but instead a perfect partnering, a perfect

equality that should be equality of place, equality of privilege,

equality of duty, equality of freedom. “Harry, each with work and with

a career. Harry, each living an own life as every man, away from home,

shutting his front door upon that home and off to work, leads an own and

separate life. Harry--”

Oh, wonderful beneath this imperturbable sky, amongst these common,

passive things--these paths, those trees, that grass, this bench--within

this seclusion of that murmurous investment of this city, the ceaseless

roar of London, standing like patient walls, eternal and indifferent,

about her quietudes. Oh, wonderful in these accustomed and insensible

surroundings thus to be calling “Harry,” as he were brother, him that a

day and night away virtually was unmet; to be exposing, as to a gracious

patron, all her mind’s treasury of thought; to be revealing, as in

confessional, her inmost places of her heart; to be receiving, as by

transfusion, the glow of affirmation on her way and in her trust. Oh,

wonderful!

Wonderful, because remember for her that she was still beneath the shock

of her dismay at her betrayal of herself; still breathless at that rout

from her prepared positions; not yet assured her banners were unsullied

in their withdrawal to her second line; not yet convinced it was no

rout but a withdrawal, wise and strategical, ranks unbroken, to the true

point of her defence.

Do try to imagine her, tremulous in this her vital enterprise, tremulous

in this wonder that her armies found. It is very desirable to remember

what can be remembered for that girl.

CHAPTER III

Harry assured her! Harry convinced her! Harry was here upon the

battlements, come with her in her retirement, joined with her as her

ally. All her ideas were his ideas. He, too, had these new views of

marriage. He said they always had been his. He hated, as she hated, that

old dependence notion: all the privileges the man’s, the woman’s all the

duties. That was detestable to him, said Harry. Marriage in his view--

“I’ll tell you this,” was one thing Harry said. “I’ll show it to you

this way, Rosalie. I don’t exactly know what a reciprocating machine

is, but I know what it sounds like, and what it sounds like is what

a marriage ought to be,--a perfect fitting together, a perfect

harmonising, a perfect joining of two perfect halves that everywhere

reciprocate.”

The word delighted her. A reciprocating machine! Yes, yes! Each an own

part; each with own and separate interests; and their parts, and

the production arising out of their interests--their individual

selves--approached together, by free will, to join towards a mutual

benefit, a shared endeavour, a common advancement, a single end.

She was desperately in earnest and so was he. There was a mill near his

people’s home in Sussex, a water mill, and his illustration by it of the

design they had showed her how earnestly her own ideas were his. There

were two wheels to this mill, Harry told her, one on either side. Each

ran in its own stream, each was entirely independent of the other; they

worked alone, but each helped the other’s work; the mill joined them and

they joined to make the mill.

That was it!

And she was not talking any generalities, and Harry was not, either.

They weren’t, either of them, playing with this idea of mutual

independence. There would “of course” be a business basis to it, Rosalie

said. She was earning her own income and she would pay her half of the

upkeep of their home together. It was a stipulation that she advanced

with a definite fear that here, at last, she might be taking Harry from

his depth; that by natural instinct of generosity, or by instinct of

immemorial custom to endow the wife with all the husband’s worldly

goods, he would here reveal a flaw in his till now flawless duplication

of the views that were her own.

But Harry (the never failing rapture of it!) was every way without spot

or blemish. He was looking straight and close into her eyes while she

put forward this, and there moved not the least dissentient shade across

his own while he received it. She need have had no fear. He said, “I

agree absolutely with that, Rosalie. There’s only one point--” and his

expansion of this point wholly entranced her because it established

conditions even more matter-of-fact and businesslike than her own broad

principle.

“There’s only one point,” Harry said. “It can’t be half and half in

terms of actual bisection. Look, Rosalie, in this matter of running the

home we’re making a contract between two parties and--don’t forget I’m a

lawyer--it has to be an equable and just contract, and to be that it has

to be based for each party’s liability--Do you like me to use the law

jargon?”

She nodded. “I do, I do!” This was frightfully, entrancingly serious for

her. This was a survey of the fortifications of her second line of her

defences. “I do, I do!”

“Well, has to be based for each party’s liability on each party’s

interest, on the extent to which each party is involved. I’m making

more--an uncommon good bit more--than you are, Rosalie. My interest,

therefore my liability, that is, my share, has to be allowed to be

proportionately the more. Put it in another way. We’re going to run an

establishment as an establishment might be run by two or more people of

different incomes who wish to join forces for mutual pleasure, two or

three relatives, two or three friends. Well, there’s a regular principle

governing that kind of arrangement. You don’t all pay the same. If you

did, you’d reduce the scale of living to the level of what the poorest

can afford, and half the idea of the combination is to enjoy a very

much better scale. No, you run the show on the level the wealthiest is

willing to go to, and to the total charge each one contributes in the

proportion of his income. If one party has a thousand a year and the

other five hundred, and the thousand-pounder wants to live at the rate

of nine hundred a year, he pays six hundred and the other three hundred.

Each is paying his just share--that’s the point. That’s how we’d arrange

it, Rosalie.”

She loved him so! If that were said a thousand times (as already perhaps

too often for the robust) it still would not approach the volume of its

swelling in the heart of Rosalie, for that was ceaseless. His attitude

in this matter now between them, as in every matter, might have been the

perfect agreement with her own view that it was and yet might so have

been presented as to be much antipathetic to her. His attitude might

have made her feel she ought to say, “Thank you, Harry, for agreeing to

that”; it might have had the note, “I know exactly how you feel about

marriage; I want to make every-thing just as you wish.” Quicksands!

Principles to be received as grants, bases of her defences to be

accepted as concessions! Quicksands! At either attitude, as at a foreign

flavour in a cup, she would have drawn back, suspicious; at either sense

within herself, of winning a favour, of accepting a hazard, she would

have taken alarm, dismayed. But it was why she loved him so that here,

as everywhere, his standpoint was her standpoint’s own reflection. She

was, as she would have said, deadly in earnest; deadly in earnest to

a depth that she could let go to absurdity and never know it for

absurdity; and so was he.

Approving this plan of computation of the share that each would pay, “It

would have to be done strictly,” she said, “as though it were strictly

business. And--you don’t know, perhaps--I’m making, or soon shall be,

just on five hundred a year.”

He smiled the nice smile of his she loved, more with his eyes than with

his lips. “I’m afraid mine’s a good bit more than that. Money’s rather

pushed at you at the Bar once it starts. You’d have to put up with

that.”

Her fondness in her eyes reflected him. “I know how famous you are

getting. I’d not be stupid about that, Harry. It would be the just

share, each according to our means; that’s understood. Only, for me, it

would have to be the just share, that’s what I’m saying; not a matter of

form, a strict proportion.”

“If you liked,” said Harry, “we’d give the figures to the costs clerk at

my chambers and let him work the contributions out.”

“Absurd!” she might have laughed; and as an absurdity he might, with a

laugh, have presented it. But quite gravely he made the suggestion, and

quite gravely, after a moment’s grave thought, “I don’t think that would

be necessary,” she returned.

His earnestness in this thing so vital to her matched her own, and

therefore she loved him; and he yet could bring to it lightly a touch

which, though light, yet was profoundly based; and therefore, newly, she

loved him. She knew she talked with immense profligacy of words in her

endeavour to make clear the principles this second line of her defences

must maintain. “Each with work and with a career, each with an own

and separate life.” She kept repeating that. “Equal in work and in

responsibility, Harry, and therefore equal in place, in privilege, in

freedom.”

And Harry, with a light touch but a grave air, a happy setting for a

profound meaning, put it in a sentence. “Things which are equal to the

same thing are equal to one another,” said Harry.

She loved him so!

But there ought here to be explained for her what, loving him so and

he so loving her, she could not have known for herself. This plan of

maintaining their establishment by contribution of share and share was

maintained by Rosalie from the beginning--to the end. She never had

cause to doubt that in all the earnestness of that close conversation

Harry was utterly sincere. She often recalled that steady gaze with no

dissentient shade across it with which his eyes received her statement

of her case and knew that only truth was in that gaze. He did believe

what she believed. It only was afterwards she discovered that also he

believed that, both for her and him, the thing would mellow down as

mellows down the year, her heady Aprils burnt in June, her burning Junes

assuaging to September; that it would pass; that time--

Yes, it must be explained. It was not active in his mind, this

reservation. It was passive, underlying, subconscious, as beneath

vigour’s incredulity of death lies passively admission of death’s final

certitude. He believed what she believed; but he believed it as are

believed infinity and eternity: wherein mankind, believing, reposes upon

that limitation of the human mind which cannot conceive infinity but

sees ultimately an end, and can pretend eternity through myriad years

but feels ultimately a termination. Harry believed what she believed but

only by stabilisation of a man’s inherent articles of faith. He was of

the male kind; and observe, by an incident, what inherent processes of

thought the male kind has:

When they were looking over the house which ultimately they took--an all

ways most desirable house in Montpelier Crescent, Knightsbridge--Rosalie

had only a single objection: it was far too big.

“Miles too big,” cried Rosalie, coming up to the second floor where

Harry had preceded her. “What are you doing there, Harry? Miles too big,

I was saying. It really is. Of course I realise you must have a house

suitable to your fame but--What are you doing, Harry?”

“Fame, yes,” breathed Harry, desperately occupied. “I’ve turned on this

tap and I can’t turn it off again. Eternal fame. After me the deluge!”

She was looking around. “But, Harry, really! Look at this floor. Two

more huge rooms. What can we--”

“Mice and Mumps!” groaned Harry, straining at the tap. “Mice and Mumps!”

He came to her wiping his hands on his handkerchief. “Too big! Look

here, supposing this house isn’t washed away by that tap. Suppose it’s

still standing here tomorrow. Take a broad, courageous view of the

thing. Suppose this isn’t the beginning of the Great Flood of London,

and that we’re going to live in a house and not an ark. Well, what

you’ve got to remember is that we’re not coming in here for a week.

We’ve got to look ahead. Take these two rooms. Why, you can see what

they’re for, what they’ve been. Opening into one another, and those

little bars on the windows, and that protected fireplace. Nurseries. Day

nursery and night nursery.”

Rosalie laughed.

CHAPTER IV

That’s all done. The thing traverses the waters of the years, as across

seas a ship, and makes presently a new shore, a new clime, wherein are

met occasions new and strange, not anticipated by Rosalie.

Here is one.

Habitant in the new continent across these years, she is wife and,

though she had laughed, is mother, and on a day is with her Harry, and

Harry is saying, not at all with any hardness in his voice, but very

gravely:

“I have a right to a home.”

She replies, as grave as he, as one debating a matter that is weighty

but that is before the arbitrament, not of feeling, but of reason,

“Harry, you have a home.”

A gesture of his head, much comprehensive, is made by him: “Is this a

home?”

“It’s where we live.”

“Ah, where we live, Rosalie!”

She did not reply to this. Himself, and not she, spoke next; but his

note was as though she had answered and he were speaking in his turn. “I

have a right to a home. The children have a right to a home.”

She said, “Then, Harry, give yourself a home. Give the children a home.”

He said, “Rosalie, I am a man.”

She answered, “Harry, I am a woman.”

Harry was smoking and he indrew an inhalation from his pipe with a long

sibilant sound: her answer was very well understood by him.

No, she never had anticipated this.

Yet might not she have seen? Astounding how in life one’s suddenly

engulfed in depths and never has perceived the shoals from which they

led; suddenly entombed in night and never has perceived the gradual

declination of the day! Why, when she looked back, so far away as in

those days of choosing their house had been in seed this thing that now

was come to fruit. And she had watched it grow from seed to seedling,

and on to bud and blossom, and never had suspected.

But had she not? Then it was curious, she knew, that, alone of all her

thoughts, all her beliefs, all her theories, her observations and

her deductions from her observations, curious that of them all only a

certain observation, made when choosing their house, she never had told

to Harry.

Choosing their house! She had gone back to her rooms from the third day

of their house-hunting gently amused at an addition to her compendium of

lore on the male habit. It was in a way like the cat idea; at least it

was, like that, reversal of a common opinion on distinguishing traits

as between men and women. It went in her mind like this and, because

it arose out of Harry, she laughed softly to herself as like this she

shaped it:

“They say a woman marries for a home. Wrong, wrong! It’s man that

marries for a home--a home that, having got it, superficially he cares

little enough about, and superficially uses as a good place to get away

from; but that’s just how he uses his business, how he uses everything.

Oh, he wants it, he wants it, and he marries for it far more than a

woman wants it or marries for it. How plain it is! A man marries to

settle down, a woman for just precisely the opposite: to break up; to

get away from the constraints of daughterhood and of Miss-hood, as a

schoolgirl, holiday-bound, from the constraints of school; to enlarge

her life, not to restrict it; to aerate her life, not to compose it.

Why, it’s inherent in a man, the desire for a home; it’s in his bones.

Look at little boys playing--it’s caves and tents and wigwams they

delight to play at; a place they can in part discover and in part

construct, and then arrange their things in, and then go off exploring

and then, all the time, be coming back to the delicious cave and creep

in and block up the door! Girls don’t play at that; they play at shops

and being grown up, at nursing dolls and not themselves being nursed.

But that’s your man--a hunter with a cave, and the return to the cave

the best part of the hunting. That’s what he marries for--a home; a

pitch of his own; a place to bring his things to and wherein to keep his

things; an establishment; a solid, anchored base; a place where he

can have his wife and his children and his dogs and his books and his

servants and his treasures and his slippers and his ease, and can feel,

comfortably, that she and they and it are his,--his mysterious cave with

the door blocked up, his base, his moorings, his settled and abiding

centre. Dear Harry!”

“Dear Harry” because all this had come to her while with secret, fond

amusement she had watched Harry delightedly and entrancedly fussing

about the houses they explored. The boy with a cave! The man with a

home! She liked the idea of a new home, and a home with Harry, but,

given outstanding features obviously essential, almost any home would

have satisfied her. She was animated and interested in the choosing,

but not with Harry’s interest and animation. Hers were the feelings with

which she had established herself in the two-room suite at the boarding

house. There any two rooms would have done; here any pleasant house

would do. It was not the rooms; it was the significance of her entry

into their possession. It was not the house; it was the significance of

all connoted by the house. The rooms had been a stepping-off place to

independence larger and to triumphs new; the house was a stepping-off

place to independence, to triumphs, to battle of life and to joy of

life, lifted upon a plane high above her old world as the stars, as

bright and keen as they.

But for Harry it was a stepping-in place.

It was Harry that fussed and examined and measured and opened and shut

and tested and tried and must have this and must have that. It was Harry

who saw everything with the eye that was going to see it and live with

it permanently and for all time. It was Harry who invested every square

yard of every interior with the attributes that should be there when

they therein were domiciled. Harry who said, “This front door! Rosalie,

we’re going to have a front door that will hit you in the eye and make

you say ‘Mice and Mumps, there’s a distinguished couple that live behind

a door like that!’ None of your wretched browns and greens and blacks

and reds for our door, Rosalie! We’ll have a yellow front door, gamboge.

I’ve seen it on a house in Westminster. I’ll take you there. You wait

till you see it. Imagine it, Rosalie, beneath that lovely old fanlight

overhead. And then yellow window boxes tinted to match in every window

and crammed with flowers. It’ll be a house you’ll run to get into

directly you catch sight of it. Then inside here, in the hall, there’ll

be the thickest rugs money can buy and the brightest light and the

warmest stove. You’ll step in and shut the yellow door and, ‘Mice and

Mumps,’ you’ll say, ‘this is home!’ Now, look here; here’ll be my study;

I’ll have bookshelves built in all round there and there and there.

Pictures there. This nook--I’ll fix a little cupboard there and keep my

tools in. I’ll spend half my time our first weeks pottering about with a

hammer and a pair of pliers. This place just here on the landing. Looks

like a dungeon. We’ll knock out a window there and fit it up with hot

and cold water as a cloak room. Now here’s your room, your--”

“My study,” she had interpolated, a little apprehensive lest for her

private room he should use another word.

“Yes, your study, rather. Each of us with our own study! A lark, eh?

And Rosalie, in mine there’ll be a special chair for you and in yours a

special chair for me. We’ll stroll in on each other’s work--”

She loved him for that. “Like two men in chambers,” she said.

His reply was, “We’ll rip out this fireplace and put you in one in

oak; the walls something between gold and brown, eh? Now come into

the drawing-room. This’ll be the room. Let’s start with the hearth and

imagine it’s winter. This is where we’ll have tea the days when I get

back in time--”

“And when I get back in time.”

“Of course, I’d forgotten that. Why, then whichever of us is back first

will be all ready with the tea and waiting to welcome the other. Can’t

you see the room? Warm, shadowed, glowing here and there, here and there

gleaming, and the tea table shining? Won’t it be a place to rush back

to? I say, Rosalie, it’s going to be rather wonderful, isn’t it?”

Dear Harry! Yes, men that married for a home.

So she had known that from the start; and, the significant thing (as

later perceived) she never had mentioned it to Harry. There was not

a line of her life, as lived before she knew him, that she had not

revealed to him; there was not a passage of her life, when joined to

his, that was not handed to him to write upon; but this, that she knew

he’d married for a home, was never revealed, never inscribed upon the

tablets submitted daily for his annotation.

Yes, significant!

But how could its significance have been perceived? Look here, there had

been a night--a thousand years ago!--when a girl had turned her face to

her pillow and cried, most frightfully. Significant! Why, that girl’s

world had lain in atoms at the significance of that girl’s grief. And

she that now looked back had been born out of those tears, as the first

woman drawn from the side of the first man, and fondly had chid that

child that no significance was there at all. There was none. There was

nothing to fear. A natural joy of life that had been stifled had been

embraced, a shattered world had been remoulded on foundings firmer and,

ah, nearer to the heart’s desire. Significant! It had been so disproved

that not more possibly could fears arise from those, her lovely

dissipations of those fears, than from its watchful mother’s reassuring

candle and her soothing words new terrors to a frightened child at

night.

Then how, she used to ask herself, could significance have been

perceived in not admitting Harry to her smiling thought on men and home?

Significance--then? Nay, memory bear witness, much, much the contrary!

Bear witness, memory, it was that very thought of Harry as boy with

cave, as man with home, had suddenly suffused her with...

“Dear Harry!” she had thought, and with the thought...

Anna! That cry of Anna’s upon that frightening night, striking her hands

against her bosom, “I have a longing--here!” Never till then its meaning

nor even thought upon its meaning.

Then! Upon that thought--“Dear Harry!”--had come, with a catch at the

breath as at an obscure twinge of pain, a tremor of the sense that

was its meaning: thereafter flooding all her being as floods a flood

a pasture. A longing to be mother, Anna’s longing was! A longing to

be mother, to hold a tiny scrap against her breast; to have her heart,

bursting for such release, torn out by baby fingers; to have her design

of God, insufferably overpacked within her by the remorseless pressure

of instinct through a million ages, relieved, discharged, fulfilled by

motherhood. Poor Anna! Ah, piteous! “Oh, God, thou knowest how hard it

is to be a woman.” Poor, piteous Anna, and poor, piteous every woman

that, made vessel of this yearning, must have it unfulfilled.

Not she!

The coronet of love, denied poor Anna, was hers. He’d said “These

rooms--the nurseries”; the crown of love; and she had laughed!

Oh, stubborn still! Oh, still not cognisant of nature’s dower to her

sex. To wear the coronet and to refuse the crown! To be wife and not to

be mother! To think of baby fingers and to think to put away the offer

of their baby clutch!

That girl that turned her face to her pillow and began to cry, most

frightfully, cried next again when she again lay abed and had a tiny

scrap, an ugly, exquisite, grotesque, miraculous scrap, a baby boy, a

baby man, along her arm and watched it there. Those had been passionate

and rending tears; these did not even flow. Those burned her eyes; these

stood within her eyes a lovely welling up of pride and adoration,

drawn from her by this newly risen wonder as by the sun at his arising

moisture in lovely mists is drawn from earth.

Motherhood! When later he was christened, she and Harry named him Hugh;

but it was a caressing diminutive she made out of his name by which he

was always known. Her tiny son! His tiny arms hugged you as never tiny

arms possibly could have hugged before and so she called him “Huggo.”

“Harry, if you could feel how he’s hugging me! It’s absurd he can

have such strength! It’s ridiculous he can love me so! And how can he

possibly know that hugging’s a sign of love? Harry, how can he? Take him

and hold him up like that and see if he hugs you the same. He is! He is!

Isn’t he?”

“Mice and Mumps,” said Harry, “he is; he’s throttling me, the tiger.”

“Ah, give him back, I’m jealous. There’s never, never been a hugger

like him since the world began. He’s Huggo. That’s his name. Creature

straight out of heaven, you’re Huggo.”

Her love for infant Huggo so maternal; her unity with Harry so

exquisitely one; how could she have known were to be met across the

waters of the years occasions new and strange, as that already shown,

or, onward yet a further voyage, as this?

The matter between them touched the same as when, “I have a right to a

home; the children have a right to a home,” Harry had said. But their

tones not the same; in Harry’s voice a quality of dulness as of one

reciting a lesson too often conned yet never understood; in hers a

certain weariness as with instruction too often given.

They had been talking a very long time. Harry hadn’t any arguments. He

just kept coming back and coming back to the one thing. He said again,

the twentieth time, in that dull voice, “We are responsible for the

children. We have a duty towards them.”

The twentieth time! She made a gesture, not impatient, just tired, that

was of repletion with this thing. “Ah, you say ‘we’ have a duty. You say

‘we’; but, Harry, you mean me. Why I a duty more than you? Why am I the

accused?”

Harry’s dull note: “Because you are a woman.” Ineffable weariness was

in the murmur that was her reply. “Ah, my God, that reason!” No, she had

never anticipated this.

CHAPTER V

How did it happen? Within her face abode the explanation of how it

happened.

There was a mirage in her face.

If she were taken (for a moment) when she had been married ten years,

her age thirty-two, and then taken again when she was forty-six, when

she had done, when, in 1922, she said, “I have done,” and her story

ceases, it is material to a portrait of her that in those fourteen years

her appearance did not greatly change. Events inscribed it; but these

writings were in two scripts, rendered in the two natures that were

hers, and, as it were, a balance was maintained between them; there

remained constant the aspect that her face presented to the world;

constant, that is to say, the spirit that looked out of her face.

That girl that at the door of the great house in Pilchester Square had

breathed, “You knew, before I knew, that I loved you,” had been called

beautiful. This woman that now was wife and now was mother was beautiful

with that girl’s beauty and with her own, matured of years, set upon it.

That girl, shaded in her colouring, commonly was sombre in her hue, but

with a quick, impetuous spirit beneath her flesh that, flashing, somehow

lightened all her tints; this woman, albeit dark, had somehow about her

a deep golden hue as of dusk in a deep wood beheld against a sunset.

Her face had always had a boyish look and still, with years, was

boyish. There was a mirage in her face. The stranger glanced and saw a

mother--extraordinarily shielding and maternal and benignant things;

and looked again and saw a boy--astonishingly reckless and impetuous

and rather boyish, hard and mutinous things. Or glanced and saw a boy,

perhaps laughing and eager, perhaps obstinate and petulant; and looked

again and only much tenderness was there.

There was a mirage in her face; and with its changes her voice changed.

When she was a boy her voice was April; when she was a mother September

was her voice.

There were two natures in her and those were their reflections; two

lodestars set above her that by turns brightened and drew her gaze; two

lodestones set within her that claimed her banners as claim the moon and

earth the inconstant sea; one of head, one of heart; one of choice, one

of dower; one of will, one of nature.

In that tenth year her married life there stood for the mother in her

face three children: Huggo who then was nine; Dora, whom she called Doda

because in her first prattle this heart’s delight of hers-“A baby girl!

A beloved one, Harry, to be daughter to me, and to be a tiny woman with

me as little girls always are, and then budding up beside me and being

myself to me again, my baby girl, my daughter, my woman-bud, my heart’s

own heart!”--had thus pronounced her name, who then was seven; and last

Benjamin, then five, whom she named Benjamin because, come third, come

after cognizance of confliction within herself, come after resentment of

his coming--called Benjamin because, come out of such, there were such

happy tears, such tender, thank-God, charged with meaning tears to greet

him, the one the last of three, the little tiny one, so wee beside the

lusty, toddling others. Benjamin she told Harry he must be named; Benji

she always called him.

Huggo and Doda and Benji! Her children! Her darling ones, her lovely

ones! Love’s crown; and, what was more, worn in the persons of these

darling joys of hers (when they were growing up to nine and seven and

five years old) in signal, almost arrogant in her disdain of precedent

to the contrary, that woman might be mother and yet work freely in the

markets of the world precisely as man is father but follows a career.

Children! There had been a time when, speaking from the boy that would

stand mutinous and reckless in her face, and with her April voice, she

had expressed her view on parentage in terms of the old resentment

at the old disability, encountered, bedrocked, wherever into life she

struck a new trail; in terms of the old invertion of an old conceit

wherever with her principles she touched conventional opinion. The

catlike attributes, the marriage for a home, here the familiar saw on

parenthood--

“They talk about hostages to fortune,” she had expressed her idea,

“they talk about a man with young children as having given hostages to

fortune. You know, it’s quite absurd. He doesn’t. I don’t say a man to

whom the support of children is a financial anxiety hasn’t, by begetting

them, placed himself in a position of captivity to fortune, or to the

future, or whatever you like to call it. He very much has. He’s backed

a bill that any day may fall due and find him without means to meet it;

he’s let himself in for blackmail, always over him a threat. But

I’m talking about men above the struggle line. They don’t, in their

children, give hostages. It’s the woman does that. Men don’t give nor

forfeit anything. It’s the woman gives and forfeits. Why, when his

friends meet a man who was last met a bachelor a couple or three years

ago, what change do they see in him? They don’t see any change at all.

There isn’t any change to see. He has to tell them; and he always tells

them rather sheepishly or rather boisterously. ‘I’m married, you know,’

he says. ‘Yes, rather. Man alive, I’ve got two kids!’ The other says,

‘My aunt!’--more probably he says ‘My God!’--‘My God, fancy you!’ And

they both laugh--laugh!

“Hostages to fortune! To a man and amongst men it’s just a joke. It’s no

joke to a woman. Do you suppose a married girl, meeting old friends,

has to tell them she’s a mother, or, if she had to tell them, would tell

them like that? Can’t they see it at a glance? Isn’t she changed? Isn’t

she, subtly perhaps, but unmistakably, altogether different from the

unfettered thing she used to be? Of course she is. How otherwise? She’s

given hostages to fortune and she’s paying; she’s being bled. She’s

giving up things, she’s not going out so much, she’s not reading so

much, she’s not playing so much, she’s not interested so much in what

used to interest her. How can she? There’s the children. How can she?

She’s given hostages to fortune. Oh, happy is the man that hath children

for they are as arrows in the quiver of a giant. But it’s the woman is

the arrowbearer! It’s the woman pays.”

Lo, there had come to this intolerance the longing--“Here!”--that Anna’s

bosom had, the urge to hold a tiny scrap against her breast, to have

her heart, bursting for such release, torn out by baby fingers. It had

o’erborne the other. She had thrown herself upon its flood; not yielded

to it as one drawn in by rising waters, but tempestuously engulfed by

it and borne away upon it as swallowed up and borne away in Harry’s arms

when “Rosalie! Rosalie!” he had cried to her.

That which the subsidence revealed, adoringly she called her Huggo.

There was a mirage in her face. When, turned again towards the star to

which she showed her boyish and impetuous look, and, following, she felt

again the call that set the mother in her face, she this time reasoned.

That idea that, having children, it was the woman who gave hostages to

fortune! Deadly and cruelly true it was, but only by convention. Why

should it be so? Why should motherhood that was the crown of love, of

woman’s life, be paid for in coin that no man was called upon to pay?

Unjust; and need not be! She perfectly well had carried on her work with

Huggo. Sleeping was the adored creature’s chief lot in life. If she had

ever thought (which she never had) of giving up her work and staying at

home on his account, what could she have done but twirl her thumbs and

watch him sleep and in his lovely lively hours superintend the nurse

who required no superintendence? As it was she was about him in the

delicious exercises of transporting him from cot through toilet and

refreshment to readiness to take the air. His lordship was off in his

lordship’s perambulator by nine o’clock every morning. She did not

herself leave, with Harry, till shortly before ten. There, in instance,

was an hour at home with not the smallest benefit to Huggo. It would

have been the same, had she remained at home, with three in four of all

the other hours. Ridiculous to lay down that a mother, having a good

nurse and a well-ordered house and a husband out all day, must tie

herself there, abandoning her own life, to attend her children!

Children! Darlings of her own! Ease for this yearning in her heart,

assumption of this lovely glory that was her natural right! Yes, she

had proved love not to be incompatible with her freedom; she would show

motherhood as beautifully could be joined.

It seemed to her a blessing upon, and an assurance in, her purpose that

in the precious person of a little daughter came the embodiment of this

reasoning and of this design. A baby girl! A tiny woman-bud to be a

woman with her in the house of Harry and of Huggo! A woman treasury into

which she could pour her woman love! Her self’s own self, whose earliest

speech chose for herself her name--her Doda!

It all worked splendidly. Winged on the eager pinions of their

individual lives these two nested their joined life in a home that for

every inmate was a perfect home; perfect for a husband, perfect for a

wife, perfect for the babies, perfect for the servants. The peace of

every home in civilized society rests ultimately on the kitchen, and the

peace of half the homes known to Harry and to Rosalie was in constant

rupture by upheavals thence. Not so behind the gamboge door. Rosalie

always granted it to men that, as was commonly said, servants worked

better for men. Men kept out of the irrational creatures’ way; that was

about it. The conduct of her life gave her the like advantage. Giving

her orders before she left the house, she was out all day and never

unexpectedly in. Positively the servants welcomed her on her return at

five o’clock!

The babies, to whom then she flew, were with a perfect nurse. Harry had

helped in her appointment. She had come one evening, early in the life

of Huggo, when a change had to be made from the nurse who specialised

only up to the point then reached by Huggo, and she had presented

herself to them, seated together in Harry’s study, a short body, one

shape and a solid shape from her shoulders to her shoes, who announced

her name as Muffett.

“Miss Muffett, I hope,” said Harry gravely.

“Unmarried, sir,” said Muffett with equal gravity and with a sudden

drop and then recovery of her stature as though some one had knocked her

behind the knees.

“There’s nothing to do,” said Harry when she had gone, “but to buy her

a turret and engage her”; and there was nothing to do, when she was

installed, but enjoy the babies and delight in them just as a man enjoys

and delights in his tiny ones,--in the early mornings before Rosalie

left for her work, in the evenings when she returned home.

It all worked splendidly. In those early years, when two were in the

nursery and as yet no third, there wasn’t a sign that Harry who had

married for a home ever could say, “I have a right to a home.” He had,

and he was often saying so, the most perfect home. He came not home of a

night to a wife peevish with domestic frets and solitary confinement and

avid he should hear the tale of them, nor yet to one that butterflied

the day long between idleness and pleasures and gave him what was left.

He came nightly to a home that his wife sought as eagerly as he sought,

a place of rest well-earned and peace well-earned. That was it! “Things

which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other.” They had

discovered and had removed the worm of disparity that eats away the

heart of countless marriages. They not infrequently had friends in to

dinner, not infrequently dined at the tables of friends, made a point

of not infrequently attending a theatre or a concert; but however the

evening had been passed--and the evenings alone were always agreed to

be the best evenings of all--there was none but they ended sitting

together, not in the drawing-room, but in Harry’s study or in hers, just

talking happiness. Equal in endeavour, they were thereby made equal on

every plane and in every taste. A reciprocating machine. That was it!

At least that was how, profoundly satisfied with it, she thought it was.

Then Benji came.

CHAPTER VI

There were attendant upon the expectation and the coming of Benji

certain processes of mind that had not been with Huggo or with Doda.

When it was in prospect she had vexation, sometimes a sense of injury,

that again her work was to be interrupted. It would make no difference

to Harry. It happened that the days of her trial were timed to fall on

the date when a criminal prosecution of sensational public interest was

due for hearing at the Old Bailey. Harry, for the defence, had added

immensely to his brilliant reputation when seeing it through the

preliminary stages before the magistrate. The Old Bailey proceedings

were to be the greatest event, thus far, in his career. He had told

her--how proud and delighted to hear it she had been!--that if he pulled

it off (and he had set his heart on pulling it off) he would really

begin to think about “taking silk.”

Well, but she also had her heart, in no single or sensational climax of

her work, but in its every phase and every hour. It absorbed her. Two

years earlier Mr. Simcox had begun disturbing signs of health that,

begun, developed rapidly. His brisk activity went out of him. His walk

had the odd suggestion of one carrying a load. His perky air went dull.

His mind was like a flagging watch, run down. He could not concentrate,

he suffered passages of aphasia, he began more and more to “give up the

office,” more and more to leave things to her. The agency in both its

branches, scholastic and insurance, developed well. She was its head

and it absorbed her. She had a sense, that was like wine to her, of

increasing swiftness of decision, of power, of judgment, of vision,

of resource. She used to hurry to her office of a morning as an artist

urgent with inspiration will hurry to his colours, or a poet to his

pen,--avid to exercise that which was within her.

Well, it was to be stopped. Childbed. For a month at least, for two

months more likely, all was to be set aside, to go into abeyance, to

drift. Whereas Harry’s work.... Yes, vexatious! These laws that gave men

the desirable place in life were not laws but conventions and she had

proved them such; but with all proved there yet remained to the man

privileges, to the woman restraints, that were ordinances fundamental

and not to be escaped. Yes, injurious!

Thus in those weeks of the coming of him that was to be Benji, solely

the boy of aspect mutinous and impetuous was in her face; and when

within a month stood her appointed time came an event that stiffened

there that aspect, turned it, indeed, actively upon the child within her

waiting deliverance. This event in its momentous incidence on her career

placed its occasion on parity with Harry’s anticipations of the Old

Bailey trial. Mr. Simcox died.

There’s no use labouring why the emotions that at this loss should have

been hers were not hers. That girl whose eyes had gathered tears at the

picture of the little figure with flapping jacket peering through the

curtains at the postman’s “rat-tat-flick” was not present in the woman

whose first thought at the sudden news, brought to her seated in her

office, was, “At such a time! Just when--Now what is to be done?” True

for her that there followed gentle feelings, and gentler yet in her

attendance on her patron’s obsequies, in the discovery that all of which

he died possessed he’d left to her, but it is the duller surfaces that

are slowest to give refraction, the least used springs that are least

pliant. She was come a long road from her first signs of hardening. She

was past, now, the stage where, when grieving for the little old man,

she would have felt contrition that her first thought at his death had

been, not of him, but of his death’s effect upon her work.

And there supervened, immediately, interests that caused the passing of

Mr. Simcox merely--to have passed.

Mr. Sturgiss, of Field and Company, attending the funeral with her, said

to her as he was taking his leave, “One would say this isn’t a moment to

be talking of other things, business things, but after all--In a way it

is the moment. You’ll be making new arrangements and rearrangements now.

Before you start settling anything I want you to have in mind the old

proposition. You’ve been loyal to poor Simcox to the end. This business

is your own now. We want it. We want you. We want you in Lombard

Street.”

This, cut and dried, glowingly enlarged in long interviews with Mr.

Sturgiss and Mr. Field, succinctly reduced to writing by the firm that

it might be fairly studied, was before her, not demanding, but eagerly

absorbing, her most earnest attention when she was a fortnight from her

trial. This was the event whose momentous incidence on her career

placed the days then in process and immediately in prospect on parity of

importance with their meaning to Harry, absorbed in preparation for his

case. There was so much to weigh; and like a threat, a doom, banked

her impending banishment from affairs, distracting her, haunting her,

hurrying her. There was so much to do, to settle, to wind up (for she

found herself arranging for the change even while she debated it); and

in the midst of it she was to be cut off as by term of imprisonment!

There was so much to scheme, to plan, to dream (her mind already

elevated among the high places of her new outlook); and between now and

action she was to go--out of action.

Whereas Harry.... Whose child it was also to be....

Yes, injurious!

Not injurious as between dear Harry and herself; but injurious as

between his sex and hers. There were moments of thinking upon the

difference when she could have conceived a grudge against the child she

was to bear.

And Harry could not perceive the difference! Immersed in his

preparations and, when the case opened, lost to all else in his case, he

presented precisely that faculty (and that permission by convention) of

complete detachment from his home that long she had known to be man’s

most outstanding and most enviable quality. He had no attention to spare

for the consideration of her own problem and ambition, and she was too

honourable to his interests, and too devoted to him in his interests, to

bother him with hers. But, more significantly to her feelings than that,

he was also too immersed to offer her, in her ordeal of childbirth, the

sympathy and the anxiety that, unengrossed, he would have shown. It

was there, profound and loving, beneath the surface; but his work came

first. He was a man, capable of detachment, permitted by convention to

practise detachment, by gift of, nature not inhibited from detachment.

A man, he could put it beneath the surface. A woman, in conflict of her

instincts and her ambitions, it was her ambitions that she must sink.

That was it! Yes, injurious.

And he did not even understand.

On what proved to be the evening before her delivery, and was the third

day of Harry’s case, she was lying, as she had lain some days, on the

Chesterfield in the drawing-room, loosely robed. Harry had thought

he could get back to tea, and got back. He came to her with tenderest

concern, and with immense tenderness at once was talking to her. But she

could see! The apparent deepening of all the lines of his dear, striking

face, as of one who for hours has been under enormous concentration;

the slight huskiness of his voice, from hard service; the repressed

excitation in his air; the frequent glint behind the soft regard of his

eyes, as of one that has been hunting high and hunting well--she could

see; she could tell where was his spirit!

Her own went lovingly to meet it where it was. “Ah, never mind all

that, Harry. Tell me all that’s been happening to you. How is it going,

Harry?”

Dear Harry! Most mannish man! She laughed (and he laughed too, knowing

perfectly well why she laughed) to note the delight, like a dog from

chain, with which he bounded off into his mind’s absorption. He sat

upright. He grabbed for a cigarette and inhaled it tremendously. “It’s

going like cutting butter with a hot knife. I started cross-examining

today. I gave him three and a half hours of it, straight off the ice,

and I’m not through with him yet. Not half. If he had as many legs as a

centipede he’d still not have one left to stand on when I’m through with

him. I doubt he’ll have his marrow bones to crawl out on, the way he’s

crumpling up. Even old Hounslow at his worst can’t possibly misdirect

the jury, the way I’ve gummed their noses on the trail. I’ll tell you--”

He told her.

She had put out both her hands and taken one of his. “It’s splendid,

Harry. It’s too splendid. How delighted I am, and proud, proud! No one

would have imagined it at the beginning. What a triumph it will be for

you!”

His grasp squeezed hers in fond response. “Why, it won’t do me any

harm,” he agreed. His tone was light. He released his hand and took up

a cup of tea, and his tone went deep. “Mind you, I’m glad about it,”

he said, and stirred the spoon thoughtfully within the cup. He had come

into the room declaring he was dying for some tea, but he had touched

none, and he now replaced the cup untasted on the table and she saw on

his face the deep “inward” look that she knew (and loved) for the sign

of intense concentration of his mind. “Yes, glad,” he spoke; his voice,

as was its habit when he was “inward,” sounding as though it was the

involuntary, and not the intentional, utterance of his thoughts. “I’ve

gone all out over this case. I saw, the minute they briefed me, that

one tiny flaw, his neglect to take up that option--you remember, I told

you--right down at the bottom of the whole tangle, and I went plumb down

for it and hung on to it and fought it up like, like a diver coming up

from fathoms down.”

She had a quickness of imagery. It constantly delighted him. “Yes,

that’s good,” she declared. “Up like a diver, Harry. Not with goggles

and a helmet and all that, but shot up like a flash, all shining and

glistening and triumphant with the jewel aloft. What a shout there’d be!

Dear Harry! You’re splendid!”

He smiled most lovingly. “As a matter of fact, I feel I ought to make a

mess of it. It’ll be the first big case since we’ve been together that,

while it’s been on, we haven’t had talks about. You couldn’t, of course,

with this so near to you. It would be significant, and proper, if I

drowned in it.”

She shook her head. “Absurd! Why, the thing I’m most glad about, Harry,

is that all this”--she indicated with a gesture her pose, her dress, her

condition--“that all this hasn’t in the least upset your work. It might

have. It hasn’t--and when it happens, it won’t, will it?”

Harry said, “I’m rather ashamed to say it hasn’t, in the least. I’ve

thought of you, often, but I’ve simply put the thought away. And when

it happens, I shall think of you--terribly--going through it; and of the

small thing--But we shall be in the crisis of the case and I shall have

to forget you. I’ll have to, Rosalie, as I have had to. The work must go

on.”

She agreed emphatically. “Of course it must.” She then said, “Whereas

mine--”

He did not attend her. The “inward” look was deep upon his face. There

was the suggestion of a grimmish smile about his mouth. One could

have guessed that he was rehearsing, with satisfaction, his enormous

application while the work was going on.

She gave a sound of laughter, and that aroused him. “What’s the joke?”

“Why, just how this does rather illuminate the point--”

“The point...?”

“Your work and mine--a man’s and a woman’s.”

“Yes, tell me, dear.”

“Why, Harry, I do think of it sometimes. We’ve planned it and arranged

it and settled it so nicely, these years, and you see the big thing

in marriage comes along and shatters it to bits. Your work goes on

precisely as if nothing at all were happening; mine has to stand by.”

“Ah, but this,” Harry said, and in his turn indicated her condition.

“This--this is different. We agreed, before Huggo, that if we had

children it need make no difference to you, to your work, in a way. And

it hasn’t, and needn’t now--when it’s over. But this time, this period,

why, that’s bound to interfere.”

“But it doesn’t interfere with you. It shows the difference.”

“Oh, it shows the difference,” he assented.

His tone was conspicuously careless, conceding the difference but

attaching to it no importance at all; and with it he rose--she had

instantly the impression of him as it were brushing the difference like

a crumb from his lap--and announced, “I’m going to my study now for a

couple of hours before dinner. I must. Our solicitor’s coming in.” He

bent over her and kissed her lovingly. “You understand, I know.”

And he went.

Yes, it showed the difference! And was not seen by him! Yes, injurious.

Yes, could conceive a grudge....

There was a mirage in her face. Her face, that had been boy’s and

mutinous these weeks, was Mary’s and was lovely in maternal love when it

was turned towards the scrap that on a morning lay against her breast;

her thoughts, that had been stubborn, hard, resentful while her days

approached, welled in remorse, compassion, yearning, joy, when they were

past and this was come. She’d grudged him, this littlest one! Grudged

his right, put her own right against it, this tiny, helpless one! When,

added to these thoughts, Huggo and Doda, those lovely darlings, were

permitted to see him, asleep beside her, he was so wee, so almost

nothing against their sturdy limbs, and had come so unwanted--yes,

unwanted, this cherishable one of all!--that she knew instantly what

name he must be given. Her Benjamin!

Lying much alone in the succeeding days, contrite, adoring; with

frequent happy tears (she was left weak): with tender, thank-God,

charged with meaning tears, she found a vindication of her self-reproach

that immensely bound her up, forgave her, gave her comfort. She could

give up her work! She could leave all and be with her darlings! Of

course she could! At any time! She had grudged the right to come of

this defenceless scrap. She had set against his right her own right. Ah,

dangerous! A long road lay that way! In conflict of his coming, with her

own rights she had been much engaged. Here, on the sheet beside her, and

in the nursery, overhead, were other rights. Well, when they claimed....

Of course she could! She had not thought enough about these things....

There is to be said for her that she thought not very widely nor

very deeply upon them now. Her resolution that she could, when it was

necessary, give up her work, scattered them. It came to her as comes to

a man, beset by poverty, scheming by this way and by that to abate it,

news of a legacy. He ceases, in his relief, his present schemes; he

has “no need to worry now.” Or came to her as comes a sail to one

shipwrecked and adrift, painfully calculating out his final dregs

of food and water. He ceases, at that emblem, his desperate plans to

stretch his days. He’s all right now.

It was like that with Rosalie.

While only she had realised her resentment of this baby’s claims, and

only now her contrite yielding to them; before she had conjectured

deeply on all the problem thus revealed; there came to her, like way

of escape to one imprisoned, like instantaneous lifting of a fog to one

therein occluded, the thought, “I can give up the work.”

Of course she could! At any moment; by a word; by the mere formulation

of the step within her mind, she could abandon her career. Not now.

It was not necessary now. But if or when--she used that phrase, in set

terms propounding her resolution to herself--if or when the call of

her children, of her home, came and was paramount, she could give up

everything and respond to it. Oh, happy! Oh, glad discharge of her

remorse! When the children wanted her she could just--come back. Field

and Company, her career, her successes--what of them? She had done

well in her career, she still would do well. Let the claim of home and

children once come into the scale against the claim of those ambitions

and--she would just come back!

Oh, happy!

“Come back”? Who was it had said something about that, something about

“come back” for a woman, making the expression thus dimly familiar in

her mind? Who? Laetitia? No, Laetitia was always associated with another

phrase: striking because in terms identical with accusation previously

delivered against her. Well she remembered it! On the day following

Harry’s visit to the house to take his deserts from poor Aunt Belle and

Uncle Pyke, she also had gone there, following his high idea of what was

right. She had been refused admittance. There had come for her as the

last voice out of that house a quivering letter from Aunt Belle, seeming

to quiver in the hand with the passionate upbraiding that had indited

it, and a forlorn sentence from Laetitia. “I have done everything for

you, everything, everything, and this is how you have rewarded me,” had

pulsed the pages of Aunt Belle; Laetitia only had written:

“Oh, Rosalie! You could have had any one you liked to love you, but you

took my Harry and I shall never, never have another.”

Miss Salmon’s cry again! Twice identically accused. Once grotesquely

accused; once, on the surface, rightly accused. Both times aware how

poignant and pathetic was the cry; not moved the first time, not moved

the second. Recurring to her now, she knew again how broken-hearted sad

it was, and knew again it ought to move, but did not. Well, not strange

now. She was a long way out of those too soft compassions. No, not

Laetitia had made “come back” familiar to her. The phrase, as she seemed

to recollect its context, was too profoundly practical for the Laetitia

sort; and that was why, of course, it moved her nothing. She had learnt,

jostling off corners in the market place, what formerly she had only

conjectured,--that there was in life no room for sentiment, it clogged;

it hampered; it brought sticky unreality into that which was sharply

real. “Come back?” No, not Laetitia. Who? Keggo? Yes, it was Keggo; and

immediately with the name’s recovery was recovered the phrase’s context.

This very matter! “Rosalie, a woman can’t--come back.”

Absurd! But, yes, how she remembered it now! “Very dangerous being a

woman,” Keggo had said. “Men go into dangers but they come out of them

and go home to tea. That’s what it is with men, Rosalie. They can always

get out. They can always come back. They never belong to a thing, heart

and soul, body and mind. Rosalie, women do. That’s why it is so very,

very dangerous being a woman. Women can’t come back. They take to a

thing, anything, and go deep enough, and they’re its; they never, never

will get away from it; they never, never will be able to come back out

of it. Rosalie, I tell you this, when a woman gives herself, forgets

moderation and gives herself to anything, she is its captive for ever.

She may think she can come back but she can’t come back. For a woman

there is no comeback. They don’t issue return tickets to women. For

women there is only departure; there is no return.”

Poor Keggo!

Poor Keggo had of course founded her theory upon her own bitter plight.

How she had given her case away when she had said, “Look at me!” It

applied to her, of course, or to any woman--or man for that matter--who

drank or drugged. It applied not in the least to such a case as this of

her own. Keggo had tried to apply it. She had said, “You have a theory

of life. You are bent upon a career in life. Suppose you ever wanted to

come back?”

She had laughed and declared she never would want to come back. Well,

look how absurd all poor Keggo’s idea was now being proved! It had

suddenly occurred to her that it might at some future time be required

of her to come back; and all she had to do was just--to come back. No

difficulty about it whatsoever! No struggle! Indeed, and fondly she

touched that by her side which had called up these thoughts, she would

come back joyously. Of course she would! Field and Company, ambition,

that for if and when her darlings called her! Yes, wrong every way,

that poor Keggo. Dangerous being a woman, she had said, and it was not

dangerous. It could be, and she had proved it, a state that could be

lived full in every aspect,--full in freedom, full in endeavour, full

in love, full in motherhood. Dangerous! A week ago, inimical to this

advent, injurious; now, in this advent’s presence, and with this

resolution gladly dedicated to it, only and wholly glorious.

This one! Come after connection, come in contrition, come to call

her back when she should need to be called, the little tiny one, the

belovedest one, the Benjamin one--her Benji!

CHAPTER VII

Those children were brought up with every modern advantage. Wisdom is

judged by the age in which it flourishes, and everything that the day

accounts wise for children those children had. Their father was of

considerable and always increasing means; their mother was of great

and untrammelled intelligence: anything that money could provide for

children, and that intelligent principles of upbringing said ought to be

provided for children, those children enjoyed. When they were out of the

care of Muffet, who was everything that a nurse ought to be, they

passed into the care of a resident governess, Miss Prescott, who was a

children’s governess, not for the old and fatuous reason that she “loved

children,” but for the new and intelligent reason that she was attracted

by the child-mind as a study and was certificated and diplomaed in the

study of children as an exact science,--Child Welfare as she called it.

Miss Prescott had complete charge of the children while they were tiny

and while they were growing up to eleven and nine and Benji to

seven years old. She taught them their lessons (on her own, the new,

principles) and on the same principles their habits and the formation of

their characters. It might roundly be said that everything troublesome

in regard to the children was left to Miss Prescott, and, left to her,

came never between the children and their mother. Their mother only

enjoyed her children, presented to her fresh, clean and happy for the

purpose of her enjoyment; and the children only enjoyed their mother,

visiting them smiling, devoted, unworried, for the purpose of their

happiness.

It was a perfect, and a mutually beneficial arrangement. As there had

been, before the children came, two independent lives behind the gamboge

door, so, with the occupation of the nurseries, there were, as it might

be, three independent households, mingling, at selected times, only for

purposes of happiness.

It was perfect. In the summer a house was taken at Cromer by the sea and

there, all through the fine weather, Miss Prescott was installed with

her charges. Their mother had three weeks from Field’s in the summer and

she and their father would spend the whole of it, and often week-ends,

at Cromer idling and playing with their darlings. That was jolly. The

children associated nothing whatever but happiness with their parents.

In the other months of the year their mother was immensely occupied with

her work at Field’s, developing beyond expectation; and their father

early and late with his work in the Temple, his esteem by solicitors and

by litigants almost beyond his time to satisfy. Their father was

much paragraphed in the social journals, and their mother also. The

paragraphs said their father was making a “princely fortune” at the Bar

and never told of him without telling also of his wife. They described

her as “of Field’s Bank” and always drove the word “unique” hand in

hand with every mention of her parts. “Unique personality”; “unique

position”; “unique among professional women”; “unique,” said one, “in

combining notable beauty and rare business acumen; an office which

she attends daily and a charming home; a profession, three beautiful

children, and a brilliant husband.”

The syntax is weak, but the truth is in it and those children were to be

envied in their mother.

Miss Prescott, when she came, did not displace the Muffet. She

was installed additional to the Muffet; and as touching the modern

principles relating to children she very soon told Muffet a thing or

two not previously dreamt of in the Muffet philosophy but having, thence

forward, occasional place in the Muffet nightmares.

The Muffet, however, was of lymphatic character, with, as her most

constant desire, the desire not to be “plagued.” She was one of those

people who are for ever declaring that they never eat anything, who at

meals, indeed, appear to eat very little, but who between meals, are

eating all day long. At all hours of the day the Muffet jaws, like the

jaws of a ruminant, were steadily munching, munching. When Benji was

three Muffet was getting distinctly fat. On a corner of the night

nursery mantelpiece she had a photographic group of her parents and of

an uncle and aunt who lived with her parents. These four were very fat

and one evening the children’s father made a remark about this portrait

that made their mother laugh delightedly.

Benji was in his cot. Huggo had just come from his bath and was having

his toes wiped by his mother because he declared Muffet had not dried

them properly. He said Muffet groaned when she stooped.

His mother said, “You know, Harry, Muffet is getting fat. Have you

noticed it?”

Their father was bent almost double swinging Doda between his legs,

the stomach of Doda reposing on the palms of his joined hands and Doda

squealing ecstatically.

Their father said, “I have. Go and look at that photograph, Rosalie, and

you’ll see why. Look at what her people are. Muffet’s broadening down

from precedent to precedent.”

It made their mother laugh. The children didn’t know why it made her

laugh, but they laughed with her. They always did, or with their father

when he laughed. And there was always lots of jolly laughter when their

father and mother came up to the nurseries.

Those children, as they passed through early childhood, never saw their

parents but happy and good-spirited. They never saw them worried nor

ever saw them sad. That was, as one might say, Rosalie’s chief offering

to her darlings. It was splendid to Rosalie that her way of life, far

from causing her (as prejudice would have prophesied) to neglect her

children, enabled her to consider them in their relations with herself

as, by their mothers, children in her childhood never were considered.

That they should associate nothing--nothing at all--but happiness with

her was the basis of it. Children, she held, ought not to see their

parents bad-tempered or distressed or in any way out of sorts or out of

control. For a child to do so has in two ways a bad effect on the child

mind. In the first place, it is harmful for children to come in contact

with the unpleasant things of life; in the second, parents should always

be to their children models of conduct and of disposition. They should

in themselves present ideals to their children. A man should be a hero

to his son; a woman an ideal to her daughter. Why is no man a hero to

his valet? It is simply because his valet sees him, as do not those

whose esteem he desires to win, in his off moments. Children should

never see their parents in their off moments.

This principle was not Rosalie’s alone. It is the modern principle. The

point, to Rosalie, was that, by her way of life, she was able to apply

it. Children were too much with their parents. That was the fault;

in her childhood the universal fault, even now the fault among the

unenlightened. Parents, being human, must have off moments; are not off

moments, indeed, in the total of the day, of greater sum than moments

of circumspection? It follows that if children are always with their

parents, the more unlovely side cannot fail to be perceived, and,

arising out of it, must follow injury by example, harm by environment,

smirching of idealism, loss of respect. In those homes where the mother

(in Rosalie’s phrase) is the children’s slave, why has the father the

children’s greater respect? Why is it fine to do what father does? Why

jolly and exciting to be with father? It is only because the father

commonly is away all day, only seen by them when, shedding other

affairs, he comes to see them specially.

Her life--oddly how well for everything and every one her attitude to

life fell out!--obtained for her and for them the same wise and happy

restriction from too free familiarity. She was able to come to her

children only when all her undivided attention and whole hearted love

could be given to them. They never saw her vexed, they never saw her

angry, they never saw her sad. It was not a commonplace to them to see

their mother. It was an event. A morning event and an evening event--and

unfailingly a completely happy event. She looked back upon her own

childhood with her own mother and reflected, fondly but clearly,

affectionately but not blinded by affection, how very different was

that. She was always with her mother. Her mother was often sad, often

worried, often, in distraction of her worries, irritable in speech.

Often sad! Why, she could remember time and again when her dear mother,

hunted by her cares, was broken down and crying. She would go to her

mother then and cry to see her crying, and her mother would put her arms

around her and hug her to her breast and declare she was her “little

comfort.” Was it good for a child to suffer scenes like that? She used

to be with her mother all day long, from early morning till last thing

at night. With what result? That she saw and suffered with her, or

suffered of her, all that her mother suffered; that she was sometimes

desolated to feeling that her heart was broken for her mother. Could

that be good for a child? Her Huggo, her Doda and her Benji never saw

her anything but radiant; and because that was so (as she told herself)

she never saw them cry, either on her account or on their own.

Therein--grief in her presence on their own account--another point

arose. With as her ideal that only happiness should be associated with

her, she found her way of life beneficial to the preservation of that

ideal in that it prevented her from being the vessel that should convey

the restrictions, the reproofs and the instruction that are troublesome

to small minds. All that was left to Miss Prescott. She remembered

lessons with her mother; she remembered the irksome learning of a

hundred “don’ts” from her mother; and though they were tender and

pathetic memories she remembered also the reverse of the picture,--being

glad to escape from her mother, resentful against her mother when stood

in the corner by her mother, when stopped doing this that and the other

by her mother, when made to learn terribly hard lessons by her mother

and to go on learning them till she had learnt them. Only childish

resentment, of course, swept up and forgotten as by the sun emerging out

of clouds the shadow from a landscape. But why should children ever have

the tiniest frown against their mother? There must be frowns, there

must be tears. Let others bear the passing grudge of those. Let Miss

Prescott.

Miss Prescott was willing and able to bear anything like that. She

delighted in such. She told Rosalie, when Rosalie engaged her, and after

she had seen the children, that her only hesitation in accepting the

post was that the children were too normal. “By normal,” said Miss

Prescott, speaking, as she always spoke, as if she were a passage out of

a book given utterance, “By normal, Mrs. Occleve, I do not, of course,

mean commonplace. Any one can see how attractive they are, how gifted;

any one can know how distinguished, with, if I may say so, such talented

parents, their inherited qualities must be. No, when I say normal,

I mean showing no disquieting signs, constitutionally tractable, not

refractory. In that sense of normality it is much more the abnormal

child to whom I would have liked to devote myself. I have specialised

in children. The harder the case the more I should be interested in it.

That’s what I mean. But I never could have hoped to find a household

where, though there can be no difficulties, I should have such

opportunities of helping children to be perfect men and women; nor a

mother to whose children I would more gladly, proudly, devote myself;

nor a place with which I should feel myself so entirely in sympathy.

If you feel, on reflection, that I should suit you, it will be, I am

sure--why should I not say so--an auspicious day for those little ones.”

How happy was Rosalie thus by provision to destiny her darlings!

Miss Prescott was thirty when engaged by Rosalie. She had a way of

looking at people which, if described, can best describe her appearance.

She was once in an omnibus in London and the conductor, standing against

her, and about to serve a ticket to a passenger seated next her, had

some trouble with his bell-punch. It would not work and he fumbled

with it, angry. Everybody in the bus watched him. It is not nice to be

watched when baffled and heated in bafflement but the only gaze to which

attention was given by the conductor was the gaze of Miss Prescott.

He glanced constantly from the obdurate machine to the face of Miss

Prescott. Suddenly he said: “‘Ere, suppose you do it, then,” and pushed

the bell-punch at her. Miss Prescott took it, did it, astoundingly and

instantaneously, and handed it back with no word. The conductor seemed

more angry than before.

It was like that that Miss Prescott looked at people.

There is right way of doing everything. Miss Prescott had an uncanny

instinct for finding it; and, applying this faculty to her training

of the child-mind, she presented herself as a notable exponent of the

system in which, as has been said, she was certificated and diplomaed.

She taught children how to play in the right way, how to learn in the

right way, and above all how, in every way and at every turn, to reason.

By the old, ignorant plan children were instructed, speaking broadly,

by love or by fear. It was by pure reason that Miss Prescott instructed

them. The child was treated as an earnest physician treats a case. Ill

temper or wrong behaviour in a child was neither vexing nor sad. It was

profoundly interesting. There was a right and scientific way to treat it

and that right and scientific way was thought out and administered. The

child was “a case.”

It was taught nothing but truths and facts. Its mind was not permitted

to be befogged with fairy stories, with superstitions, with Father

Christmases and the like, nor yet with religious half-truths and

misty fables. These entailed not only befogging at the time, but

disillusionment thereafter. Disillusionment was wicked for a child.

It further was taught nothing at all (in the matter of lessons) at the

grotesquely early age at which children used to be taught. It was taught

first to reason.

In general the whole system lay in developing the child’s reasoning

powers and then, at every turn and particularly at every manifestation

of indiscipline, appealing to its reason. “I am here to be happy”--that

was the first, and surely the kindest and easiest, knowledge to fix

in the child. From that foundation everything was worked. It never was

necessary to punish a child. It only was necessary to reason with it. In

the old phraseology a child meet to be punished was a naughty child.

In the terminology of Miss Prescott such a child was a sick child or an

unreasoning child: a case presenting an adverse symptom. But take the

older term,--a naughty child. A naughty child was an unhappy child. The

treatment went like this, “I am here to be happy. I am not happy. Why am

I not happy? Because I have done so and so and so and so....”

Kind, wise, simple, effective, easy. Rosalie in her childish

misdemeanours would have been prevailed upon by the unhappiness her

conduct caused her mother. All wrong! A faulty process of reasoning;

indeed not a process of reasoning at all: a crude appeal to the

emotions. Those three children who on the one part never saw their

mother sad and were constrained to comfort her, on the other never

were bribed to good behaviour by the thought of grieving her. They

only associated happiness with her and they enjoyed happiness simply by

reasoning away unhappiness.

Kind, wise, simple, effective, easy.

Happy Huggo, happy Doda, happy Benji, happy Rosalie!

CHAPTER VIII