sort he is, that stalks and pounces. One seeks only to record him when
he thus assails, and there is this result; that it is necessary to
pare away so much. In instance, there’s to be inserted now a note on
Rosalie’s advance in her career. It’s cut to nothing. This is because
all that career ultimately was known to her never to have really
mattered. And so with other things. That girl, all through, pressing so
strong ahead, rises to the eye not cumbered with other importance than
her own. There might be asked for (by a reader) presentation of Harry’s
parents; of what was doing all this time to her own parents in the
rectory, to Harold, Robert, Flora, Hilda; of friends that Rosalie and
Harry had. That girl’s passage is not traced in such. Whose is? The
chart where such are marked is just a common public print, stamped for
the public eye. They’re not set down upon that secret chart all carry
in the cabin of their soul, and there, in that so hidden and inviolable
stateroom, poring over it by the uncertain swinging lamp of conscience,
prick out their way.
Her installation in the bank had been a notable success. She dealt with
all the insurance advice and with income-tax advice and business; and
it was remarkable to her, at first, how many of Field’s clients were as
children in the mysteries of income tax, and as children alike in their
ignorance of the possibilities of life insurance and in their pleasure
at the discoveries she set before them. But further than this (and more
important, said Mr. Sturgiss and Mr. Field) was the quick response
of the clients to the various domestic advice that it was Rosalie’s
business to give. Husbands and wives from the East, or returned thither
from London and writing from the East, consulted her on innumerable
matters. When, in instance, an army officer wrote to her from India,
very diffidently wondering if she could help him in the matter of some
Christmas presents for his wife and children at home, Mr. Sturgiss was
uncommonly pleased.
“I knew it!” said Mr. Sturgiss. “That’s the kind of thing. You watch how
side-lines like that will develop. That’s what these people want--some
one at home they can rely on. I tell you, Mrs. Occleve, you, that is
to say your department of Field’s, is what the Anglo-Eastern has been
wanting ever since Clive and Warren Hastings went out--a link with home.
You see.”
She did see. Mr. Field saw. The clients saw. The friends of the clients
saw--and became clients.
All of her position reposed, and was developed by her, on the cruel
disabilities of those who earn their bread in the East. For all such,
married, comes, in time, the sad and the costly business of the divided
home,--the two establishments, the sundering of children and parents, of
husband and wife. By the age of seven at latest, the children have to
be sent home for health and education. Then the sundering, the losing of
touch, the compulsion upon the man, that those at home may be promptly
supported, to deny himself year after year the longed-for visit home.
The losing of touch.... Invaluable to them to have in Field’s, in
“that Mrs. Occleve” a link, known personally or by reputation, that was
useable as relations (capricious, “touchy,” interfering) often are not
useable; and dependable as relations, unpractical, certainly are not
always dependable. Invaluable to the clients; declared by Mr. Field and
by Mr. Sturgiss to be invaluable to the bank; absorbing and splendid to
Rosalie. “And still,” Mr. Sturgiss was always saying, “still capable of
much bigger development.”
He sketched one day a development that would be a stride indeed.
It began to be discussed by the three. It connoted so absolute a
recognition of Rosalie’s worth that she decided--lest it should fall
through--she would not mention it to Harry till either it was fallen
through or was afoot. Then!
It made her busy. She told Harry once, when they’d been talking of
how much at office she was kept, of her work, and of the place she was
making for herself, “Well, it’s not bad, Harry,” she told him. “It’s
not bad. I’ll admit that. What pleases me is that it’s only a beginning;
well as it’s going, and long as I’ve now been at it, only a beginning.
I can’t, as I’ve often said to you, be doing all this without getting a
long insight into the actual banking business. Oh, don’t you remember
my telling you about that appalling evening when I told poor Uncle Pyke
that I wanted to be a banker? How outraged he was! Poor person, how
rightly outraged! The ridiculous notion that I ever could be a banker! A
grotesque dream!” She gave a small laugh as if tenderly smiling at image
before her of that innocent, eager girl at the Pyke Pounce table. She
said softly, “A grotesque dream. Now, with patent limitations--not a
dream.”
It was like that that Time (disguised as triumph) kept out of the way;
and similarly disguised, showed no sign either on the children’s side.
All splendid there! Growing up! Huggo set to school!
Huggo learnt with Miss Prescott till he was nine, then attended daily a
first-rate school for little boys in Kensington, at eleven started as a
boarder at a preparatory school for Tidborough. Next he was to go to
the great public school itself, afterwards to Oxford and the Bar. All’s
well! Time had nothing at all to say during the first two stages of the
programme. It was in Huggo’s first holidays from the preparatory school
that Time whipped out his blade and pounced.
On a day that was a week before the end of that holidays the great new
scheme for Rosalie at Field’s rose to its feet and walked. It was a
special mission on behalf of the bank.
It necessitated.. . .
She came once or twice to a bit of a stop like that while waiting their
evening talk together in which she should tell Harry. It necessitated
a departure from the established order of things; but what of that? Was
not the way bill of her life all departures from things established,
and all successful, and were not all contingencies of this particular
departure fully insured against? She very easily cantered on, on this
rein. That bit of a stop was scarcely a check in the progression of her
thoughts.
Seated with Harry in Harry’s room that night she was about to tell
him her great news when, “I’d an unusual offer made to me today,” said
Harry.
Almost the very words herself had been about to use!
“Why so had I to me!” she cried.
They both laughed. “Tell on,” said Harry.
“No, you. Yours first.”
“Toss you,” cried Harry; and spun a coin and lost and went ahead: “Well,
mine doesn’t exactly shake the foundations of the world with excitement
because I refused it. It was to go out to defend in a big murder case in
Singapore!”
She exclaimed, “In Singapore!”
“Yes, Singapore. Why do you say it like that?”
She did not answer.
The prisoner, Harry went on, was a wealthy trader, immensely wealthy,
and immensely detested, it appeared, by the European settlement; had
native blood in his veins; was charged with poisoning an Englishman
with whose wife he was supposed to have been carrying on an amour. “A
wretched, unsavoury business,” said Harry, and went on to say that,
though the fee offered was extraordinarily handsome, he had declined the
proposal. It was doubtful he would actually make more money over it than
in his normal round at home, more than that it went against the grain to
be defending a man of native origins who had pretty obviously seduced a
white woman if not murdered her husband. “No, no ticket to Singapore for
me, thanks,” said Harry.
Rosalie turned to him with a sudden, direct interest. “Harry, suppose
you had accepted, how long would you have been away?”
“Not less than six months in all. Certainly not less. That’s another
point against--”
“Yes, against the idea, because in any case you don’t want to go. But
suppose the circumstances had been different; suppose it was a case that
for various reasons very much attracted you; would you have gone?”
Harry said indifferently, “Oh, no doubt, no doubt.”
“Although it would have taken you from home six months--or more? You’d
not have minded that?”
He laughed delightedly. “Ah, ha! I was beginning to wonder what you were
driving at. You’re a regular lawyer, Rosalie; you led me on and then
caught me out properly.”
His amusement was not reflected by her. She said with a certain
insistence, “But you wouldn’t have minded?”
He laughed again. “The judge ruled that the question was admissible and
must be answered. Well, minded--I’d have minded, of course, very much
in a way. I’m a home bird. I’d have hated being away the best part of a
year. But there you are. If the call was strong enough, there you are;
it would have been business.”
She indrew a long breath. “That’s it. It would have been business.”
There was then a pause.
Harry, who had been talking lightly, then said slowly, “Rosalie, is
there something behind this?”
She turned towards him with a very nice smile. “Harry, I’ve been doing a
very shocking thing. I’ve been making you commit yourself.”
“Commit myself?”
She nodded. “Been taking down your statement without warning you that it
may be used in evidence against you.”
He said gravely, “Somehow I don’t like this.”
She told him, “Ah, stupid me! I’m making a small thing seem big. Listen,
Harry. It was curious to me this about you and Singapore--”
“Yes, I noticed that. Why?”
“Because there’s an idea of my going out to Singapore.”
He was astounded. She might have said to Mars. “You? To Singapore?”
“To the East generally. To Bombay, to Rangoon, to Singapore. For about a
year.”
He was all aback. “For about a year? Rosalie, I can’t--Why on earth--?”
She did not like this. The great scheme! Her special mission! It
necessitated.... Here was the necessity at which she had checked
but confidently ridden on, and Harry was pulled right up by it. His
astonishment was not comfortable to her. Was there to be a check then?
He said again, “You? A year? But, Rosalie, what on earth--”
She pronounced a single word, his own word:
“Business.”
He was standing before her on the hearthrug. He made a turn and at once
turned back. “Are you thinking of this seriously?”
“Most seriously.”
“Of going?”
“Of going. It’s business.”
“For a year?”
“Harry, yes.”
He began to fill his pipe with very slow movements of his fingers, his
eyes bent down upon her. “And you called this--just now--a small thing?”
She said with a sudden eagerness, “Harry, it’s a very big thing for me,
for Field’s. I meant a small thing in the sense not to be made a fuss
about.”
He made very slowly a negative movement with his head. “I don’t see it
like that.”
“Let me tell you, Harry.”
She told him how the great possibilities of the department she had
established in the bank rested on the personal touch established between
herself and the clients. The scheme was that those possibilities should
be developed to their fullest extent. While she was in London that
personal touch could be established with clients by dozens. If she
visited the branches in the East, at Bombay, at Rangoon, at Singapore,
it was by hundreds that the touch could be established. That was it.
Field’s customers would talk to her, and when she was returned they
would talk of her, and would tell others of her, as one met, not during
the jolly freedom of leave when the impulse was to feel that, after all,
nothing mattered much, but met out there when they were in the yoke
and the harness of the thing,--met as one fresh out from home in their
particular interests and shortly, charged with their special interests,
returning home. That was it! A novel mission, a valuable mission, her
mission. About a year. To start in about six weeks. “There, Harry,
that’s the plan.”
“And you are going?”
“I have agreed to go.”
He said slowly, “It astonishes me.”
There was then a pause.
She spoke. “I think I do not like your astonishment, Harry.”
“It is justified.”
“No, no; not justified. When you told me of a possibility of Singapore
for you I was not astonished. I made no difficulty.”
“Different,” he said. “Different.”
“Not different, Harry. The same. How different? If you could go, I can
go. The same. Aren’t things with us always the same?”
He shook his head. “Not this. If I had to go--”
“Yes, yes. It’s the point. If you had to go you’d have to go. Well, I
have to go.”
“Rosalie, if I had to go I could go. A man can.”
She cried, “But, Harry, that--This isn’t us talking at all. You mean a
man can leave his home because his home can go on without him. But our
home--it’s just the same for me in our home. We’ve made it like that.
It runs itself. The kitchen--I don’t know when I last gave an order.
The children--there’s never a word. The thing’s organised. I’m an
organiser.” She laughed, “Dear, that’s why they’re sending me. Isn’t it
organised?”
He assented, but with an inflexion on the word “It’s--organised.”
She did not attend the inflexion. “Well, that’s no organisation that
can’t, in necessity, run by itself. This can. You know, quite well, this
will. You know, quite well, that you will not be put about a jot.”
“Oh, I know that,” he said.
“Well, then. Astonished--why astonished?”
He looked at her. “Let’s call it,” he said, “the principle of the
thing.”
Oh, now astonishment between them. Her voice, astounded, had an echo’s
sound--faint, faint, scarcely to be heard, gone. “The prin-ci-ple!”
This room was lit, then, only by a standard lamp remote from where they
were beside the fire. She was in a deep armchair; its partner, Harry’s
chair, close by. He sat himself on the arm, looking towards her. The
firelight made shadows on his face.
She presently murmured, her voice as though that echo, lost, was
murmuring back, “Oh, it is I that am astonished now. The principle!
It’s like a ghost. Harry, how possibly can there come between us the
principle?”
His voice was deep, “Are we afraid of it, old girl?”
She put out a hand and touched him and he touched her hand. They were
such lovers still. That was the thing about it. There never had been
an issue between them, not the smallest; the bloom of their first union
never had dissipated, not a rub. But there was in Harry the intention
now to take her, and there was in her the apprehension now of being
taken, to a new dimension of conversation, not previously trod by them.
As they proceeded it was seen not to be light in this place; a place
where touch might be lost.
She said, “But to bring up the principle in this! It can’t be possible
you’ve changed. It isn’t conceivable to me that you have changed. Then
how the principle?”
“It is the situation that has changed, Rosalie. It never occurred to me;
I never dreamt or imagined that a thing like this could arise.”
She moved in her chair. “Oh, this goes deep....”
He put a hand on her shoulder. “We’re not afraid.”
“But I’m so strong in this. So always certain. In our dear years
together so utterly assured. Nothing within the principle could touch
me. I am steel everywhere upon the principle. I might hurt you, Harry.”
“I’ll not be hurt.”
“Well, say it, Harry.”
He was silent a moment. “There isn’t really very much to say. To me it’s
so clear.”
She murmured, “And to me.”
He said, “We’ve made this home--eleven years. It’s been ideal. You have
combined your work with your--what shall I call it?--with your domestic
arrangements--your business with your domesticity--You’ve done it
wonderfully. We’ve never had to discuss the subject since we agreed upon
it.”
She murmured, “That is why--agreed.”
“Agreed in general. But when you take the home as between a man and a
woman, there are bound to be responsibilities which, however much you
share, cannot be divided. The woman’s are the--the domesticity.”
“What are the man’s?”
“To maintain the home.”
“I share in that.”
“Well, grant you do. I do not claim to share the other.”
“You are not asked to, Harry.”
“No, but, Rosalie, I’ve the right to ask you to provide the other.”
Her murmur said, “Oh, do not let us bring up rights. I am so fixed on
rights.”
“Rosalie, let’s keep the thing square. A man can leave his home; he
often has to. I think not so a woman; not a mother; not as you wish now
to leave it. It can’t, without her, go on--not in the same way.”
“Yes, ours. Ours can.”
“Not in the same way. You can’t take out the woman and leave it the
same,--the same for the man, the same for the children. We’re married.
The married state. With children. Doesn’t the whole fabric of the
married state rest on the domesticity of woman?”
She murmured, “No, on her resignation, Harry.”
As if he had touched something and been burnt he very sharply drew in
his breath.
She said, “Ah, you’d be hurt, I told you. Dear, I can’t be other than I
am on this. Upon her resignation, Harry. Men call it domesticity. That’s
their fair word for their offence. It’s woman’s resignation is the
fabric of the married state. She lets her home be built upon her back.
She resigns everything to carry it. She has to. If she moves it shakes.
If she stands upright it crashes. Dear, not ours. I’ve stood upright all
the time. I’ve proved the fallacy. A woman can stand upright and yet
be wife, be mother, make home. Dear, you are not to ask me now--for
resignation.”
Therein, and through all the passage of this place where the footway
was uneven, the light not good, the quality of her voice was low and
noteless, sometimes difficult to hear. There is to say it was by that
the more assured, as is more purposeful in its suggestion the tide that
enters, not upon the gale, but in the calm and steady flow of its own
strength.
The quality of Harry’s voice was very deep and sometimes halting, as
though it were out of much difficulty that he spoke. He said, deeply,
“That you stand upright does not discharge you from responsibilities.”
She said, “Dear, nor my responsibilities discharge me from my
privileges.”
There was then a silence.
He spoke, “But I am going to press this, Rosalie. I say, with all
admitted, this thing--this ‘I could go but you should not go’--is
different as between us. I am a man.”
She made a movement in her chair. “Ah, let that go. I have a reply to
that.”
“What reply?”
“I am a woman.”
He began--“It’s nothing--.”
She said, “Oh, painful to give you pain. To me--everything.”
He got up from his position beside her and went to his chair and seated
himself. He sat on the edge of the chair, bowed forward, his forearms on
his knees, his hands clasped; not smoking; his pipe between his fingers,
his eyes upon the fire. Once or twice, his hands close to his face, he
slightly raised them and with his pipe-stem softly tapped his teeth.
CHAPTER IX
He had called it the principle. She watched him. That attitude in which
he sat was of a profundity of meditation not to be looked upon without
that sense of awe, of oppression, of misgiving that is aroused by the
suggestion in man or nature of brooding forces mysteriously engrossed.
There came to her, watching him, a thought that newly disturbed her
thoughts. He had called it the principle. She had been astonished but
she had not been perturbed. Upon the principle as between man and woman,
husband and wife, she was, as she had said, so strong, so confident,
accustomed and assured, that there was nothing could be said could touch
her there. But it was not the principle. This was the knowledge brought
to her by the new thought suddenly appeared in her mind, standing there
like a strange face in a council of friends, unbidden and of a suspect
look. What if she communicated that knowledge to Harry brooding there?
He had called it the principle. What if she put across the shadowed room
the sentence that should inform him it was not the principle but was an
issue flying the flag of ships whose freights are dangerous? What if she
put across the shadowed room the sentence, “Men that marry for a home”?
Ay, that was it! The thing she had always known and never told.
Those are keepsakes of our secret selves, those observations, vows,
conspiracies with which romantically we plot towards our ideals. This
the sole keepsake of her treasury she never had revealed to Harry.
Significant she had not. Some instinct must have stayed her. Yes,
significant! He had called it the principle. It was not the principle.
He was sincere upon the principle and in the examination of eleven years
had proved his sincerity. It was not the principle. It was that herein,
in her intention to exercise her freedom in a new dimension, she had
touched him, not through the principle, but upon the instinct that led
him, as she believed men to be led, to marry for a home, a settling-in
place, a settling-down place, a cave to enter into and to shut the door
upon.
Oh, this was dangerous! There were no lengths to which this might not
lead! If at her first essay at that which countered his idea of home she
was to be asked to pause, what, in the increasing convolutions of the
years, might not she be asked to abandon? Let him attempt restriction of
her by appeal to principle and she could stand, and win, unscathed. Let
him oppose her by his wish within his home to shut the door, and that
was to put upon her an injury that only by giving him pain could be
fought. Oh, dangerous! Not less an injury because by sentiment and not
by reason done! Much more an injury because so subtly done! Much more!
Dangerous! Ah, from this the outset to be withstood!
He spoke and his first words were confirmation of her fears.
“Rosalie, do you feel quite all right about the children?”
Yes, she could see where this was set to lead. He could leave her with
the children; but she--men that married for a home--could not leave him
with the children.
She said gently, “Dear, there’ll not be the least difficulty.
Everything’s perfectly arranged. Everything will perfectly well go on.”
He had not moved his pose and did not move it. His voice presented in
tone the profound meditation that his pose presented. He said, “I don’t
quite mean that. I mean, do you always feel everything’s quite all right
with them?”
How setting now? She answered, “Dear, of course I do.”
His eyes remained upon the fire. “Rosalie, d’you know I sometimes
don’t.”
Her motion--a lifting of her face, a questing of her brows--was of a
helmsman’s gesture, suspicious to catch before it set a shifting of the
breeze. “Harry, in what way? They’re splendid.”
“You feel that?”
“Dear, you know they are.”
He put his pipe to his mouth and with that meditative tapping tapped his
teeth. “Splendid, yes, in health, in appearance, in development, in all
that kind of thing. I don’t mean that.” He turned his face towards her
and spoke directly. “Rosalie, have you ever thought they’re not quite
like other children?”
Oh, setting from what quarter this? She said, “They’re better--miles and
miles.”
He got up. “Well, that’s all right. If you have noticed nothing, that’s
all right.”
“But, Harry. I am at a loss, dear. Of course it’s all right. But what
have you noticed, think you’ve noticed?”
He was standing before her, his back against the mantelpiece, looking
down at her. “Just that--not quite like other children.”
“But in what way?”
“It’s hard to say, old girl. If you’ve not noticed it, harder still.
Not quite so childish as at their age I seem to remember myself with
my brothers and sisters being childish. A kind of--reserve. A kind
of--self-contained.”
She shook her head, “No, no.”
“You think it’s fancy?”
“I’m sure it is.”
He was silent a moment. “It’s rather worried me. And of course now--If
you are going to be away--”
Stand by! She had the drift of this!
She said simply, “Harry, this can’t be.”
“You can’t give up the idea?”
Her hand upon the helm that steered her life constricted. “It is not to
be asked of me to give it up.” She paused. She said softly, “Dear, this
is a forward step for me. You are asking me to make a sacrifice. I would
not ask you.”
He began, “There are sacrifices--”
“They are not asked of men.”
He said, “Rosalie, you said once, when Benji was born, that, if at any
time need be, you would give up, not a thing like this, but your work
entirely.”
As if to shield or to support her heart she drew her left hand to it.
“Would you give up yours, Harry?”
He said quickly, “I’m not suggesting such a thing. It is ridiculous. I’m
only showing you--”
She began to say her say, her voice reflective as his own had been. “But
you have shown me frightful things, shown me how far and oh, how quick,
a thing that starts may go. Oh, my dear, know the answer before it ever
is suggested. Sacrifices! It is sacrifice for the children that you
profess to mean. Well, let us call it that. Have you ever heard of a
father sacrificing himself for his children? There’s no such phrase.
There’s only the feminine gender for that. ‘Sacrificed himself for his
wife and children.’ It’s a solecism. If grammar means good sense,
it isn’t grammar because it’s meaningless. It can’t be said.
It’s grotesque. But ‘Sacrificed herself for her husband and her
children,’--why, that the commonest of cliches. It’s written on half the
mothers’ brows; it should be carved on half the mothers’ tombs--upon my
own dear mother’s.” She stood up and faced him. “Harry, not on mine.”
She put a gentle hand on his. “I love you--you know what our love is. I
love the children--with a truer love that they have never been a burden
to me nor I on a single occasion out of mood with them. But, Harry, I
will not sacrifice myself for the children. When I ask that of you, ask
it of me. But I never will ask it of you.”
She was trembling.
He put an arm about her shoulders. “It’s over. It’s over. Let’s forget
it, Rosalie.”
Of course she did not forget it. Of course she knew that Harry could
not. Men that marry for a home! Already in his mind the thought that
for his home she should give up, not only this present forward step,
but--everything! Oh, man-made world! Oh, man-made men! “It’s over. It’s
over,” he had said. Of course she knew it was not over. Men that marry
for a home! Secret she had kept it and in the same moment that she had
realised the significance of her secrecy it had been enlarged. Now it
stalked abroad.
But what is to be observed is the quality of the love between them. It
was through the children that he had made this claim that he had sought
to impose upon her. She had told him, as she believed, that what he
thought he saw was fancy. It never occurred to her to imagine so base
a thing as that he, to give himself grounds, had invented or even
exaggerated his fancy; but it had been excusable in her (threatened as
she saw herself) to avoid, in the days that followed, discussion of that
fancy, much less herself to bring it forward. Her love for Harry was
never in that plane. It could admit no guile. It happened that within
the week she was herself a little pained by a matter with the children.
She took her pain straight to her Harry.
On his last day of the holidays before he returned for his second term
at his preparatory school, Huggo was noisy with excitement at the idea
of returning. It rather pained Rosalie that he showed not the smallest
sign of regret at leaving home. Miss Prescott had done all the necessary
business of getting his clothes ready for school, but Rosalie took from
Field’s this last afternoon to do some shopping with her little man (as
she termed it) in Oxford Street; to buy him some little personal things
he wanted,--a purse of pigskin that fastened with a button, a knife with
a thing for taking stones out of horses’ hoofs, and a special kind of
football boots. Since there had come to her the “men that marry for
a home” significance, that mirage in her face had much presented that
mutinous and determined boy it often showed. Only the mother was there
when she set out with Huggo. And then the sense of pain.
Oxford Street appeared to be swarming with small boys and their mothers
similarly engaged. All the small boys wore blue overcoats with velvet
collar and looked to Rosalie most lovably comic in bowler hats that
seemed enormously too big for their small heads. Huggo was dressed to
the same pattern but his hat exactly suited his face which was thin and,
by contrast with these others, old for his years. Rosalie wished somehow
that Huggo’s hat didn’t suit so well; the imminent extinguisher look of
theirs made them look such darling babies. And what really brought out
the difference was that all these other small boys invariably had a hand
stretched up to hold their mothers’ arms and walked with faces turned
up, chattering. Huggo didn’t. She asked him to. He said, “Mother, why?”
“I’d love you to, darling.”
He put up his hand and she pressed it with her arm to her side, but she
noticed that he was looking away into a shop window while he did as he
was asked, and there came in less than a dozen paces a congestion on the
pavement that caused him to slip behind her, removing his hand. He did
not replace it.
In the shop where the knife was to be bought an immense tray of every
variety of pocketknife was put before them. Huggo opened and shut blades
with a curiously impatient air as though afraid of being interfered with
before he had made his choice. Immediately beside Rosalie was another
mother engaged with another son upon another tray.
“It’s got to have a thing for levering stones out of horses’ hoofs,”
said Huggo, brushing aside a knife offered by the assistant and
rummaging a little roughly.
Rosalie said, “Darling, I can’t think what you can want such a thing
for.”
The lady beside her caught her eye and laughed. “That’s just what I’m
asking my small man,” she said.
Her small man, whose face was merry and whose hat appeared to be
supported by his ears, looked up at Rosalie with an engaging smile and
said in a very frank voice, “It’s jolly useful for lugging up tight
things or to hook up toffee that’s stuck.”
They all three laughed. Huggo, busily engaged, took no notice.
He found the knife he wanted. Rosalie showed him another. “Huggo, I’m
sure that one’s too heavy and clumsy.”
The voice of the little boy with the hat on his ears came, “Mummie, I’d
rather have this one because you chose it.”
Rosalie said to Huggo, “It will weigh down your pocket so.”
“This one! This one!” cried Huggo and made a vexed movement with a foot.
Rosalie, sitting with Harry before the fire in Harry’s room that night
said, “Harry, tell me some more of what you said the other day about the
children.”
He looked up at her. He clearly was surprised. “You’ve been thinking
about it?”
“I’ve been with Huggo shopping for him this afternoon and been at little
things a little sad. Harry, when you said ‘not like other children’ did
you mean not--responsive?”
He said intensely, “Rosalie, it is the word. It’s what I meant. I
couldn’t get it. I wonder I didn’t. It’s my meaning exactly--not
responsive. You’ve noticed it?”
“Oh, tell me first.”
“Rosalie, it’s sometimes that I’ve gone in to the three of them wanting
to be one with them, to be a child with them and invent things and
imagine things. Somehow they don’t seem to want it. They don’t--invite
it. Your word, they don’t--respond. I want them to open their hearts and
let me right inside. Somehow they don’t seem to open their hearts.”
She said, “Harry, they’re such mites.”
He shook his head. “They’re not mites, old girl. Only Benji. And even
Benji--It was different when they were wee things. It’s lately, all
this. They don’t seem to understand, Rosalie--to understand what it is I
want. That’s the thing that troubles me. It’s an extraordinary thing
to say, but it’s been to me sometimes as if I were the child longing
to be--what shall I say?--to have arms opened to me, and they were the
grown-ups, holding me off, not understanding what it is I want. Not
understanding. Rosalie, why don’t they understand?”
She had a hand extended to the fire and she was slowly opening and
shutting her fingers at the flames. This, coming upon the feeling she
had had that afternoon with Huggo, was like a book wherein was analysed
that feeling. But, “I am sure they do understand, dear,” she said. “I’m
sure it’s fancy.”
“I think you’re not sure, Rosalie.”
“Oh, yes, I am. If it’s anything it’s just perhaps their way--all
children have their ways. What I thought about Huggo this afternoon
might perhaps be something what you mean. Harry, if it is, it’s just the
little man’s way.”
“What was it you thought?”
She maintained that movement of the fingers of her hand. “Why, only
things I noticed; tiny things; nothings, I’m sure. Out shopping with me,
Harry. Well, it was his last day and I would have expected somehow he
would have been fonder for that. He wasn’t and I rather felt it. Things
like that. I would so like him to have held my arm. He didn’t want to.
Not very grateful for the things we bought. But there, why should he be,
dear Huggo? But just his way; that’s what one ought to think. But I felt
it a little.”
Harry said, “I know. I know. It’s that that I have felt--not responsive.
It’s what I’ve thought I’ve noticed in them all.”
Telling him perhaps enlarged, as telling does, her sensibilities. She
said very quickly, “Not Benji!”
“Well, Benji’s so very young. But even--But in the other two--”
She said as quickly as before, “Ah, Doda’s responsive!”
“You’ve seen it, dear, in Huggo.”
“Oh, Harry, nothing, just his way. I’m sorry now I mentioned it.”
He had been watching the flexion of her hand. He said, “I’m glad you
have. When I spoke of it the other day you said you didn’t see it. I
think it’s generous in you to admit you have.”
She murmured, “Generous?”
“It brings up--Rosalie, does this affect a little, alter perhaps, your
decision?”
She shut her fingers sharply. “No.” She kept them shut. “There’s nothing
at all could alter that, Harry.”
He turned aside and began to fill his pipe, with slow movements.
It has been warned that it was in this holidays of Huggo’s from his
preparatory school that Time, that bravo of the cloak-and-dagger school,
whipped out his-blade and pounced. These, since that warning, were but
the doorways and the lurking posts he prowled along.
He now was very close to Rosalie.
Rosalie and Harry both were home to lunch next day. In the afternoon
they were to take Huggo to Charing Cross to see him off in the saloon
specially reserved for his school. All the children were at lunch for
this occasion. Benji in a high chair just like the high chair that had
been Rosalie’s years back--what years and years!--at the rectory. Huggo
was in boisterous spirits. You would think, you couldn’t help thinking,
it was his first day, not his last day home. Rosalie observed him as
she had not before observed him. How he talked! Well, that was good. How
could Harry have thought him reserved? But he talked a shade loudly and
with an air curiously self-opinionated. But he was such a child, and
opinions were delightful in a child. Yes, but something not childish
in his way of expressing his opinions, something a shade superior,
self-satisfied; and she particularly noticed that when anything in
the way of information was given him by Harry or by herself he never
accepted it but always argued. She grew very silent. She felt she would
have given anything to hear him, in the long topic of railways with his
father, and then of Tidborough School, say, “Do they, father?” or, “Does
it, father?” He never did. He always knew it before or knew different.
Once on a subject connected with the famous school Harry said, a shade
of rebuke in his voice, “My dear old chap, I was at Tidborough. I ought
to know.” Rosalie felt she would have given anything in the world for
Huggo to reply, “Sorry, father, of course you ought.” Instead he bent
upon his plate a look injured and resentful at being injured. But in a
minute she was reproaching herself for such ideas. Her Huggo! and she
was sitting here criticising him. Different from other children! Why, if
so, only in the way she had affirmed to Harry--miles and miles better.
Opinionated? Why, famously advanced for his years. Superior? Why,
bright, clever, not a nursery boy. She had been wronging him, she had
been criticising him, she had been looking for faults in him, her Huggo!
Unkind! Unnatural!
Listen to him! The meal was ended. His father was bantering him about
what he learnt, or didn’t learn, at school; was offering him an extra
five shillings to his school tip if he could answer three questions.
The darling was deliciously excited over it. How his voice rang! He was
putting his father off the various subjects suggested. Not Latin--he
hadn’t done much Latin; not geography--he simply hated geography. Listen
to him!
“Well, scripture,” Harry was saying. “Come, they give you plenty of
scripture?”
“Oh, don’t they just! Tons and tons!” Listen to him! How merry he
was now! “Tons and tons. First lesson every morning. But don’t ask
scripture, father. Father, what’s the use of learning all that stuff,
about the Flood, about the Ark, about the Israelites, about Samuel,
about Daniel, about crossing the Red Sea, about all that stuff: what’s
the use?”
Time closed his fingers on his haft and took a stride to Rosalie.
She sat upright. She stared across the table at the boy.
Harry said, “Here, steady, old man. ‘What’s the use of Scripture?’”
“Well, what is the use? It’s all rot. You know it isn’t true.”
Time flashed his blade and struck her terribly.
She called out dreadfully, “Huggo!”
“Mother, you know it’s all made up!”
She cried out in a girl’s voice and with a girl’s impulsive gesture of
her arm across the table towards him, “It isn’t! It isn’t!”
Her voice, her gesture, the look upon her face could not but startle
him. He was red, rather frightened. He said mumblingly, “Well, mother,
you’ve never taught me any different.”
She was seen by Harry to let fall her extended arm upon the table and
draw it very slowly to her and draw her hand then to her heart and
slowly lean herself against her chair-back, staring at Huggo. No one
spoke. She then said to Huggo, her voice very low, “Darling, run now to
see everything is in your playbox. Doda, help him. Take Benji, darlings.
Benji, go and see the lovely playbox things.”
When they had gone she was seen by Harry to be working with her fingers
at her key-ring. In one hand she held the ring, in the other a key that
she seemed to be trying to remove. It was obstinate. She wrestled at it.
She looked up at Harry. “I want to get this”--the key came away in her
hand--“off.”
He recognised it for her office pass-key.
Caused by that cry of hers to Huggo and by that ges-ture with her cry,
and since intensifying, there had been a constraint that he was very
glad to break. He remembered how childishly proud she had been of that
key on the day it was cut for her. They had had a little dinner to
celebrate it, and she had dipped it in her champagne glass.
He said, “Your pass-key? Why?”
She said, “I’m coming home, Harry.”
“Coming home?”
She was sitting back in her chair. She tossed, with a negligent movement
of her hand, the key upon the table. “I have done with all that. I am
coming home.”
He got up very quickly and came around the table to her.
PART FOUR--HOUSE OF CARDS
CHAPTER I
There is a state wherein the mind, normally the court of pleas where
reason receives and administers the supplications of the senses, is
not in session. Reason is sick, suspends his office, abrogates his
authority, withdraws to some deep fastness of the brain, and suffers the
hall of judgment to be the house of license or of dreams: of dreams, as
sleep, as vanity of reverie; of license when there is tumult in the body
politic, as fever, as excesses of the passions, as great shock. Reason
is sick, withdraws, and there is strange business in that place.
If that is just the way one writes, not susceptible of easy
comprehension, and not enough explanatory of Rosalie’s condition, it
goes like this in Rosalie’s own words. Drooped back there in her chair
before that littered disarray of lunch, and that key lying there, and
Harry stooping over her and holding both her hands, she said, “Oh,
Harry! Oh, Harry! I feel deathly sick.”
She said it had been a most frightful shock to her, what Huggo had
declared. She said, “Oh, Harry, I feel all undone.”
Undone! We’ll try to feel her mind with that; to let that explain her
when she said this else, and when she wrote some things that shall be
given.
She said she had suffered, in that moment of crying out to Huggo and
of stretching out her arm to him, the most extraordinary--what was the
word?--the most extraordinary hallucination. “Harry, when Huggo said
that frightful thing! Oh, Harry, like an extraordinary dream, I was a
child again. It wasn’t here; it was happening; it was the rectory; and
not you and the children but all us children that used to be around the
table there. No, not quite that. More extraordinary than that. Robert
was there; Robert, I think, in Huggo’s place; and all the rest were
me--me as I used to be when I was ten; small, grave, wondering, staring.
And yet myself me too as I was then--oh, horrified as I’d have then been
horrified to hear the Bible stories called untrue; jumped up and crying
out, ‘It isn’t! It isn’t!’ as I would then have jumped up and cried out;
and all the other Rosalies staring in wonder as I’d have stared. Oh,
extraordinary, extraordinary! Within this minute, I have been a child
again. The strangest thing, the strangest thing!
“I was a child again, Harry, in a blue frock I used to wear and in a
pinafore that had a hole in it; and all those other Rosalies the same.
Those other Rosalies! To see them! Harry, I’ve not seen that Rosalie
I used to be--not years and years. That tiny innocent! It is upon me
still. I feel that small child still. Oh, I feel it! I remember--dear,
did I ever tell you?--when my father once... had been talking about
Cambridge... and suddenly cried out, it was at breakfast, ‘Cambridge! My
youth! My God, my God, my youth!’ There was coffee from a cup that he’d
knocked over came oozing, and I just sat there huge-eyed, staring, a
small, grave wondering child....
“Oh, Harry, my youth, my childhood--and now the children’s! The
difference! The difference!”
Harry talked to her. He ended, “The teaching, all the ideas, dear girl,
you mustn’t worry, it’s all different nowadays.”
“Harry, to hear it from a child like that!”
“It’s startled you. It needn’t. We’ll talk it out. We’ll fix it. It’s
just what he’s been taught, old girl.”
She said, “Oh, it is what he’s not been taught!”
Then there were things that, while was still upon her this shock, this
sense of being again the small, grave child in the blue frock and in
the pinafore with the hole in it, she wrote down. She dismissed Miss
Prescott. She thought, when the interview of dismissal opened, that she
would end by upbraiding Miss Prescott, but she was abated all the time
in any anger that she might have felt by Huggo’s other frightful words,
“Well, mother, you never taught me any different.” She did not want to
hear Miss Prescott tell her that. She told Miss Prescott simply that
she was giving up her business and coming now to devote herself to the
children. She thought, she said, their education had in some respects
been faulty, and told Miss Prescott how. Miss Prescott, speaking like
a book, told her it had not been faulty and told her why. “Truth,
knowledge, reason,” said Miss Prescott. “Could it conceivably be
contested that these should not be the sole food and the guiding
principle of the child mind?”
It was after that interview that Rosalie, sitting long into the night,
wrote down some things. She is to be imagined as wrenched back, as by a
violent hand, across the years, and in the blue frock and the pinafore
with a hole in it again, and awfully frightened, terribly unhappy, at
the thing she’d heard from Huggo. That was the form her shock took.
Beneath it she had at a blow abandoned all her ambitions as when a child
she would instantly have dropped her most immersing game and run to a
frightening cry from her mother; as once, in fact (and the incident and
the parallel came back to her), she had been building a house of cards,
holding her breath not to shake it, and her mother had scalded her hand
and had cried out to her, frighteningly. “Oh, mummie, mummie!” she had
cried, running to her; and flap! the house of cards had gone. Her inward
cry was now, “The children! The children!” and what amiss the leaving of
her work? Her work! Oh, house of cards!
Her state of mind, the imaginings in which that shock came to her, is
better seen by what she wrote down privately, to relieve herself,
than by the talk about it all that she had with her Harry. She wrote
immediately after Miss Prescott had stood up for “truth, knowledge,
reason,” and by combating truth, knowledge, and reason more clearly
expressed herself than in her talk with Harry. It was in her diary she
wrote--well, it wasn’t exactly a diary, it was a desultory journal
in which sometimes she wrote things. As she wrote, her brow, in the
intensity of her thought, was all puckered up. She still felt “deathly
sick; all undone.” She wrote:
“Of course it’s as she says (Miss Prescott). That is the kind of thing
to-day. Knowledge, stark truth--children must have in stark truth all
the knowledge there is on all the things that come about them. It’s
strange; yes, it is strange. No parent would be such a fool as to trust
a child with all the money she has nor with anything superlatively
precious that she possesses; but knowledge, which is above all wealth
and above all treasure, the child is to have to play with as it likes.
Oh, it is strange. Where is it going to stop? If you bring up a child on
the fact that all the Old Testament stories are untrue, a bundle, where
they are miraculous, of obviously impossible fairy tales, what’s
going to happen to the New Testament? The Immaculate Conception, the
Resurrection, the Ascension--what’s your child-mind that knows the
old stories for inventions going to say to those? Are they easier to
believe? The Creation or the Conception? The Flood or the Resurrection?
God speaking out of a burning bush or the Ascension to Heaven? The
pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire or the Three in One of the
Trinity? Oh, I wonder if Modern Thought has any thought to spare for
that side of the business--or for its results in a generation or two?”
Then she wrote:
“I’ve never taught them any different.”
Then she wrote:
“Mother, I am a child again to-night. Darling, in that blue frock I used
to wear. Darling, all that I to-night am thinking is what you taught
me. Oh, look down, beloved! I’ve been so wrong. I thought everything was
infinitely better for them than you made it, beloved mother, for me. I
didn’t realise.”
Then she wrote:
“It just means losing everything in God that’s human. It must mean that.
All our intelligence, if materialism may be called intelligence; all
modern teaching, if this new stuff that they pontificate may be called
teaching, offers us God the Spirit but, as it seems to me to-night,
denies us God the Father and God the Son. It may be--reasonable. But
things spiritual demand for their recognition emotions spiritual, and
there’s a pass that thousands reach when the spirit is a dead thing.
If they are to believe in God only as a Spirit, a Force, a Power; an
Essence to be felt but not seen; an Element to be absorbed into but not
to be visualised--if this, if these, there needs in them some spirit,
some force, some power of themselves to lift themselves to meet it.
They must be of themselves responsive as hath the sea within itself
that which respondeth to the sublimation of the sun. Well, there are
thousands (am I not one?) that have it not. It once was theirs. Now it
is not theirs. If there is for them only God the Spirit then is there
for them only that to which they have no more power to reach than has
one bedridden power to rise and find a mile away what may restore him.
They have only that, their breaking heart, which would cast itself, ah,
with what bliss of utter abandonment, before God the Father, a human and
a personal Father, quick to succor, and before God the Son, a human and
a personal Son, ardent to intercede. And that is denied them. That God
that existed and that was taught to exist for my mother and for her day
to this day may not exist. It may be--reasonable. Oh, it is offering a
stone where bread was sought.”
She also wrote:
“Oh, mother, if you could have been here, how you would have loved my
darlings, and how you would have given them all that you gave to me!
I will now, mother. Mother, I’ve come back home to them, in the blue
frock, and in the pinafore with a hole in it.”
That was the spirit in which she came back home to the children, that
and all that went with it and that arose out of it. It was nothing at
all to her when she did it, the frightful break with Field’s. Harry
was distressed for her, but there was no need at all for him to be
distressed, she told him. There wasn’t a sigh in her voice, nor in her
inmost thoughts a sigh, when, telling him of the interview with Mr.
Field and with Mr. Sturgiss at her resignation of her post, she said
with a smile, “Carry on? Of course the department can perfectly well
carry on. Dear, it’s just the words I said to you a fortnight back on
the matter so very different. ‘The thing’s organised. It runs itself.
That is why it is the success it is, because it’s organised. That’s
why I can come away and leave it, because I’m an organiser. Aren’t I an
organiser?”
He held her immensely long in his arms. “You are my Rosalie,” he said.
Immensely long he held her, immensely close; oh, men that marry for a
home! Until, come home, she saw Harry’s tremendous happiness in the home
that now she gave him, she never had realised the longing that must have
been his for the home for which he had married, and never till now had
had. It was poignant to her, the sight of his tremendous happiness.
“Always to find you here!” he would cry, in the first weeks of the new
life, coming home to tea and coming in to her in the drawing-room where
she would be, all ready for him, with Doda and with Benji. “Always to
leave you here!” he would say, taking leave of her in the morning, and
she and Doda and Benji coming with him to the hall door to see him off.
“Mice and Mumps,” he used to add in codicil, “Mice and Mumps, I’m a
happy chap!” and was for ever bringing home trifles for her and for the
children, or plans and passes for how and where the Saturday and the
weekend should be spent, all four together. “Mice and Mumps, I’m gorged
with happiness! And you, Rosalie?”
“Oh, happy!” she used to say.
And was. It was poignant to her, his tremendous happiness, and it
brimmed up the cup of her own happiness. She was doing virtuously and
she had of her virtue that happiness which, as the pious old maxims tell
us, comes of being good.
That should have been well; but virtue is a placid condition and the
happiness arising out of it placid. It brims no cups, flushes no cheeks,
sparkles no eyes. It is of the quality of happiness that one, loving a
garden, has from his garden, the happiness of tranquillity, not of stir;
of peace, not of thrills; of the country, not of the town. There was
more heady stuff than this that Rosalie had out of her new condition,
and that was dangerous. She was doing virtuously and she had out of her
virtue an intoxication of joy that, in so far as it is at all concerned
with virtue, arises, not from virtue’s self, but from the consciousness
of virtue. That was dangerous. The danger point in stimulants is when
they are resorted to, not as concomitant of the pleasures of the table,
but be-cause they stimulate. Rosalie, come to her children and her Harry
and her home, to the thought of her renunciation and of her happiness
constantly was turning for the enormous exhilaration of happiness that
there she found. “How glad I am I gave it up! How glad! How glad!
How right I’m doing now! How right! How right! How happy I am in this
happiness! How happy! How happy!”
Is it not perceived that thus it was not well assured, this great joy
that she had, this cup of hers that brimmed? She started from that
danger point at which the drug is drunk for stimulant. On the very first
day of her new life she was saying, “How glad I am! How glad I am!” and
going on radiant from her gladness. But she, in her resort to this her
stimulant, suffered this grave disparity with the drinker’s case: he
must increase his doses--and he can. She, living upon her stimulant,
equally was compelled--but could not. The renunciation that brimmed her
happiness on the first day was available to her in no bigger dose on the
succeeding days, the hundredth day and the three hundredth and the five
hundredth. It never could increase. It had no capacity of increase. Is
it not perceivable that it had, on the contrary, a staling quality?
It would have been all right if it had been all right. It would have
been all right if it had not been all wrong. If these absurd premises
can be understood, her case can be understood. She used them herself in
after years. “It would have been all right,” she used to say to herself,
twisting her hands together, “if it had been all right.” “It would have
been all right,” she used to say to herself, “if it had not been all
wrong.” What she meant, and what here is meant, requires it to be
recalled that it was in that spirit of that glimpse of herself back a
child again in the blue frock and in the pinafore with a hole in it that
she came back to the children, came back home to them. Shocked by
the thing that had come to pass, penitential by influence of the old
childhood influences that had stirred within her, most strangely and
most strongly transported back into that childhood vision of herself, it
was in the guise of that child and with that child’s guise as her ideal
for them that passionately she desired to take up her children’s lives.
Her Huggo, her man child, her first one! Her Doda, her self’s own self,
her woman-bud, her daughter! Her Benji, her littlest one, her darling!
She longed, as it were, to throw open the door, and in that blue frock
and in the spirit of that blue frock most ardently to run in to them
and hug them, blue frocked, to her breast, and be one with them and tell
them the things and the things and the things that were the blue frock’s
mysteries and joys, and hear from them the things and the things and the
things that were the blue frock’s all-enchanted world again.
That was what most terribly she wanted and with most brimming gladness
set about to do--and there was borne, in upon her, hinted in weeks,
published in months, in seasons sealed and delivered to her, that there
was among her children no place for that spirit. They did not welcome
the blue frock; they did not understand the blue frock; they were not
children as she had been a child. It was what Harry had said of them,
they somehow were not quite like other children; it was what she herself
had noticed in Huggo; they did not respond. They’d gone, those children,
too long as they’d been left to go. She came to them ardently. They
greeted her--not very responsively. They didn’t understand.
What happened was that, coming to them great with intention, she was,
by what she did not find in them, much dispirited in her intention.
What followed from that was that she turned the more frequently to the
stimulation of the thought of her renunciation, to the sensation of
happiness that arose in her by consciousness that she was doing what she
ought to be doing. She would be puzzled, she would be a little pained,
she would be a little tired at the effort, fruitless, to call up in the
children those lovely childish things that as a child had been hers.
She then would feel dispirited. She then would think, “But how glad I am
that I gave it all up; but how right I am to be at home with them; but
how happy I am that I am now doing that which is right.” That stimulated
her. That made her tell herself (as before she had told Harry) that
it was just fancy, this apparent difference, this indifference, in the
children.
But the more she found necessary that stimulus, the less that stimulus
availed; and she began to feel, then, the first faint gnawings after
that which had been stimulus indeed, her work, her career.
Of course this is making a case for her, this is special pleading for
her, but who so abandoned that in the ultimate judgment a case will
not for him be prepared? Try to consider how it went with her. First
intoxication of happiness; and must not intoxication in time wear
off? Then immense intention and then dispirited in her intention. Then
frequent resource to the stimulus of her realisation of virtue and then
the natural diminution of that cup’s effect. Is she not presented prey
for her life’s habit’s longings? Is she not shown dejected and caused by
that dejection (as caused by depression the reclaimed victim of a drug)
to desire again that which had been to her the breath of life?
That was how it went with her.
Doda was nine when she began; Huggo, when he was home for his holidays,
eleven, rising twelve; Benji only seven. They seemed to her, all
of them, wonderfully old for their years and, no getting over that,
different. She tried to read them the stories she used to love. They
didn’t like them. Doda didn’t like “The Wide Wide World” and didn’t like
“Little Women.” Huggo thought “The Swiss Family Robinson” awful rot,
and argued learnedly with her how grotesque it was to imagine all that
variety of animals and all that variety of plants in one same climate.
“But, Huggo, you needn’t worry whether it was possible. It was just
written as a means of telling a family of children natural history
things. They didn’t have to believe it. They only enjoyed it. I and
your uncle Robert never worried about whether it was possible; we simply
loved the adventure of it.”
“Well, I can’t, mother,” said Huggo. “It’s not possible, and if it isn’t
possible, I think it’s stupid.”
And Doda thought Ellen in the “Wide Wide World” silly, and Beth and Jo
and the others in “Little Women” dull.
She read them Dickens, but it was always, “Oh, leave out that part,
mother. It’s dull.” And so was Scott Lamb’s “Tales from Shakespeare”
never had a chance at all. They had heard from Miss Prescott, or Huggo
had heard at school, that Shakespeare was a lesson. “Oh, not a thing
out of lessons, mother.” What they liked were what seemed to Rosalie
the crudely written stories, and the grotesque and usually rather vulgar
comic drawings, in the host of cheap periodicals for children that
seemed to have sprung up since her day. They called these exciting or
funny and they revelled in them. They were different. Benji was no more
than a baby, but he was extraordinarily devoted to Doda, liked only the
things that Doda liked, and did not like the things that Doda didn’t
like, or, in the language sometimes a little unpleasantly emphatic that
always was Doda’s and Huggo’s, that Doda “simply loathed.” Rosalie had
some old bound numbers of treasured juvenile periodicals of the rectory
days. Even Benji didn’t like them. They were markedly different from the
books the children did like. Their illustrations were mainly of children
in domestic scenes. “Don’t they look stupid?” was Doda’s comment; and
Benji, copying, thought they were stupid too.
All this was a very small thing and of itself negligible; even,
as Rosalie told herself, natural--naturally children of succeeding
generations changed in their tastes. It only is introduced as
conveniently showing in an obscure aspect what was noticeable to
Rosalie, and felt by her, in many aspects, whose effect was
cumulative. “A kind of reserve,” Harry had said of them: “a kind
of--self-contained.” It was what she found. She wanted to be a child
with the children; they didn’t seem to understand. She wanted to open
her heart to them and have their hearts opened to her; they didn’t seem
to understand. She was always seeing that vision of Rosalie in the blue
frock among them, rather like Alice, the real Alice, Tenniel’s Alice.
She was always feeling that Rosalie, thus guised, was held off from
their circle, not welcomed, not understood, as certainly they did not
care for the demure, quaint Alice of Tenniel.
She began to have sometimes when she was with the children an
extraordinary feeling (just what Harry had said) that she was younger
than the children, that it was she who was the child, they that were the
grown-ups.
When the step of her renunciation was first taken, ardent to devote
herself to them in every moment of the day, she began to give their
lessons to Doda and to Benji. It was not a success. The methods of
teaching, as the text-books, had changed since she was a child. The
Prescott methods were here and to her own methods the children did not
respond. There it was again--did not respond. There was obtained a Miss
Dormer who came in daily and who confined herself, Rosalie saw to that,
solely to lessons; the walks and all the other hours of the day were
Rosalie’s.
That’s all for that. The picture has been overdrawn if has been given
the suggestion that Rosalie was unhappy with the children or the
children openly indifferent to her. All of that nature that in fact
arose was that, whereas Rosalie had expected an immense and absorbing
occupation with the children, she found instead an occupation very
loving and very happy but not relieving her of all the interest and all
the affection she had desired to pour into it. It was rather like to a
hungry person a strange dish that had looked substantial but that, when
finished, was found not to have been substantial; still hungry. She
had thought the children would have been entirely dependent on her. She
found them in many ways independent and wishing to be independent. It
would have been all right if it had been all right. That was it. It
would have been all right if it had not been all wrong. That was it.
She began to think of Field’s.
When first she began to think of Field’s, which was when she had been
nine months away from Field’s, she would let her mind run upon it
freely, as it would. One day, thus thinking upon it, she brought up her
thoughts as it were with a round turn. She must not think so much about
Field’s--not like that. She sighed, and with the same abruptness of
mental action checked her sigh; she must not regret Field’s--not like
that.
It was a fateful prohibition. It was the discovery to herself, as to
Eve of the tree by the serpent, of a temptation seductive and forbidden.
Thereafter “like that” her mind, missing no day nor no night, was often
found by her to be there. The quality that made “like that” not seemly
to her, increased, at each return, its potency.
It became very difficult to drag her mind away. It became impossible to
drag her mind away.
Her governance of her mind became infected and it became not necessary
to think it necessary to drag her mind away.
She had not visited Field’s since she had left. Mr. Sturgiss and Mr.
Field had written to her reproaching her for carrying to such lengths
of neglect her desertion of them, and she had responded banteringly but
without a call. One day (she had lain much awake on the previous night)
she at breakfast told Harry she had the idea of going that afternoon to
see how Field’s was getting on.
She was surprised at his supplement to his reply. The children had left
the room. He first agreed with her that the idea was good. “Yes, rather;
why not?” was the expression he used. He then said, surprising her,
“Rosalie, you’ve never, have you, regretted?”
Her surprise framed for her her reply. “Why ever should you ask that?”
“I’ve thought you’ve not been looking very well lately.”
“But what’s the connection, Harry?”
“Fretting?”
She smiled. “I’m not the fretting sort.”
He was perfectly satisfied. “I knew you’d tell me if you were.
Everything going well?”
“Fine.”
He shot out his arms with a luxurious stretching gesture. “Mice and
Mumps, it’s been fine for me, I can tell you. Fine, fine!”
How happy he looked! How handsome he looked! Her thought was “Dear
Harry!”
He got up and began to set about his departure. She went with him into
the hall and she called up the stairs, “Children, father’s going.” They
came bounding down. He joked and played with them. He loved this custom,
now long established. She brushed his hat, also a rite she knew he
loved. He kissed her with particular affection. “Yes, you go up to
Field’s and give old Sturgiss and old Field my love. You’ll almost have
forgotten the way there. I say, it’s funny, isn’t it, how time changes
things and how it goes? We couldn’t have imaged this once, and here it
is the most established thing in the world. Do you know, it’s almost
exactly a year since you chucked it?”
“Chucked it!” The light expression smote her. O manlike man that thus
could phrase divorce that from her heart’s engrossment had cut her life
asunder!
In the afternoon she set out upon her intention. It meant nothing, her
visit, she assured herself. It had no purpose beyond the exchange of
courtesies. But when she was leaving the house she paused. Should she
go? She went down the steps and through the gate, then paused again. She
returned to the house. She had an idea. She would take the children with
her. She called them, and while they gleefully dressed for the outing
she repeated to herself the word in which the idea of taking them with
her had come to her.
“A bodyguard!” she said.
The note of laughter she gave at the word had a tremulous sound.
Tremulous would well have described her manner when they were at
Field’s. She was asking herself as they went towards the City what it
was that she wanted to hear--that Field’s was doing very well without
her? That her department was not doing very well without her? Which?
She would not let her mind affirm which it was that she desired.
It appeared, when they arrived, that it was neither, nor anything at
all to do with the Bank. Her first words to the partners were of
smiling apology at bringing to precincts sacred to business, “a herd of
children.” That was a natural introduction of herself; it was an unusual
thing to do. But not natural the way in which she maintained the subject
of the children. It seemed that she had come to talk of nothing
else. Tremulous she was; talking, of the children, with the incessant
eagerness, and with the nervous eagerness, of one either clamant to
establish a case or frightened of a break in the conversation lest
a break should cause appearance of a subject most desperately to be
avoided.
Her bodyguard!
Mr. Field and Mr. Sturgiss were delighted to see her and expressed
themselves delighted to see the children. There was plenty in the bank,
coffers and strong-rooms and all sorts of exciting things, said Mr.
Field, that would amuse the small people, and when tea was done they
should be taken around to see them. In an inner holy of holies, behind
the partners’ parlour, a very exciting tea was made. A clerk was sent
out for a parcel of pastries and returned with an enormous bag, and
there was no tablecloth, nor no proper tea-table, and the children, much
excited, were immensely entertained.
Easy, while they were there, to make them the conversation’s centre.
But the meal ended and then became most evident her anxiety to keep the
chatter on the children. They became impatient to be off on the promised
exploration. She delayed it. Twice the clerk who was to conduct the tour
was about to be summoned. By a new gathering of general attention, she
stopped his coming. When at last he came she said she would be of the
party. The partners did not want that. The children did not want it.
“Mother, it will be much more exciting by ourselves.” She insisted.
She was aware for the first and only time in her life of a feeling
of nerves, of not being quite in control of herself, of making of her
insistence rather more than should be made.
“Well, stay,” said Mr. Sturgiss, “at least for a minute’s chat before
you join them.”
That was not possible, unless she was going to become hysterical, to
resist. The children trooped away. Her bodyguard!
She turned aside and it is to be remembered for her that, her face
concealed from the partners, she gave the tiniest despairing gesture
with her hands.
When, with the children, she was returning home, she was trying to
determine whether, while it was in suspense, she had or had not desired
to hear of the partners that which she had heard from them. They had
talked with her generally of the business. They had talked particularly
of the work of her department of the business. There was approaching all
the time the thing that sooner or later they must say. She was trembling
all the time to know how she would receive it. In whichever of its two
ways it came would she be glad or would she be sorry? She simply did not
know. She suddenly herself projected the point. She could not endure
any longer its delay. “And Miss Farmer,” she said. “How’s Miss Farmer
doing?” Miss Farmer, formerly one of her assistants, had on her
resignation taken her place.
Miss Farmer, replied Mr. Sturgiss, was estimable but--he opened his
hands and made with them a deprecatory gesture. “She’s not you. How
could she be you, or any one be you? We could replace Miss Farmer.
What’s the good? It’s you we’ve got to replace. We can’t replace you.”
Her heart had bounded.
CHAPTER II
That happened in the Christmas holidays, in January. In February was
Doda’s eleventh birthday. The child had friends rather older than
herself, neighbours, who for a year had been boarders at a school
in Surrey. She was desperately eager to join them there and it was a
promise from Rosalie that she should go when she was twelve, earlier if
she were good. On this eleventh birthday, which brought birthday letters
from the neighbours at the school and thus again brought up the subject,
“Oh, haven’t I been good?” cried Doda at the birthday breakfast. “Oh,
do let me go next term, mother. Father, do say I may.” Her eagerness for
school had been much fostered by Huggo’s holiday stories of school life;
and Huggo, as Doda now adduced, was leaving his preparatory and starting
at Tidborough next term; couldn’t she, oh, couldn’t she make also her
start then?
Harry said, “O grown-up woman of enormous years, think of your sorrowing
parents. How will you like to leave your weeping mother, Doda? How will
you like to leave your heart-broken old father?”
“Oh, I’d love to!” cried Doda.
The ingenuousness of it made her parents laugh.
“She’ll have her way, won’t she?” said Harry, when Doda, conscious, by
that laugh, of tolerance, had danced out of the room.
“I think she’d better,” said Rosalie.
The school was very well known to Rosalie. It was exclusive and
expensive; was limited to seventy girls, of whom twenty, under the age
of thirteen, were received in the adapted Dower House of the ancient
estate which was its home; and the last word in modernity was, in every
point of administration, its first word. It had been established only
eight years. The motto of its founders and of its lady principal was
“Not traditions--precedents!”
The subject came up again between Rosalie and Harry that evening and it
was decided that Doda should be placed there after the next holidays, at
the opening of the summer term. Harry declared himself, “in my bones” as
he expressed it, against boarding schools for girls, “But that’s my old
fogeyism,” said he. “It’s the modern idea that girls should have the
same training and the same chances in life as their brothers, and
there’s no getting away from the right of it.”
Rosalie said in a low voice, “To what end?”
He did not hear her. She had got out from the accumulation of papers
of her business life prospectuses and booklets of the school and he was
amusedly browsing over the refinements and advantages therein, not by
traditions but by precedents, set forth. “Mice and Mumps, Rosalie,”
said he, “they not only do riding as a regular thing but ‘parents are
permitted, if they wish, to stable a pupil’s own pony (see page 26).’
Oh, thanks, thanks! ‘Mr. Harry Occleve, barrister-at-law, availing
himself of your gracious permission on page twenty-six, is sending down
for his daughter a coach and four with ‘ostlers, grooms, coachmen, and
outriders complete.’ Ha!”
She was just watching him.
He said after an interval: “Yes, there’s a lot of sound stuff here,
Rosalie. It’s convincing. Not that any one needs convincing on the point
less than you and I.” He quoted again. “‘And advance them towards an
independent and a womanly womanhood.’ And it talks further back about
how ‘Idle women’ will soon be recognised as great a term of reproach
as ‘an idle man.’ It’s sound. I like this booklet here that each
girl’s given, ‘To the Girl of the Future.’ It tells them all about an
independent career, makes no fancy picture of it, tells ‘em everything.
Did you read that?”
“A long time ago. It probably doesn’t tell them one thing.”
“What?”
“That they can always--chuck it.”
He looked up quickly. “Hull-o!”
She gave him no response to his expressed surprise and he laughed and
said, “D’you know, Rosalie, I don’t believe I’ve ever before heard you
use slang.”
“You taught me that bit, Harry.”
“Oh, I sling it about. When did I?”
“One day last holidays when it was just on a year since I’d left
Field’s. Just a year, you said, since I’d--chucked it. O Harry--”
There was a quality in her voice that might, from what she saw upon his
face, have been a tocsin’s roll. His face was as a place of assembly
into which, as it might be a people alarmed, there came crowding in
emotions.
He said, “What’s up?”
She said, “O Harry, you look out for yourself!”
There was much movement in his face. “Look out for myself?”
She said, “That came out of me. I didn’t know I was going to say it.
It’s a warning. It shows the fear I have.”
“Rosalie, of what, of what?”
“Harry, for you.”
“You’re going to say something you think will hurt me?”
“No, something you’ll have to fight--if you want to fight it. Harry,
perhaps I can’t go on like this. I want to go back to my work.”
He expired a breath he had been holding. “I was guessing it.”
“Before just now?”
“No, while you’ve been speaking. Only now. I asked you weeks ago if you
ever felt you regretted--”
She leant forward from the couch whereon she sat, and with an extended
hand interrupted him. She said intensely, “Look here, Harry, if it was
just regret I’d not mind and I would tell you No a hundred times, just
not to disturb you, dear. But when you asked me that you spoke, a minute
afterwards, of my having--chucked it, as if it was giving up sugar
or stopping bridge. Well, that’s why I’m warning you to look out for
yourself. Because, Harry, I don’t regret it. I’m craving to go back to
it, craving, craving, craving!” She stopped. She said, “Do you want me
not to go back, Harry?”
He looked steadily at her. “Rosalie, it would be a blow to me.”
She said, “Well, then!” and she leaned back in the couch as though all
now was explained.
He very gravely asked her, “Are you going back, Rosalie?”
“Would it be a crime, Harry, to go back?”
He said to her, “I believe in my soul it would be a disaster.”
She got up. “Come over here to me, Harry.”
He went to her and took the hands that she extended to him. “If you
think that, a disaster, and if to you it would be what you said, a blow;
then that’s what I mean by saying, Harry, you look out for yourself. I
don’t know if I’m going back. I want to go terribly, oh, terribly. There
was a woman I once knew told me that if a woman once gives herself to
a thing, abandons all else and gives herself to it, she never never can
come back from it. ‘They don’t issue return tickets to women,’ she said
to me. ‘If you give yourself,’ she said, ‘you’re its. You may think you
can get away but you never will get away. You’re its.’ She was right,
Harry. I believe I’ve got to go back. If you don’t want me to, well,
you look out for yourself.” She drew herself towards him by her hands.
“Harry, when I went down to Field’s with the children that day last
holidays I took them to be a bodyguard to me, to prevent me from being
captured. When they left me there alone for a few minutes, I turned away
and wrung my hands because I knew I was going to be terribly tempted. I
am terribly tempted. I’m being dragged.” She went into his arms. “Harry,
hold me terribly tight and say you don’t want me to go back.”
He most tenderly embraced her. “Don’t go back, Rosalie.”
She disengaged herself, and made a sound, “Ah!” as if, while he had held
her body, herself had held the fort of her solicitude for his desires
against the horde of her own cravings that swarmed about its walls.
How long?
There was a mirage in her face. While Easter came and Doda, in huge
spirits, made her start at school, and Huggo, boisterously elated, his
start at Tidborough, and Benji, much dejected at Doda’s going, his start
at Huggo’s former day school; and while the long summer term and the
holidays passed on, there was never again seen nor heard by Harry the
tenderness that had been in her face and in her voice when she had
warned him, “Well, Harry, you look out for yourself,” and when she had
asked him, “Harry, hold me terribly tight in your arms and say you do
not want me to go back.” There thenceforward did fill up her countenance
the boy, mutinous and defiant, that was her other self. It was almost
upon the morrow of that passage with him (whose poignancy the written
word has failed to show) that she had a revulsion from the attitude
she had then exposed to him. Avid now to go back to the life she had
abandoned, she was ferocious to herself when she remembered she had
asked him, “Would it be a crime, Harry, to go back?” A crime! “Horrible
traitor to myself that I was” (her thoughts would go) “to question it a
crime just to take up my life again! A crime! Horrible fool that I was
to be able, with no sense of humour, to give to so natural a desire an
epithet so ludicrous as crime! A crime! A right, a right!”
Worst of all, she had invited, she had implored, Harry when her longings
were manifest to reason with her. Her longings now always were manifest;
but when he reasoned with her it was out of the scorpions of her
revulsion that she answered him.
He once said, “It appears to me that your attitude is changed from the
night you first mentioned this.”
She said, “Harry, what’s disturbing me when we talk about it is not my
own case, it’s the general case. Here’s a woman--never mind that it’s
me--here’s a woman that has made a success in life, that has abandoned
it and that wants to go back to it. You argue she mustn’t. I could say
it’s monstrous. I don’t say that. I choose to say it’s pitiful. If it
was a man, he’d go. He wouldn’t think twice about it. And if he did
think twice about it, every opinion and every custom that he
consulted would tell him he was right to go. It happens to be a woman,
therefore--well, that’s the reason! It’s a woman--therefore, No.
That’s the beginning of the reason and the end of the reason. A
woman--therefore, No. Oh, it’s pitiful--for women.”
Harry questioned: “Every opinion and every custom would tell a man to
go? No, no. You’re taking too much for granted, Rosalie. He wouldn’t
go, necessarily, and he wouldn’t be advised to go, if he had duties that
pulled him the other way.”
She gave a note of amusement. “But that’s the point. He never would have
such duties. It’s notable that a man always makes his duties and his
ambitions go hand in hand. Yes, it’s notable, that.”
“Well, put it another way. Suppose it wasn’t necessary for him to go....
Suppose nothing depended on his going, much on his staying. That makes
the parallel, Rosalie.”
She said to him, “Ah, I’ll agree to that. Let that make the parallel.
They’d tell a man in such a case, ‘Man, take up your ambitions. You are
a man. You have yourself to think of.’ That’s what they’d say. Well,
that’s what I’m saying. ‘I am a woman. I have myself to think of.’”
He asked, “And shall you, Rosalie?”
She said, “I’m thinking--every day.”
The more she thought, the more she stiffened. This was the thought
against whose goad she always came--Why should she be hesitant? What a
position! What a light upon the case and upon the status of woman
that, just because she was a woman, she must not consider her own, her
personal interests! For no other reason; just that; because she was a
woman!
“I’ve shut a gate behind me,” she on another day said to Harry. “That’s
what I’ve done. I’ve come out of a place and shut the gate behind me
and because I am a woman I mustn’t open it and go back. That’s what a
woman’s life is--always shutting gates behind her. There aren’t gates
for a man. There’re just turnstiles. As he came out so he can always go
back--even to his youth. When he’s fifty he still can go back and have
the society of twenty and play the fool as he did at twenty. Can a
woman?”
“That’s physical,” said Harry. “A man much longer keeps his youth.”
She said then the first aggressively bitter thing he ever had heard her
say. “Ah, keeps his youth!” she said. “So does a dog that’s run free.
It’s the chain and kennel sort that age.”
She hardened her heart.
She looked back upon the days when she had discovered for herself the
difference between sentiment and sense, between sentimentality and
sensibility. She then had made her life, and therefore then her
happiness, by putting away sentiment and using sense for spectacles. She
told herself she now was ruining her life, and certainly letting go her
happiness, by suffering herself to bear the sentimental handicap.
The summer holidays came. It had been her obvious argument to Harry
that, now the elder children were at school, and Benji soon to be the
same, that reason for her constant presence in the home no longer was
advanceable. It had been Harry’s argument to her that there were the
holidays to remember. The holidays came. Huggo wrote that he wanted to
go straight from school to a topping time in Scotland to which he had
been invited by a chum; when that was over he had promised, and he was
sure he would be allowed, to have the last three weeks with another
friend whose people had a ripping place in Yorkshire. Doda came home and
Doda’s first excitement was that nothing arranged might interfere with
an invitation from mid-August to a schoolfellow whose family were going
to Brittany. So much for her holiday necessity! Rosalie thought. So much
for Harry’s idea of how the children would naturally long to spend the
vacation all together! Doda did not seem to have a thought for Huggo,
nor Huggo a thought for when he should see Doda. Neither of them, she
could not help noticing, had the faintest concern to be with Benji. She
and Harry with Benji went down to a furnished house in Devonshire, and
the other two, their plans in part curtailed, were brought to join them.
It was jolly enough. It would have been more truly jolly, she used
to think, if Doda had not largely divided her time between writing to
apparently innumerable school friends and counting the days to when she
might be released for the Brittany expedition; and if Huggo had not
for the first few days openly sulked at the veto on the Yorkshire
invitation. How independent they were, how absorbed in their friends,
how--different!
She hardened her heart.
The reopening of the schools drew on and return was made to London.
Huggo and Doda were made ready for school and returned to school. The
Law Courts reopened and Harry took up again his work. October! You
could not take up a paper without reading of the inauguration of the new
Sessions at all the universities and seats of education. October! The
newspapers that for months had been padding out vapid nothings became
intense with the activities of a nation back to the collar. October! The
first brisk breath of winter in the air! She could not stand this! Could
not, could not!
She said suddenly one evening: “Harry, I was down at Field’s to-day.
They want me.”
Ever since, by that simile of hers of the dog chained and kenneled,
she had put a bitter note into this matter between them, he had by this
means or by that contributed no share to it when she had presented it.
He once had referred to the dog incident. “I can’t talk to you when you
talk like that, old girl,” he had said. “That’s not us. We don’t talk
like that. You know how I feel about this matter. Talking only vexes
it.”
“Harry, I was down at Field’s to-day. They want me.” It was now to be
faced.
He put down the paper he had been reading and began to fill his pipe.
“This wants a smoke,” he said and smiled at her; and he then told her
that which the level quality of her voice, a note from end to end of
purpose, had informed him. “I think we’re getting to the end of this
business,” he said.
Her voice maintained its quality. “Yes, near the end, Harry.”
“Field’s want you. What are you going to do?”
“Going back.”
“I want you.”
“I’m not leaving you. I am with you, as I came to you!”
“The children want you.”
“I am not leaving the children.”
“It’s a question of home, Rosalie. It’s the home wants you.”
She shook her head.
“What are you going to do?
“Going back.”
“You’ve thought of everything?”
“Everything.”
“The children?”
“Harry, the children don’t want me in the way that children used to want
their mothers when I was a child. They don’t display the same affection,
not in the same way, that we used to. I wish they did. I came back
for it. It wasn’t there. They’re darlings, but they’re self-reliant
darlings, self-assured, self-interested.”
“They’ve a right to a home, Rosalie.” He paused. “And, Rosalie, I have a
right to a home.”
She said, “Have I no rights?”
“There are certain things--” he slowly said and paused
again--“established.”
She said quickly, “Yes, men think that. They always have. Well, I
believe that nothing is.”
He looked steadily before him. “If it’s not established that woman’s
part is the home part; if that is going to change, I wonder what’s going
to happen to the world?”
She said, “Men always do. They always have--wondered, and the future
always has changed right out of their wondering. I believe that the
future is with woman. I believe that as empires have passed, Rome,
Greece, Carthage, that seemed to their rulers the pillars of the world,
so will pass man’s dominion. Woman’s revolt--it’s no use talking of it
as that, as a revolt. Women aren’t and never will be banded. They’re
like the Jews. They’re everywhere but nowhere. But the Jews have had
their day; woman--not yet. They work, not banded, but in single spies.
In every generation more single spies and more single spies. In
time.... In every generation man’s dominion, by like degree, decreased,
decreased. In time.... I’m one of this day’s single spies, Harry.”
He said with a sudden animation, “Look here, let’s take it on that
level, Rosalie. In your case what’s the need? Call it dominion. I’ve
never exercised nor thought to exercise dominion over you.”
“But you’ve not understood, Harry. I gave up what was my life to me.
To you I’d only--chucked it. Oh, but that hurt! That man’s supreme
indifference, that is dominion.”
He said, “I’ll know it, dearest, for your sacrifice.”