Part 22

"And I do hope you'll have a boy, dear. I was dreadfully disappointed when all my three were girls, and so was poor dear Charlie, though he was much too kind to say so. And then Dorothy's first two, dear little darling things, though I wouldn't change them for the world--still, you know how delighted she was when little Charles appeared. There is something about having a son, you know, Lily."

Lily, thoroughly understanding this cryptic statement, agreed to it, but she said also:

"Nicholas doesn't mind which it is, if only we really have a child, and I don't think I could be disappointed, so long as it lived."

"Ah, poor little thing. But you'll see, Lily dear, everything is going to be all right this time. Only you must take great care of yourself. You've no mother, and you won't mind a little advice from me, will you? Tell me, dear, do you...."

Cousin Ethel was very kind, and intensely interested, full of counsels that related to the physiological aspect of the situation.

Philip Stellenthorpe desired a grandson. He told Lily sadly that his own son was causing him great anxiety.

"He sometimes almost seems to be growing up a heartless little boy."

"You know, Father, Kenneth isn't really a little boy at all, now."

"He will always be a little boy to me," returned her father with simplicity. "When, please God, you have your own child, Lily, you'll know that's one of the sad and beautiful things about the parents of a child. To them, he never really grows up. They always see him as the dear little baby they took care of, and petted, and loved."

"Kenneth wouldn't like that, you know, Father. He doesn't really want to be taken care of, now. I think, in fact, that he resents being treated as though he were still a child."

"It's very ungrateful," said Philip, shaking his head. "Ungrateful and heartless. You were not like that, my little Lily."

"I was a girl, not a boy."

She hesitated, and then the thought of Kenneth made her speak.

"But, Father, sometimes I've wished that I was rather more like Kenneth. He's honest, anyway. He wants to develop into an individual with characteristics and opinions and beliefs of his own. I know Kenneth is often conceited and--and tiresome, but I don't really think he's heartless."

"Then what is he, pray? What is his persistent refusal to confide in me, to follow the advice that I'm only too ready to give him, to trust me?"

"I suppose he wants to feel that he belongs to himself."

"What nonsense!" Philip was roused to the extent of making use of a colloquialism. "A child, in one sense, must always belong to the parents who brought him into the world. Why, he owes them everything--life itself. The opinions and beliefs that you talk about, can only come to him through the things they teach him or cause him to be taught."

"That," said Lily, "is why it seems to me that so many of us, of his generation, are handicapped. I mean that we were taught along certain grooves, and never told to look beyond. Never told that Truth is not to be handed on, ready-made, but must be won at individual cost. And never told, either, that free-will is the right of every human soul, and that all teaching is only preliminary to the exercise of that free-will." She stopped, deeply in earnest, and gazed at her father.

"I should like my child," she said timidly, "to feel always that he belongs to himself. That we, Nicholas and I, can only tell him that we ourselves have learnt such and such things, and then leave him also to learn them by his own experience. I shouldn't want him to take his beliefs on trust from us--or from anybody. We are not omniscient. How can we tell the aspect that the Truth is to wear for him? Only he can find that out, perhaps at the cost of many mistakes. But it seems to me that the knowledge we have won for ourselves must be a more real and lasting thing than the ready-made standards of other people."

Philip shook his grey head, and Lily saw that his worn face looked more deeply lined.

"My poor little girl, you will see it all very differently when you have your child."

With all the intensity that was in her, Lily inwardly resolved that never, through weakness or faltering of hers, should that prophecy be realized. Never, so long as the clarity of vision won at long last still remained to her, would she let sentimentality, however disguised, blind her to the rights of her child's individual soul.

To Philip she said nothing more.

He looked at her sorrowfully and pitifully, but after a little while he found, as he had always found, a fiction with which to drape the hard reality that he disliked.

"You're not yourself at present, you know, my little pet. It's very natural. Your condition.... You'll look at it all very differently by-and-by."

Thus Philip, deriving such comfort as he could from a fictitious optimism.

Lily left it to him, and sought no further to speak of the many things that were in her mind. She had once come very near to hating her father in the bitterness of her youth, and now, with the faint dawn of a better wisdom, she was glad to let the past rest, to know that the future was not in his hands.

Sometimes, but very seldom, Lily reflected upon the possibility of her own death in child-birth.

Rather to her own surprise, she did not want to die. She wanted to see her child, and to remain with it.

"Of course you won't die, my darling," said Nicholas tenderly. "You must stay and look after me, eh, Lily? And you couldn't let the poor little thing be motherless, whichever it is."

"Which do you want, Nicholas?"

"Of course, every man wants a son." Nicholas threw back his shoulders in the old, characteristic way. "But I should love a little girl, Lily, with pretty hair like yours."

He touched her brown hair very softly. Often, now, his caresses were tinged with diffidence, and he was less prodigal of them.

"If you have a girl, Lily, you'll be able to have her always with you. A girl needn't go to school. You'd like that, wouldn't you?"

"Yes. Only, Nicholas----"

She slipped her hand into his, doubtful whether he would agree with what she was about to say, and instinctively and half unconsciously seeking to propitiate him, as she would have to do for all the days of their married life, if she was to act upon the convictions that were hers, but were indifferent to him.

"You wouldn't always want to have her at home if she wanted to go away? They have the right to develop along their own lines--the children."

Nicholas gave her a shrewd glance.

"You didn't get much of a chance that way, did you? I shall leave it to you, my dear. It's the mother's job to bring up her daughters, isn't it, and her son, too, for that matter, till he goes to school. Do you know what Ignatius Loyola used to say?"

"I don't think so. Tell me."

"'Give me a child until he is seven years old. After that any one may have him who wills,'" quoted Nicholas. "So you see that according to that, it's the early years that count."

"I believe it's true," she exclaimed.

"So do I. Those are the impressions that remain longest. I've lived a good many more years in this funny old world than you have, my dear, and I flatter myself that my memory is as good as that of most people----" he paused.

"Eh, Lily?"

"Your memory is a very good one, Nicholas."

"Well, be that as it may, I've certainly come to the conclusion that it's those early impressions that make one's after-life. Somehow, they're ineradicable."

Lily believed it utterly. Searching her own lesser experience, and greater perceptions, she knew that so it had been with herself.

So would it be with her child.

"It's for me to make those early impressions true ones," she thought. "Not just ideas of blind loyalty and unreasoning trust, that later years are bound to destroy, but of self-reliance, and honesty of mind, and courage in facing things as they are."

Nicholas had said that she should bring up the child herself, and she knew that he meant it.

It was the best that she could hope for now. The perfect union of minds to whom an identical vision has been vouchsafed could never be hers and his. The marriage of body, soul and spirit, that she had once dreamed of dimly, and called by its true name of Love, she had forfeited through her marriage with Nicholas.

She had long sought to comfort herself with illusions, but she had found no strength until she had put facts into words, and stripped the truth of sentimental accessories.

In her final acceptance, she felt nearer to her husband than ever before.

It was not the fault of Nicholas that their relations to one another had been founded upon a falsity. The one wrong for which he might reproach himself had been powerless to hurt her.

They only spoke of it once again.

Lily asked her husband whether he knew what had become of Doris Dickenson.

"Must we mention her?" he said unwillingly.

"Not if you'd rather not. I only wondered what she was doing?"

"No good, from what I heard! Not that it amounts to much, but I did hear somebody commiserating poor old Dickenson the other day. She isn't living at home. She can't keep straight."

A vision of Miss Dickenson, to Lily's eyes so singularly unattractive, rose to her mind in odd juxtaposition to the account now given of her.

She could have laughed, but for knowing that it would shock Nicholas sincerely to hear her.

"Don't you bother your little head about her, my darling child. She's a wrong 'un, that's what she is," said Nicholas with great finality.

He looked at her wistfully.

"You _have_ been a perfect darling to me, Lily. I know you've forgiven me, but I shall never, as long as I live, forgive myself."

"Nicholas, don't let's ever speak of it again."

"Really, Lily?"

"Really."

He drew a long breath.

"Well! I've got a wonderful little wife. You must take great care of yourself, my dear. You're tired now, aren't you?"

"Yes."

She smiled at him gratefully, surprised and touched that he should have seen.

"I generally know when you're tired, I fancy," said Nicholas complacently. "There isn't very much escapes me, eh, Lily?"

She leant against him, very tired.

"Eh, Lily?" Nicholas repeated.

She roused herself, and answered him as she knew that he wished to be answered.

* * * * *

Lily's child was a boy.

With his advent, a certain measure of personal happiness came to her, that sometimes made her marvel.

"But after all," she thought, "why should I arrogate to myself the right of deciding what my greatest happiness is to be?"

She looked at the sleeping child, and willed that he might never know the kindly deceits, the sentimental falsities, the arbitrary presentment of a fraction of truth as Truth entire, that had made for the standards of her own youth a foundation of shifting sands.

The long, long way round that it had been to arrive at last at her own convictions, and cease to try and wrench them into line with those of other people!

The baby stirred a little and she bent over him quickly, and as she soothed her child to sleep again, Lily whispered to him:

"You shall belong to yourself. Always."

_June_ 9th, 1920. SINGAPORE.

_Feb._ 17th, 1921. JOHORE.

* * * * *

BY E. M. DELAFIELD

TENSION THE HEEL OF ACHILLES