Part 8

Might there not indeed, as here with her, have been no father at all? The mere servant of Nature, whipped with passion to her purpose, then feared by the laws he and his like had made to construct a world; feared by them, disemboweled by them and by Nature herself driven out and cast aside.

It was not that these ideas had any definite substance of thought in her mind. Those few words she repeated aloud. The rest had merely stirred in her like some nebulous form of life, having neither shape nor power of volition.

She did not know to what plane of thought she had raised herself. She did not appreciate any distinct purpose that it brought. All she knew and in a form of vision, was that she was alone; that it was not a hateful thing her body held; that she was possessed of something no power but tragic Fate could despoil her of; that it was something over which she had direct power of perfecting in creation; that in the essence of her womanhood, she was greater than he who at the hands of Nature had been driven to her arms and left them, clasping that air which, in her ears, was full of the voices of life, full of the greatest meaning of existence.

III

For three days she left this letter unanswered, tempted at moments to misgiving about herself and the future that spread before her, yet always in ultimate confidence, rising above the mood that assailed her.

On the third day, receiving another letter of the same remorseful nature, begging her to write and say she was not in her silence thinking the worst of him, she sent her reply. To the sure dictation of her heart, she wrote--

"I have never thought about forgiveness, not once. I can scarcely believe you wrote these two letters which I have received. Do you remember once we talked about women wasting their lives beneath the burden of prejudice? You were the one man I had ever met, you were the one man, I thought, in all the world, who understood the truth about women. But I suppose there is something in the very nature of men that makes it impossible for them to realize the simple forces that make us what we are. All they see are the thousand conventionalities they have set about us to complicate us. We are not complicated. It is only the laws that make us appear so.

"That first of our two nights on the cliffs, did you find me complicated or difficult of understanding? I showed, as well as gave you myself and this is how you have treated that revelation. I will not let it make me unhappy. It could so deeply if I allowed it to get the upper hand. If I need anything now, now that I know I am going to have a child--don't be frightened yet, I only feel it in my heart--do you think it is help or advice for concealment? Do you think it is any assistance to me to know that all the world will be ashamed of me, but only you are not?

"Why do you even hint about shame to me? Did you think I shared what you call your weakness? Did you think for those moments that, as you say of yourself, I forgot or lost restraint?

"Never write to me again. Unfortunately for me, it is you most of all who could succeed in making me feel ashamed and I will not be ashamed. What lies before me is not to be endured but to be made wonderful. Will shame help me to do that?

"Perhaps you think I am an extraordinary woman. You say to yourself, 'Well, if that's her nature, it can't be helped, we've got to go through with it.' You would not believe me if I told you that all women in their essence are the same. It is only with so many that the prize of self-advancement, the hollow dignity of social position, the chimera--I don't know if I've spelt it right--of good repute, all of which you offer them if they obey the laws you have made to protect your property, are more attractive and alluring than the pain and discomfort and difficulty of bringing children into a competitive world. But you call this the line of least resistance.

"Because you find the majority of women so ready to be slaves to your laws do you imagine that they are not in essence the same as me? But starve one of those women as I and my sisters have been starved by circumstance, deny to her the first function which justifies her existence by the side of men with their work, as thousands and thousands are denied, taking in the end any husband who will fulfill their needs of life, and you will find her behave as I behaved.

"I have to thank you for one thing. Since I met you, my mind has opened out and in a lot of things, such as these which I am writing, I can think in words what a lot of women only feel but cannot express. I have to thank you too, that for those moments I loved. So many women don't even do that, not as they understand love.

"All that time together, playing golf, walking and talking on the cliffs, I felt our minds were at one. That with a woman is the beginning of love. All unities follow inevitably after that. It is not so with men. Your letters prove it to me. Perhaps this is why the formality of marriage is so necessary to make a screen for shame. I wonder if you realize in how many married women it is a screen and no more. I know now that to my own mother it was no more than that.

"I had no shame then. I loved. Loving no longer, I still now have no shame because, and believe me it is not in anger, we have no cause to meet again. I know I am going to have a child. I know he is going to be wonderful if I can make him so. I shall get my love from him as he grows in years and I am sure there is only one love. Passion is only an expression of it. My life will be fuller than yours with all the possessions you have. Bringing him up into the world will absorb the whole heart of me.

"Oh, my dear--I feel a great moment of pain to think what we have lost and truly I do not forget my gratitude for what I have gained. Never worry yourself in your thoughts by what you imagine I shall have to face. I know what my sisters will say, but what they will say will be no expression of the envy they will feel. I am quite human enough to find much courage in that.

"When it comes, I expect I shall leave Bridnorth. I confess I am not a Bombastes. I shall hide my shoes in my cupboard, but none shall step into them, nevertheless.

"I hate to say this and do not say it in any backbiting spirit. I know you will think you have to support me. You have not. Fortunately my share of what we girls have is enough to support me and enable me to bring him up as I mean him to be brought up. So please send me nothing. It would hurt me to hurt you by returning it.

"I do not think I can say any more. I count them up--six sheets of paper. Yet I believe you will read them all.

"Good-by."

IV

In the appointed time, Mary knew that the reality of her life had come to her. At the first opportunity after the sureness of her knowledge, she attended Holy Communion in Bridnorth church. It was not so much to pray she went, as to wait in that silence which falls, even upon the unimaginative mind, during the elevation of the host and all the accompanying ceremony of the rubric.

She asked no favor of her God. She waited. She said no prayers. She listened. It was a spiritual communion, beyond the need of symbols, above the necessity of words. Psychology has no function to describe it. It was her first absolute submission of both mind and body to the mystery of life. Here consciously, she felt she could do nothing. Here, as it might be, was the instant of conception. Whatever it was, whether it were God or Nature, this was the moment in which she held herself in suspension, feeling she had no conscious part to play.

When she rose from her knees, it was with an inner and hidden knowledge of satisfaction that she had passed successfully through some ordeal of her soul; that whatever it was within her, it had not failed in the supreme test of her being; that, in a word, she was a woman at last and that life had justified itself in her.

If such a moment there be as this instant of conception; if in her soul where no words conceal and no thoughts have substance, a woman can spiritually be aware of it, such an instant this was in the life of Mary Throgmorton.

From this moment onward, she set her mind upon definite things. In two months' time she had planned everything that she was to do.

Passing once through Warwickshire lanes one summer when she had been staying with friends in Henley-in-Arden, a storm of rain had driven them for shelter. They had come to the towpath of the canal near by where it flows into the lock at Lonesome Ford when the clouds that had been threatening all day heaped up to thunder and broke above them with a sudden deluge of rain.

Sharply from the towpath where they walked, the ground rose in high banks of apple orchard, through the trees of which, on the top of the hill, could just be seen the half-timbered gables of an old farmhouse.

Taking a gap in the hedge and climbing the orchard hill, they had hastened there for shelter. It was close upon tea-time. The farmer's wife had let them in.

She was a sour-visaged woman, slow and sparing of speech, yet in the silent, considerate way she gave them welcome and tended to their wants, there had been something intangible yet inviting that attracted Mary to her.

With an expression upon her long, thin and deeply lined face that suggested resentment to them all, she showed them into the best parlor, the room that had its black horsehaired sofa, its antimacassars on all the chairs, its glass cases containing, one a stuffed white owl, the other a stuffed jay; the room where the family Bible lay on a home-worked mat reposing on a small round table; the room that had nothing to do with their lives, but was an outward symbol of them as God-fearing and cleanly people.

In time Mary came to learn that with those who work upon the land, there are no spare moments; that the duties and demands of the earth know no Sabbath day of rest. That afternoon, she pictured them on Sundays in that room, with hands folded in their laps, reading perhaps with quaint intonations and inflections from the massive volume on its crocheted mat. It was never as thus she saw them.

As they went by, catching a glimpse of the parlor kitchen with its heavy beams of oak in the ceiling, she had wished they might have had their tea there. But the old lady was too unapproachable for her to ask such a favor then. In the best parlor they sat, eating the bread and butter and homemade bullace jam which she had brought them, commenting upon the enlarged photographs in their gilt frames on the walls.

One picture there was of a young girl, a very early photograph which had suffered sadly from unskillful process of enlargement. Yet unskillful though it had been, the photograph had not been able to destroy its certain beauty. Mary had called her friends' attention to it, but it seemed they could not detect the beauty that she saw.

"I don't think a long face like that is beautiful in a woman," one of them had said.

"I didn't mean the features," replied Mary. "She looks--"

She stopped, words came in no measure with her thoughts in those days. But when the farmer's wife had returned later to inquire if they wanted any more bread and butter cut, she questioned her with an interest none could have resented as to who the girl might be.

"Is she a daughter of yours?" asked Mary.

"Darter?" She shook her head and where another woman might have smiled at the compliment of Mary's interest, she merely turned her eyes upon the portrait as though she looked across the years at some one who had gone away. "That was me," said she. "It was took of me three days afore I was married. My old man had it out a few years ago and got it made big like that. Waste of money I told him."

And with that, having learnt their needs, she went out of the room.

It was later, when they had finished tea, and the sun was striking through the lace curtains into that room, almost obliterating its artificialities, when indeed they knew the storm was over, they left the parlor and finding the farmer with his wife in the kitchen, came there asking what they must pay.

"We beant settin' out to provide teas," she replied with no gratuity of manner in her voice.

"I guess you didn't come lookin' for tea," said the farmer, who had evidently talked it over with her and decided what they should do and say--"The storm drove 'ee."

While her friends stood arguing upon the issue, Mary had looked about her, observing the warm color of the brick-paved floor, the homely sense of confidence in the open chimney with its seats at either side, the jar of wild flowers, all mingled, that stood upon the window sill, the farmer's gun on its rest over the mantel-shelf; then the farmer and his wife themselves.

Once having seen that enlarged portrait, she knew well what it was that attracted her to the sour visage, the uninviting expression and the attenuated features of the farmer's wife. The girl she had been, the wistful creature she had set out for company with through life, somewhere, lurking, was in company with her still. She needed the finding, that was all.

"Waste of money," she had told him. There lay much behind that accusation; much that Mary if she had had time would have liked to find out.

The farmer himself, at first glance, would have taken the heart of any one. He smiled at them as he spoke with an ingenuous twinkle of good humor in his eyes. A mere child he was; a child of the land. Such wisdom as he had, of the land it was. The world had nothing of it. His thoughts, his emotions, they were in the soil itself. Adam he was, turned out of his garden, scarce conscious of the flaming sword that had driven him from the fruitful places, but seeking the first implement his hands could find to toil with and bring the earth to good account.

Unable to persuade these two that they should give any return for the meal they had had, they expressed their gratitude as best they could and went away. It was not until they had come back through the sloping orchard and were again upon the towing path of the canal, that Mary thought of the possibility of returning there at some other time.

The simplicity of the life of those two, the sense she had had of that nearness to the earth they lived on had touched her imagination deeper than she knew.

"Just wait for me a moment," said she. "I must go back--" when, before they could ask her reason, she had left them and was running back through the orchard.

The door which led into the parlor kitchen was opened to her knocking by the farmer's wife. Face to face with her purpose, she stammered in confusion as she spoke.

"I know you don't think of supplying teas or anything like that," she said awkwardly--"but I do so like your--your farm, your house here, that I wondered if there'd ever be any chance of coming back again for a little while; staying here I mean. I wondered if you would let me a room and--if there'd be any trouble about providing me with meals, then let me get them for myself. I should like to come here so much that I had to come back, just to ask."

With no change of expression, no sign of pleasure at Mary's appreciation of their home, the farmer's wife looked round at her husband still seated at his tea and said,

"Well--what do 'ee think, Mr. Peverell?"

His mouth was full. He passed the back of his hand across it in the effort of swallowing to make way for words and then, as best he could, he mumbled,

"'Tis for you to say, Missis. 'Twon't stop me milking cows or cuttin' barley."

She turned to Mary.

"'Ee'd have a mighty lot to do for 'eeself," she had said--"If 'ee come, 'twould be no grand lodging. 'Ee'd be one of us."

What better, she had thought. To be one of them was to be one with everything about them, the fruit trees in the orchards, the dead leaves and the new. Even then, although she never knew it clearly, the fruitful scents of the earth had entered and for long were to linger in her nostrils.

It was not that she had any knowledge of the soil, or could have explained to herself how one crop should follow another. She knew nothing of the laws a farmer lives by, the servant of Nature that he is, or the very earth he grows to be a part of and learns to finger as it were the very ingredient of his being.

She had not been trained to reason. All that she felt of the attraction of that place did not suggest itself in the direct progression of purposes to her mind. There were the odors of life in the air. She took them in through her senses alone. Through her senses alone she knew their fecundity. That fruitfulness it was which filtered like drops of some magic elixir into her blood.

It had been two years since she went that day to Yarningdale Farm, yet the odors still lingered, calling some sense and purpose in her soul which, until the sermon at that Christmas-time and following her meeting with Liddiard, had been all vague, illusive and intangible.

Now, with more assurance, she knew. In that old farmhouse, if they would have her, she was going to bring her child into the world. There, in what seemed not the long but the speedy months to her, she was going to breathe in the scents of the earth, absorbing the clean purposes of life as they are set forth in the tilling of the soil, the sowing of the seed, the reaping of the harvest.

It was to be close to the very earth itself she needed. There is no clear line of argument to trace in a woman's mind. Her marriage bed had been the heathered moors. The scent of the earth had been all about her as she lay in Liddiard's arms. No soft or spotless pillows had there been for her head to rest on. In no garments had she decked herself for his embrace. No ceremony had there been, no formalities observed. There was nothing that had happened to associate it in her mind with the conventional wedding night, blessed by the church, approved of by all.

If blessing there had been, and truly she felt there had, then the stars had blessed them, the soft wind from off the sea across the heather roots had touched her with its fingers; the dark night with all its silence had been full approval in her heart.

And he who was to come out of such a union as that, what else could he be but a wild, uncultivated thing? A seed falling from the tree, not sowed by the hand of man in exotic places; a young shoot finding its soil in the rotting fibers of earth that only Nature had prepared; a green bough that Nature only in her wildest could train, fighting its way upwards through the forest shades to the clear brilliance of the eternal light.

Such she felt he was. As such she meant him to be. There was no science in her purpose, no clear argument of thought. No reason other than this first impression she had had can be traced to justify the determination to which she came.

To Mrs. Peverell she wrote asking if they could let her have their little room beneath the eaves of the thatch when, hearing it was vacant, she replied that she would come down for a day or two and see them first.

But before she went, one thing had she set herself to perform. Now her sisters must know. Her mind was prepared. It was Hannah she determined to tell.

V

It was a morning in the middle of the week, after the children's lessons were over. With eyes that recorded intangible impressions to her mind, Mary watched her eldest sister kissing each one as they went. With each one, it was not merely a disposal, but a parting; not a formality but an act, an act that had its meaning, however far removed it might have been from Hannah's appreciation of it.

"What do you feel about those children?" she asked her, suddenly and unexpectedly when the last one had gone and the door had closed.

"Feel about them?"

Hannah looked up in surprised bewilderment.

"I've never thought what I felt," she added. "They're darlings--is that what you mean?"

"No--that's not quite what I mean. Of course they're darlings. Do you ever think what you feel, Hannah?"

"No."

"Never think in words--all higgledy-piggledy and upside-down, of course--but words that explain to you, even if they couldn't explain to anybody else?"

"No."

"I don't believe any of us have ever done that," Mary continued--"unless perhaps Jane. She thinks in words sometimes, I believe, but I'm sure they hurt her when she does, so she probably does it as little as possible. Just to say they're darlings doesn't convey what you feel. You don't know what you do really feel--do you?"

"No--I suppose I don't."

"I expect that's why, when you have to deal with real things where words only can explain, they come like claps of thunder and are all frightening. I've got something to tell you that will frighten you, Hannah. But it wouldn't have frightened you so much if you'd ever thought about those children in words. I don't believe it would frighten Jane. It would only make her angry."

"What is it?" asked Hannah. She was not frightened as yet. Mary's voice was so quiet, her manner so undisturbed and assured, that as yet no faint suspicion of what she was to hear was troubling her mind.

"Let's come out into the garden," said Mary.

Even there, with that issue, she felt she wanted the light of open air, the growing things about her, the environment her whole body now was tuned to. That room was confined, and suffocating to her. There were the two portraits on the wall, who never, with all their love, would be able to understand what she had to tell. There were the echoes of countless family prayers that had had no meaning. There was all the atmosphere of conventional formality in which she felt neither she nor her child had any place. It was of him she was going to tell. She could not tell it there.

"Come out into the garden," she repeated and herself led the way, when there being something to hear which already Mary had wrapped in this mystery of introduction, Hannah could do no less than follow with obedience.

It was between those borders, now massed white with double pinks, softening the air with the scent of them as they breathed it in, that they walked, just as Jane and she had done before.

"Do you ever wish you'd had a child, Hannah?" Mary asked presently, and Hannah replied--

"I don't think I've ever really wanted to be married."

So much was it an answer that would have satisfied her once, that Mary smiled to think how different she had become. Not for one moment had it been her meaning that Hannah should see that smile. Not for one moment would she have understood it. Yet she saw. The sudden seizing of her fingers on Mary's arm almost frightened.

"You smiled," she whispered--"Why did you smile?"

The honest simplicity of her brought Mary to a sudden confusion. She could not answer. Seeing that smile, Hannah had caught her unawares in her thoughts. She knew then she was going to hurt this gentle creature with her simple view of life and her infinite forbearance of the world's treatment of her.

Here was the first moment when truly she felt afraid. Here was the first time she realized that pain is the inevitable accompaniment of life. She tried to begin what she had to say, but fear dried up the words. She moistened her lips, but could not speak.

"Tell me why you smiled," repeated Hannah importunately. "What is it you've got to say?"

Mary had thought it would be easy. So proud, so sure she was, that abruptness had seemed as though it must serve her mood. She tried to be abrupt, but failed.