Phase III
I
Many times Fanny tried to speak of that night and of the night that followed before Liddiard went away, but there was a strange serenity in Mary’s face in those days which suppressed all Fanny’s emotions of sympathy, confidence and vital curiosity.
There were times when she hoped Mary might speak herself, if not of what actually had happened, at least in some measure of Liddiard and herself. Ever since their youth, being much of an age together, sharing the same room, they had had few secrets from each other. If she were to ask no more than Fanny’s opinion of Liddiard, it would have afforded loophole for confidence. One discussion would have led to another. If necessary, Fanny would even have revived in her memory all that she had told Mary about her own little tragedy on those cliffs. To have gained that confidence every sense in her needed so much, she would have suffered the crudest flagellation of memory; the more cruel it was, the more exquisite would have been her pain.
But never had Mary been more aloof. Never had she been more distant and reserved. To Hannah perhaps, if to any, she showed an even closer affection, sometimes helping her with the teaching of her children and every day spending an hour and even more in their prattling company.
For long walks she went alone. Frequently at night, when she had retired to her room and Fanny on some feminine pretext came to her door, she found it locked.
“What is it?” asked Mary from within.
“Just Fanny.”
“What do you want?”
“Oh—nothing! I wondered if you’d finished with that book.” Such as this might be her excuse.
“Yes, I have. I left it downstairs in the dining-room.”
“Well—good-night, Mary.”
“Good-night, Fanny.”
No more than this. That locked door seemed symbolical of Mary in those days. So had she barred all entrance to her soul from them and like the Holy of Holies behind the locked gates of the Temple was inapproachable to their unsanctified feet.
And all this seeming was no less than the actual truth. To Mary her body had indeed become the sanctuary, the very chalice of the Host of sacred things. She knew she was going to have a child. Such knowledge was pure folly and had no foundation upon fact. It lay only in her imagination.
Yet lying awake at night and waking early in the mornings with the first light the sun cast into her room, she had sensations, inventions only of the fancy, that were unmistakable to her.
Already she was conscious of the dual life of her being. Such had happened to her as indeed had separated her in difference from them all in that house.
Her thoughts of Liddiard were glowing thoughts. Sometimes as she lay, half sleeping in her bed, she felt him there beside her. But in all her fully conscious moments, she had no need of his return.
Their meetings upon the cliffs those two nights before he had gone from Bridnorth, had left her calm rather than excited. Almost she would have resented his actual presence in her life just then. In the distance which separated them, she felt the warm sense of that part of her being he had become; but his absence was not fretting her with the need of his embraces. No furnace of sexual inclination had there been set alight in her. In this respect he had not differenced her. She was the same Mary Throgmorton of outwardly passionless stone, only the hidden flame he had set light within her was that, unquenchable, which the stress of circumstance in time would burn with such a fervid purpose as none of them could stay.
Behind that locked door of her bedroom the night after his departure, she sat and wrote to him. A short letter it was, free of restraint, as though across some narrow space dividing them, she had just called out of her heart to him and laughed.
“I love you,” she wrote. “Don’t let it interfere with life. You have given some greater thing than you could ever dream of, and need not think of breaking hearts or things that do not happen in a healthy world. I am not thinking of the future. For just these few moments, the present is wonderful enough. Just because I belong to you, I sign myself—YOUR MARY.”
Herself, with jealous hands, that morning she posted it and when she came back to the house a letter from him was awaiting her.
Both Jane and Fanny watched her as, with an amazing calmness, she picked it up and put it in her lap.
Both, knowing what they knew, were swift to ask themselves again, was this their Mary who had grown so confident with love.
A smile of expectation twitched about Jane’s lips as Hannah, simple as a child, inquired who it was had written.
This would confuse her, Jane thought, and almost with the eagerness of spite, she waited for the flaming cheeks, for all the discomfort of her lip and eye.
Mary looked up quietly from her plate. Almost she felt sorry for them then that they were ignorant of all she knew. What was there to hide in telling them that? She realized Jane knew. She felt her waiting for those signs of the distressing confusion of a guilty heart. She had no guilt in her heart. She was not ashamed. They had no power to shame her.
“It’s from Mr. Liddiard,” she replied openly.
“Mr. Liddiard!” repeated Hannah. “What’s he writing to you about?”
“I shall know when I read the letter,” replied Mary quietly.
“I wonder how you can manage to wait till then,” said Jane.
“I don’t suppose it’s very important,” said Hannah, and Jane laughed, but Fanny could bear it no longer. None of them knew what she knew. She left the room.
II
Alone to her room, Mary brought her letter. That room had become the chapel of her most sacred thoughts. There, in that house, she was alone. There, as though it were the very script of her faith, she brought her letter and, locking the door, took it across to her chair by the window and sat down.
There was something she needed in this message from him. Courage had not failed her. No pricks of conscience fretted her peace of mind. More it was that in the conventional outlook of that house, in the atmosphere indeed of all Bridnorth, she felt set aside. Nor did she fear to be thus separated. Only it was at moments that it was chill. At times she shivered as though the cold edge of a draught through unsuspected chinks had found her out and for the moment set back the temperature of her courage.
Merely momentary were these misgivings. With a shaking of her shoulders, she could dispel them. The touch of his hand across that distance which separated them, the sound of his voice, all to be contained in her letter, these would drive them utterly away.
Alone there in that house, she needed her letter and her fingers were warm and her heart was beating with a quiet assurance as she tore open the envelope.
“Mary—” it began. She liked that. Her heart answered to it. It was not the passionate embrace she sought; rather it was the firm touch of a hand in her own. This simple use of her name fully gave it her.
“Mary—I have been wanting to write to you, my dear, ever since I came home. I even tried in the train coming back when, not only my hand on the paper, but it seemed my mind as well, were so jolted about that I gave it up as a bad job.
“I want you to believe, my dear, that I know my own weakness, but only for your sake do I honestly regret it. For myself, I have no real regrets at all. Knowing you, as I have done, has made a greater fullness in my life. Knowing me, as you have done, can only have brought bitterness and, I am ashamed to think of it, perhaps shame to yours.”
Mary laid the letter down in her lap. Fingers of ice were touching on her heart. He thought he had brought her shame. Shame? What shame? If with his wife it were greater fullness to him, what fullness must it not be to her with none other than him beside her? She picked up the letter and the pupils of her eyes as she read on were sharpened to the finest pinpoints.
“I blame myself utterly and I blame myself alone. Life was all new to you. It was not new to me. I should have had the courage of my experience. If my character had been worth anything at all, I ought to have had the will of restraint even to the last. I wonder will you ever forgive me, for believe me, my dear, it is a great wish in my heart, always to be thought well of by you. I suppose thoughts are prayers and if they are, then you do not know how often I pray that nothing may happen to you. But if my thoughts are not answered and you have to suffer, for my weakness, you may know I will do all I can. None need ever know. With care that could be achieved, but we will not talk of that yet, or will I think of it if I can help it until you let me know for certain. Not once did you mention it, even after the first time we were alone in the wonderful still night on those cliffs. So many another woman would. So many another would have reckoned the cost before she knew the full account. You said nothing. You are wonderful, Mary, and if any woman deserves to escape the consequences of passion, it is you.”
Again she laid the letter down. For a while she could read no more. The consequences of passion! Reckoned the cost! The full account! God! Was that the little mind her own had met with?
None need ever know! With care that could be achieved! She started to her feet in sudden impulse of feeling that her body held a hateful thing. Instinctively she turned to the mirror on her dressing table, standing there some moments and looking at her reflection, as though in her face she might find truly whether it were hateful or not.
Seemingly she found her answer, for as she stood there, without the effort of speech or conscious motion of the muscles of her throat, the words came between her lips—“Fear not, Mary—” Scarcely did she know she had said them, yet, nevertheless, they were the voice of something more deep and less approachable than the mere thoughts of her mind.
It was not hateful. There was all of wonder and something more beautiful about it than she could express.
Had she been told she was to receive such a letter, she would have feared to open it lest it should destroy courage and make hideous the very sight of life. But in trust and confidence having opened it, and in gradual realization having read, its effect upon her had been utterly different from what she might have anticipated.
Such an effect as this upon any other woman it might have had. But this Mary Throgmorton was of imperishable stone, set, not in sheltered places, or protected from the winds of ill-repute, but apart and open for all the storms of heaven to beat upon with failing purpose to destroy.
It may have alienated her that letter. Indeed it cut off and put her consciously alone. She knew in that moment she no longer loved. She knew how in the deepest recesses of her soul there did not live a father to her child. It was hers. It was hers alone. If this was a man, then men were nothing to women. Two nights of burning passion he had been with her and for those moments they had been inseparably one. But now he had gone as though the whole world divided them. The future was hers, not his. With that letter he had cancelled all existence in the meaning of life. There was no meaning in him. A mere shell of empty substance had fallen from her. To herself she seemed as though she were looking from a great height down which that hollow thing fluttered into the nothingness of space, leaving her in a radiant ether that none could enter or disturb.
Then of a sudden and in all consciousness now, there came with rushing memory into her mind, the thought of that sermon at Christmas time.
“Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favor with God.”
She repeated the words aloud; hearing them now as she spoke them in her throat and knowing, with all the fullness of its meaning to her, the realization it gave expression to when she voiced the thought which that day in church had followed it.
“Who was the father of the Son of Man?”
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.
“Oh, Hannah, I’ve got such a lot to say,” she began, and with an impulse took her sister’s arm and of a sudden felt this gentle, gray-haired woman might be as a mother to her when all the world, as now she was realizing with her first confession of it, would be turned against her. “I don’t know how to begin. I know you must understand, and I think I want you to understand, more than anybody else. No one else will. Of course I can be sure of that.”
She had succeeded, as well she knew she would, in frightening Hannah now. She was trembling. Leaning on her arm, Mary could feel those vibrations of fear. So unused to all but the even flow of life, and finding herself thus suddenly in a morass of apprehension, the poor creature’s mind was floundering helplessly. One step of speculation after another only left her the more deeply embedded in her fears.
“Tell me what it is,” she whispered—“Tell me quickly. Was it that Mr. Liddiard?”
How surely she had sensed the one thing terrible in her life a woman can have to tell. Never having known the first thrilling thoughts of love, her mind had reached at once to this. Countless little incidents during the time that Liddiard was in Bridnorth, incidents that had attracted her notice but which she had never observed, had come now swiftly together as the filings of iron are drawn to a magnet’s point. The times they were together, the letters she had received, sometimes a look in Jane’s face when she spoke of him, sometimes a look in Fanny’s when she was silent. One by one but with terrible acceleration, they heaped up in her mind to the pinnacle of vague but certain conclusion.
“Was it that Mr. Liddiard?” she repeated.
“Yes.”
“I felt it was. I felt it was. Don’t say you’re in love with him—a married man—Oh, Mary, that would be terrible.”
“I’m not in love,” said Mary.
The deep sigh that drew through Hannah’s lips made her afraid the more. How could she tell her? Every moment it was becoming harder. Every moment the pride she felt was not so much leaving her as being crowded into the back of her mind by these conventional instincts, the habit of affection for her family, the certain knowledge of their shame, the disproportionate value of their thoughts of her.
A few hours before she had asked herself what mattered it if they thought the very worst, if they had no sympathy, if with their contempt of her they turned her from the house. In any case she was going. Never could she stay there. Never could this child of hers breathe first the stifling air that she had breathed so long.
Yet now when her moment of confession was upon her, pride seemed a little thing to help her through. The piteous fear in Hannah weakened it to water in her blood. She felt sorry for her sister who had done nothing to deserve the shame she was sure to feel. Conscious of that sorrow, she almost was ashamed of herself. Nothing was there as yet to whip her pride to life again. With mighty efforts of thought, she tried to revive it, but it lay still in her heart. This fear of Hannah’s, her deep relief when the worst she could think of proved untrue, kept it low. With all the strength she had, Mary could not resuscitate her pride.
“What is it then?” Hannah continued less tremulously—“What is it if you’re not in love? Was he a brute? Did he make love to you?”
With all the knowledge she had gained, Mary now found herself amazed at this simplicity of mind which once quite well she knew had been her own. For an instant it gave her courage. For an instant it set up this new antagonism she had found against the laws that kept her sex in the bondage of servitude to the needs of man. So in that instant and with that courage, she spoke it out, abruptly, sharply as she had known she must. The swift, the sudden blow, it made the cleanest wound.
“I’m going to have a child, Hannah,” she said, and in a moment that garden seemed full of a surging joy to her that now they knew; and in a moment that garden seemed to Hannah a place all horrible with evil growing things that twined about her heart and brought their heavy, nauseating perfume, pungent and overbearing to her nostrils.
She dropped Mary’s arm that held her own. With lips already trembling to the inevitable tears, she stood still on the path between those rows of double pinks, now bearing up an evil, heavy scent to her, as she stared before her.
It could not be true! How could it be true? She fought with that, the refusal to believe its truth.
“He was only here a fortnight,” she muttered oddly. “You didn’t know him. You’d never met him before. You only played golf with him, or you walked on the cliffs. You didn’t know him. How can you expect me to believe it happened—in a fortnight? Mother was engaged to father for two years. I—I wasn’t born till fourteen months after they’d been married!”
She laughed—a thin crackle of laughter.
“You’re a fool, Mary. You don’t know what you’re talking about. He was only here a fortnight.”
“It’s quite true, Hannah,” said Mary quietly. “I’m going to have a child.”
Her heart was beating evenly now. They knew. Pride was returning with warming blood through her veins. Less and less she felt the chill of fear.
Swiftly Hannah turned upon her.
“But you said you weren’t in love!” she exclaimed.
How quickly she was learning! Already love might have explained, excused, extenuated.
“I’m not in love,” said Mary—“I know now I’m not in love. I was at the time. At least I know what love is. The thing you love doesn’t destroy love when it goes. Once you love, you can’t stop loving. The object may alter. Your love doesn’t. If there’s no object then your love just goes on eating your heart away. But it’s there.”
“Oh, my God!” cried Hannah—“Where did you learn all this—you! Mary! The youngest of all of us! Whom do you love then if you don’t love him? Oh, it’s horrible! Is your heart eating itself away?”
“No.”
“Then what? What is it? I don’t understand! How could I understand? I am an old woman now. Somehow you seem to make me know I’m an old woman. What is it? What do you love?”
“I told you I’m going to have a child,” whispered Mary—“Isn’t that something to love? It’s here with us as I’m talking now. There are three of us, Hannah, not two. Isn’t that something to love?”
For a long moment, Hannah gazed at her, then, suddenly clasping her hands about her face she turned and with swift steps ran, almost, down the path and disappeared into the house. It was as she watched her going, that Mary had a flash of knowledge how deep the wound had gone.
VI
Now this much was accomplished in the schedule of her mind. They would all know. She left it to Hannah to tell them. The next day after this confession to her sister, she went to Yarningdale Farm, having made all arrangements to stay there two or three days and complete her plans for the future.
It had been a difficult moment to tell Hannah. She had not quite realized beforehand how difficult it would be. Pride she had calculated would have helped her from the first; pride of the very purposes of life that had passed her sisters by. But pride had not been so ready to her thoughts when the actual moment of contact had come. The habitual instincts of convention had intervened. Pride, when it had come to her aid, had not been pride of herself. It was proud she was of her sex when in the abruptness of that instant she had flung her confession before Hannah.
There would be no question of pride; no support could it give her when she came to tell Mrs. Peverell. To that simple farmer’s wife it could only seem that here was one, pursued by the error of her ways, seeking sanctuary and hiding her shame in the remotest corner she could find.
Giving no reason to Jane or Fanny, but only to Hannah for her sudden departure, she went the next day into Warwickshire.
“You can tell them when I’m away,” she said to Hannah. “It’s no good thinking you needn’t tell them. Hiding it won’t conceal. They must know.”
With an impulsive gesture she laid her hands on Hannah’s shoulders and looked into those eyes that indeed, as she had said, even in those few short hours of knowledge, had grown conscious that she was old.
“I don’t know how much you hate me for bringing all this trouble on you. It shan’t be much trouble, I promise you. No one need know why I’ve gone away. But I sort of feel sure of this, Hannah, you don’t hate me for the thing itself—not so much as you might have thought you would have done.”
Hannah tried to meet the gaze of Mary’s eyes. Her own held fast a moment, then faltered and fell. Something in Mary’s glance seemed to have tracked down something in her. The one with her child had glimpsed into the heart of her who had none. It had been like a shaft of light, slanting into a cellar, some chamber underground that for long had been locked, the bolts on whose door were rusty and past all use, the floor of which was no longer paved for feet to walk upon.
For so many years untenanted had that underground chamber been that, as has been said, Hannah had forgotten its existence. Content had come to her with the house of life she lived in and now by the illumination of this ray of light, shooting through cellar windows, lighting up the very foundations of the structure of her being, she had been made aware, when it was all too late, of the solid and real substance upon which Nature had built the wasted thing she had become.
“Don’t!” she muttered. “Don’t—don’t!” and almost in shame it might have been she hung her head as though it were Mary who might accuse, as though Mary it were who rose in judgment above her then.
Mr. Peverell in a spring cart from the nearest station brought Mary to Yarningdale Farm. She had no need to touch Henley-in-Arden. There was no likelihood that whilst there she would ever come across her friends. They had walked many miles that day. It was the highest improbability they would ever walk that way again; and certainly not to visit the farm.
“It happen be a quiet day,” he said as he gathered up the reins, “or I couldn’t have come for ’ee with the spring cart. No—I couldn’t have come for ’ee with the spring cart if it didn’t happen to be a quiet day. I got the machine ready last night and we be cuttin’ hay to-morrow.”
Cutting hay!
“May I help?” she asked with an impulsive eagerness. He looked down at her on the lower seat beside him and his eyes were twinkling with a kindly amusement.
“‘Ee can help,” said he, “but hay-makin’ ain’t ’helpin’—it’s work. When they cut the grass over at Stapeley—Lord Orford’s place there over—there’s some of the ladies puts on them dimity-like sunbonnets and come and help. But then you see there’s plenty to do the work.” His eyes twinkled again. “We’ve only got hundred and thirteen acres and there’s me and the carter and a boy. My missis comes out. So does the carter’s wife. But ’tain’t helpin’. ’Tis work. We can’t ’ford amusements like helpin’ each other. We have to work—if you understand what I mean.”
“But I mean that too,” she said quickly. “I meant to work. Of course I don’t know anything about it; but couldn’t I really do something?”
“We’ll be beginning half-past five to-morrow morning,” he said and she felt he was chuckling in his heart. She felt that all who did not know the land as he knew it were mere children to him.
“Can’t I get up at half-past five?” she asked.
“Can ’ee?”
“Of course I can. I want to work. Do you know that’s one of the things I want to come here for. When I come and stay—that’s what I’ve come to arrange with Mrs. Peverell—when I come and stay, I want to work. I can do what I’m told.”
“There’s few as can,” said he. “Them things we’re told to do, get mighty slow in doin’. Could ’ee drive a horse rake?”
“I can drive a horse.”
He whipped up the old mare and said no more until she asked him why they had not cut the grass that day. It was so fine, she said, and fine weather she thought was what they wanted first of all.
“There be plenty of fine days when the grass is green,” said he. “’Twill be fine now a few days, time we’d be gettin’ it in. We’d a shower yesterday—a nice drop of rain it was. Sun to-day and they trefolium’ll have their seed just right and nigh to droppin’. ‘Ee want the seed ripe in the stack. ’Tain’t no good leavin’ it in the bottom of the wagon.”
She let him talk on. She did not know what trefolium was. He needed a listener, no more. Questions would not have pleased his ear. All the way back he talked about the land and as to one who understood every word he said. There was his heart and there he spoke it as a lover might who needed no more than a listener to hear the charms of his mistress. The mere sound of his voice, the ring it had of vital energy, these were enough to make that talking a thrilling song to her. It echoed to something in her. She did not know what it was. Scarce a word of it did she understand; yet not a word of it would she have lost.
This something that there was in him, was something also in her. Indistinctly she knew it was that which she must feed and stimulate to make her child. As little would he have understood that as she had comprehension of his talk of crops and soil. Their language might not be the same, but the same urging force was there to give them speech and thought. Just as he spoke of the land though never of himself or his part with it, so she thought of her child, a thing that needed soil to grow in. No haphazard chance of circumstance did she feel it to be. Tilling must she do and cleansing of the earth, before her harvest could be reaped. Her night would come, that night before, that night when all was ready, that night after rain and sun when the seed was ripe and must be gathered in the stack and none be wasted on the wagon floor.
“‘Ee understand what I’m sayin’,” she suddenly heard him interpose between the level of her thoughts.
“Yes, yes—I understand,” said she. “And you don’t know how interesting it is.”
He turned the mare into the farm gate and tossed the reins on to her back.
“She’s a knowsome girl,” he said that night as he lay beside his wife. “She’s a knowsome girl. ’Twon’t rain to-morrow. There was no rain in they clouds.”
VII
The next evening it was, after the first day in the hayfield and while Mr. Peverell in the big barn was sharpening the knives of the mowing machine, that Mary set herself to the task of telling his wife why she wanted to come to the farm.
Hard as she knew it would be, so much the harder it became when alone she found herself watching that sallow face with its sunken and lusterless eyes, the thin, unforgiving line of lip, the chin set square, obediently to turn the other cheek to the smiting hand of Fate.
Mrs. Peverell was knitting.
“A woolly vest,” said she—“for the old man, come next winter. Time they leaves be off the apple trees, the wind ain’t long afindin’ we’d be here top of the hill.”
For a while Mary sat in silence counting her stitches—two purl, two plain, two purl, two plain. The needles clicked. The knotted knuckles turned and twisted, catching the light with rhythmic precision. And all the time she kept saying to herself—“Soon he’ll come back from the barn and I shan’t have said it. Soon he’ll come back.”
“Did you make all your children’s things for them?” she asked with sudden inspiration, striking the note to key her thoughts when she could speak them.
The needles clicked on. The knotted knuckles twisted and turned as though she had never heard. The head was bent, the eyes fastened upon her stitches.
Thinking she had not heard, Mary was about to repeat her question when suddenly she looked. Stone her eyes were, even and gray. Through years, each one of which was notched upon her memory, she looked at Mary across the dim light of their parlor kitchen.
“I had no children,” she said hardly; “all the stitches I’ve ever gathered was for my man.”
Her gaze upon Mary continued for a long silence then, as though her needles had called them, her eyes withdrew to her knitting. Saying no more, she continued her occupation.
To Mary could she have said less? There was the gap filled in between that winsome creature whose portrait hung upon the wall in the other room and this woman, sour of countenance, whose blood had turned to vinegar in her heart.
Many another woman would have been still more afraid, possessed of such knowledge as that. With a heart that swelled in her to pity, Mary found her fear had gone.
Somewhere in that forbidding exterior, she knew she could find the response of heart she needed. Even Nature, with her crudest whip, could not drive out the deeper kindliness of the soul. It was only the body she could dry up and wither, with the persisting ferment of discontent; only the external woman she could embitter with her disregard.
For here was one whom circumstance had offered and Nature had flung aside. Great as the tragedy of her sisters’ lives might be, Mary knew how much greater a tragedy was this. Here there was no remedy, no fear of convention to make excuse, no want of courage to justify. Like a leper she was outcast amongst women. The knowledge of it was all in her face. And such tragedy as this, though it might wither the body and turn sour the heart, could only make the soul great that suffered it.
Mary’s fear was gone. At sight of the unforgiving line of lip and square set chin to meet adversity, she knew a great soul was hidden behind that sallow mask.
The long silence that had followed Mrs. Peverell’s admission added a fullness of meaning to Mary’s words.
“It’d sound foolish and empty if I said I was sorry,” she said quietly, “but I know what you must feel.”
The lusterless eyes shot up quickly from their hollows. Almost a light was kindling in them now.
“‘Ee bain’t a married girl,” she said, “Miss Throgmorton or what ’ee call it, that’s how I wrote my letter to ’ee.”
“Yes.”
“How could ’ee know things I’d feel?
“I do.”
“How old are ’ee?”
“Thirty next September.”
“Why haven’t ’ee married?”
“I haven’t been asked. Look at me.”
“I am.”
“But look at me well.”
Mrs. Peverell stared into her eyes.
“I have three sisters older than me,” Mary went on. “Four girls—four women. We’re none of us married. None of us was ever as pretty or sweet as you were when that photograph was taken of you in the other room.”
The silence that fell between them then as Mrs. Peverell gazed at her was more significant than words. For all they said, once understanding, they did not need words. Indications of speech sufficed.
“Did any of ’ee want to be married?” asked the farmer’s wife. “Did you?”
“Did you?” replied Mary.
“I wanted a good man,” said she, “and I got him.”
“Yes, but looking back on it now—all these years—back to that photograph in there, was that what you wanted?”
All this time Mrs. Peverell had been holding her needles as though at any moment the conversation might command her full attention no longer and she would return to her knitting. Definitely, at last she laid it in her lap and, leaning forward, she set her eyes, now lit indeed, upon Mary’s face before her.
“‘Ee know so much,” said she slowly. “How did ’ee learn? What is it ’ee have to tell me?”
Without fear, Mary met her gaze. Long it was and keen but she met it full, nor turned, nor dropped her eyes. Brimmed and overflowing that silence was as they sat there. Words would have been empty sounds had they been spoken. Then, but not until it had expressed all their thoughts, Mrs. Peverell’s lips parted.
“It’s sin,” she said.
“Is it?” replied Mary, and, so still her voice was that it made no vibrations to disturb the deeper meaning she implied. In their following silence, that deeper meaning filtered slowly but inevitably through the strata of Mrs. Peverell’s mind, till drop by drop it fell into the core of her being. In the far hidden soul of her, she knew it was no sin. She knew moreover that Mary had full realization of her knowledge. Too far the silence had gone for her to deny it now. Whatever were the years between them, in those moments they were just women between whom no screen was set to hide their shame. They had no shame. All that they thought and had no words for was pure as the clearest water in the deepest well.
It was at this moment as they sat there, still, without speech, that the door opened and Mr. Peverell entered. Swiftly his wife turned.
“‘Ee’ll not be wanted here awhile,” she said sharply. “Go and sit in the parlor, or back to the barn, or get to bed maybe. The hay’ll make without talking.”
Obediently, like a child, he went out at once and closed the door. It was not things they talked of that he might not hear. Not even was it things they talked of that he might not understand. Here it was that no man had place or meaning; in that region their minds were wandering in, no laws existed but those of Nature. They walked in a world where women are alone.
The opening of that door as he came in, the closing of it as obediently he went out, seemed to make definite the thoughts they had. At the sound of his footsteps departing, Mrs. Peverell turned to Mary.
“Say all ’ee’ve got to say,” she muttered. “I’m listenin’.”
And as definitely Mary replied—
“I’m going to have a baby. Seven months from now. I don’t want you to think I’m hiding here. I could take refuge anywhere. I’m not ashamed. But there are seven months. They won’t be long to me. Indeed they’ll be all too short. Children aren’t just born. They’re made. Thousands are born, I know. I don’t want just to bear mine. When I came here that day, two years ago, I felt something about this place. You’ll think nothing of this. You live here. It’s so much part of your life that you don’t know what it means. But you’re close to the earth—you’re all one with growing things. You touch Nature at every turn. Oh—do you understand what I’m saying?”
“I don’t understand,” said Mrs. Peverell, “but I’m listenin’ and I beant too old to feel.”
Mary sped on with the words that now were rushing in her thoughts.
“Well—all that means such a lot to me. That’s how I want to make my child, as you make your lives here. No cheating. You can’t cheat Nature. No pretence—no shame. There’s nothing so flagrant or unashamed as Nature when she brings forth. Out there in the world, there where I live, they’d do all they could to make me ashamed. At every turn they’d shriek at me it was a sin. The laws would urge them to it, just as for that one moment they urged you. It’s not a sin. It’s not a shame. It’s the most wonderful thing in the world. Do you think if women had the making of the laws that rule them, they’d ever have made of it the shame it is out there? When I knew that this was going to happen to me, I remembered my impressions of this place two years ago, and I knew it was here I would make him, month by month, while he’s leaning in me to make him. Oh—I know I must be talking strangely to you; that half of what I say sounds feather-brained nonsense, but—don’t you know it’s true, don’t you feel it’s true?”
With an impulsive gesture when words had failed, she leant forward and caught the knotted knuckles in her hand.
Mrs. Peverell glanced up.
“In that room there,” said she, pointing in the direction of the parlor sitting room, “there’s a girt Bible lies heavy on a mat. We bought it marriage time to write the names of those we had.”
“I saw it,” said Mary.
“’Tis clean paper lies on front of it,” she went on. “It shan’t be clean for long. We’ll write his name there.”
VIII
The moment Mary entered the square, white house on her return to Bridnorth, she was aware that both Jane and Fanny knew. The coach had set her down outside the Royal George, but no faces had been at the windows as she went by. No servant had been sent up the road to carry back her bag. Outwardly she smiled. Her disgrace had begun.
This was the end of Bridnorth life for her. Here was to begin a new phase wherein she had none but herself to lean upon; wherein the whole world was against her and in that substance of stone already hardening in her spirit, she must stand alone.
The whole house seemed empty as she came in. She went to her room without meeting any one. They could not long have finished tea. She looked into the drawing-room as she went by. No tea had been left out for her.
Her bed was prepared to sleep in. There were clean towels and a clean mat on the dressing table; but the sign by which they always welcomed each other’s return after absence was missing. There were no flowers in the room. The garden was full-yielding. Flowers in profusion were withering in the beds. There was no bowl of them in her room.
It was here, indeed it was everywhere, she felt the presence of Jane. It was not Hannah, now that she had time to think it out, it was not Fanny, but Jane she had come back to meet. Jane with the unyielding spirit of those laws Mary had found consciousness of, against which she set herself in no less unyielding antagonism.
It was bitterness, as it is with so many, that had ranged Jane in battle against her sex. She made no allowances. Almost with a fierce joy, she kept to the very letter of the law. Hers was the justice of revenge and there are no circumstances can mitigate one woman in another’s eyes when she transgresses as Mary had done.
In her room she waited, unpacking her things, then sitting and looking out into the garden until the bell rang for their evening meal. With sensations divided between a high temper of courage and a feeling of being outcast in that house she had known so long as home, she went down to the dining-room.
They were already seated. Jane was carving the joint. She did not look up. Fanny raised her eyes in silence. The wish to give her welcome was overawed by wonder of curiosity. It was Hannah who said—
“You told us in your letter you were coming back by this afternoon’s coach, but we weren’t quite sure.”
Caught in an instant’s impulse, with an effort Mary controlled herself from saying—
“Didn’t you do what Jane told you to do?”
She held her tongue and sat down.
It was a strange and oppressive silence that fell upon them during that meal. Oppressive it was, but electrical as well. Vivid, vital forces were at work in all their minds. Storms were gathering they all knew must burst at last. Something there was that had power to gather those forces to their utmost before they broke and were dispersed in speech.
There they were, four unmarried women, seated about that table with the two portraits looking down upon them in their silence. So they had occupied their allotted positions year by year—year by year. Often there had been quarrelings between them. Often they had not been on speaking terms. Winds of disagreement had fretted the peaceful surface of that house again and again.
But this which was upon them now was unlike any silence that had fallen upon them before. Then they had kept silent because they would. It was now they kept silent because they must. The pervading presence of something about them was tying their tongues from speech. Without the courage to tell themselves what it was, they knew.
There was another in their midst. Those four women, they were not alone. It was not as it had been for so many years. They knew it could never be so again. Something had happened to one of them that set her apart. Each in the variety of her imagination was picturing what that something was. Hannah it frightened. Jane it enraged. Fanny it stirred so deeply that many times through the terribleness of that meal, she thought she must faint.
One and all they might have spoken, had it been no more than this. But that presence in the midst of them kept their tongues to stillness. Life was springing up, where for so long there had been all the silence of a barren field. They could hear it in their hearts. Almost it was a thunder rolling that awed and overwhelmed.
The sound of their knives and forks, even the swallowing of their food hammered across that distant thunder to their conscious ears. Each one knew it was becoming more and more unendurable. Each one knew the moment must come when she could bear it no longer. It was Mary who reached that moment first.
Laying down her knife and fork and pushing away her plate unfinished, she flung back her head with eyes that gathered their eyes to hers.
“Why don’t you speak?” she cried to them. “Why can’t you say what you’re all wanting to say—what’s got to be said sooner or later? I know you know—all of you. Hannah’s told you. And you’ve thought it all out, as much as it can be thought out. I don’t want any favors from you. This has been my home. I’m quite ready for it to be my home no longer. In any case I’m going away. There’s no question, if you’re afraid of that, of my appealing to you for pity or generosity. It’s only a question of the spirit in which I go and the spirit of what I leave behind. That’s all. And why can’t you say it? Why can’t you tell me what it is? You, Jane! Why don’t you speak? You’re the one who has anything to say. You told them not to meet the coach. You told them not to put any flowers in my room. If it’s something really to fight about, let’s fight now. I’m not going to fight again. I’m going away where my child will be born with all the best that I can give it, but I’ll hear what you’ve got to say now, only for God’s sake say it!”
IX
None of them knew their Mary like this. Until that moment scarcely in such fashion had she known herself. New instincts had risen in her blood. Already the creative force was striking a dominant note in her voice, setting to fire a light in her eyes.
They felt that evening she had gained power that would never be theirs. Hannah fell obedient to it as one who humbles herself before mighty things; Fanny fell to fear, awed by this note of battle that rang like a challenge in her voice.
Jane alone it was who stood out away from them and, from amidst the ranks of that army of women who acknowledge the oath of convention, offering both heart and blood in its service, accepted the call to combat.
“You talk,” she said, with her voice rising swiftly to the pitch of conflict; “you talk as though there were two ways of looking at what you’ve done. You talk as though there were something fine and splendid in it, but were not quite sure whether we were fine or splendid enough to see it. I never heard anything so arrogant in all my life. You seem to think it’s a concession on your part to say you’re going away. Of course you’re going away. We’ve lived decently and cleanly in this place all these years. They’ve had no reason to be ashamed of us,” her eyes flashed to the portraits and back to Mary, “not till now. Do you think we’re going to flaunt our shame in their faces!”
Catching a look of pain in Hannah’s eyes, as though that last blow had been too searching and too keen, she struck it home again.
“It is shame!” she said. “I’m not so different from all of you. I feel ashamed and so do they. What else can we possibly feel—a married man—a man you don’t even love. It’s filthy! And if you want to find another word for it than that, it’s because you’ve even come to be ashamed of the truth. There’s something in decency; there’s something in modesty and cleanliness. They taught us it. The whole of their lives they taught us that. They brought us up to be proud of the class we belong to, not to behave like servant girls snatching kisses that don’t belong to us with any man who comes along and likes to make a fool of us.”
Fanny, who up to that moment had been gazing at her sister, caught in a wonder at this flow of speech, now of a sudden dropped her eyes, twining and untwining the fingers in her lap. How could Mary answer that? Cruel as it was, it had the sting of truth. She dared not look at her and could only wait in trembling for her reply.
She might have gained courage had she looked. Those blows had not beaten Mary to her knees. With her head thrown back, she waited for the last word, as though, now they had come to it, there were rules to be observed and pride in her own strength put aside all need to ignore them.
“Have you anything more to say?” she asked with a clear voice.
“Do you want any more than that?” retorted Jane.
“I don’t mind how much more there is,” replied Mary quietly, “we’re saying all we feel. We aren’t mincing things. I’m going to say what I feel. I’m going to hit and hurt as hard as you, so go on if you want to. This isn’t a squabble. I don’t want to bicker or cavil or interrupt. We’re not just cats fighting now, we’re women and we’ll try and talk fair. Say anything more you’ve got to say.”
“Well, if that’s not enough for you,” continued Jane, “if it is not enough to allude to what I saw with my own eyes, or to tell you there are servant girls who could behave better than that, then I’ll talk of what, thank God, I didn’t see and I’ll tell you it’s worse than shame what you have done and not even the excuse of being betrayed by love that you have to offer for it. I’ll say it, Mary, and I don’t care now because you’ve asked for it. You must be a bad woman in your heart, there must be something vile about you that makes you not fit to touch us or be in the same house with us. You’ve asked for that and you’ve got it. You’ve wanted every word there is to say. I should have left that unspoken if you hadn’t asked for it. But that’s what I feel. If you were a woman off the streets in London and sitting there at our table, I couldn’t feel more sick or ashamed at the sight of you.”
“Jane!” cried Hannah. “Oh, don’t say anything so horrible or terrible as that!”
“What’s terrible about it? What’s horrible about it?” asked Mary. “It isn’t true. Jane knows it isn’t true. When a woman’s fighting for the conventions Jane’s fighting for, she doesn’t use the truth—she’s incapable of using it.”
“What is the truth then?” exclaimed Jane. “If you’ve satisfied yourself you know, if you’ve invented anything truer than what I’ve said to make an excuse for yourself, let’s hear what it is.”
“Yes, you shall hear it,” said Mary, and a deep breath she drew to steady the torrent of words that was surging in her mind. “First of all it’s not true that I didn’t love. I did. She’s perverted the truth there. I did love. I’m not going to tear my heart open and show you how much. I don’t love any longer. That’s what Jane has made use of—the best she could. But what I feel now has nothing to do with it. What I feel now is the result of circumstances it won’t help any way to explain. What happened that makes the vileness she talks about, happened when I was in love, as deeply in love as any woman can be, and as I never expect to be again. But it’s not because of love that I’m going to defend myself. It’s not because of love that I show this arrogance, as you call it. That’s not the truth I’ve found or invented for myself. Love’s only half the truth when you come to value and add up the things that count in a woman’s life. Of all the married people we know, how many women who have found completion and justification for their existence really love their husbands? Love! Oh, I don’t know! Love’s an ecstasy that gives you a divine impetus towards the great purposes of life. I don’t want to talk as though I’d been reading things out of a book. That almost sounds like it. But you can’t imagine I haven’t been thinking. These two months, these last six months, ever since something that happened last Christmas time, I have. And thinking’s like reading, I suppose. It’s reading your own thoughts.”
A smile of security twitched at Jane’s lips.
“Well, is this the wonderful truth?” she asked. “Are we to sit and listen to you, the youngest of us, telling us that love’s an ecstasy? Because if you’re going to give us a lecture about love, perhaps you’d like a glass of water beside you.”
“No, that’s not the wonderful truth,” she replied quietly. She felt Jane could not sting her to anger and somehow she smiled. “The truth is this, which they up there had never learnt and no one seems to know. Life’s not for wasting, but what have been our lives here, we four girls—girls! Women now! What has it been? Waste—waste—nothing but waste. Why has Hannah’s hair gone gray? Why are you, Jane, bitter and sour and dry in your heart? Why’s Fanny drawn and tired and thin and spare? Why do I look older than I am? Because we’re waste—because Life’s discarded us and thrown us on one side, because for a long time now there’s been nothing in the world for us to do but sit in this room with those portraits looking down on our heads and just wait till we filter out like streams that have no flood of purpose to carry them to the sea. Our lives have only been a ditch, for water to stagnate in. We find nothing. We can’t even find ourselves. Fanny there, grows thinner every year. And who’s to blame for it?”
Her eyes shot up to the portraits on the wall and half furtively all their eyes followed hers.
“They’re to blame, but not first of all they aren’t. What makes it possible that Jane can speak as she does, talking about what has happened to me as the vilest of all vile things? Men have made it possible, because men have needed children for one reason and one reason only. Possession, inheritance and all the traditions of family and estate. These are the things men have wanted children for and so they made the social laws to meet their needs. But there are more things in the world to inherit than a pile of bricks and a handful of acres. Do you think I want my child to have no more inheritance than that? I tell you almost I’m glad he has no father! I’m glad he won’t possess. There are things more wonderful than bricks and acres that are going to be his if I have the power to show them to him. There are things in the world more wonderful than those which you can just call your own. And it’s those laws of possession and inheritance we have to thank for the idleness our lives have been set in. Jane thinks herself a true woman just because she’s clung to modesty and chastity and a fierce reserve, but those things are of true value only when they’re needed, and what man has needed them of us? Who cares at all whether we’ve been chaste and pure? None but ourselves! And what’s made us care but these false values that make Jane’s shame of me?”
With flashing eyes she turned to Jane.
“You’ve asked for the truth,” she cried now. “Well, you shall have it as you thought you gave it to me. You’re not really ashamed of me. You’re envious, jealous, and you’re stung with spite. Calling me a servant girl or a woman of the streets only feeds your spite, it doesn’t satisfy your heart. You’d give all you know to have what I have, but having allowed yourself to be a slave to the law all you have left is to take a pride in your slavery and deck it out with the pale flowers of modesty and self-respect.”
She stood up suddenly from her chair and walked to the door. An instant there, she turned.
“As soon as I can get my things together,” she said, “I’m going to a place in Warwickshire. If Hannah wants to know my plans afterwards I’ll write and tell her. Don’t think I’m not quite aware of being turned out. That’s quite as it ought to be from Jane’s point of view. You’d dismiss a servant at once. But don’t think you’ve made me ashamed. I only want you to remember I went as proud, prouder than you stayed.”
This was the real moment of Mary Throgmorton’s departure from the square, white house in Bridnorth. When a few days later she left in the old coach that wound its way over the crest of the hill on which so often she had watched it, it was the mere anticlimax of her going and to all who saw that departure must have seemed but a simple happening in her life.