The Green Bough

Phase V

I

It was a still hot day at the end of the month of July in the following year. Vast mountain ranges of cumulus clouds too heavy on the horizon to sweep across the sky with the storm they promised hung sullen and low in masses of pale purple rimmed with golden pink. Rain was sadly wanted all the country round. Only the Highfield meadow at Yarningdale was lush and green. The cows were there grazing on the aftermath.

With her sewing, Mary had come down to the field an hour or more before there was need to drive them in. John was playing with Lucy down the stream. She could hear their voices in and out of the willows. They were like dryad and faun, laughing together. His voice was as a lute to Mary. She listened to it and to the very words he said, as she would have listened to a faun playing on his pipe, half bewitched by it, half tricked to laughter and to joy that was scarcely of this world.

“If I’m the captain,” she heard him saying, “you have to dance whether you like it or not.”

Claude Duval and Treasure Island! Both flung together in the melting pot of his fancy.

She peered down the field through the trunks of the pollarded willows and saw a dryad dancing before a faun sitting cross-legged in the grass. A fay-looking sight it was in the hazy mist of that sunshine. With unsteady balance, Lucy swayed in and out of the tree shadows, alternately a thing of darkness and a thing of light. And there below her in the grass he sat, with his mop of hair and his profile cut sharp against the dark trunk of a willow tree, looking to Mary who saw him with the mist in his eyes like pagan Nature, back to the times of Pan. Herself as well, as there she watched, she felt she could have danced for him.

Was that what love was—the thing that she had never known? Could this be it, this godlike power that Nature lent to man to make a woman dance for him, and, as she danced, trick all his senses till he was no more than man, when Nature snatched her loan away and with Pan’s laughter caught the woman in her arms and vanished in the trees and hid herself?

That moment then she seemed to see it so and with a later vision beheld the woman stepping out from underneath the shadows of the wood, leading a faun, so young his feet seemed scarcely touching the grass he walked upon.

Her sewing fluttered to her lap. In that midsummer heat, her eyes half closed, then opened, startled at the sound of solid footsteps by her side. She looked up and there stood Liddiard, his hat in his hand, a nervous smile upon his lips. She was too taken unawares to fathom them.

“Am I dreaming?” she muttered.

“You were asleep,” said he.

“But this isn’t dreaming?”

“No—you’re awake now.”

“Why—? What is it? Why have you come here?”

“To see you.”

“After all these years?”

“Twelve of them.”

He sat down on the grass a little apart from her, watching her face.

“You look very little older, Mary. There isn’t a gray hair in your head. I’ve plenty.”

“My hair’s nondescript,” she replied, still in an amaze. “It takes a long time to go gray. Why have you come here? Did they tell you at Bridnorth where I was?”

“Yes.”

“Then why have you come?”

“I told you, to see you.”

“But what about?”

He smiled again as he watched her.

“You haven’t changed at all, Mary. The same directness; the same unimpressionable woman, the same insensitiveness to the delicate word. Does it give you no pleasure at all to think I should come back after all these years to see you?”

“Was I unimpressionable once?” she asked quietly, and took no notice of the latter part of his sentence.

He looked away across the Highfield meadow and there between the willow trees he saw the mop of hair, the sharp cut profile, the little figure half hidden by the grass, looking as though he grew out and was part of the very earth itself he sat on.

Liddiard looked back at Mary.

“Is that him?” he muttered.

She nodded her head and then of a sudden a fear, nameless and unreasonable, shook her through all her body.

“You came to see him,” she whispered. “You came because of him. Didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

“How did you know?” he asked.

“How did I know?” Her throat gave out a sound like laughter; a mirthless sound that frightened her and awed him. “Shouldn’t I know, better than him; better even than you? Wouldn’t I know everything that touches him, touches him near and touches him far away? What do you want to see him for? He’s nothing to do with you—nothing!”

“I know that, Mary. He’s yours. He’s nothing to do with me; but mightn’t I have something to do with him?”

Fear sickened in her throat. She wet her lips and gathered her sewing from her lap as though she might run away; then laid it down again.

“Say what you mean,” she said quickly. “I don’t want delicate words. You’re right. I never did. They break against me and in their pieces mean nothing. I want the words I can understand. What do you mean you might be something to him? What could you be? He’s mine, all mine! I made him—not you. I know I made him. I meant to. Every moment I meant to. It was just a moment of passion to you, a release of your emotions. It was ease it gave you—I can’t help how I speak now—it was ease! It brought me the most wonderful pain in the world. You didn’t want him! In that letter you wrote you talked about the consequences of passion! Consequences! My God! Is he no more than a consequence! A thing to be avoided! A thing, as you suggested, to be hidden away! I made him, I tell you—I meant to make him! I gave every thought in my mind and every pulse in my body to make him what he is while you were scheming in yours how the consequences of passion might be averted. What is the something you could be to him now after all these years? Where is the something any man can be to the child a woman brings into the world? Show me the man who, in such relationship as ours, will long for his child to be born, will give his passion, not for relief, but in full intent to make that child his own. Show me the man outside the convenience of the laws that he has made who will face the shame and ignominy he has made for himself and before all the world claim in his arms the thing he meant to create—then I’ll admit he has something to do with the child he was the father of. Father! What delicate word that is! There’s a word that breaks into a thousand little pieces against my heart. I don’t know it! I don’t understand it! I pick up the pieces and look at them and they mean nothing! Have you come after all these years to tell me you’re his father, because if you have, you’re talking empty words to me.”

A little shout of laughter fluttered down to them through the still air. She never heard it. The beating of her heart was all too loud. Scarcely knowing what she did, she picked up her sewing and went on with her work, while Liddiard stared before him down the field.

“I suppose you imagine,” he said presently, “I suppose you imagine I don’t feel the justice of every word you’ve said. You think I’m incapable of it.”

She made no reply and he continued.

“I know what you say is quite true. I haven’t come here to tell you I’m his father. I scarcely feel that I am. If I did, I wouldn’t thrust it on you. But there’s one thing you don’t count in all you’ve said.”

“What’s that?” she sharply asked.

“For all that you made him, for all the thoughts and pulses that you gave, he stands alone. He is himself, apart from you or me. The world is in front of him whilst it’s dropping behind us two.”

Again she laid her sewing down. A deeper terror he had struck into her heart by that. That was true. She knew it was true. The coming of Lucy into that hayfield only the summer before was proof that it was true. He stood alone. She had said as much to Mrs. Peverell herself. “He’ll give the best he has,” she had said in effect. “Perhaps he’ll leave the farm and break your heart. Perhaps if I live, he’ll break mine.” This was true. Whole-heartedly she hated Liddiard for saying it. When all her claims were added up, John still stood by himself—alone.

“Go on,” she whispered with intense quietness. “Say everything you’ve got to say. I’m listening.”

He looked about him for reassurance, doubtful and ill at ease because of the note in her voice, yet set of purpose upon that for which he had come.

“I have told my wife everything,” he began and paused. She bowed her head as he waited for a sign that she had heard.

“I told her a week ago to-day. My wife is now forty-seven. We have no children. We can have none. A week ago to-day we were discussing that; that I had no one, no one directly to whom I could leave Wenlock Hall. She knows what that place means to me. I think you know too. It was my father’s and his father’s. Well, it has been in the family for seven generations now. Each one of us has done something to it to improve it. In the Stuart period one of my ancestors built a chapel. Before then a wonderful tithe barn was built. It’s one of the finest in England. The date is on one of the beams—1618. The eldest son has always inherited. We’ve never broken the line. We were talking about it the other night. I was an only son. The property is not entailed. The next of kin is a cousin. He’s the only male Liddiard. I’m not particularly fond of him, but he’s the only Liddiard. I should leave it to him. My wife was saying what a pity it was. She wondered whose fault it could be. ‘I believe it must be mine,’ she said, ‘and if it is, what can I do?’”

He paused again and looked long at Mary whose needle still with the finest of precision was passing in and out of the material in her hands.

“I told her what she could do,” he added and met Mary’s eyes as they looked up.

“What was that?” she asked quietly.

“I told her she could give our child a home and a name,” said he, “if you would consent to let him go.”

II

It was in Mary’s sensations as though, all unprepared, she had turned a sudden corner and found herself looking into an abyss, the darkness and depth of which was unfathomable. All sense of balance and equilibrium seemed to leave her. She reeled and was giddy in her mind. She could have laughed aloud. Her mental stance upon the plane of thought became a negation. Her grip was gone. She was floating, nebulously, foolishly, without power of volition to gravitate herself to a solid conception of anything.

He proposed to take John away from her. He was suggesting to her by every word he said that it was her duty to John to let him go. Not only could she laugh at the thought of it—she did. After all these twelve years when the whole of her life and John’s too were planned out like a design upon a loom, needing only the spinning, she was to tear the whole fabric into shreds and fling it away! It was preposterous, unbelievable that he could have thought it worth while to come to her with such a suggestion. Yet she laughed, not because it was so ludicrous as to be unbelievable, but because Fate had so ordered it that, in a depth of her consciousness, she knew he could have done nothing else.

From the world’s point of view it was the natural and inevitable sequence in an extraordinary chain of events. Many a woman would be glad of such an advancement for her son. Most conceivable it was that a man should desire his own flesh and blood to inherit and carry on in his name that of which the generations had made him proud. All this she realized. All this was the darkness and depth of the abyss into which she looked.

But then the sound of her laughter in her ears gave her hold again. More real than all worldly considerations became the cruelty it was to her. More real even than that was the destruction of the ideal she had cherished in her heart and nurtured and fed in John’s.

His education was to have been the earth, the very soil his feet trod, not the riches that came out of that earth and more than the soft wet clay, soiled the hands of him who touched them. It was to give, not to enjoy; to labor, not to possess with which she had hedged him in upon his road to happiness and fulfillment. These were the realizations which, with the sound of her laughter, gave her hold again.

She saw the depth and darkness of that abyss, but shut her eyes to it. In full possession of herself, having gained equilibrium once more, she turned upon Liddiard with a scorn he had never seen in her.

“I’m forty now,” she said, “and I don’t think you’ll deny that I have found and faced the world. In your sheltered place down there in Somerset, you can’t maintain that you have met the world—as I’ve met it. The real things have never threatened you to crush your spirit or break your courage as they have mine. Setting up a chapel or building a tithe barn aren’t the real things of life. Keeping your lawns cut and your borders trimmed won’t make England great or set in order the vast forces of life that govern us. Inheriting isn’t creating, possession isn’t power. You want to train my son to the thought that it is. For twelve years I’ve trained his little mind to the knowledge that it isn’t. You want him to possess and enjoy. I want him to labor and live. You want him to inherit your pride. I want him to create his own. Doesn’t it ever occur to you that since your family established itself in its possessions in Somersetshire, it’s been decaying in purpose, decaying in spirit, decaying in power? Doesn’t it ever occur to you that you’re making no surplus of energy in that house of Liddiard, but by means of the laws of inheritance are living upon a little circle of energy that goes round and round, always dissipating itself with every generation, always becoming the lesser instead of the greater; creating no energy that is new, only using up that which is old; setting up chapels for itself and building itself tithe barns, always for itself, never making that energy really free for the whole world to profit by?”

Liddiard stood staring at her in amazement. She was not talking with the words of a woman. She was talking with the words of a force, a new force; something, coming up against which he felt himself puny and small and well-nigh impotent.

“You think I’m talking like a street orator,” she said, justly reading that look. “Very probably I am to you. I know nothing of the social science, none of the facts for what I’m saying. I’ve never even said things like this before. I’m not picking my words. I’m only saying what I feel, what I believe all women are feeling in their hearts. One and all, if their thoughts were known, I believe they know they have contributed long enough to the possessive passions of men. Long enough they’ve been through the pains of birth and the greater pain of disappointment in their sons in order to give men children to inherit the possessions that are theirs. Long enough they’ve been servants, slaves even, to the ideals of men. The laws have been constructed to make and keep them so. The civilization of the world has been built up on the principle of ‘get by force and keep by servitude.’ The women who marry into royalty must breed or they are put away. That’s what we do with the cows here on this farm. If they don’t have calves and give milk, they’re sent away to the market and they’re sold. But do you really think you can keep women upon that plane of life forever? Here, at Yarningdale, I set my teeth and close my eyes when the cow is driven away. But do you suppose women are getting for themselves no more soul than that beast has? Do you think they’re always quietly going to be driven away? Do you think they merely want to be stalled and well-fed for their efficient service? Do you think with men as they are, making love and passion a horror to some women they marry, that we are forever going to believe they are fathers of our children and have supreme power to teach them none but their own ideals?”

She came a little closer to him as now they stood out there in the Highfield meadow.

“I’m outside your laws,” she said. “You can’t touch me. I believe there are countless women who would be as I am, if they dared. I believe there are countless women who would give all they know to be able to train their sons to their own ideals as I can train mine. We don’t know anything about government or the forces that drive nations in peace and in war; but we do know that the real peace is not in possession, the real war is not in physical force and bloodshed to keep what you have got, or win a little more. One day there’ll come a time when women won’t give their sons for that, when they’ll train themselves and train them to higher conceptions than you men have had.”

Of a sudden she turned from the reason in her mind to the emotion in her breast.

“You shan’t have my John!” she cried. “You shan’t have him! I made him, as every woman could make her child if once she thought it was worth while. Well—I’ve thought it worth while, as now I think it worth while to fight for him and keep him. When you made your laws about illegitimacy and gave the woman the right in her child, it was because you considered that some men were fools and all women were cowards and that the one must be punished for his folly no less than the other for her fear. But what would you do if in the end that law turned round against you? What would you do if all women chose to do as I have done and refused to bind themselves in matrimony to the man who gave them a child? Men would still be fools, you may be sure of that. Nature relies upon their folly, while they have thought that what she relied upon was their power. Power it may be with the few, the few that can inspire real love; but folly it is with the most of men; folly and greed which causes them to make so many women scoff at and hate the thought of love. Yes—hate the thought of love, some women do. Every young girl shrinks at the thought of physical contact. Many a young woman goes to her marriage with terror in her heart and with many that terror becomes horror when she knows. Even we become the possession you take to yourselves. What most of you call love—is that. But I’m going to teach my John better things. When he comes to love, he shall come awed, as a woman comes, not tramping with the pride of victory and possession. When he comes to love, it shall be to make her find it as wonderful as now she falsely dreams it is. You can’t prevent me. I don’t belong to you.”

Still it was a force that spoke in her, a force before which, with character alone, he felt he had no power to oppose. She was not even speaking as one amongst the countless women she had called upon, but as woman, setting herself up in conflict against man. This was real war. He had sensed well enough what she meant by that. Yet in the habit of his mind, with power or no power to oppose, he took such weapons as he could lay his hands upon and struck back at her.

“Don’t let’s stand here, like this,” said he. “Can’t we sit down on the grass and talk it out?”

She sat down and, as her body touched the ground, discovered that she was trembling in every limb.

“You’re an extraordinary woman, Mary,” he began. “The most extraordinary woman I’ve ever known. You talk with your heart and yet you make me feel all the time as though your heart were unapproachable. I’ve never touched it. I know that. I never touched it even those two nights in Bridnorth. I thought I had, but your letter afterwards soon proved to me I hadn’t. Some man could, I suppose, but as you talk, I can’t conceive the type he’d be. You know you frighten me and you’d terrify most men. I don’t say it in any uncomplimentary fashion, but most men, hearing what you’ve said just now, would go to the ends of the earth rather than make love to or marry you.”

“You needn’t talk about lack of compliment,” she said with a wry smile. “I’m quite aware of it. Women like me don’t attract men. They say we’re not natural. They like natural women and by that they mean they like women who are submissive. But if they think that’s the natural woman, their conception of women has stopped with the animals. We aren’t passive. We’re coming to know that we’re a force. Look at the way this talk of the enfranchisement of women is growing. Who’d have listened to it twenty years ago? I don’t profess to know what it means. I don’t profess to conjecture what it’s coming to. But it’s growing; you can’t deny it.”

She must have thought she had won her way. Passing like this to abstract and speculative things, she must have believed he had no more to say; that question no longer existed about her keeping John. It only proved the want of knowledge of facts she admitted and it was inevitable she must have. She had spent all the force of the vital energy of her defense, but she had not subdued the man in him. Right as he knew in his heart she was, there was yet all the reserve of reason in his mind. The generations of years of precedent were all behind him. She had not subdued him merely by victory over his emotions. The force she had was young and ill-tried. She had set it up against convention and triumphed for all these years. She did not realize now what weight of pressing power there was behind it, the overbearing numbers that must tell in the end.

He was only waiting for this moment; this moment when in the flush of seeming victory she was weakest of all; this moment when in confidence her mind relaxed from its purpose and, as was always happening with his sex and hers, he could take her unawares. None of this conscious intent there was in him. He was merely articulating in his mind in obedience to the common instinct which through all the years of habit and custom and use have become the nature of man.

“Yes, that idea about the enfranchisement of women is growing,” he admitted generously, “but I quite agree we can none of us know what it’ll come to. It can’t alter one thing, Mary.”

In a moment alert with the unyielding note in his voice, she inquired what that might be.

“It can’t alter the fact that each one of us, child, of whatever enfranchisement we may be, stands utterly and completely alone, encouraged or hampered in our fulfillment by the circumstances of birth that are made for us. It happens that men are more equipped for the making of those circumstances than women are. It happens that men are more capable of wrestling with and overcoming the difficulties of environment, well, in other words, of providing the encouragement of circumstance. I don’t think you can get away from that. I don’t think you can get away from the fact that in this short life we don’t want to waste our youth in making a suitable environment whenever it’s possible to start so much ahead and conserve our energies for the best that’s in us.”

He turned quickly as he sat and looked at her.

“What have you called him?” he asked.

“John,” she replied. “He’s John Throgmorton.”

“Well, do you think you’re giving him the best chance of trying his soul with the biggest things? Whatever ideals you have for him, he stands alone with the circumstances of life in which you place him. Do you think he’s going to do the best with them here? Do you believe when he grows up, he’ll live to bless you for the chances of life you threw away for him to-day? Do you think, if he has ambition, he’ll be thankful that he started life as a farmer’s boy with scarcely any education and but small prospects, when he could have been a master of men with a big estate and no need to consider the hampering necessity of making ends meet? Do you think if he’s ambitious, he’ll be thankful to you for that? Ask any one who has the widest and most generous experience of the world what they imagine will be his state of mind when, with ambition awakening, he comes to learn that he started with that handicap. Your ideals and ideas may be perfect in theory. How do you think they’ll come out in practice? Ideas are nothing unless they can stand against the melting flames of fact. The experience of every one would go to tell you that in a practical world, which this is, you were wrong. Can you prove you will be right? Can you prove that when John grows up and ambition lights in him, he’ll thank you for your choice to-day?”

She sat in silence, listening to every word; every word that beat with the mechanical insistence of a hammer stroke against her brain. They were all arguments she would have expected any one to use in such a case. They were all the very forces against which she had fought for so long. Yet hearing them now with this added element of emotion concerning John, which drove them not only into her brain, but beating up against her heart as well, she realized how unanswerable they sounded in—he had said it—in a practical world.

Supposing John did come to reproach her when he learnt the opportunity of life she had refused for him? Her heart shrank and sickened from the thought of it. If it were for herself alone, how easy it would be to refuse; how easy to stand by the principles and ideals she knew in her soul were true.

But why should he ever know? Who would there ever be here in Yarningdale to tell him? For one instant that thought consoled and the next assailed her with venomous accusations. Was it not the self-confession of weakness to hope for concealment and deception to save her from retribution? The very realization of it shook her faith. To be true, to be worthy, to endure, ideals must be able to face the fiercest light; must live, be tried, be nailed to the cross if necessary. Only through such a test could they outlive the mockery of those who railed at and spat on them. She knew she could face the contempt of the whole world. In her own world had she not faced it already? But could she endure the recriminations of him whose whole life was so inextricably woven with her own?

“Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favor with God.”

Those words came to her, a beacon across the heads of all the years; but it seemed very far away to her then. The light of it flickered an instant bringing courage to her heart and then died out again.

She did fear now. More than anything she had feared in her life, did she shrink from the reproach of John when he should come to years of appreciation. Her heart was here involved. Too shrewdly had Liddiard struck home at her weakest point.

“Do you think he’ll live to bless you for the chances in life you threw away for him to-day?”

But why should it be to-day? Why in a sudden moment should this situation be thrust upon her? Why should she be harassed like this to say what she would do?

“You can’t expect me to give you a decision about this all at once,” she said, and there were rough edges to her voice. These were not the smooth words of an easy mind.

He heard each note. He knew she was swaying from her purpose. He realized the approach of what he had come there determined to secure.

“I don’t wish you to give a decision to-day,” he replied. “Of course I couldn’t expect you to. Do you think I don’t realize what I’m asking you—however much it may be for his sake.”

“No—but I don’t mean to-day or this year or the next,” she went on in her distress. “Can’t you wait until it can be put to him, until he’s old enough to judge for himself; until he’s learnt something of all I want to teach him?”

Liddiard put out his hand. She did not see it.

“My dear Mary,” he said, as he withdrew it again, “wonderful as your ideals are, you have the fault of all idealists. You don’t equip them to meet the facts of life. They’re like flowers planted on a highway. You don’t reckon on the traffic of the world that will break them down. Whatever your dreams may be, they cannot stop that traffic. The carts must go by. You can’t prevent a man from setting out on his journeys. You can only hinder him from reaching his destination by the beast you give him to draw the vehicle of his ambitions, by the sound of the ramshackle vehicle itself which you provide him with to reach his journey’s end. John couldn’t come to Wenlock Hall with the education of a farmer’s boy. That would be too cruel. That would hamper him at every turn. The springs of his cart would be creaking. It would be like asking him to drive down Rotten Row in a muck cart. Do you think he’d find that fair? He must go to school. He must go to the University. He must learn the things that it is necessary he should know to fill a position like that. You can’t send him. It must be me. I don’t want your decision at once. I can wait a week, a month, more. But you must see yourself it can’t be years. It can’t be till he’s able to choose for himself. That is the unpractical side of your ideals. You don’t realize it would be too late then.”

Mary sat with her elbows resting on her knees, her face locked and hidden in her hands. It was an abyss which, round that unexpected corner, she had seen yawning at her feet. It was deep. It was dark. Nothing so dark or deep or fathomless had presented itself to her in her life before. She felt herself falling, falling, falling into the bottomless pit of it and not one hand was there in all the world that stretched itself out to save her.

She had come so far, knowing at every turn that, for all the rough and broken surfaces, her road was right; thinking, however hard or merciless to her feet, it yet would lead to sweet and quiet places. Courage she had had and fear she had known along the whole way. Still she had striven on as one, bearing a heavy burden, who knows there is release and rest at her journey’s end.

But before the chasm of this abyss that fronted her, it was not so much courage she lost as the vital essence of volition. For herself she did not feel afraid. Whatever destruction might be awaiting her in those depths, she did not shrink from it. Eagerly, willingly, she would have sacrificed herself, but had no strength to take the hazard of what might chance and sacrifice him.

There was little need for Liddiard to tell her how every precedent in life opposed the thing she had set herself to do. And once John had come in contact with life itself, how could she be sure the pressure of his thoughts would not be tinctured with regret. What more bitter inheritance, what more accusing testimony of her failure than that?

Not always a faun could she keep him. Not always with a dryad could he play in happy meadows. The world it seemed had grown too old, too worn, for that. Something must happen to stir human nature to its depths and rearrange the threadbare and accepted values before it could ever be young again.

Here she knew she was but dreaming dreams. There lay the abyss before her. Nothing in the wildest flights of her imagination she could conceive was able to fill its depths or make a bridge, however treacherous, to span it.

He had said it. These things were unanswerable in a practical world; and in a practical world there was no true sense of vision. The possessions of men had become their limitations. Beyond them and the ease they brought to the few years that were theirs, they could not see.

The vision she had had was but a glimpse; a world beyond, not a world about her. As Liddiard watched her, she sank her head upon her knees. He thought she had turned to tears. But a heart, breaking, turns to that water that does not flow out of the eyes.

He thought she had turned to weeping and in genuine sympathy laid his hand gently on her arm. And this was the spear thrust that set free the water from the gash his touching hand made in her side.

She drew away and lifted her head and looked at him.

“You’re strangling all the joy in the world,” she said.

III

There came the sound of a voice through the willow trees, across the other side of the stream. It was a sturdy voice, high and ringing with encouragement.

“Bear up—be brave,” it said. “We’re coming to the ford. Once the river’s crossed there are only a few more miles to go before we’re safe.”

The smile that rose into Mary’s eyes found no place to linger there. She turned with Liddiard at the sound to see, a faun no longer, a faun transformed to stalwart man, bearing a distressed maiden in his arms—a knight errant shouldering the precious burden of outraged womanhood and bringing her to safety.

Again the smile crept back into Mary’s eyes. Again it crept away.

“Has Lucy hurt herself?” she asked. “What’s the matter with her?”

“There were two terrible robbers in the wood,” said he as he strode with his burden into the stream. “They had tied her to a tree. She was all naked when I found her. I’ve killed them both—she’s—” Then seeing Liddiard for the first time, he stopped. Astonishment leapt into his eyes. He set his Lucy down and stood staring.

“John,” said Mary, “this is a friend of mine, a Mr. Liddiard.” She turned to Liddiard. “This is my John,” she said.

They met and solemnly shook hands. With eyes that sought for subtlest meanings and hidden things, Mary watched them, the touching of their hands, the look of the eyes. So surely she knew, across the unmeasured distance between them, Liddiard was casting the javelin of his soul to pierce John’s heart. In that silence as he stood holding John’s hand, she knew he was eagerly, determinedly, poignantly conscious of being father of her child and in that silence was straining to project his consciousness into the very soul of John. Would he respond? She watched them both, but closest by far, her John. Was there some voice in life between father and child which all the years and all their silence could not still? With almost a jealous dread she stood before that moment swift in her mind to see the faintest sign. Would he respond?

For a while John’s hand lay in Liddiard’s, then of himself he took it away.

“Can we go on playing, Mummy?” he asked. When she knew there had been no answer to Liddiard’s call; when, sure in her heart he know none but her, she knelt down on the grass at his side and took his cool cheeks in her hands.

“If you’ll kiss me,” said she, “if you’ll kiss me first.”

He framed his lips and kissed her eyes and stood back laughing. He framed his lips again and kissed her mouth, then laughed again and lastly, flinging his arms about her neck, he poured his kisses like a song into her ears, then, shouting to his Lucy, ran away.

In a long silence, Liddiard turned and watched them, faun and dryad once more, spirits of that sunshine and those deep green shades of the trees. He looked back at Mary.

“You’ve made a sturdy, splendid thing of him, Mary,” he said emotionally. “You’ve made him fit for the very best.”

She closed her eyes.

“Who’s the little girl?” he asked presently.

“Lucy—Lucy Kemp. She’s the daughter of a farmer who lives over there. They’re great friends.” She half smiled. “I was jealous at first. I know now these things must be. Boy and girl, why shouldn’t they begin that way? It’s grown to be the sweetest of wooings to me. They’re becoming like two young shoots together. One day their roots will twine.”

He put on his hat.

“You can’t be sure of that,” said he. “One day perhaps he’ll need his own. I know you think, living here, that class means nothing. You rule out heredity altogether. But it comes out. He might be content. Do you think a girl like that could ever make him realize the fullness of life?”

Fear sprang back into her heart again.

“Oh, why did you ever come?” she said. “We were all so happy here!”

IV

Mary stayed on at Yarningdale when John was taken away to school. Had she had fear of the pain it was, she would still have remained. Mr. and Mrs. Peverell were getting old and so close by this was her life now knit with theirs, she knew her absence would have made too deep a void were she to leave them then.

The natural milkmaid she had become, so skillful, so acknowledgable and conscientious in her work, that Mr. Peverell had increased his activities in this direction. Where at first there had been but nine milking cows, there now were fourteen. All through the summer months, he supplied thirty gallons of milk a day. Filled in the churns, Mary drove with it every evening in the spring cart to the station. At her suggestion and by means of her labor he undertook the rearing of his own calves and the ultimate introduction of them into the milking herd. Whenever good fortune brought them a promising heifer calf, it was given into Mary’s charge. It became an interest deeper and more exacting than she knew to wean and rear it for the herd. So they were able to know the character and history of each beast as it came into service, its milking qualities, its temper, the stock from which it sprang.

As thus, having weaned him towards the vision of life she had, Mary would have reared her John.

“Why—why did ’ee let ’en go, Maidy?” Mrs. Peverell had cried to her the night after John’s departure when she lay stretched upon her bed, staring, staring, staring at the paper on the wall.

“I’d taught him to give,” she muttered. “How would he believe what I’d said one day, when he learnt that I’d kept back? How can you teach another how to live if you don’t know how, yourself? There’s only one way of knowing the truth about life—living it. I shan’t lose him. I know deep and deep and deep in my heart, I shan’t. He’s gone, but he’ll come back. Should I really have believed if I hadn’t let him go? The belief that’s really in the spirit comes out in the flesh. It must! It must! Or soul and body are never one.”

It was to herself she had spoken. Never her hopes, ambitions or faith for John had she attempted to explain to Mrs. Peverell. None but the simplest issues of life could that good woman appreciate. Right or wrong things were with her. No other texture but this they had. In fullest conviction she knew that Mary had been right in everything she had done. So close in sympathy with their Maidy was she now that even in this parting with John, that well-nigh broke her heart, she felt Mary must be right.

“Shall I cross his name out of the book, Maidy?” she had asked as she was leaving the room. “’Twon’t be nothing to him, this place, when he comes into his big estate.”

Sitting up in the bed, Mary had called Mrs. Peverell to her, clutching her hands.

“Never do that!” she cried. “That was his birthright. He was born here. I made him here. Promise me, don’t do that. If you did that, I should feel I’d lost him forever!”

---

For the first half of every holiday at school John came back to his mother at Yarningdale. The remainder of his time he spent in Somerset. How closely she watched him it is not difficult to suppose. Every term that passed brought him to her again with something she had taught him gone, with something they had taught him in its place.

To the outward observer, he was the same John. All his love he gave her, teasing her with it as he grew older, playing the lover to her shyness when she found him turning from boy to man.

They spoke little of Liddiard or the life in Somerset for the first year. All invitations to Wenlock Hall though freely offered, she refused.

---

“I appreciate your wife’s generosity of wish to meet me; don’t think me seeking to make difficulties; really I am trying to avoid them,” she wrote.

---

In fact it was that Yarningdale was her home and still, pursuant of her purpose, she would not allow John to associate her in his mind with any other place. Within a year they had made him feel the substance of his inheritance. He spoke of Wenlock Hall, knowing it would be his. Inevitably he made comparisons between their lives and hers, but it was not until after his first term at Oxford that openly he questioned her wisdom in staying on the farm.

“They both want you down there, Mater, at Wenlock Hall. And after all, this is a poky little place, isn’t it? Of course the farm’s not bad, but it’s a bit ramshackle and sometimes I hate to think of you still milking the cows in those dingy old stalls. We’ve got lovely sheds at Wenlock Hall, asphalt floor, beautifully drained, plenty of light and as clean as a new pin.”

She looked at him steadily.

“For nearly eighteen years, John, I’ve been milking the cows in those stalls. Until two weeks before you were born, I sat there milking them. As soon as I was well again I went back. You’ve got your little private chapel at Wenlock Hall. Those stalls are my chapel. That little window hung with cobwebs through which I’ve seen the sunset—oh, so many times, I don’t want any more wonderful an altar than that. In those stalls I’ve had thoughts no light through stained glass windows could ever have brought to me. Do you remember sitting beside me there while I milked, oh, heaps of times, but one time particularly when you asked me about God?”

He thought an instant and then burst into shouts of laughter.

“What, that time I asked you if God had a beard like old Peverell?”

She tried to laugh with him, just as, at the time, she had tried to control her laughter. This was the difference between John, then and now; was it not indeed the difference in all of her life?

“That was the end,” said she, “that was the last question you asked. We had said a lot before that. Don’t you remember?”

“I was just a kid then,” said he. “I suppose I was always asking questions.”

“Don’t you now?”

“No, not so much, why should I? Mater, you don’t expect me always to be a silly little fool, do you?”

The breath was deep she drew.

“You were far from being a silly little fool then, John. Those questions were all wonderful to me, even the last one.”

He laid both his hands upon her shoulders and looked far into her eyes.

“You take life so seriously, Mater,” he said.

“Only when it loses its seriousness, John,” she replied. “I was full of the joy of it in those days when always you were flinging your earnest little questions at me. It’s now when it seems to me sometimes you want to play with life that I take it seriously. It’s now, when sometimes you give me the impression you just want to enjoy life, that all the joy goes out of it. I wonder would you understand, my dearest,” she slipped her arm about his neck, “if I told you you were more of a man to me then than often you are now.”

“Well, dash it, Mater, I can’t help it. We don’t go mooching about the ‘Varsity with long faces wondering about God. Every chap enjoys himself as much as he can and that all depends on the allowance he gets from his people. They’re jolly decent to me that way. I’ve a good deal more than most fellows. Why, I have a corking time up there and why shouldn’t I? I shall be young only once.”

“You might always be young,” she whispered. “They’re teaching you that youth’s a thing to spend, like money when you have it. I know it’s all the training, my dear. I ought never to have let you go. I’d never have taught you that.”

“I shouldn’t have got much joy out of working on this bally old farm, should I?” he retaliated. “The Pater’s busy enough down at Wenlock Hall, but he doesn’t actually do manual work. He’s always going round the place. I don’t suppose it pays, real profits, I mean, like old Peverell makes this pay, but it gives plenty of employment.”

“Pater? Is that what you call him now?”

After the sound of that word, she had heard no more. It rang with countless echoes in her brain. What a sound it might have had if ever she had loved. Was it as hollow to other women as it was to her now?

“He asked me to, this year,” said John. “Just before I went up to the ‘Varsity. I couldn’t refuse, could I? After all, he is my father. Lots of people say I’m awfully like him.”

Mary turned away.

“I must go out and fetch the cows now,” she said. “Would you like to come?”

He showed an instant’s pause. Before it had passed, swiftly that instant her pride arrested it.

“Perhaps you were going to do something else,” said she.

“Well, as a matter of fact, I was going to take old Peverell’s gun round by the wood. It’s alive with rabbits. He says they’re spoiling his mangolds.”

“All right, my dear. I’ll see you at supper-time.”

She drove the cows into the shed. One by one they filed into their accustomed stalls. Mechanically she fastened the chains about their necks and took down her stool and brought her pail. Leaning her cheek as so many times she had done against the first warm flank, she looked up. The setting sun was shining through the window.

V

This and many other such conversations revealed in time to Mary that which she had both known and feared. John was changing. Every fresh occasion of their meeting he was altered a little more. The possessive passion, inherent in the very nature of his sex, was stirring in him. Gradually but inevitably they were wakening in him the pride of inheritance. Less and less did it seem to her he was creating his own.

It was all too subtle to arrest, too elusive to oppose. Still, as always, he had his charm. Both Peverell and his wife found him altered, it was true, but improved.

“There be gettin’ the grand manner of the squire about ’en,” Peverell said one day when he went back to Somerset before returning to Oxford. “How many acres is it coming to ’en? Two thousand! Well! A young man needs his head set right way on to let none o’ that go wastin’.”

Not even did Mary let Mrs. Peverell see the wound she had. Scarcely herself did she realize how deep it had gone. But more than in his manner and the things he said, it was in his attitude to Lucy she was made most conscious of his change.

During his first holidays, they had played together as though no difference had entered their lives to separate them. The next time they were more reserved. A shyness had come over them which partly Mary justified to herself, ascribing it to that awkwardness of the schoolboy who, if he is not playing some manly game or doing some manly thing, is ever ready to fear the accusation of ridiculousness.

But it was before he went to Oxford, while he was yet at school that the change in him became more than that merely of confusion. It was plain to be seen that he avoided her then. A solitary figure, wandering in the Highfield meadow where first they had met, where, most likely it was, they still would meet whenever he was at Yarningdale, showed to Mary the patient heart that watched and waited for him.

Sometimes at Mary’s invitation she joined and walked with them. Often it was no more than a shouted greeting from John, flung into the wind over his shoulder, after which the little figure would disappear through the willow trees and for the rest of those holidays perhaps be seen no more, or ever be mentioned by John.

“Have you lost all interest in Lucy?” Mary asked him straightly once when, at the end of his time at Yarningdale, he was packing up his things for the rest of his holiday in Somerset.

He looked up, at first surprised and then with color rising in his cheeks.

“What do you mean by interest?” he asked. “I like her very much. If you mean I haven’t seen her these holidays, I can’t go hunting her out, can I?”

“Can’t you? You used to once.”

“Well, I was a kid then. So was she. She’s nearly seventeen now.”

“Doesn’t it all come back to a matter of interest though? You can’t be interested, of course, if you’re not. I’m not suggesting that you’re being willfully unkind to her. I don’t think you’d be willfully unkind to any one; but do you know what will happen as soon as you’ve gone?”

“What?”

“She’ll come round here on some pretext. She’ll contrive to seek me out and gradually we shall begin to talk about you and then, most cunningly it will seem to herself she is doing it, she’ll ask whether you said anything about her while you were here and if you did what it was and how you said it or what I think you meant by it.”

John flung the things into his bag.

“I wish you wouldn’t encourage her, Mater,” he exclaimed.

She came across the room to him. She took his hands that clumsily were folding some garment before he could pack it. She forced him to turn his face to hers.

“It’s just as much that she encourages me,” she said. “Do you know I was jealous of her once?”

He guffawed with laughter and took her face in his hands and kissed her between the eyes.

“I was,” she whispered, her voice made more than tender with that kiss. “When she first took your thoughts a moment from me, that day you met her when we were making hay in the Highfield meadow, I was jealous then. Now we have one thing, so closely in common that, though she’s only sixteen and I’m forty-seven we’ve become inseparable friends.”

“What do you mean, one thing in common?”

“The old John.”

For an instant she gave lease to her emotion and gently clung to him.

“That was the young John,” she added in a whisper, “the little boy with the mop of hair who was a pirate captain and a Claude Duval and a hundred sturdy men all contained, John, in the simplest, sweetest mind that held one thought. It was to be a man like Mr. Peverell and till the soil with labor from sunrise to the sunset, a man like Mr. Peverell who owed no thanks to any, but out of his own heart and with his own energy made his pride, a man like Mr. Peverell who gave all that he had to the earth which gave all back again to him.”

Her voice was almost trembling now. Chance of circumstance had placed this moment in her hands. She knew she was fighting for her ideals, perhaps with the last opportunity that would ever be given her.

Would he respond? Her heart fluttered in her breast with fear. Had this opportunity come too late? Was he past answering to it now? She hung upon the moment with catching breath, scarce daring to watch his eyes, lest she should know too soon.

Feeling his arm slip round her shoulder, finding his lips against her cheek, she could have cried aloud for joy, yet all in strange perversity kept the stiller in his arms.

This was response. The touch of her mind had not yet gone from his. He had emotions yet that answered to her own. The possessive passion had not won him wholly for its own. A heart he had that still could beat with hers, that still could urge the love in him to take her in his arms.

She knew he was going to speak and waited, saying no more herself to prompt the answer he might give, but laying her cheek against his lips, hearing the breath he drew as he replied.

“I don’t feel that I’ve changed, Mater,” he murmured to her. “I’m a bit older, that’s all. Being up at Oxford makes you see things differently, and it’s awfully different at Wenlock Hall from what it is here. You get out of the way of doing things for yourself, there are so many people to do them for you. Why don’t you come down there? It’s awfully jolly. They’d give you an awfully good time. I know they would. Let me send a wire and say you’re coming these holidays, with me, now? Do! Will you?”

She shook her head. He did not know what temptation he offered. But there, in Yarningdale was the citadel of her faith. Deeply as she longed always to be with him, she dared not sally forth on such adventure as that. Only her faith was there to be its garrison. Only by setting her standard there upon its walls did she feel she could defend the fortress of her ideals.

If she could but keep his love, as now in his arms she felt she had it sure, then always there was hope she might draw him back to the life that she had planned for him. A brave hope it was while she rested there in his arms. For one moment it soared high indeed; the next it fluttered like a shot bird to the earth.

“Don’t ask me about Lucy,” he said as still he held her to him. “You can’t expect me to feel the same about her, or that it should grow into anything more than it was. After all, she’s only Kemp’s daughter.”

She looked away. Her hold of him loosened. Scarcely realizing it, she had slipped from his arms and was standing alone.

VI

It was just before the summer vacation, when John was eighteen, that he had written to Mary, saying—

---

“I’ve got special leave to come down next Friday and I want to ask you something. There’s a girl I’ve got to know, well, she’s twenty-five and I want you to meet her first before they do at Wenlock Hall.”

---

She had come then and so soon. The first woman of John’s own choosing now he was become a man. The jealousy she had known concerning Lucy was as nothing to this she felt with a sickness of apprehension in her now. Fate, circumstance, the mere happenings of life, these had brought him his Lucy. But here was one his heart must have sought out, his soul had chosen. She seemed to know there was no chance, but something selective about this. Here the nature that was in him had been called upon. For the first time, with no uncertainty, she was to learn what that nature was.

Mrs. Peverell indeed had spoken true when she had called him a love-child. His response to passion had been swift and soon. And was he coming, awed to love as once she had said she would teach him to come? Or was he tramping with the pride of victory and possession? The moment she saw this girl, she would know. The world was full of women who asked for no more; who judged the affections of their men by just that measure of animal passion which in their hearts and often upon their tongues they professed to despise.

Only the few there were who, never asking but waiting for the love that she had wished to teach him, inspired it. Had his heart sought out one of these? With fear and trembling she read on.

---

“I can’t explain in writing,” the letter continued, “but you must see her before any one else.”

---

The degree of her gratitude for that for a moment drove away all fear, but not for long.

---

“I’ve told her everything about myself,” she read on. “She’s wonderful. She doesn’t mind a bit. I want you to let me bring her down to Yarningdale. She can have my room and I’ll doss out at the Inn. I know you’ll like her. You must. She’s splendid. I’ve warned her what the farm is like, that it’s a bit rough, but she doesn’t care and she’s longing to meet you.”

---

All Mary’s intuitive impressions of her who did not mind when she had heard about her John, she put away from her and, harnessing the light horse in the spring cart, drove down that Friday to the station.

It was characteristic of John’s letters that he had not mentioned her name. Many of his friends at the ‘Varsity she knew well by his accounts of them, having no more classification for them in her mind than the nicknames they went by.

John was leaning out of the carriage window as the train drew in. Swift enough she noted the look of eager excitement in his eyes; but it was that figure in the pale blue frock behind him she saw. As they came down the platform towards her, John first with his bounding stride, still it was the figure behind him her heart was watching, notwithstanding that she gave her eyes to him.

“Here’s Dorothy Fielding, Mater,” he said, scarcely with pause to exchange their kiss of meeting.

She turned with the smile that hid her hurt to meet those eyes her John had chosen to look into.

It was a quiet woman this Dorothy saw, so calm and serene as made her realize how all those subtle preparations she had made for this meeting were wasted here. That she was well gowned, well shod, that her hair was neither too carefully dressed nor untidy in its effect, that her hat showed confidence in her taste, all these preparations over which she had taken such care she knew could not avail here in the judgment of those eyes that met hers.

This was not just a woman she had to please and satisfy; it was something like an element, like fire or like rushing water her soul must meet, all bare and stripped of the disguising superficialities of life.

“This is the first time I’ve heard your name,” said Mary with that smile she gave her. “John never mentioned it in his letter. But then I don’t suppose he’s ever told you what I was like.”

“Mater! I’ve told Dorothy everything, haven’t I, Dee? Described every little detail about you, rather!”

Mary’s hands stretched out and held his. Her eyes she kept for Dorothy.

“Well, I hope you’re not disappointed,” she said, “because I’m not a bit like it—am I?”

She knew so soon, at once. So far beyond the reach of conscious comprehension had been Dorothy’s surprise that now it came rushing to the surface of her mind with Mary’s detection of it.

“On the contrary,” she replied, “I think I’d have known you anywhere.”

Then from that moment they knew they shared no thought in common. That first lie was the sound of their challenge. Each for their separate purposes they were at enmity in their claim of John. He stood beside them, there upon the platform, supremely unconscious of the forces he had set free, sublimely happy in his achievement of bringing them together.

There were two women, dearer to him at that moment than any two other people in the world and all he saw was the smiles they gave each other. The spiritual and the material need of him they had, for which already they had cried the challenge to battle, this came no more even to the threshold of his mind than came to his ears, intent on all they said, the short, sharp whistle of the departing train.

Each in that first moment had set up her standard. His soul was the sepulchre for which Mary fought. There between those two, lay John’s ideals and visions of life. It was they who had the power to make them what they should be. Through them he was to find stimulus for the emotions that should govern all he did. Still was he for molding, still the plastic spirit needing the highest emotion of the highest ideal to give it noblest purpose.

And here, as ever, his mother was she who in that malleable phase set first the welfare of his soul. No conception or consideration of inheritance was there to hinder her. It was not to a man fit for the world she saw him grow, but to equip him for life she gave the essence of her being.

This from the very first, before ever that cry of his lifted above the wind in the elm trees, had been her sure and certain purpose. No possessions in life there were but him to limit the perspective of her vision; and such a possession was he as for whom, if need be, she could make absolute sacrifice.

Already she had done so. Already once she had given her heart for breaking to let him go. Fear there was in her now she had not had courage enough in her purpose. Fear there was she had not trusted enough to faith.

Would he have lived to rebuke her for the opportunity she had thrown away? Might he not have lived, as she would have taught him, to thank her for the sense of life she had given him in exchange for the world that now was at his feet?

Once she had given her heart for breaking and it had healed in the patient endurance of her soul. She had no thought to give it here. Here in that moment as they met upon the platform, she knew she must fight to the last. Men might make the world, but it was women who created life. Between those two women, laughing like a schoolboy, he stood for his life to be shaped and fashioned and all that appeared upon the surface of things to him was that the world was a happy place.

VII

It would be a false conception of Mary Throgmorton in this phase of her being to picture her as consenting to the common wiles of women.

She fought her battle for her John with weapons the stress of circumstances made ready for her hand. All men have done the same. Guile there may seem to have been in her, but none greater than that which in some one form or another is called forth from all human nature in any conflict. The smiles with which Dorothy greeted her had to be met with smiles; the delicate word she so despised demanded no other than the delicate word from her. To have used blunter, heavier weapons than these might indeed have routed her opponent, yet to have won in such a case would have been worse than loss.

Here was war in the true sense as she knew it; not the flinging of a greater force against a lesser, winning on the field of battle and in the very boastful pride of victory, losing in the field of life. It was not to confound her enemy she sought but to win that issue upon which the full justice of her hope was set. Not for herself to gain or keep it had she made her heart of tempered steel, but for another to find the liberty his soul had need of.

It was for John she fought and none of his pity dared she awaken for his Dorothy, well knowing that though by Nature victors themselves, there was little love in the hearts of men for a triumphant woman.

If this was guile, it was such as life demanded of her then. With all nobility of character to criticize herself, she did not pause here for sentiment. If the weapons she must use were not to her liking, necessity yet fitted them readily to her hold.

Never had John seen his mother so gentle or so kind. For the first time in his conscious mind he appreciated the pain of jealousy he knew must be pricking at her heart. For in some sense it was her defeat it seemed to him he witnessed; a brave defeat with head high in pride and eyes that sadness touched but left no tears. He came to realize the ache of loneliness she felt whenever in the fields, about the farm or through the woods he went with Dorothy alone. After a few days, it was he, unprompted, who asked her to accompany them, and Mary whose wisdom it was so readily to find some duty about the house or with the cows that prevented her acceptance.

Gradually she permitted him to come upon suspicion that these excuses were often invented. Gradually she brought him to consciousness of the sacrifice she made. He found he learnt it with effort or intent and appreciated in himself the breadth of vision his heart had come by.

“Did you realize,” he said one day to Dorothy in the woods, “that the Mater just invented that excuse not to come with us?”

She shook her head.

He found amaze at that.

“She did,” said he. “Those cow stalls don’t want whitewashing again. They’re a bit ramshackle compared with ours at Wenlock Hall, but they’re as clean as a new pin. Old Peverell told me the inspector said they’d never been so clean before. She invented it.”

Suddenly he took Dorothy’s arm.

“Do you know you’ve done that for me?” he whispered.

“Done what?”

“Given me a wider view of things, taught me to realize other people’s feelings as well as my own, shown me what she suffers when she sees me go off to Wenlock, what she suffers when I bring you down here and go out with you every day, leaving her alone.”

“But why should she suffer?” asked Dorothy. “She’s your mother, she must love you. She must want to see you happy. She must be glad you’re going to come into that beautiful place in Somersetshire.”

He fell to silence, having no answer to that, yet feeling she somehow had not understood what he had meant.

That night he came to Mary’s room to say good-night before he went down to the bedroom he had taken at the Crooked Billet. Always hitherto it had been a knock upon the door, a call of good-night and then her listening to the sound of his footsteps down the thinly carpeted stairs. This time he asked if he might come in.

By the light of her candle, Mary was lying in her bed reading one of the books from a little shelf at her bedside. More than she knew, this request of his startled yet spurred her no less to the swift expediency of what she must do.

“Just one moment,” she called back, steadying the note in her voice. Quickly then she slipped from her bed, arranging her hair as best she could before the mirror; with a fever almost of speed, changing her night attire for a garment the best she had, fresh with the scent of the lavender she kept with all her things. Not once did her fingers fumble in their haste. Another moment she was back in bed again, her book put back upon the shelf and another, one of those Nature books she used to read when he was a little boy, taken in its place.

“Come in,” she said and, because her voice was so low with her control of eagerness, she had to repeat her summons.

It was as the door opened and he entered that she felt like a mistress receiving her lover. Her heart was beating in her throat. Even John found her eyes more bright than he had ever seen them before.

All love of women in that moment she knew was the same. For sons or lovers, if it were their hearts beat too high for the material judgments in a material world, what did that matter if so high they beat as to lift the hearts of men to nobler than material things? This, she realized it, was her function; this the power so many women were denied, having no vision of it in themselves because men did not grant it license in their needs.

Not to give him possession as a lover did she admit him then, but in the sacrifice of her love and of herself to lift him through emotion to the most spiritual conceptions of life that were eternal.

Never in all that relationship between herself and John had she felt the moment so surely placed within her hands as then.

“What is it?” she asked, so gently in her voice that she could have laughed aloud at her own self-possession.

“Just came in to say good-night,” said he with an attempt at ease, and came across to the bed and leant over it to kiss her cheek, uplifted to meet his, and found that clean scent of lavender in his nostrils when, before he had really learnt his purpose, he sat down upon the bed at her side and remained there, gazing into her eyes.

“What are you reading?” he asked.

She turned the book round for him to see, making no comment; allowing the memories of childhood to waken in him of their own volition.

He shut the book up, contriving to let his hand find hers as she contrived to let it stay there without seeming of intent.

“What is it, John?” she whispered again.

He shrugged his shoulders.

“Nothing except just what I said. I wanted to say good-night.” Yet he still lingered; still, without keeping it, his hand remained in hers.

For some while he stayed there, sitting on her bed, saying nothing, playing only with his fingers that held her hand. With a supreme patience she waited in silence, knowing no words were needed there, her heart throbbing with an expectant pulse that rose to riot as suddenly he slipped on to his knees on the floor and leant his head against her breast.

“I want her, Mater,” he whispered. “Haven’t you guessed that? I’m terribly in love.”

Had she guessed that? Indeed! But had she ever dreamt or hoped for this, that his first love-making would be through her? This was the first love scene, the first passion in the drama of his life and in awe of what it was, he had chosen her to play it with.

Emotions such as were triumphant in Mary Throgmorton then cannot easily be captured. Here in certain fact was the first hour of love her heart had surely known; an hour, albeit not her own, which for the rest of her life was to remain with its burning embers in her memory.

With deep breaths she lay for a moment still, holding him in her arms.

“Haven’t you told her, John?” she asked presently.

He shook his head against her breast.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I can’t just tell her I love her. It’s more than that. She wouldn’t understand. If she did, she might hate me for it.”

It might have been youth and the utter lack of his experience. He was only just eighteen. But Mary found in it more than that. In the first great emotion in his life, when he was stirred so deep as to touch those very first impressions she had given him in his childhood, he was setting on one side himself and the demands that Nature made on him.

How little his Dorothy would appreciate that, Mary had made certain estimate the first moment they had met. No awe of love was there in her; no vision his need of her could ever destroy. She, with the many others, was amongst those women who, bowing herself to the possessive passions of men, would sell her soul in slavery to share them if she could.

Whatever of her training it was they had bereft him of at Wenlock, however out of the true line they had bent that green bough her hands had fashioned, still in the vital elements of his being, he sought the clear light above the forest trees about him. In this swift rush of love, a storm that beat and shook him with the force of it, some spiritual impulse still remained. He felt his Dorothy was some sacred thing, too sweet to touch with hands all fierce as his.

How long would that remain with him? In the materialism of his new environment would they let him keep it for long? Another day and drawn by the shrilling call of Nature into the arms of Dorothy, might he not lose it even so soon as that?

He did not know how true he spoke when he had said she would not understand. A product of the laws of man she was, eager and passionate to submit, needing that trampling spirit of possession to give her sense of life, caring little how soon love trod itself into the habit of familiar touch.

No emotion of ideals would she have with which to set her children forth upon their journeys. Into an old and tired world they would be ushered with grudging of the pain they brought and fretting complaint of ugly circumstance. Consequences of passion they would be, no more, with nothing but the magic of youth to give them laughter in their playgrounds.

So well did Mary know that night as he lay there against her breast, John would not keep his spirit long untouched when other arms than hers had held him. Too soon had they taken her from him. Too soon, in that moment’s want of faith, had she let him go. Possession of the earth already had brought him scorn of it. Again and again had she seen that in the change of his mind towards their simple life at Yarningdale.

The earth she would have had him labor in, was such as now would soil his hands. It was enjoyment he sought, she knew it well, not life. With that poison of inheritance they had instilled into his blood, fast he was becoming an echo, not a voice. The message of all ideals was being stilled to silence in him. They were teaching him to say what the Liddiards had said one generation upon another—gain and keep, gain and keep—it would be folly to give away.

Only in this, this love that stirred him to the very essence of his being, was he recalling the years of emotion she had given to the fashioning of his soul. Here for that moment as he lay in her arms, he was the man her heart had meant to make him, awed by love, made timorous almost by the power of his passion.

But how long would it survive its contact with that casual materialism his Dorothy would blend it with? How soon before she made his love that habit of the sexes which bore no more than drifting consequences upon its stream?

Neither long would it be, nor had she power now to intervene. Clasping her arm more tightly round him, already she felt him slipping from her, the more because in that brief moment he was so much her own.

“My dearest, need you tell her yet?” she asked. “I know you feel a man, but you’re still so young. You’re only eighteen, you couldn’t marry yet. Liddiard wouldn’t want you to marry. Need you tell her yet?”

“I must,” he muttered. “Not for a little while yet perhaps. I’ve told you. That was a help. I don’t feel so much of a brute as I did. But sooner or later I shall have to. I can’t help being young and I’m not inventing what I feel. Other chaps feel it too, quite decent fellows, but somehow or other I can’t do what they do.”

“What do they do?”

Frankly she would have admitted that was curiosity, but curious only was she to know what he did not do rather than what they did.

“What do they do, John?” she repeated as he lay there, silent.

“Oh, they go up to London when they get the chance. There are women, you wouldn’t understand that, Mater. Probably you’ve never known there were women like that. How could you have known down here? My God! Fancy one of those women in the fields! She’d drop down in the grass and she’d hide her face. Anyhow in streets they keep their heads up. They look at you in the streets.”

“And you couldn’t do that, John?”

“No—I tried. I went up to London once. We went to a night-club. All sorts of them were dancing there. I just couldn’t, that’s all. The fellow I was with, he went away with one of them. I envied him and I hated him. I don’t know what I felt. I couldn’t. It didn’t make me feel sick of it all. I don’t think I felt afraid. You kept on coming into my mind, but just you wouldn’t have stopped me if I’d really wanted to. I did want to. I had wanted to. That’s what we meant to do. But when I got there to that place, and one of those women kissed me, I felt there was something else I wanted more. I think I nearly went mad that night. I had a little bed in a stuffy little room in a poky little hotel. I couldn’t sleep. I never slept a wink. I nearly went mad calling myself a fool for not doing what I’d wanted to do. There I’d have done it. Then I didn’t care what I did. But it was too late then. I’d lost my chance. I was sorry I’d lost it.”

He raised his head and looked at her.

“I’m not sorry now, Mater. I wasn’t sorry for long. Aren’t men beasts?”

“My dear—my dear,” she whispered. “If they were all like you, what a world love could make for us to live in. Oh, keep it all, my dear. Never be sorry. It isn’t the right or the wrong of it, John. It’s the pity of it. If women had men like you to love them, think what their children would be! Don’t tell her yet, John. Wait a little longer if you can.”

“I can’t!” he moaned. “I can’t wait. She knows I care for her. I’m sure she does. I must tell her everything.”

If only it had been Lucy he had shrunk from telling, then fear would have met with fear and mingled into love. It was not fear he would meet with in Dorothy. Too wise perhaps she might be to laugh at his timorousness, but swift enough would she turn it to the passion to possess.

---

That night as John lay in Mary’s arms, there reposed with simple state in the Government House at Sarajevo, the two dead bodies of a man and a woman who had found rest in the shadow of the greatest turmoil the world had ever known, which through the minds of millions in central Europe were ringing the words—

“The great questions are to be settled—not by speeches and majority resolutions, but by blood and iron.”

VIII

John waited a little as he had said he would. Two days later, keeping his silence, he returned to Oxford. In her first encounter with Mary, Dorothy knew that she had lost. She was no equal, she realized it, to that serene and quiet woman who gave her smile for smile and in whose eyes the smile still lingered when in her own it had faded away.

It was not before the latter end of July that the first whisper of war came to Yarningdale. Conflagrations might burst forth in Europe; the world might be set alight. It mattered little to them at Yarningdale farm. Whatever might happen, the cows had still to be milked, the crops to be gathered, the stacks to be built. How did it effect them what an Emperor might say, or a little gathering of men elect to do? They could not stop the wheat from ripening. They could not stop the earth from giving back a thousandfold that which man had given to the earth.

“War!” exclaimed Mr. Peverell. “Men beant such fools as that! ’Tis all a lot of talk to make the likes of us think mighty fine of them that says they stopped it. We’m have taxes to pay and if those what are in the Government doant make a noise about something, we might begin awonderin’ what they did to earn ’em.”

It was all very well to talk like that and likely enough it sounded in their parlor kitchen at Yarningdale. But there were other thoughts than these in Mary’s mind and not all the confident beliefs of peace amongst those who had nothing to gain and all to lose, could shake her from them.

When once it had become a daily topic of speculation and newspapers in Yarningdale were being read every morning, she formed her own opinions as to what would happen out of the subconscious impulses of her mind.

Deep in her heart, she knew there would be war, a mighty war, a devastating war. Something the spirit of her being had sense of revealed to her that this was the inevitable fruit of that tree of civilization men had trained to the hour of bearing. This was its season. War was its yield. With blood and iron the crop of men’s lives must be gathered. Inevitably must the possessive passion turn upon itself and rend the very structure it had made. The homes that had been built with greed, by greed must be destroyed. This, as they had made it, was the everlasting cycle Nature demanded of life. Energy must be consumed to give out energy. To inherit and possess was not enough. It was no more than weeds accumulating and clogging in the mill-wheel. If man had no ambition other than to possess; if in his spirit it was not the emotion of the earth to give, then the great plow of war must drive its furrow through the lives of all of them.

In some untraceable fashion, Mary felt that the whole of her life had been building up to this. Somehow it seemed the consummation of all she had tried and failed to do. At the supreme moment of her life, she had been lacking in faith of her ideals. She had lost the clear sight of her vision. The whole world had done that and now it was faced with the stern justice of retribution.

There must be war. She knew there must. Men and women, all of them had failed. What could there be but the devastating horror of war to cleanse the evil and rid of the folly of weeds the idle fallows of their lives?

“Well, if it is to be war,” said the Vicar one day, having tea with Mary and Mrs. Peverell in the parlor kitchen, “Germany’s not the nation of shrewd men we’ve thought her. If she insists upon it,” he added, his spirit rising from meekness with a glitter in his eye, “she’ll have forgotten we’re the richest nation in the world. On the British possessions the sun never sets. She’ll have forgotten to take that into account.”

Every man was talking in this fashion. She read the papers. It was there as well. Long articles appeared describing the wealth of the German colonies and what their acquisition would mean to England if she were victorious on the sea. Extracts were printed from the German papers exposing her lust and greed because, with envious eyes upon the British Colonies she was already counting the spoils of victory.

There in the quiet and the seclusion at Yarningdale, Mary with many another woman those days, not conscious enough of vision to speak their thoughts, saw the world gone mad in its passion to possess.

It seemed to matter little to her at whose door the iniquity of lighting the firebrand lay. War had been inevitable whoever had declared it. The cry of broken treaties and sullied honor stirred but little in her heart as she heard it. What mattered it if a man was true to his word when all through the years he had been false to the very earth he dwelt on?

That cry of sullied honor through the land was as unreal to her as was the cry of sullied virtue that ever had conscripted women to the needs of men. The principles of possession could never be established with honor, the functions of life could never be circumscribed by virtue. It was not honorable to gain and keep. It was not virtuous to waste and wither.

War was inevitable. By the limitations of their own vision men had made it so. There was horror but no revolt in her mind when, on the morning of that fourth of August, she read the text of the British Ultimatum.

“They must give back now,” she muttered to herself as she stood by her dressing table gazing down at a photograph of John in its frame. “They must all give back, sons, homes—everything. They’ve kept too long. It had to come.”

A few days passed and then three letters came for her, one swift upon another. Each one as she received it, so certain had her subconscious knowledge been, she read almost without emotion. The announcement of war had not staggered her. She felt the ache of pain, as when the barren cows were driven out of the farmyard to go to the market, but since she had been at Yarningdale, knew well enough the unerring and merciless power of retribution in Nature upon those who clogged the mill-wheel of life, who broke the impetus of its ceaseless revolutions whereby no speed was left to fling off the water drops of created energy.

Each letter as she received it, she divined its contents. The first was from John.

“DEAR OLD MATER—”

She heard the ring of vitality in that.

“They’re all going from here. If I cock on a year or two, they’ll take me. I sort of know you’d like me to. Do you know why? Do you remember once my asking you something about a couple of moles the hay knives had chopped? I was thinking of it yesterday, I don’t know why, and that made me realize you’d understand. Do you remember what you said about Death, that sometimes it was just a gift when things were worth while? Well—good Lord! It’s worth while now, not that the blighters are going to kill me. I’ve got as much chance as any one of getting through. But you are glad I’m going, aren’t you? You’re not going to try to stop me. They say the Army’s big enough with the French on one side and the Russians on the other to knock Germany into a cocked hat in three months. But I must get out and have one pot at ’em.”

---

All this she had divined as her fingers tore open the envelope, but never had she dared to hope that the impulse of it would have come from his memory of what she had said to him those days when he was in the fashioning of her hands. This, she had made him. She clutched the letter in her hands and held it against her face and thanked God she had not wholly failed. The next two letters came together by the same post on the following day. She knew their handwriting. No envelope could have concealed their contents from her eyes. Liddiard’s she opened first.

“MY DEAR MARY—”

“I suppose John has written to you of this preposterous suggestion of his that he should volunteer, and I know you will do all you can to prevent it. To begin with he is not of age. He will have to lie about it before they can accept him and, secondly, War is a job for soldiers and the Army is there to see it through. If they rush him out without proper training as I hear it is likely they may do, it’s unfair on him; it’s unfair on all of us. We’ve paid for our Army as a nation and now it’s got its work to do. Calling for recruits now as they did in the South African war is not fair to the country. These young boys will go because they’re hysterical with excitement for adventure, but where will the country be if they don’t come back?

“I rely on you, my dear Mary, to do all you can to dissuade him from this mad project of his. With all the knowledge that one day he is to be master of Wenlock, I know he still looks reliantly towards you in that little farmhouse. Do all you can, my dear. We cannot lose him, neither you nor I.”

With a hard line about her lips which, had she seen it, would have reminded her of her sister Jane, she laid the letter down and picked up that from Dorothy.

---

“Please—please don’t let him go,” it cried out from the written page to her. “I can’t stop him. I’ve tried. He won’t listen to me. I learnt those few days while I stayed at Yarningdale how he will listen to you. He belongs to me. He told me so. Please—please don’t let him go.”

---

She picked up the other letter and stood looking at them together, side by side, then dropped them from her hand and from the bosom of her dress drew out the slip of paper John had written on and pressed it once more against her cheek.

Downstairs in the parlor kitchen with the pen and ink that Mr. Peverell used when he kept his farm accounts, Mary sat down and wrote to Liddiard.

---

“If I could do everything, I would do nothing,” she wrote. “This is what I made him. I would not unmake him if I could. You must give. I must give. We must all give now. We’ve kept too long. Don’t you know what this war is? It’s not England fighting for her rights or Germany for her needs. It’s Nature revolting against man. You’ve made your chapels and your tithe barns for yourselves. The earth is going to shake them into the dust again. If I could do everything, I would do nothing. He takes my heart with him when he goes. But there is nothing I can do. We must all give now—at last—women as well as men. These things that happen now—these are the consequences of passion.”

IX

To Mary Throgmorton, tending and milking Mr. Peverell’s cows at Yarningdale Farm, those first few weeks of the Great War were as the resultant dream that shadows the apprehensive mind.

Every morning after her work was done, she would retire to her room with her newspapers, therein to read the countless conflicting reports which they contained. The feverish desire to give active help or be amongst the first of those personally to contribute to the cause found her calm and self-possessed. She had her work to do. So long as the cows were there in Mr. Peverell’s meadows, they had to be milked. Her duty it had been for the last eighteen years to milk them. Her duty it seemed to her to continue.

From all the villages round about them, the young men were going up to join the colors. Little processions of them accompanied by their mothers and sweethearts passed along the roads to the station, going to the nearest recruiting office. Most of them had flowers in their caps and went singing on their way, lifting their voices to a cheer at sight of any whom they passed.

Whenever she met them, Mary cheered in fervent response; but looking back over her shoulder when they had gone by, there were tears, hot and stinging in her eyes, so that always their departure to her was through a mist. They vanished, nebulous, like spirits, out of her sight. She looked till she could see no longer. The vision of them trembled as the air trembles over the scorching earth on a summer’s day. She felt it was the last vision she would ever have of them.

Only their mothers and their sweethearts came back, little weeping groups of them, along the same road. Whenever she saw these approaching her, she would break her way into the fields or the woods rather than pass them by. For more than the boys themselves with the high light of a strange laughter in their eyes, it was the faces of the mothers as they all went by together, that had dragged, like the warning pains of child-birth, at her heart.

Pale beneath the wind-burnt ruddy skins they were. It was pallor of anger; anger of soul at the senseless waste. The cry of England for her sons was loud indeed. In countless hearts the note of it was shrilling without need of proclamation. These boys had heard it and heard no more. Their mothers had heard it too. No less had it rung its cry in Mary’s ears. But deeper and further-reaching was the hearing of the women in those early days of war.

Later, doubtless, their senses became almost numb to the true meaning of that voice flung far across the land. Even the vitality of despair grew still in their breasts. The horrors of war sickened, choked, asphyxiated them. They gave their sons like animals going to the slaughter house with eyes that were staring and wide, and in whose nostrils the heavy smell of blood had acted as a soporific on the brain.

But at first, Mary had little doubt of the look she saw in those mothers’ eyes. They were giving up, not what they had got, but what they had made. The created thing they were sacrificing; the thing which in love and pain and energy of soul they had offered out of themselves to give life to. There was little of the fervor of patriotism about them. To those country railway stations they marched with their pale faces, their set lips, the aching pain in their eyes. Each for her son’s sake smiled as he looked at her; each for her son’s sake smiled as she waved farewell. But on the hollow mask she wore, that smile was but a painted thing. He looked to his sweetheart or he laughed to his companions and it died away.

Somewhere in their buried and inarticulate consciousness, those mothers knew that wrong was being done to them. Vaguely they knew it was man with his laws of force and his passion of possession who had done that wrong; vaguely they knew it, but had no clear vision in their hearts to give them voice to revile.

Such an one Mary came upon, a day when rain had driven her to take shelter and she came back by a foot-path across the fields. On the smooth rail of a well-worn stile the woman was seated, her feet resting for support on the step below, her body faintly swinging to and fro, not for comfort but as though she rocked sorrow like a suffering babe in her arms.

At sound, then sight of Mary who must cross the stile if she passed that way, the woman sat erect and took her feet down from their resting-place.

Once having seen her, she looked no more at Mary as she approached, but set her face outwards with a steady gaze in her eyes. In an impetus of memory, Mary recognized her as one of a little band she had seen marching to the station earlier in the day. She had been alone with her son. No sweetheart was there to share their parting. Alone she had bid farewell to him. Alone she returned.

Had there been others with her, Mary might have turned back; at least she would have hurried by. Now, coming to the stile, she stopped.

“Have you lost your way?” she inquired.

“No, thank you, Miss.”

“It was only I saw you coming by the road this morning and this footpath doesn’t lead to Lonesome Ford.”

“We came by the road because all the boys were going that way. They take it easier when they go all together. Seems they laugh in a crowd. What we have acomin’ back seems best alone.”

Mary made gentle inquiries, what recruiting office her son had gone to—what regiment he hoped to join—his age—his trade—what other sons she had.

“He’s my only—” she replied steadily.

Had she broken into weeping, Mary would have comforted and left her. Tears are their own solace and need no company. But there were no tears here. She sat upon the top rail of the stile, her head high above Mary, her features sharp and almost hard against the sky, her eyes set fast across the rolling fields that dipped and lifted, with elm-treed hollows and uplands all spread gold with corn.

“I have one only,” said Mary quietly. “He’s in training now.”

That made them one, but the calm voice of her who had spoken made the other lean towards that unity for dependence. Impulsively she stretched out her hand and straight and firmly Mary took it.

“I don’t know who you are, Ma’am,” she said with words her emotion quickened on her lips. “I’m more or less of a stranger to these parts. You may be a grand lady for all I know and judging by your voice, but the way you spoke and all that’s happening these days, seems to me we’re all just women now.”

“All just women,” said Mary softly.

She responded eagerly to the gentle encouragement and went swiftly on as though no interruption had been made.

“What I mean,” she said, “we’ve both just parted from what’s dearest to us in life—that makes us one. You might be a lord’s lady and I just one of common folk—no less, we’re one. Something’s happened to us that’s made us look up like and see each other—it’s made you put out your hand to me and what I want to know is what it is that’s happened, because with all these talks of England in danger and hatred of those beasts of Germans, there seems something else and I can’t get it right. I know, now it’s come to it, my son’s got to go out and fight. I wouldn’t stop him. But I don’t think I’d have brought him into the world if I’d known. There are some as like fighting. He doesn’t. He cried in my lap last night, but not because he couldn’t make up his mind to go. He knew he was going this morning, but he cried in my lap and I heard him say, ‘I know I shall fight and hate and go mad with the rest of them when it comes to the time.’ I don’t rightly know what he meant by that. I hope he does hate but it seemed to me as if it was that he feared most.”

“Perhaps he saw himself mad and drunk with blood,” said Mary. “Can’t you imagine he’d loathe the sight of that? Have you ever seen a woman intoxicated with drink?”

“Once I did—no—twice I did.”

“Would you like to think of yourself like that?”

She bent her head.

“You’ve made that plain,” she muttered. “I didn’t care asking him at the time. Seemed he just wanted to go talking on with no questions. There’ll be hundreds like him, I suppose, thousands perhaps and some as like fighting. ’Twill be an adventure to them, but hell it’ll be to him. P’r’aps that’s as it must be. The world’s all sorts. But I can’t help thinking the world’s wrong for us women. Be they the fighting kind or not, we didn’t bring ’em into the world for this wasting. They say that thousands of our boys were lost during that first retreat from ‘Mons’ I think they call it. If you saw the thousands of mothers they belong to all come together in a crowd like the boys marching and they had some one to lead ’em, what would they do to them as have made this war? They’d tear them limb from limb. That’s what they’d do. I used to think the world was a fair and sweet enough place once. They told us there, those people up in London in the Government there could be no war. The papers said it. Up to the last they said it. Every man said it to you, too. There can’t be no war, they said, not a big European war, they said, the world ’d stop still in a month, they said, there’d be no trade. Seems to me men go sweating in labor and toiling with work and half the time they don’t know what they’re making.”

Mary let her talk on. So plain it was to be seen that it gave her ease; so plain that this was the accumulation of her thoughts, flowing over from the full vessel of her heart that could hold no more.

“What’s all this,” she continued, “all this they’ve been saying about treaties and what they call International Law? Seems to me we’ve let men make the world long enough. They’ve made hell of it. How could there be peace with them making all those guns and ships and weapons which was only invented to destroy peace? I don’t believe nothing’s made to waste in this world. If you make a thing it’ll get itself used somehow and if it don’t and goes to rust, then something’s wrong in the minds of them as wasted their time on it. If my man had told me before we married I’d got to give him a son as one day would be crying in my lap because he found life horrible, do you think I’d have married him? No—he told me the little home we was going to have and all the things he’d give me to put in it and how when I was going to have a child he’d work so hard as we could afford to get a girl in to help. That’s what he told me those evenings we walked up and down the lanes courting, and that’s what it seems to me men in high places who make the Government have been telling those thousands of mothers that have their hearts broken now this very hour. Men want to get hold of things in this world. Grasping always they are. And nations are like men, because men have had the making of them. And the nation that has the most men has the most power to grasp, and the more they grasp, the more will others get jealous of them, and the more they get jealous, the more they’ll need to fight. But who gives them the power they have? Who gives them the sons they ask for? And what I want to know is why do we go on giving for them to spoil?”

Mary watched her as the last rush of her words lit up her eyes to a sullen anger.

“Countless women will think like you,” she said quietly, “when this war’s over. They won’t listen any more when men tell them there’s honor in their slavery or pride in the service that they give. We shall bring children into the world on our own conditions, not on theirs. To our own ideals we shall train them; not to the ideals of men. You’re not the first who’s thought these things. I’ve thought them too and hundreds of others are thinking them and we shan’t be the last.”

She stretched out her hand.

“There’s a new world to be made,” she said with a thrill in her voice. “Men have had their vision. We can’t deny they’ve had that. Without their vision would they ever have been able to persuade us as they have? They’ve had their vision while we’ve had none. They’ve had their vision and it’s brought us so far. When women find a vision of their own; when once they see in a clear picture the thoughts that are aching in their hearts now, nothing will stop them. You see and I see, but we are powerless by ourselves. I know just how powerless we are, even to have faith in our own sight. I thought I had faith once—enough faith to carry me right through—but I hadn’t. At the crucial moment that faith failed me. I had trained my son so far in the light of the vision I had and then they came and with all the threats they made of the good things he was losing in life, my courage failed me. I let them have him for their own and little by little I’ve watched him drift away from me.”

“Do you know,” she added, coming to a swift realization as she spoke, “do you know I’m almost glad of this War. He volunteered at once, though he’s only eighteen. He volunteered against his father’s wishes. This war’s going to stop him drifting. It’s going to stop thousands from drifting as they were. They’ll see there’s something wrong with the civilization they have built up, that it’s an earthquake, a volcano, a state of being which any moment may tumble or burst into flame about their heads. For that, I’m not sorry for the War. We couldn’t have shown men how wrong they were without it. It’ll be to their mothers they’ll go—these boys—when they come back.”

She took her hand away and climbed over the stile.

“You’ll have him back,” she said. “One of these days you’ll have his head in your lap again.”

For one moment they looked in each other’s eyes. There was a compact in that look. In purpose they had found sympathy. Out of the deep bitterness of life they had found a meaning.

Once, as she walked away, Mary looked over her shoulder. The woman still sat there on the stile, still with her features cut sharp in profile against the sky, still gazing across the elm-treed hollows and the uplands all spread with gold of corn.

---

On Sunday night, October the fourth, in a little force of naval reserves, John marched from Ostend to his battle position on the Nethe.

Mary did not know where he had gone. He had not known himself. In the midst of his training, the order had come for his departure. Two hours he had had with her at Yarningdale; no more. All that time he had laughed and talked in the highest spirits. Constrained to laugh with him, her eyes had been bright, her courage wonderful.

It was not until she drove back alone in the spring cart from the station, that she knew the brightness in her eyes had sunk as in those other women’s eyes to the sullen light of anger.

“Oh—the waste—the senseless waste of it!” she had muttered that night as she lay waiting for the relief of sleep.

The next five days had passed in silence. She went about her duties as usual, but none seeing her dared speak about the War. It was whispered only in that parlor kitchen; whispers that fell with sibilant noises into silence whenever she came into the room.

Each morning, as always, she took her papers away to her room to read. Nothing of that which she yearned to know could they tell her. On the ninth of October Antwerp had fallen. Amongst all the strongholds that were crumbling beneath the weight of the German guns, this meant nothing to her. She laid the paper down and went out into the fields.

It was the evening of three days later when she was milking the cows in their stalls, that Mrs. Peverell came, bringing her a telegram into the shed. Her hands were wet with milk as they took it. They slipped on the shiny envelope as, without hesitation, she broke it open.

When she had read it, she looked up, handing it in silence to Mrs. Peverell, then turned with the sense of habit alone remaining in her fingers and continued with her milking.

The End