Those children were brought up with every modern advantage. Wisdom is judged by the age in which it flourishes, and everything that the day accounts wise for children those children had. Their father was of considerable and always increasing means; their mother was of great and untrammelled intelligence: anything that money could provide for children, and that intelligent principles of upbringing said ought to be provided for children, those children enjoyed. When they were out of the care of Muffet, who was everything that a nurse ought to be, they passed into the care of a resident governess, Miss Prescott, who was a children’s governess, not for the old and fatuous reason that she “loved children,” but for the new and intelligent reason that she was attracted by the child-mind as a study and was certificated and diplomaed in the study of children as an exact science,—Child Welfare as she called it. Miss Prescott had complete charge of the children while they were tiny and while they were growing up to eleven and nine and Benji to seven years old. She taught them their lessons (on her own, the new, principles) and on the same principles their habits and the formation of their characters. It might roundly be said that everything troublesome in regard to the children was left to Miss Prescott, and, left to her, came never between the children and their mother. Their mother only enjoyed her children, presented to her fresh, clean and happy for the purpose of her enjoyment; and the children only enjoyed their mother, visiting them smiling, devoted, unworried, for the purpose of their happiness.
It was a perfect, and a mutually beneficial arrangement. As there had been, before the children came, two independent lives behind the gamboge door, so, with the occupation of the nurseries, there were, as it might be, three independent households, mingling, at selected times, only for purposes of happiness.
It was perfect. In the summer a house was taken at Cromer by the sea and there, all through the fine weather, Miss Prescott was installed with her charges. Their mother had three weeks from Field’s in the summer and she and their father would spend the whole of it, and often week-ends, at Cromer idling and playing with their darlings. That was jolly. The children associated nothing whatever but happiness with their parents.
In the other months of the year their mother was immensely occupied with her work at Field’s, developing beyond expectation; and their father early and late with his work in the Temple, his esteem by solicitors and by litigants almost beyond his time to satisfy. Their father was much paragraphed in the social journals, and their mother also. The paragraphs said their father was making a “princely fortune” at the Bar and never told of him without telling also of his wife. They described her as “of Field’s Bank” and always drove the word “unique” hand in hand with every mention of her parts. “Unique personality”; “unique position”; “unique among professional women”; “unique,” said one, “in combining notable beauty and rare business acumen; an office which she attends daily and a charming home; a profession, three beautiful children, and a brilliant husband.”
The syntax is weak, but the truth is in it and those children were to be envied in their mother.
Miss Prescott, when she came, did not displace the Muffet. She was installed additional to the Muffet; and as touching the modern principles relating to children she very soon told Muffet a thing or two not previously dreamt of in the Muffet philosophy but having, thence forward, occasional place in the Muffet nightmares.
The Muffet, however, was of lymphatic character, with, as her most constant desire, the desire not to be “plagued.” She was one of those people who are for ever declaring that they never eat anything, who at meals, indeed, appear to eat very little, but who between meals, are eating all day long. At all hours of the day the Muffet jaws, like the jaws of a ruminant, were steadily munching, munching. When Benji was three Muffet was getting distinctly fat. On a corner of the night nursery mantelpiece she had a photographic group of her parents and of an uncle and aunt who lived with her parents. These four were very fat and one evening the children’s father made a remark about this portrait that made their mother laugh delightedly.
Benji was in his cot. Huggo had just come from his bath and was having his toes wiped by his mother because he declared Muffet had not dried them properly. He said Muffet groaned when she stooped.
His mother said, “You know, Harry, Muffet is getting fat. Have you noticed it?”
Their father was bent almost double swinging Doda between his legs, the stomach of Doda reposing on the palms of his joined hands and Doda squealing ecstatically.
Their father said, “I have. Go and look at that photograph, Rosalie, and you’ll see why. Look at what her people are. Muffet’s broadening down from precedent to precedent.”
It made their mother laugh. The children didn’t know why it made her laugh, but they laughed with her. They always did, or with their father when he laughed. And there was always lots of jolly laughter when their father and mother came up to the nurseries.
Those children, as they passed through early childhood, never saw their parents but happy and good-spirited. They never saw them worried nor ever saw them sad. That was, as one might say, Rosalie’s chief offering to her darlings. It was splendid to Rosalie that her way of life, far from causing her (as prejudice would have prophesied) to neglect her children, enabled her to consider them in their relations with herself as, by their mothers, children in her childhood never were considered. That they should associate nothing—nothing at all—but happiness with her was the basis of it. Children, she held, ought not to see their parents bad-tempered or distressed or in any way out of sorts or out of control. For a child to do so has in two ways a bad effect on the child mind. In the first place, it is harmful for children to come in contact with the unpleasant things of life; in the second, parents should always be to their children models of conduct and of disposition. They should in themselves present ideals to their children. A man should be a hero to his son; a woman an ideal to her daughter. Why is no man a hero to his valet? It is simply because his valet sees him, as do not those whose esteem he desires to win, in his off moments. Children should never see their parents in their off moments.
This principle was not Rosalie’s alone. It is the modern principle. The point, to Rosalie, was that, by her way of life, she was able to apply it. Children were too much with their parents. That was the fault; in her childhood the universal fault, even now the fault among the unenlightened. Parents, being human, must have off moments; are not off moments, indeed, in the total of the day, of greater sum than moments of circumspection? It follows that if children are always with their parents, the more unlovely side cannot fail to be perceived, and, arising out of it, must follow injury by example, harm by environment, smirching of idealism, loss of respect. In those homes where the mother (in Rosalie’s phrase) is the children’s slave, why has the father the children’s greater respect? Why is it fine to do what father does? Why jolly and exciting to be with father? It is only because the father commonly is away all day, only seen by them when, shedding other affairs, he comes to see them specially.
Her life—oddly how well for everything and every one her attitude to life fell out!—obtained for her and for them the same wise and happy restriction from too free familiarity. She was able to come to her children only when all her undivided attention and whole hearted love could be given to them. They never saw her vexed, they never saw her angry, they never saw her sad. It was not a commonplace to them to see their mother. It was an event. A morning event and an evening event—and unfailingly a completely happy event. She looked back upon her own childhood with her own mother and reflected, fondly but clearly, affectionately but not blinded by affection, how very different was that. She was always with her mother. Her mother was often sad, often worried, often, in distraction of her worries, irritable in speech. Often sad! Why, she could remember time and again when her dear mother, hunted by her cares, was broken down and crying. She would go to her mother then and cry to see her crying, and her mother would put her arms around her and hug her to her breast and declare she was her “little comfort.” Was it good for a child to suffer scenes like that? She used to be with her mother all day long, from early morning till last thing at night. With what result? That she saw and suffered with her, or suffered of her, all that her mother suffered; that she was sometimes desolated to feeling that her heart was broken for her mother. Could that be good for a child? Her Huggo, her Doda and her Benji never saw her anything but radiant; and because that was so (as she told herself) she never saw them cry, either on her account or on their own.
Therein—grief in her presence on their own account—another point arose. With as her ideal that only happiness should be associated with her, she found her way of life beneficial to the preservation of that ideal in that it prevented her from being the vessel that should convey the restrictions, the reproofs and the instruction that are troublesome to small minds. All that was left to Miss Prescott. She remembered lessons with her mother; she remembered the irksome learning of a hundred “don’ts” from her mother; and though they were tender and pathetic memories she remembered also the reverse of the picture,—being glad to escape from her mother, resentful against her mother when stood in the corner by her mother, when stopped doing this that and the other by her mother, when made to learn terribly hard lessons by her mother and to go on learning them till she had learnt them. Only childish resentment, of course, swept up and forgotten as by the sun emerging out of clouds the shadow from a landscape. But why should children ever have the tiniest frown against their mother? There must be frowns, there must be tears. Let others bear the passing grudge of those. Let Miss Prescott.
Miss Prescott was willing and able to bear anything like that. She delighted in such. She told Rosalie, when Rosalie engaged her, and after she had seen the children, that her only hesitation in accepting the post was that the children were too normal. “By normal,” said Miss Prescott, speaking, as she always spoke, as if she were a passage out of a book given utterance, “By normal, Mrs. Occleve, I do not, of course, mean commonplace. Any one can see how attractive they are, how gifted; any one can know how distinguished, with, if I may say so, such talented parents, their inherited qualities must be. No, when I say normal, I mean showing no disquieting signs, constitutionally tractable, not refractory. In that sense of normality it is much more the abnormal child to whom I would have liked to devote myself. I have specialised in children. The harder the case the more I should be interested in it. That’s what I mean. But I never could have hoped to find a household where, though there can be no difficulties, I should have such opportunities of helping children to be perfect men and women; nor a mother to whose children I would more gladly, proudly, devote myself; nor a place with which I should feel myself so entirely in sympathy. If you feel, on reflection, that I should suit you, it will be, I am sure—why should I not say so—an auspicious day for those little ones.”
How happy was Rosalie thus by provision to destiny her darlings!
Miss Prescott was thirty when engaged by Rosalie. She had a way of looking at people which, if described, can best describe her appearance. She was once in an omnibus in London and the conductor, standing against her, and about to serve a ticket to a passenger seated next her, had some trouble with his bell-punch. It would not work and he fumbled with it, angry. Everybody in the bus watched him. It is not nice to be watched when baffled and heated in bafflement but the only gaze to which attention was given by the conductor was the gaze of Miss Prescott. He glanced constantly from the obdurate machine to the face of Miss Prescott. Suddenly he said: “‘Ere, suppose you do it, then,” and pushed the bell-punch at her. Miss Prescott took it, did it, astoundingly and instantaneously, and handed it back with no word. The conductor seemed more angry than before.
It was like that that Miss Prescott looked at people.
There is right way of doing everything. Miss Prescott had an uncanny instinct for finding it; and, applying this faculty to her training of the child-mind, she presented herself as a notable exponent of the system in which, as has been said, she was certificated and diplomaed. She taught children how to play in the right way, how to learn in the right way, and above all how, in every way and at every turn, to reason. By the old, ignorant plan children were instructed, speaking broadly, by love or by fear. It was by pure reason that Miss Prescott instructed them. The child was treated as an earnest physician treats a case. Ill temper or wrong behaviour in a child was neither vexing nor sad. It was profoundly interesting. There was a right and scientific way to treat it and that right and scientific way was thought out and administered. The child was “a case.”
It was taught nothing but truths and facts. Its mind was not permitted to be befogged with fairy stories, with superstitions, with Father Christmases and the like, nor yet with religious half-truths and misty fables. These entailed not only befogging at the time, but disillusionment thereafter. Disillusionment was wicked for a child. It further was taught nothing at all (in the matter of lessons) at the grotesquely early age at which children used to be taught. It was taught first to reason.
In general the whole system lay in developing the child’s reasoning powers and then, at every turn and particularly at every manifestation of indiscipline, appealing to its reason. “I am here to be happy”—that was the first, and surely the kindest and easiest, knowledge to fix in the child. From that foundation everything was worked. It never was necessary to punish a child. It only was necessary to reason with it. In the old phraseology a child meet to be punished was a naughty child. In the terminology of Miss Prescott such a child was a sick child or an unreasoning child: a case presenting an adverse symptom. But take the older term,—a naughty child. A naughty child was an unhappy child. The treatment went like this, “I am here to be happy. I am not happy. Why am I not happy? Because I have done so and so and so and so....”
Kind, wise, simple, effective, easy. Rosalie in her childish misdemeanours would have been prevailed upon by the unhappiness her conduct caused her mother. All wrong! A faulty process of reasoning; indeed not a process of reasoning at all: a crude appeal to the emotions. Those three children who on the one part never saw their mother sad and were constrained to comfort her, on the other never were bribed to good behaviour by the thought of grieving her. They only associated happiness with her and they enjoyed happiness simply by reasoning away unhappiness.
Kind, wise, simple, effective, easy.
Happy Huggo, happy Doda, happy Benji, happy Rosalie!
It has been said of Time, earlier in these pages, the cloak-and-dagger sort he is, that stalks and pounces. One seeks only to record him when he thus assails, and there is this result; that it is necessary to pare away so much. In instance, there’s to be inserted now a note on Rosalie’s advance in her career. It’s cut to nothing. This is because all that career ultimately was known to her never to have really mattered. And so with other things. That girl, all through, pressing so strong ahead, rises to the eye not cumbered with other importance than her own. There might be asked for (by a reader) presentation of Harry’s parents; of what was doing all this time to her own parents in the rectory, to Harold, Robert, Flora, Hilda; of friends that Rosalie and Harry had. That girl’s passage is not traced in such. Whose is? The chart where such are marked is just a common public print, stamped for the public eye. They’re not set down upon that secret chart all carry in the cabin of their soul, and there, in that so hidden and inviolable stateroom, poring over it by the uncertain swinging lamp of conscience, prick out their way.
Her installation in the bank had been a notable success. She dealt with all the insurance advice and with income-tax advice and business; and it was remarkable to her, at first, how many of Field’s clients were as children in the mysteries of income tax, and as children alike in their ignorance of the possibilities of life insurance and in their pleasure at the discoveries she set before them. But further than this (and more important, said Mr. Sturgiss and Mr. Field) was the quick response of the clients to the various domestic advice that it was Rosalie’s business to give. Husbands and wives from the East, or returned thither from London and writing from the East, consulted her on innumerable matters. When, in instance, an army officer wrote to her from India, very diffidently wondering if she could help him in the matter of some Christmas presents for his wife and children at home, Mr. Sturgiss was uncommonly pleased.
“I knew it!” said Mr. Sturgiss. “That’s the kind of thing. You watch how side-lines like that will develop. That’s what these people want—some one at home they can rely on. I tell you, Mrs. Occleve, you, that is to say your department of Field’s, is what the Anglo-Eastern has been wanting ever since Clive and Warren Hastings went out—a link with home. You see.”
She did see. Mr. Field saw. The clients saw. The friends of the clients saw—and became clients.
All of her position reposed, and was developed by her, on the cruel disabilities of those who earn their bread in the East. For all such, married, comes, in time, the sad and the costly business of the divided home,—the two establishments, the sundering of children and parents, of husband and wife. By the age of seven at latest, the children have to be sent home for health and education. Then the sundering, the losing of touch, the compulsion upon the man, that those at home may be promptly supported, to deny himself year after year the longed-for visit home. The losing of touch.... Invaluable to them to have in Field’s, in “that Mrs. Occleve” a link, known personally or by reputation, that was useable as relations (capricious, “touchy,” interfering) often are not useable; and dependable as relations, unpractical, certainly are not always dependable. Invaluable to the clients; declared by Mr. Field and by Mr. Sturgiss to be invaluable to the bank; absorbing and splendid to Rosalie. “And still,” Mr. Sturgiss was always saying, “still capable of much bigger development.”
He sketched one day a development that would be a stride indeed. It began to be discussed by the three. It connoted so absolute a recognition of Rosalie’s worth that she decided—lest it should fall through—she would not mention it to Harry till either it was fallen through or was afoot. Then!
It made her busy. She told Harry once, when they’d been talking of how much at office she was kept, of her work, and of the place she was making for herself, “Well, it’s not bad, Harry,” she told him. “It’s not bad. I’ll admit that. What pleases me is that it’s only a beginning; well as it’s going, and long as I’ve now been at it, only a beginning. I can’t, as I’ve often said to you, be doing all this without getting a long insight into the actual banking business. Oh, don’t you remember my telling you about that appalling evening when I told poor Uncle Pyke that I wanted to be a banker? How outraged he was! Poor person, how rightly outraged! The ridiculous notion that I ever could be a banker! A grotesque dream!” She gave a small laugh as if tenderly smiling at image before her of that innocent, eager girl at the Pyke Pounce table. She said softly, “A grotesque dream. Now, with patent limitations—not a dream.”
It was like that that Time (disguised as triumph) kept out of the way; and similarly disguised, showed no sign either on the children’s side. All splendid there! Growing up! Huggo set to school!
Huggo learnt with Miss Prescott till he was nine, then attended daily a first-rate school for little boys in Kensington, at eleven started as a boarder at a preparatory school for Tidborough. Next he was to go to the great public school itself, afterwards to Oxford and the Bar. All’s well! Time had nothing at all to say during the first two stages of the programme. It was in Huggo’s first holidays from the preparatory school that Time whipped out his blade and pounced.
On a day that was a week before the end of that holidays the great new scheme for Rosalie at Field’s rose to its feet and walked. It was a special mission on behalf of the bank.
It necessitated.. . .
She came once or twice to a bit of a stop like that while waiting their evening talk together in which she should tell Harry. It necessitated a departure from the established order of things; but what of that? Was not the way bill of her life all departures from things established, and all successful, and were not all contingencies of this particular departure fully insured against? She very easily cantered on, on this rein. That bit of a stop was scarcely a check in the progression of her thoughts.
Seated with Harry in Harry’s room that night she was about to tell him her great news when, “I’d an unusual offer made to me today,” said Harry.
Almost the very words herself had been about to use!
“Why so had I to me!” she cried.
They both laughed. “Tell on,” said Harry.
“No, you. Yours first.”
“Toss you,” cried Harry; and spun a coin and lost and went ahead: “Well, mine doesn’t exactly shake the foundations of the world with excitement because I refused it. It was to go out to defend in a big murder case in Singapore!”
She exclaimed, “In Singapore!”
“Yes, Singapore. Why do you say it like that?”
She did not answer.
The prisoner, Harry went on, was a wealthy trader, immensely wealthy, and immensely detested, it appeared, by the European settlement; had native blood in his veins; was charged with poisoning an Englishman with whose wife he was supposed to have been carrying on an amour. “A wretched, unsavoury business,” said Harry, and went on to say that, though the fee offered was extraordinarily handsome, he had declined the proposal. It was doubtful he would actually make more money over it than in his normal round at home, more than that it went against the grain to be defending a man of native origins who had pretty obviously seduced a white woman if not murdered her husband. “No, no ticket to Singapore for me, thanks,” said Harry.
Rosalie turned to him with a sudden, direct interest. “Harry, suppose you had accepted, how long would you have been away?”
“Not less than six months in all. Certainly not less. That’s another point against—”
“Yes, against the idea, because in any case you don’t want to go. But suppose the circumstances had been different; suppose it was a case that for various reasons very much attracted you; would you have gone?”
Harry said indifferently, “Oh, no doubt, no doubt.”
“Although it would have taken you from home six months—or more? You’d not have minded that?”
He laughed delightedly. “Ah, ha! I was beginning to wonder what you were driving at. You’re a regular lawyer, Rosalie; you led me on and then caught me out properly.”
His amusement was not reflected by her. She said with a certain insistence, “But you wouldn’t have minded?”
He laughed again. “The judge ruled that the question was admissible and must be answered. Well, minded—I’d have minded, of course, very much in a way. I’m a home bird. I’d have hated being away the best part of a year. But there you are. If the call was strong enough, there you are; it would have been business.”
She indrew a long breath. “That’s it. It would have been business.”
There was then a pause.
Harry, who had been talking lightly, then said slowly, “Rosalie, is there something behind this?”
She turned towards him with a very nice smile. “Harry, I’ve been doing a very shocking thing. I’ve been making you commit yourself.”
“Commit myself?”
She nodded. “Been taking down your statement without warning you that it may be used in evidence against you.”
He said gravely, “Somehow I don’t like this.”
She told him, “Ah, stupid me! I’m making a small thing seem big. Listen, Harry. It was curious to me this about you and Singapore—”
“Yes, I noticed that. Why?”
“Because there’s an idea of my going out to Singapore.”
He was astounded. She might have said to Mars. “You? To Singapore?”
“To the East generally. To Bombay, to Rangoon, to Singapore. For about a year.”
He was all aback. “For about a year? Rosalie, I can’t—Why on earth—?”
She did not like this. The great scheme! Her special mission! It necessitated.... Here was the necessity at which she had checked but confidently ridden on, and Harry was pulled right up by it. His astonishment was not comfortable to her. Was there to be a check then? He said again, “You? A year? But, Rosalie, what on earth—”
She pronounced a single word, his own word:
“Business.”
He was standing before her on the hearthrug. He made a turn and at once turned back. “Are you thinking of this seriously?”
“Most seriously.”
“Of going?”
“Of going. It’s business.”
“For a year?”
“Harry, yes.”
He began to fill his pipe with very slow movements of his fingers, his eyes bent down upon her. “And you called this—just now—a small thing?”
She said with a sudden eagerness, “Harry, it’s a very big thing for me, for Field’s. I meant a small thing in the sense not to be made a fuss about.”
He made very slowly a negative movement with his head. “I don’t see it like that.”
“Let me tell you, Harry.”
She told him how the great possibilities of the department she had established in the bank rested on the personal touch established between herself and the clients. The scheme was that those possibilities should be developed to their fullest extent. While she was in London that personal touch could be established with clients by dozens. If she visited the branches in the East, at Bombay, at Rangoon, at Singapore, it was by hundreds that the touch could be established. That was it. Field’s customers would talk to her, and when she was returned they would talk of her, and would tell others of her, as one met, not during the jolly freedom of leave when the impulse was to feel that, after all, nothing mattered much, but met out there when they were in the yoke and the harness of the thing,—met as one fresh out from home in their particular interests and shortly, charged with their special interests, returning home. That was it! A novel mission, a valuable mission, her mission. About a year. To start in about six weeks. “There, Harry, that’s the plan.”
“And you are going?”
“I have agreed to go.”
He said slowly, “It astonishes me.”
There was then a pause.
She spoke. “I think I do not like your astonishment, Harry.”
“It is justified.”
“No, no; not justified. When you told me of a possibility of Singapore for you I was not astonished. I made no difficulty.”
“Different,” he said. “Different.”
“Not different, Harry. The same. How different? If you could go, I can go. The same. Aren’t things with us always the same?”
He shook his head. “Not this. If I had to go—”
“Yes, yes. It’s the point. If you had to go you’d have to go. Well, I have to go.”
“Rosalie, if I had to go I could go. A man can.”
She cried, “But, Harry, that—This isn’t us talking at all. You mean a man can leave his home because his home can go on without him. But our home—it’s just the same for me in our home. We’ve made it like that. It runs itself. The kitchen—I don’t know when I last gave an order. The children—there’s never a word. The thing’s organised. I’m an organiser.” She laughed, “Dear, that’s why they’re sending me. Isn’t it organised?”
He assented, but with an inflexion on the word “It’s—organised.”
She did not attend the inflexion. “Well, that’s no organisation that can’t, in necessity, run by itself. This can. You know, quite well, this will. You know, quite well, that you will not be put about a jot.”
“Oh, I know that,” he said.
“Well, then. Astonished—why astonished?”
He looked at her. “Let’s call it,” he said, “the principle of the thing.”
Oh, now astonishment between them. Her voice, astounded, had an echo’s sound—faint, faint, scarcely to be heard, gone. “The prin-ci-ple!”
This room was lit, then, only by a standard lamp remote from where they were beside the fire. She was in a deep armchair; its partner, Harry’s chair, close by. He sat himself on the arm, looking towards her. The firelight made shadows on his face.
She presently murmured, her voice as though that echo, lost, was murmuring back, “Oh, it is I that am astonished now. The principle! It’s like a ghost. Harry, how possibly can there come between us the principle?”
His voice was deep, “Are we afraid of it, old girl?”
She put out a hand and touched him and he touched her hand. They were such lovers still. That was the thing about it. There never had been an issue between them, not the smallest; the bloom of their first union never had dissipated, not a rub. But there was in Harry the intention now to take her, and there was in her the apprehension now of being taken, to a new dimension of conversation, not previously trod by them. As they proceeded it was seen not to be light in this place; a place where touch might be lost.
She said, “But to bring up the principle in this! It can’t be possible you’ve changed. It isn’t conceivable to me that you have changed. Then how the principle?”
“It is the situation that has changed, Rosalie. It never occurred to me; I never dreamt or imagined that a thing like this could arise.”
She moved in her chair. “Oh, this goes deep....”
He put a hand on her shoulder. “We’re not afraid.”
“But I’m so strong in this. So always certain. In our dear years together so utterly assured. Nothing within the principle could touch me. I am steel everywhere upon the principle. I might hurt you, Harry.”
“I’ll not be hurt.”
“Well, say it, Harry.”
He was silent a moment. “There isn’t really very much to say. To me it’s so clear.”
She murmured, “And to me.”
He said, “We’ve made this home—eleven years. It’s been ideal. You have combined your work with your—what shall I call it?—with your domestic arrangements—your business with your domesticity—You’ve done it wonderfully. We’ve never had to discuss the subject since we agreed upon it.”
She murmured, “That is why—agreed.”
“Agreed in general. But when you take the home as between a man and a woman, there are bound to be responsibilities which, however much you share, cannot be divided. The woman’s are the—the domesticity.”
“What are the man’s?”
“To maintain the home.”
“I share in that.”
“Well, grant you do. I do not claim to share the other.”
“You are not asked to, Harry.”
“No, but, Rosalie, I’ve the right to ask you to provide the other.”
Her murmur said, “Oh, do not let us bring up rights. I am so fixed on rights.”
“Rosalie, let’s keep the thing square. A man can leave his home; he often has to. I think not so a woman; not a mother; not as you wish now to leave it. It can’t, without her, go on—not in the same way.”
“Yes, ours. Ours can.”
“Not in the same way. You can’t take out the woman and leave it the same,—the same for the man, the same for the children. We’re married. The married state. With children. Doesn’t the whole fabric of the married state rest on the domesticity of woman?”
She murmured, “No, on her resignation, Harry.”
As if he had touched something and been burnt he very sharply drew in his breath.
She said, “Ah, you’d be hurt, I told you. Dear, I can’t be other than I am on this. Upon her resignation, Harry. Men call it domesticity. That’s their fair word for their offence. It’s woman’s resignation is the fabric of the married state. She lets her home be built upon her back. She resigns everything to carry it. She has to. If she moves it shakes. If she stands upright it crashes. Dear, not ours. I’ve stood upright all the time. I’ve proved the fallacy. A woman can stand upright and yet be wife, be mother, make home. Dear, you are not to ask me now—for resignation.”
Therein, and through all the passage of this place where the footway was uneven, the light not good, the quality of her voice was low and noteless, sometimes difficult to hear. There is to say it was by that the more assured, as is more purposeful in its suggestion the tide that enters, not upon the gale, but in the calm and steady flow of its own strength.
The quality of Harry’s voice was very deep and sometimes halting, as though it were out of much difficulty that he spoke. He said, deeply, “That you stand upright does not discharge you from responsibilities.”
She said, “Dear, nor my responsibilities discharge me from my privileges.”
There was then a silence.
He spoke, “But I am going to press this, Rosalie. I say, with all admitted, this thing—this ‘I could go but you should not go’—is different as between us. I am a man.”
She made a movement in her chair. “Ah, let that go. I have a reply to that.”
“What reply?”
“I am a woman.”
He began—“It’s nothing—.”
She said, “Oh, painful to give you pain. To me—everything.”
He got up from his position beside her and went to his chair and seated himself. He sat on the edge of the chair, bowed forward, his forearms on his knees, his hands clasped; not smoking; his pipe between his fingers, his eyes upon the fire. Once or twice, his hands close to his face, he slightly raised them and with his pipe-stem softly tapped his teeth.
He had called it the principle. She watched him. That attitude in which he sat was of a profundity of meditation not to be looked upon without that sense of awe, of oppression, of misgiving that is aroused by the suggestion in man or nature of brooding forces mysteriously engrossed. There came to her, watching him, a thought that newly disturbed her thoughts. He had called it the principle. She had been astonished but she had not been perturbed. Upon the principle as between man and woman, husband and wife, she was, as she had said, so strong, so confident, accustomed and assured, that there was nothing could be said could touch her there. But it was not the principle. This was the knowledge brought to her by the new thought suddenly appeared in her mind, standing there like a strange face in a council of friends, unbidden and of a suspect look. What if she communicated that knowledge to Harry brooding there? He had called it the principle. What if she put across the shadowed room the sentence that should inform him it was not the principle but was an issue flying the flag of ships whose freights are dangerous? What if she put across the shadowed room the sentence, “Men that marry for a home”?
Ay, that was it! The thing she had always known and never told. Those are keepsakes of our secret selves, those observations, vows, conspiracies with which romantically we plot towards our ideals. This the sole keepsake of her treasury she never had revealed to Harry. Significant she had not. Some instinct must have stayed her. Yes, significant! He had called it the principle. It was not the principle. He was sincere upon the principle and in the examination of eleven years had proved his sincerity. It was not the principle. It was that herein, in her intention to exercise her freedom in a new dimension, she had touched him, not through the principle, but upon the instinct that led him, as she believed men to be led, to marry for a home, a settling-in place, a settling-down place, a cave to enter into and to shut the door upon.
Oh, this was dangerous! There were no lengths to which this might not lead! If at her first essay at that which countered his idea of home she was to be asked to pause, what, in the increasing convolutions of the years, might not she be asked to abandon? Let him attempt restriction of her by appeal to principle and she could stand, and win, unscathed. Let him oppose her by his wish within his home to shut the door, and that was to put upon her an injury that only by giving him pain could be fought. Oh, dangerous! Not less an injury because by sentiment and not by reason done! Much more an injury because so subtly done! Much more! Dangerous! Ah, from this the outset to be withstood!
He spoke and his first words were confirmation of her fears.
“Rosalie, do you feel quite all right about the children?”
Yes, she could see where this was set to lead. He could leave her with the children; but she—men that married for a home—could not leave him with the children.
She said gently, “Dear, there’ll not be the least difficulty. Everything’s perfectly arranged. Everything will perfectly well go on.”
He had not moved his pose and did not move it. His voice presented in tone the profound meditation that his pose presented. He said, “I don’t quite mean that. I mean, do you always feel everything’s quite all right with them?”
How setting now? She answered, “Dear, of course I do.”
His eyes remained upon the fire. “Rosalie, d’you know I sometimes don’t.”
Her motion—a lifting of her face, a questing of her brows—was of a helmsman’s gesture, suspicious to catch before it set a shifting of the breeze. “Harry, in what way? They’re splendid.”
“You feel that?”
“Dear, you know they are.”
He put his pipe to his mouth and with that meditative tapping tapped his teeth. “Splendid, yes, in health, in appearance, in development, in all that kind of thing. I don’t mean that.” He turned his face towards her and spoke directly. “Rosalie, have you ever thought they’re not quite like other children?”
Oh, setting from what quarter this? She said, “They’re better—miles and miles.”
He got up. “Well, that’s all right. If you have noticed nothing, that’s all right.”
“But, Harry. I am at a loss, dear. Of course it’s all right. But what have you noticed, think you’ve noticed?”
He was standing before her, his back against the mantelpiece, looking down at her. “Just that—not quite like other children.”
“But in what way?”
“It’s hard to say, old girl. If you’ve not noticed it, harder still. Not quite so childish as at their age I seem to remember myself with my brothers and sisters being childish. A kind of—reserve. A kind of—self-contained.”
She shook her head, “No, no.”
“You think it’s fancy?”
“I’m sure it is.”
He was silent a moment. “It’s rather worried me. And of course now—If you are going to be away—”
Stand by! She had the drift of this!
She said simply, “Harry, this can’t be.”
“You can’t give up the idea?”
Her hand upon the helm that steered her life constricted. “It is not to be asked of me to give it up.” She paused. She said softly, “Dear, this is a forward step for me. You are asking me to make a sacrifice. I would not ask you.”
He began, “There are sacrifices—”
“They are not asked of men.”
He said, “Rosalie, you said once, when Benji was born, that, if at any time need be, you would give up, not a thing like this, but your work entirely.”
As if to shield or to support her heart she drew her left hand to it. “Would you give up yours, Harry?”
He said quickly, “I’m not suggesting such a thing. It is ridiculous. I’m only showing you—”
She began to say her say, her voice reflective as his own had been. “But you have shown me frightful things, shown me how far and oh, how quick, a thing that starts may go. Oh, my dear, know the answer before it ever is suggested. Sacrifices! It is sacrifice for the children that you profess to mean. Well, let us call it that. Have you ever heard of a father sacrificing himself for his children? There’s no such phrase. There’s only the feminine gender for that. ‘Sacrificed himself for his wife and children.’ It’s a solecism. If grammar means good sense, it isn’t grammar because it’s meaningless. It can’t be said. It’s grotesque. But ‘Sacrificed herself for her husband and her children,’—why, that the commonest of cliches. It’s written on half the mothers’ brows; it should be carved on half the mothers’ tombs—upon my own dear mother’s.” She stood up and faced him. “Harry, not on mine.” She put a gentle hand on his. “I love you—you know what our love is. I love the children—with a truer love that they have never been a burden to me nor I on a single occasion out of mood with them. But, Harry, I will not sacrifice myself for the children. When I ask that of you, ask it of me. But I never will ask it of you.”
She was trembling.
He put an arm about her shoulders. “It’s over. It’s over. Let’s forget it, Rosalie.”
Of course she did not forget it. Of course she knew that Harry could not. Men that marry for a home! Already in his mind the thought that for his home she should give up, not only this present forward step, but—everything! Oh, man-made world! Oh, man-made men! “It’s over. It’s over,” he had said. Of course she knew it was not over. Men that marry for a home! Secret she had kept it and in the same moment that she had realised the significance of her secrecy it had been enlarged. Now it stalked abroad.
But what is to be observed is the quality of the love between them. It was through the children that he had made this claim that he had sought to impose upon her. She had told him, as she believed, that what he thought he saw was fancy. It never occurred to her to imagine so base a thing as that he, to give himself grounds, had invented or even exaggerated his fancy; but it had been excusable in her (threatened as she saw herself) to avoid, in the days that followed, discussion of that fancy, much less herself to bring it forward. Her love for Harry was never in that plane. It could admit no guile. It happened that within the week she was herself a little pained by a matter with the children. She took her pain straight to her Harry.
On his last day of the holidays before he returned for his second term at his preparatory school, Huggo was noisy with excitement at the idea of returning. It rather pained Rosalie that he showed not the smallest sign of regret at leaving home. Miss Prescott had done all the necessary business of getting his clothes ready for school, but Rosalie took from Field’s this last afternoon to do some shopping with her little man (as she termed it) in Oxford Street; to buy him some little personal things he wanted,—a purse of pigskin that fastened with a button, a knife with a thing for taking stones out of horses’ hoofs, and a special kind of football boots. Since there had come to her the “men that marry for a home” significance, that mirage in her face had much presented that mutinous and determined boy it often showed. Only the mother was there when she set out with Huggo. And then the sense of pain.
Oxford Street appeared to be swarming with small boys and their mothers similarly engaged. All the small boys wore blue overcoats with velvet collar and looked to Rosalie most lovably comic in bowler hats that seemed enormously too big for their small heads. Huggo was dressed to the same pattern but his hat exactly suited his face which was thin and, by contrast with these others, old for his years. Rosalie wished somehow that Huggo’s hat didn’t suit so well; the imminent extinguisher look of theirs made them look such darling babies. And what really brought out the difference was that all these other small boys invariably had a hand stretched up to hold their mothers’ arms and walked with faces turned up, chattering. Huggo didn’t. She asked him to. He said, “Mother, why?”
“I’d love you to, darling.”
He put up his hand and she pressed it with her arm to her side, but she noticed that he was looking away into a shop window while he did as he was asked, and there came in less than a dozen paces a congestion on the pavement that caused him to slip behind her, removing his hand. He did not replace it.
In the shop where the knife was to be bought an immense tray of every variety of pocketknife was put before them. Huggo opened and shut blades with a curiously impatient air as though afraid of being interfered with before he had made his choice. Immediately beside Rosalie was another mother engaged with another son upon another tray.
“It’s got to have a thing for levering stones out of horses’ hoofs,” said Huggo, brushing aside a knife offered by the assistant and rummaging a little roughly.
Rosalie said, “Darling, I can’t think what you can want such a thing for.”
The lady beside her caught her eye and laughed. “That’s just what I’m asking my small man,” she said.
Her small man, whose face was merry and whose hat appeared to be supported by his ears, looked up at Rosalie with an engaging smile and said in a very frank voice, “It’s jolly useful for lugging up tight things or to hook up toffee that’s stuck.”
They all three laughed. Huggo, busily engaged, took no notice.
He found the knife he wanted. Rosalie showed him another. “Huggo, I’m sure that one’s too heavy and clumsy.”
The voice of the little boy with the hat on his ears came, “Mummie, I’d rather have this one because you chose it.”
Rosalie said to Huggo, “It will weigh down your pocket so.”
“This one! This one!” cried Huggo and made a vexed movement with a foot.
Rosalie, sitting with Harry before the fire in Harry’s room that night said, “Harry, tell me some more of what you said the other day about the children.”
He looked up at her. He clearly was surprised. “You’ve been thinking about it?”
“I’ve been with Huggo shopping for him this afternoon and been at little things a little sad. Harry, when you said ‘not like other children’ did you mean not—responsive?”
He said intensely, “Rosalie, it is the word. It’s what I meant. I couldn’t get it. I wonder I didn’t. It’s my meaning exactly—not responsive. You’ve noticed it?”
“Oh, tell me first.”
“Rosalie, it’s sometimes that I’ve gone in to the three of them wanting to be one with them, to be a child with them and invent things and imagine things. Somehow they don’t seem to want it. They don’t—invite it. Your word, they don’t—respond. I want them to open their hearts and let me right inside. Somehow they don’t seem to open their hearts.”
She said, “Harry, they’re such mites.”
He shook his head. “They’re not mites, old girl. Only Benji. And even Benji—It was different when they were wee things. It’s lately, all this. They don’t seem to understand, Rosalie—to understand what it is I want. That’s the thing that troubles me. It’s an extraordinary thing to say, but it’s been to me sometimes as if I were the child longing to be—what shall I say?—to have arms opened to me, and they were the grown-ups, holding me off, not understanding what it is I want. Not understanding. Rosalie, why don’t they understand?”
She had a hand extended to the fire and she was slowly opening and shutting her fingers at the flames. This, coming upon the feeling she had had that afternoon with Huggo, was like a book wherein was analysed that feeling. But, “I am sure they do understand, dear,” she said. “I’m sure it’s fancy.”
“I think you’re not sure, Rosalie.”
“Oh, yes, I am. If it’s anything it’s just perhaps their way—all children have their ways. What I thought about Huggo this afternoon might perhaps be something what you mean. Harry, if it is, it’s just the little man’s way.”
“What was it you thought?”
She maintained that movement of the fingers of her hand. “Why, only things I noticed; tiny things; nothings, I’m sure. Out shopping with me, Harry. Well, it was his last day and I would have expected somehow he would have been fonder for that. He wasn’t and I rather felt it. Things like that. I would so like him to have held my arm. He didn’t want to. Not very grateful for the things we bought. But there, why should he be, dear Huggo? But just his way; that’s what one ought to think. But I felt it a little.”
Harry said, “I know. I know. It’s that that I have felt—not responsive. It’s what I’ve thought I’ve noticed in them all.”
Telling him perhaps enlarged, as telling does, her sensibilities. She said very quickly, “Not Benji!”
“Well, Benji’s so very young. But even—But in the other two—”
She said as quickly as before, “Ah, Doda’s responsive!”
“You’ve seen it, dear, in Huggo.”
“Oh, Harry, nothing, just his way. I’m sorry now I mentioned it.”
He had been watching the flexion of her hand. He said, “I’m glad you have. When I spoke of it the other day you said you didn’t see it. I think it’s generous in you to admit you have.”
She murmured, “Generous?”
“It brings up—Rosalie, does this affect a little, alter perhaps, your decision?”
She shut her fingers sharply. “No.” She kept them shut. “There’s nothing at all could alter that, Harry.”
He turned aside and began to fill his pipe, with slow movements.
It has been warned that it was in this holidays of Huggo’s from his preparatory school that Time, that bravo of the cloak-and-dagger school, whipped out his-blade and pounced. These, since that warning, were but the doorways and the lurking posts he prowled along.
He now was very close to Rosalie.
Rosalie and Harry both were home to lunch next day. In the afternoon they were to take Huggo to Charing Cross to see him off in the saloon specially reserved for his school. All the children were at lunch for this occasion. Benji in a high chair just like the high chair that had been Rosalie’s years back—what years and years!—at the rectory. Huggo was in boisterous spirits. You would think, you couldn’t help thinking, it was his first day, not his last day home. Rosalie observed him as she had not before observed him. How he talked! Well, that was good. How could Harry have thought him reserved? But he talked a shade loudly and with an air curiously self-opinionated. But he was such a child, and opinions were delightful in a child. Yes, but something not childish in his way of expressing his opinions, something a shade superior, self-satisfied; and she particularly noticed that when anything in the way of information was given him by Harry or by herself he never accepted it but always argued. She grew very silent. She felt she would have given anything to hear him, in the long topic of railways with his father, and then of Tidborough School, say, “Do they, father?” or, “Does it, father?” He never did. He always knew it before or knew different. Once on a subject connected with the famous school Harry said, a shade of rebuke in his voice, “My dear old chap, I was at Tidborough. I ought to know.” Rosalie felt she would have given anything in the world for Huggo to reply, “Sorry, father, of course you ought.” Instead he bent upon his plate a look injured and resentful at being injured. But in a minute she was reproaching herself for such ideas. Her Huggo! and she was sitting here criticising him. Different from other children! Why, if so, only in the way she had affirmed to Harry—miles and miles better. Opinionated? Why, famously advanced for his years. Superior? Why, bright, clever, not a nursery boy. She had been wronging him, she had been criticising him, she had been looking for faults in him, her Huggo! Unkind! Unnatural!
Listen to him! The meal was ended. His father was bantering him about what he learnt, or didn’t learn, at school; was offering him an extra five shillings to his school tip if he could answer three questions. The darling was deliciously excited over it. How his voice rang! He was putting his father off the various subjects suggested. Not Latin—he hadn’t done much Latin; not geography—he simply hated geography. Listen to him!
“Well, scripture,” Harry was saying. “Come, they give you plenty of scripture?”
“Oh, don’t they just! Tons and tons!” Listen to him! How merry he was now! “Tons and tons. First lesson every morning. But don’t ask scripture, father. Father, what’s the use of learning all that stuff, about the Flood, about the Ark, about the Israelites, about Samuel, about Daniel, about crossing the Red Sea, about all that stuff: what’s the use?”
Time closed his fingers on his haft and took a stride to Rosalie.
She sat upright. She stared across the table at the boy.
Harry said, “Here, steady, old man. ‘What’s the use of Scripture?’”
“Well, what is the use? It’s all rot. You know it isn’t true.”
Time flashed his blade and struck her terribly.
She called out dreadfully, “Huggo!”
“Mother, you know it’s all made up!”
She cried out in a girl’s voice and with a girl’s impulsive gesture of her arm across the table towards him, “It isn’t! It isn’t!”
Her voice, her gesture, the look upon her face could not but startle him. He was red, rather frightened. He said mumblingly, “Well, mother, you’ve never taught me any different.”
She was seen by Harry to let fall her extended arm upon the table and draw it very slowly to her and draw her hand then to her heart and slowly lean herself against her chair-back, staring at Huggo. No one spoke. She then said to Huggo, her voice very low, “Darling, run now to see everything is in your playbox. Doda, help him. Take Benji, darlings. Benji, go and see the lovely playbox things.”
When they had gone she was seen by Harry to be working with her fingers at her key-ring. In one hand she held the ring, in the other a key that she seemed to be trying to remove. It was obstinate. She wrestled at it. She looked up at Harry. “I want to get this”—the key came away in her hand—“off.”
He recognised it for her office pass-key.
Caused by that cry of hers to Huggo and by that ges-ture with her cry, and since intensifying, there had been a constraint that he was very glad to break. He remembered how childishly proud she had been of that key on the day it was cut for her. They had had a little dinner to celebrate it, and she had dipped it in her champagne glass.
He said, “Your pass-key? Why?”
She said, “I’m coming home, Harry.”
“Coming home?”
She was sitting back in her chair. She tossed, with a negligent movement of her hand, the key upon the table. “I have done with all that. I am coming home.”
He got up very quickly and came around the table to her.