Once Aboard the Lugger Part 27

I am amused, and it is something to tell you and to laugh at the more heartily by the compelling sound of your own laughter.

"Everything is new. Why, my very clothes are new. Look, here in my left hand is my handkerchief. Only a handkerchief this morning, and to other eyes still but a handkerchief. But to mine! Why, you have had it in your hand and indeed it speaks to me of you. Here you laid your arm, this was the side upon which you touched me as we sat together, here in my hair your fingers caressed me--each and all they are new-- different from this morning.

"Are you thinking me silly when I write like this, or are you dreadfully bored with it? I can't help it, Georgie; love means so much more to us women than to you men. It is essentially different. When a man in love thinks of the woman he thinks of her as 'mine,' and that thrills him--possession. But when the woman thinks of him she thinks of herself as 'his,' and that moves every fibre of her, strikes every chord--capitulation. The man expresses love by saying 'You are mine'; the woman by 'I am yours.' That is how it is with me. I sing to myself that I am yours, yours, yours. I want you to have every bit of me. I want you to know every thought I have. If I had bad thoughts, I would tell them you. If I had desires, I would make them known and would not blush. I want you to see right into my very heart. I want to lay everything before you--to come to you bound and naked. That is what love is with women, dear. Some of us resist it, school it otherwise-- but I do not think they are happy; not really happy. It is our nature to be as I have said, and to fight against nature is wearying work, leaving marks: it is to get tossed aside out of the sun.

"Are you thinking me unutterably tiresome and foolish?--but you will not think that; because you love me.

"Ah, let me write that again!-because you love me. And let me write this: I love you.

"My dear, is not that curious?--the precious joy of saying 'I love you,' and the constant yearning to hear it said. Not lovers alone have this joy and this desire. Mothers teach their babies to say 'I love you, mother,' and constantly and constantly they ask, 'Do you love me, baby? '--yes, and are not satisfied until they have the a.s.surance. And babies, too, will get up suddenly from their toys to run to say, 'Mother, I _do_ love you.'

"Why is it? Why is love so doubted that it must for ever be declared?

So doubted that even those who do love must constantly be proclaiming the fact to the object of their affections, impelled either by the subconscious fear that that object mistrusts the devotion, or by the subconscious fear that they themselves are under delusion and must protest aloud--just as a child upon the brink of being frightened in the dark will say aloud, 'I'm not afraid!' Why is it?

"Actions are allowed to proclaim hate, deeds suffice to advertise sympathy, but love must be testified by bond. To what crimes must love have been twisted and contorted that it should come to such a pa.s.s?

How often must it have been used as disguise to be now thus suspected?

"You never knew I thought of things like this, did you?

"My dear dear, I who am so frivolous think of yet deeper things. And I would speak of them to you tonight, for I would have you know my heart and mind as, dearest (how dear to think!), you know my face. Yes, of deeper things. I suppose clever people would laugh at the religion my mother and father lived in, taught me, died in, and now is mine. They believed--and I believe--in what I have heard called the Sunday School G.o.d! the G.o.d who lives, who listens, and to whom I pray. I have read books attempting to shatter this belief--yes, and I think succeeding because written with a cunning appeal only to the intelligence of man.

Can such a Being as G.o.d exist? they ask. And since man's intelligence can only grasp proved facts, proofs are heaped upon proof that He cannot. The impossibilities are heaped until man must--of his limitations--cry that it is impossible. But in my belief G.o.d is above the possibilities--not to be judged by them, not to be reduced to them. I suppose such a belief is Faith--implicit Faith--the Faith that we are told makes all things possible. Well, fancy, for the sake of having a 'religion' that comes into line with 'reason,' abandoning the sense of comfort that comes after prayer! Fancy receiving a 'reasoned'

belief and paying for it the solace of entreating help in the smallest trouble and in the largest!

"Do you know, my dear dear, that I pray for you every night?--for your health, your happiness, and your success?

"Now you know a little more of me. Is there more to learn, I wonder?

Not if I can make it clear.

"The candle is in a most melancholy condition: in the last stage of collapse. I have prodded it out from its socket with my knife and set it flabbily on a penny--so it must work to its very last drop of life. That will not be long delayed. I shall suddenly be plunged into darkness and must undress in the dark. I shall be smiling all the time I am undressing, my thoughts with you.

"At eleven--ten minutes' time--I am to be leaning from the window gazing at Orion as you too--so we agreed--will be gazing. Each will know the other has his thoughts, and we will say 'good-night.' How utterly foolish! How contemptibly absurd, common!--and how mystically delightful! You and I with Orion for the apex of eye's sight and our thoughts flying from heart to heart the base!

"Georgie mine, if we had never met could we have ever been so happy?

Impossible! Impossible! Before I pray for you to-night, I thank G.o.d for you.

"I have kissed the corner where I shall just be able to squeeze in-- good-night."

Such was her letter-disloyal to women in its exposure of those truths of women's love which are theirs by the heritage of ages, by their daily training from childhood upward, and against which they should most desperately battle; simple in its ideas of religion; silly in its baby sentiment.

Such was my Mary.

CHAPTER V.

Beefsteak For 14 Palace Gardens.

I.

Friday was the night of the incident in the library between Bob Chater and Mary; Sat.u.r.day the exchange of love in the Park between Mary and her George; Sat.u.r.day evening the writing of Mary's letter; upon Monday George read it.

Now it was Monday morning, and precisely at ten o'clock three persons set out for the same seat in Regent's Park--the mind of each filled with one of the others, empty of all thought of the third.

Mary--accompanied by David and Angela--carried towards the seat the image of her George, but had no heed of Mr. Bob Chater's existence; she was the magnet that drew Bob, ignorant of George; George sped to his Mary and had no thought of Bob.

Our young men were handicapped in point of distance. Mary, with but a short half-mile to go, must easily be first to make the seat; Bob, coming to town from a week-end up the river, would occupy little short of an hour. George from Herons' Holt to that dear seat, allowed full seventy-five minutes.

II.

Upon the whole, Mr. Bob Chater had not enjoyed his week-end; ideally circ.u.mstanced, for once the attractions it offered had failed to allure.

Mr. Lemmy Moss, in the tiny riparian cottage he rented for the summer months, was the most excellent of hosts; Claude Avinger was widely known as a rattling good sort; the three young ladies who came down early on Sunday morning and had no foolish objections to staying indecorously late, were in face, figure and morals all that Bob, Lemmy, and Claude could desire. Yet throughout that day in the cushioned punt Bob won more pouts than smiles from the lady who fell to his guardianship.

Disgustedly she remarked to her friends on the home journey, "Fairly chucked myself at him, the deadhead "--wherein, I apprehend, lay her mistake. For whether a man's a.s.sault upon a woman be dictated by love or desire, its vehemence is damped by acquiescence, spurred by rebuff.

Doubtless for our l.u.s.ty forefathers one-half the fascination of obtaining to wife the naked ladies who caught their eye lay in the tremendous excitement of s.n.a.t.c.hing them from their tribes; while for the ladies, the joy of capture comprised a great proportion of the amorous delights.

The characteristics remain. Maidens are more decorously won to-day; their tribes do not defend them; but they do the fighting for themselves. The st.u.r.dier the defence they are able to make, the greater the joy of at length being won; while, for the suitor, the more pains he hath endured in process of conquest the more keenly doth he relish his captive.

So with Bob. The young lady fairly chucking herself at him in the punt he could not forbear to contrast with the enticing reserve of Mary.

The more playfully (or desperately, poor girl) she chucked herself at him, the more did her charms cloy as against those of that other prize who so stoutly kept him at arm's-length. Nay, the more strenuously did she seek to entice his good offices, the more troubled was he to imagine why another of her s.e.x should so slightingly regard him.

Thus, as the day wore on, was Bob thrice impelled towards Mary--by initial attraction of her beauty; by natural instinct to show himself master where, till now, he had been bested; and by the stabbings of his wounded vanity.

On Monday morning, then, he caught the ten o'clock train to town, hot in the determination immediately to see her and instantly to press his suit. He would try, he told himself, a new strategy. Bold a.s.sault had been proved ill-advised; for frontal attack must be subst.i.tuted an advance more crafty. Its plan required no seeking. He would play--and, to a certain extent, would sincerely play--the part of penitent. He would apologise for Friday's lapse; would explain it to have been the outcome of sheer despair of ever winning her good graces.

As to where he would find her he had no doubts. Dozing one day over a book, he had not driven David and Angela from the room until they had forced upon him a wearisome account of the secluded seat they had discovered in Regent's Park. His patience in listening was an example of the profit of casting one's bread upon the waters; for, making without hesitation for the seat, he discovered Mary.

III.

The children, as he approached, were standing before her. David had scratched his finger, and the three were breathlessly examining the wounded hand for traces of the disaster. Brightly Mary was explaining that the place of the wound was over the home of very big drops of "blug," which could not possibly squeeze out of so tiny a window; when Angela, turning at footsteps, exclaimed: "Oh, dear, oh, dear, what _shall_ we do? Here's Bob!"

Alarm drummed in Mary's heart: fluttered upon her cheeks. She had felt, as she told her George, so certain that from Bob she had now not even acknowledgment to fear, that this deliberate intrusion set her mind bounding into disordered apprehensions--stumbling among them, terrified, out of breath.

When he had raised his hat, bade her good morning, she could but sit dumbly staring at him-questioning, incapable of speech.

It was Angela that answered his salutation: "Oh, why _have_ you come here? You spoil _everything_."

"Hook!" said Bob.

David asked: "What's hook?"

"Run away."