The Green Bough Part 15

"Good-by."

IV

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

She asked no favor of her G.o.d. She waited. She said no prayers. She listened. It was a spiritual communion, beyond the need of symbols, above the necessity of words. Psychology has no function to describe it. It was her first absolute submission of both mind and body to the mystery of life. Here consciously, she felt she could do nothing.

Here, as it might be, was the instant of conception. Whatever it was, whether it were G.o.d or Nature, this was the moment in which she held herself in suspension, feeling she had no conscious part to play.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She stopped, words came in no measure with her thoughts in those days.

But when the farmer's wife had returned later to inquire if they wanted any more bread and b.u.t.ter cut, she questioned her with an interest none could have resented as to who the girl might be.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

barley."

She turned to Mary.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was to be close to the very earth itself she needed. There is no clear line of argument to trace in a woman's mind. Her marriage bed had been the heathered moors. The scent of the earth had been all about her as she lay in Liddiard's arms. No soft or spotless pillows had there been for her head to rest on. In no garments had she decked herself for his embrace. No ceremony had there been, no formalities observed.

There was nothing that had happened to a.s.sociate it in her mind with the conventional wedding night, blessed by the church, approved of by all.

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