The Green Bough Part 29

"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 gra.s.s 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 pa.s.sive. We're coming to know that we're a force. Look at the way this talk of the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt 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. Pa.s.sing 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 s.e.x 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 enfranchis.e.m.e.nt 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 enfranchis.e.m.e.nt we may be, stands utterly and completely alone, encouraged or hampered in our fulfillment by the circ.u.mstances of birth that are made for us. It happens that men are more equipped for the making of those circ.u.mstances 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 circ.u.mstance. 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 circ.u.mstances 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 a.s.sailed 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 G.o.d."

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 hara.s.sed 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