The Green Bough Part 34

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

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

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

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

The earth she would have had him labor in, was such as now would soil his hands. It was enjoyment he sought, she knew it well, not life.

With that poison of inheritance they had instilled into his blood, fast he was becoming an echo, not a voice. The message of all ideals was being stilled to silence in him. They were teaching him to say what the Liddiards had said one generation upon another--gain and keep, gain and keep--it would be folly to give away.

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

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

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

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

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

"What do they do?"

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

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

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

"And you couldn't do that, John?"

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

I'd lost my chance. I was sorry I'd lost it."

He raised his head and looked at her.

"I'm not sorry now, Mater. I wasn't sorry for long. Aren't men beasts?"

"My dear--my dear," she whispered. "If they were all like you, what a world love could make for us to live in. Oh, keep it all, my dear.

Never be sorry. It isn't the right or the wrong of it, John. It's the pity of it. If women had men like you to love them, think what their children would be! Don't tell her yet, John. Wait a little longer if you can."

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

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

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

"The great questions are to be settled--not by speeches and majority resolutions, but by blood and iron."

VIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It seemed to matter little to her at whose door the iniquity of lighting the firebrand lay. War had been inevitable whoever had declared it.

The cry of broken treaties and sullied honor stirred but little in her heart as she heard it. What mattered it if a man was true to his word when all through the years he had been false to the very earth he dwelt on?

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

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

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

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

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

"DEAR OLD MATER--"

She heard the ring of vitality in that.

"They're all going from here. If I c.o.c.k on a year or two, they'll take me. I sort of know you'd like me to. Do you know why? Do you remember once my asking you something about a couple of moles the hay knives had chopped? I was thinking of it yesterday, I don't know why, and that made me realize you'd understand. Do you remember what you said about Death, that sometimes it was just a gift when things were worth while?