The Green Bough Part 9

And then, when one morning, Mary said--

"I've been thinking, f.a.n.n.y--why shouldn't I turn that room looking over the garden into a bedroom? We're awfully cramped here. It's just like us to go on with the same arrangements, merely because we're used to them."

Then f.a.n.n.y knew, and her knowledge was more of an upheaval in her mind than any thought of this revolution against the placid routine of their existence. So much greater was it that she could not even bestir herself to resentment against Mary for preferring to be alone.

The thought crossed her mind--

"How do I interfere with her? It's awfully selfish of her to want to be alone. It isn't as if we hadn't shared the same room for years."

Such thoughts as these would have been poignant at any other time. Mary was prepared for the a.s.sertion of them. But they seemed idle to f.a.n.n.y then--foolish and utterly devoid of purpose.

She sat on the side of her bed, staring at Mary busily engaged in doing her hair. And she knew so well what the meaning of that centered occupation was. Such a moment she would have chosen herself for an announcement of that nature.

Mary was in love, and with a man who had a wife already. She was surprised in her own soul at the littleness of weight the second half of that realization carried in her thoughts. She did not ask herself what--this being so--Mary was going to do about it. As a problem of impenetrable solution, it meant scarcely anything to her. All that kept repeating itself in her mind was just the knowledge that Mary was in love--Mary was in love.

She felt a sickness in her throat. It was not of fear. It was not exactly of joy. She might have been seized of an ague, for she trembled. The sensation was like waves breaking over her; as though she were in water, fathoms deep, and were struggling to keep her lips above the surface that she might breathe freely. But she could not breathe; only in stolen moments, as if breath were no longer hers to hold.

Mary was in love. She wanted that room by herself so that at night she could lie alone with her thoughts and none could touch or spoil them with their presence. She wanted that room alone so that in the morning she could wake with none but her thoughts beside her. She was in love.

Suddenly the world to f.a.n.n.y seemed bitter and black and cold. She was out of it. It had gone by. She was left there on the roadside--trembling.

Love was the magic by which she herself could be revealed to herself when, coming upon this sudden knowledge of Mary, it was that she realized there was no magic in the world for her.

She was alone, unloved, unloving. In that there was merely consciousness, a staring, hungry consciousness of herself. Only in the abandonment of generosity that came with love could she find any meaning in her soul. Only by giving could she gain.

The tragedy of f.a.n.n.y Throgmorton and the countless women that are like her was that she had none to whom she could give.

All this, without a word in her thoughts that could have given it expression, was what she felt about Mary as she sat on her bedside that morning and watched her sister doing her hair.

VI

Jane made the discovery for herself, but by chance.

One morning when Mary had gone out, indicating the likelihood of her playing a game of golf, Jane put on her oldest hat, took the path through the marshes which avoided the necessity of going through the village where she would be seen and criticized for her clothes, and went alone up onto the cliffs beyond Penlock.

These were rare, but definite, occasions with her. She felt the necessity of them at unexpected intervals as a Catholic, apart from Saints' days and Holy days, feels the necessity of confession and straightway, in the midst of business hours or household duties, seeks out the priest and speaks his mind.

To Jane, those lonely walks with the solemn solitude of those cliffs, were confessional moments when, setting herself at a distance which that wide environment could lend her, she could look on at herself, could calmly inspect and almost dispa.s.sionately criticize.

She went without knowledge of her purposes. It was just for a walk, she said, and if questioned why she insisted upon going alone, she would find herself becoming angry at their curiosity.

"Mayn't I sometimes like my own company better than anybody else's?" she would ask shortly and that was about all she knew definitely of these confessional calls. If she was aware of any mental exercise during those walks, it was in momentary observations of Nature, a lark soaring, a flight of gulls upon the water, the life of that farm in the hollow above Penlock. Of that inquisitorial examination of herself, practically she knew nothing. It took place behind the bolts of doors, all sound of it shut out, barring admittance to her conscious self.

Coming back for the midday meal she would say to Hannah across the table--

"How you can stick in the house all day, one week after another, beats me. It was perfectly lovely this morning up there on the moors. We all make life so automatic here that one might as well put a penny in the slot and have finished with it. It's only a pennyworth we get."

From this they received the impression she had also given to herself, that she had been drinking in the beauties of the countryside. If she had, it was but a sip of wine at the altar where she had been kneeling in inmost meditation.

This morning, feeling the sun too hot for energy, she had found for herself a sheltered bed in the heather where, through a gap in the jungle it became as she lay in the midst of it, she could see the farm in its hollow, the sea of cerulean beyond and, nearer in the foreground, a belt of pine trees standing up amongst their surrounding gorse and bracken.

It was there upon a path leading through the bracken to a gate in one of the farmer's hedges, she caught her first glimpse of Mary and Liddiard.

The mere fact of her not being on the golf links as she had said drove the suspicion hot, like a branding iron, on Jane's thoughts.

She watched them pa.s.s by below the hill on which she had found her bed and her eyes followed them like a bird's, alert and keen. When they stopped at the gate and Liddiard seated himself on it with his feet resting on the bar beneath while Mary stood below him, Jane made for herself a window in that secreting wall of heather and lay there, watching them, with all her blood fermenting to a biting acid that tasted in her mouth and smarted in her eyes, becoming even, as it were, a self-righteous irritation beneath her skin.

To her it was obvious enough. Their Mary who read so many books, who seemed to care so little what destiny the fateful coach to Bridnorth brought her, was sport of Fate and surely now. Their Mary was in love.

Jane angered at the realization of it to think what a fool her sister was. It would be talked about the whole village over, especially then, during the holidays when the summer visitors were there. One visitor there was in particular who came every year and spent most of her mornings after bathing drying her hair on the beach and talking scandal till hunger and the mid-day meal called her homewards.

What a fool she was! This story of herself and a married man would linger long whiles in Bridnorth. They had not much to talk of. They preserved their gossipings with a.s.siduous care. Each year it would be whispered about her and men would keep her at a greater distance than ever.

They talked there together for an hour and more. For an hour and more, Jane lay and watched them. What were they talking of? Sometimes by the way he spoke, leaning down and riveting each word upon Mary's attention, it seemed as though their conversation were of the most serious nature.

How could it be serious? What a fool she must be if she thought it was!

It was an idle flirtation with him, a married man, alone on his holidays, amusing himself with the most likely girl that offered herself. Yet never with all her astuteness would Jane have considered that Mary was the most likely. Always Mary had seemed, except for her games, insensible to the attractions of men. What had come over her?

f.a.n.n.y was the one whom men with inclination for harmless pa.s.sing of their time had singled out for semi-serious interchange of ideas. f.a.n.n.y was romantic. Men liked that when it did not become too serious to interfere with the free pursuit of their enjoyments.

But this, as she watched them there through her curtain of heather, looked more romantic than anything she could ever have imagined about f.a.n.n.y. Had they been strangers and had she come across them thus she would have felt herself in the presence of something not meant for her to see and, pa.s.sing them by, she would have given all impression of looking the other way, however covertly she might have observed.

Yet here it was her own sister and, to herself, calling it her duty, she watched them both with every sense stretched forth to clutch each sign or movement that might give evidence to her impulsive mind how far the thing had gone between them.

She was not long in learning the utmost truth. After a long silence, Liddiard slipped down off the gate and stood in the bracken looking directly into Mary's eyes. Jane felt that look. She held her breath as it pierced into her own eyes. Then, when he laid his hands upon Mary's shoulders and for an instant held her so as he spoke, Jane swallowed in her throat and against the roots of heather felt her heart beating like a trapped bird in her breast.

At that distance, more sure than Mary, she knew what was going to happen. More sure than either of them, she knew. When suddenly, as though some leaping power had swept upon him unexpectedly, he took her in his arms and their heads were one together, linked with his kisses, Jane had known of it more surely than he.

Feeling those kisses on her own lips, on her eyes, her throat, and like hammers beating in her heart, Jane buried her face in the heather but did not know that she moaned with pain.

When she looked up, they had gone.

VII

If those kisses were hurtful to Jane, they were a sublime realization to Mary. In the rush of them as they pressed against her lips, she felt a consummation of all those forces of life which, with the Bridnorth coach, had so often called to her as it came and pa.s.sed with its message out of the world.

Rightly or wrongly in the accepted standards of morality, Mary felt such completed justification in those moments as to be sensitive of the surging intentions of life triumphing within her. This, she knew then, was the fullness of meaning in a woman's life. If it were pleasure, it was not the pleasure of sensation; not even the pleasure of the promise of gratification. None of the joys of amorous delay were mingled in those kisses for her.

What she felt in the rushing torrent in her veins was all subsidiary to the overwhelming sense of fulfillment.

He would have lingered there beside that gateway in the bracken, would have dallied with the joy it was to him to feel her whole being in response to his. But Mary had no need of that.

If this was what her mother had meant by concealment of her own sensations, she surely had it then. This was not an hour of dalliance in her life. It was the deep-sounding prelude to the realization of the very spiritual substance of her being.