This Freedom Part 30

He turned aside and began to fill his pipe, with slow movements.

It has been warned that it was in this holidays of Huggo's from his preparatory school that Time, that bravo of the cloak-and-dagger school, whipped out his-blade and pounced. These, since that warning, were but the doorways and the lurking posts he prowled along.

He now was very close to Rosalie.

Rosalie and Harry both were home to lunch next day. In the afternoon they were to take Huggo to Charing Cross to see him off in the saloon specially reserved for his school. All the children were at lunch for this occasion. Benji in a high chair just like the high chair that had been Rosalie's years back--what years and years!--at the rectory. Huggo was in boisterous spirits. You would think, you couldn't help thinking, it was his first day, not his last day home. Rosalie observed him as she had not before observed him. How he talked! Well, that was good. How could Harry have thought him reserved? But he talked a shade loudly and with an air curiously self-opinionated. But he was such a child, and opinions were delightful in a child. Yes, but something not childish in his way of expressing his opinions, something a shade superior, self-satisfied; and she particularly noticed that when anything in the way of information was given him by Harry or by herself he never accepted it but always argued. She grew very silent. She felt she would have given anything to hear him, in the long topic of railways with his father, and then of Tidborough School, say, "Do they, father?" or, "Does it, father?" He never did. He always knew it before or knew different. Once on a subject connected with the famous school Harry said, a shade of rebuke in his voice, "My dear old chap, I was at Tidborough. I ought to know." Rosalie felt she would have given anything in the world for Huggo to reply, "Sorry, father, of course you ought." Instead he bent upon his plate a look injured and resentful at being injured. But in a minute she was reproaching herself for such ideas. Her Huggo! and she was sitting here criticising him. Different from other children! Why, if so, only in the way she had affirmed to Harry--miles and miles better.

Opinionated? Why, famously advanced for his years. Superior? Why, bright, clever, not a nursery boy. She had been wronging him, she had been criticising him, she had been looking for faults in him, her Huggo! Unkind! Unnatural!

Listen to him! The meal was ended. His father was bantering him about what he learnt, or didn't learn, at school; was offering him an extra five shillings to his school tip if he could answer three questions. The darling was deliciously excited over it. How his voice rang! He was putting his father off the various subjects suggested. Not Latin--he hadn't done much Latin; not geography--he simply hated geography. Listen to him!

"Well, scripture," Harry was saying. "Come, they give you plenty of scripture?"

"Oh, don't they just! Tons and tons!" Listen to him! How merry he was now! "Tons and tons. First lesson every morning. But don't ask scripture, father. Father, what's the use of learning all that stuff, about the Flood, about the Ark, about the Israelites, about Samuel, about Daniel, about crossing the Red Sea, about all that stuff: what's the use?"

Time closed his fingers on his haft and took a stride to Rosalie.

She sat upright. She stared across the table at the boy.

Harry said, "Here, steady, old man. 'What's the use of Scripture?'"

"Well, what is the use? It's all rot. You know it isn't true."

Time flashed his blade and struck her terribly.

She called out dreadfully, "Huggo!"

"Mother, you know it's all made up!"

She cried out in a girl's voice and with a girl's impulsive gesture of her arm across the table towards him, "It isn't! It isn't!"

Her voice, her gesture, the look upon her face could not but startle him. He was red, rather frightened. He said mumblingly, "Well, mother, you've never taught me any different."

She was seen by Harry to let fall her extended arm upon the table and draw it very slowly to her and draw her hand then to her heart and slowly lean herself against her chair-back, staring at Huggo.

No one spoke. She then said to Huggo, her voice very low, "Darling, run now to see everything is in your playbox. Doda, help him. Take Benji, darlings. Benji, go and see the lovely playbox things."

When they had gone she was seen by Harry to be working with her fingers at her key-ring. In one hand she held the ring, in the other a key that she seemed to be trying to remove. It was obstinate. She wrestled at it. She looked up at Harry. "I want to get this"--the key came away in her hand--"off."

He recognised it for her office pa.s.s-key.

Caused by that cry of hers to Huggo and by that ges-ture with her cry, and since intensifying, there had been a constraint that he was very glad to break. He remembered how childishly proud she had been of that key on the day it was cut for her. They had had a little dinner to celebrate it, and she had dipped it in her champagne gla.s.s.

He said, "Your pa.s.s-key? Why?"

She said, "I'm coming home, Harry."

"Coming home?"

She was sitting back in her chair. She tossed, with a negligent movement of her hand, the key upon the table. "I have done with all that. I am coming home."

He got up very quickly and came around the table to her.

PART FOUR--HOUSE OF CARDS

CHAPTER I

There is a state wherein the mind, normally the court of pleas where reason receives and administers the supplications of the senses, is not in session. Reason is sick, suspends his office, abrogates his authority, withdraws to some deep fastness of the brain, and suffers the hall of judgment to be the house of license or of dreams: of dreams, as sleep, as vanity of reverie; of license when there is tumult in the body politic, as fever, as excesses of the pa.s.sions, as great shock. Reason is sick, withdraws, and there is strange business in that place.

If that is just the way one writes, not susceptible of easy comprehension, and not enough explanatory of Rosalie's condition, it goes like this in Rosalie's own words. Drooped back there in her chair before that littered disarray of lunch, and that key lying there, and Harry stooping over her and holding both her hands, she said, "Oh, Harry! Oh, Harry! I feel deathly sick."

She said it had been a most frightful shock to her, what Huggo had declared. She said, "Oh, Harry, I feel all undone."

Undone! We'll try to feel her mind with that; to let that explain her when she said this else, and when she wrote some things that shall be given.

She said she had suffered, in that moment of crying out to Huggo and of stretching out her arm to him, the most extraordinary--what was the word?--the most extraordinary hallucination. "Harry, when Huggo said that frightful thing! Oh, Harry, like an extraordinary dream, I was a child again. It wasn't here; it was happening; it was the rectory; and not you and the children but all us children that used to be around the table there. No, not quite that. More extraordinary than that. Robert was there; Robert, I think, in Huggo's place; and all the rest were me--me as I used to be when I was ten; small, grave, wondering, staring. And yet myself me too as I was then--oh, horrified as I'd have then been horrified to hear the Bible stories called untrue; jumped up and crying out, 'It isn't! It isn't!' as I would then have jumped up and cried out; and all the other Rosalies staring in wonder as I'd have stared.

Oh, extraordinary, extraordinary! Within this minute, I have been a child again. The strangest thing, the strangest thing!

"I was a child again, Harry, in a blue frock I used to wear and in a pinafore that had a hole in it; and all those other Rosalies the same. Those other Rosalies! To see them! Harry, I've not seen that Rosalie I used to be--not years and years. That tiny innocent!

It is upon me still. I feel that small child still. Oh, I feel it!

I remember--dear, did I ever tell you?--when my father once... had been talking about Cambridge... and suddenly cried out, it was at breakfast, 'Cambridge! My youth! My G.o.d, my G.o.d, my youth!' There was coffee from a cup that he'd knocked over came oozing, and I just sat there huge-eyed, staring, a small, grave wondering child....

"Oh, Harry, my youth, my childhood--and now the children's! The difference! The difference!"

Harry talked to her. He ended, "The teaching, all the ideas, dear girl, you mustn't worry, it's all different nowadays."

"Harry, to hear it from a child like that!"

"It's startled you. It needn't. We'll talk it out. We'll fix it.

It's just what he's been taught, old girl."

She said, "Oh, it is what he's not been taught!"

Then there were things that, while was still upon her this shock, this sense of being again the small, grave child in the blue frock and in the pinafore with the hole in it, she wrote down. She dismissed Miss Prescott. She thought, when the interview of dismissal opened, that she would end by upbraiding Miss Prescott, but she was abated all the time in any anger that she might have felt by Huggo's other frightful words, "Well, mother, you never taught me any different."

She did not want to hear Miss Prescott tell her that. She told Miss Prescott simply that she was giving up her business and coming now to devote herself to the children. She thought, she said, their education had in some respects been faulty, and told Miss Prescott how. Miss Prescott, speaking like a book, told her it had not been faulty and told her why. "Truth, knowledge, reason," said Miss Prescott. "Could it conceivably be contested that these should not be the sole food and the guiding principle of the child mind?"

It was after that interview that Rosalie, sitting long into the night, wrote down some things. She is to be imagined as wrenched back, as by a violent hand, across the years, and in the blue frock and the pinafore with a hole in it again, and awfully frightened, terribly unhappy, at the thing she'd heard from Huggo. That was the form her shock took. Beneath it she had at a blow abandoned all her ambitions as when a child she would instantly have dropped her most immersing game and run to a frightening cry from her mother; as once, in fact (and the incident and the parallel came back to her), she had been building a house of cards, holding her breath not to shake it, and her mother had scalded her hand and had cried out to her, frighteningly. "Oh, mummie, mummie!" she had cried, running to her; and flap! the house of cards had gone. Her inward cry was now, "The children! The children!" and what amiss the leaving of her work? Her work! Oh, house of cards!

Her state of mind, the imaginings in which that shock came to her, is better seen by what she wrote down privately, to relieve herself, than by the talk about it all that she had with her Harry. She wrote immediately after Miss Prescott had stood up for "truth, knowledge, reason," and by combating truth, knowledge, and reason more clearly expressed herself than in her talk with Harry. It was in her diary she wrote--well, it wasn't exactly a diary, it was a desultory journal in which sometimes she wrote things. As she wrote, her brow, in the intensity of her thought, was all puckered up. She still felt "deathly sick; all undone." She wrote:

"Of course it's as she says (Miss Prescott). That is the kind of thing to-day. Knowledge, stark truth--children must have in stark truth all the knowledge there is on all the things that come about them. It's strange; yes, it is strange. No parent would be such a fool as to trust a child with all the money she has nor with anything superlatively precious that she possesses; but knowledge, which is above all wealth and above all treasure, the child is to have to play with as it likes. Oh, it is strange. Where is it going to stop? If you bring up a child on the fact that all the Old Testament stories are untrue, a bundle, where they are miraculous, of obviously impossible fairy tales, what's going to happen to the New Testament? The Immaculate Conception, the Resurrection, the Ascension--what's your child-mind that knows the old stories for inventions going to say to those? Are they easier to believe? The Creation or the Conception? The Flood or the Resurrection? G.o.d speaking out of a burning bush or the Ascension to Heaven? The pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire or the Three in One of the Trinity? Oh, I wonder if Modern Thought has any thought to spare for that side of the business--or for its results in a generation or two?"