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This Freedom

A >> A. S. M. Hutchinson >> This Freedom




"I'm sure it is."

He was silent a moment. "It's rather worried me. And of course
now--If you are going to be away--"

Stand by! She had the drift of this!

She said simply, "Harry, this can't be."

"You can't give up the idea?"

Her hand upon the helm that steered her life constricted. "It is
not to be asked of me to give it up." She paused. She said softly,
"Dear, this is a forward step for me. You are asking me to make a
sacrifice. I would not ask you."

He began, "There are sacrifices--"

"They are not asked of men."

He said, "Rosalie, you said once, when Benji was born, that, if
at any time need be, you would give up, not a thing like this, but
your work entirely."

As if to shield or to support her heart she drew her left hand to
it. "Would you give up yours, Harry?"

He said quickly, "I'm not suggesting such a thing. It is ridiculous.
I'm only showing you--"

She began to say her say, her voice reflective as his own had been.
"But you have shown me frightful things, shown me how far and oh,
how quick, a thing that starts may go. Oh, my dear, know the answer
before it ever is suggested. Sacrifices! It is sacrifice for the
children that you profess to mean. Well, let us call it that. Have
you ever heard of a father sacrificing himself for his children?
There's no such phrase. There's only the feminine gender for that.
'Sacrificed himself for his wife and children.' It's a solecism. If
grammar means good sense, it isn't grammar because it's meaningless.
It can't be said. It's grotesque. But 'Sacrificed herself for her
husband and her children,'--why, that the commonest of cliches.
It's written on half the mothers' brows; it should be carved on
half the mothers' tombs--upon my own dear mother's." She stood up
and faced him. "Harry, not on mine." She put a gentle hand on his.
"I love you--you know what our love is. I love the children--with
a truer love that they have never been a burden to me nor I on
a single occasion out of mood with them. But, Harry, I will not
sacrifice myself for the children. When I ask that of you, ask it
of me. But I never will ask it of you."

She was trembling.

He put an arm about her shoulders. "It's over. It's over. Let's
forget it, Rosalie."

Of course she did not forget it. Of course she knew that Harry could
not. Men that marry for a home! Already in his mind the thought
that for his home she should give up, not only this present forward
step, but--everything! Oh, man-made world! Oh, man-made men! "It's
over. It's over," he had said. Of course she knew it was not over.
Men that marry for a home! Secret she had kept it and in the same
moment that she had realised the significance of her secrecy it
had been enlarged. Now it stalked abroad.

But what is to be observed is the quality of the love between them.
It was through the children that he had made this claim that he
had sought to impose upon her. She had told him, as she believed,
that what he thought he saw was fancy. It never occurred to her to
imagine so base a thing as that he, to give himself grounds, had
invented or even exaggerated his fancy; but it had been excusable
in her (threatened as she saw herself) to avoid, in the days that
followed, discussion of that fancy, much less herself to bring it
forward. Her love for Harry was never in that plane. It could admit
no guile. It happened that within the week she was herself a little
pained by a matter with the children. She took her pain straight
to her Harry.

On his last day of the holidays before he returned for his second
term at his preparatory school, Huggo was noisy with excitement
at the idea of returning. It rather pained Rosalie that he showed
not the smallest sign of regret at leaving home. Miss Prescott had
done all the necessary business of getting his clothes ready for
school, but Rosalie took from Field's this last afternoon to do some
shopping with her little man (as she termed it) in Oxford Street;
to buy him some little personal things he wanted,--a purse of pigskin
that fastened with a button, a knife with a thing for taking stones
out of horses' hoofs, and a special kind of football boots. Since
there had come to her the "men that marry for a home" significance,
that mirage in her face had much presented that mutinous and
determined boy it often showed. Only the mother was there when she
set out with Huggo. And then the sense of pain.

Oxford Street appeared to be swarming with small boys and their
mothers similarly engaged. All the small boys wore blue overcoats
with velvet collar and looked to Rosalie most lovably comic in
bowler hats that seemed enormously too big for their small heads.
Huggo was dressed to the same pattern but his hat exactly suited
his face which was thin and, by contrast with these others, old for
his years. Rosalie wished somehow that Huggo's hat didn't suit so
well; the imminent extinguisher look of theirs made them look such
darling babies. And what really brought out the difference was that
all these other small boys invariably had a hand stretched up to
hold their mothers' arms and walked with faces turned up, chattering.
Huggo didn't. She asked him to. He said, "Mother, why?"

"I'd love you to, darling."

He put up his hand and she pressed it with her arm to her side,
but she noticed that he was looking away into a shop window while
he did as he was asked, and there came in less than a dozen paces
a congestion on the pavement that caused him to slip behind her,
removing his hand. He did not replace it.

In the shop where the knife was to be bought an immense tray of every
variety of pocketknife was put before them. Huggo opened and shut
blades with a curiously impatient air as though afraid of being
interfered with before he had made his choice. Immediately beside
Rosalie was another mother engaged with another son upon another
tray.

"It's got to have a thing for levering stones out of horses' hoofs,"
said Huggo, brushing aside a knife offered by the assistant and
rummaging a little roughly.

Rosalie said, "Darling, I can't think what you can want such a
thing for."

The lady beside her caught her eye and laughed. "That's just what
I'm asking my small man," she said.

Her small man, whose face was merry and whose hat appeared to be
supported by his ears, looked up at Rosalie with an engaging smile
and said in a very frank voice, "It's jolly useful for lugging up
tight things or to hook up toffee that's stuck."

They all three laughed. Huggo, busily engaged, took no notice.

He found the knife he wanted. Rosalie showed him another. "Huggo,
I'm sure that one's too heavy and clumsy."

The voice of the little boy with the hat on his ears came, "Mummie,
I'd rather have this one because you chose it."

Rosalie said to Huggo, "It will weigh down your pocket so."

"This one! This one!" cried Huggo and made a vexed movement with
a foot.

Rosalie, sitting with Harry before the fire in Harry's room that
night said, "Harry, tell me some more of what you said the other
day about the children."

He looked up at her. He clearly was surprised. "You've been thinking
about it?"

"I've been with Huggo shopping for him this afternoon and been at
little things a little sad. Harry, when you said 'not like other
children' did you mean not--responsive?"

He said intensely, "Rosalie, it is the word. It's what I meant. I
couldn't get it. I wonder I didn't. It's my meaning exactly--not
responsive. You've noticed it?"

"Oh, tell me first."

"Rosalie, it's sometimes that I've gone in to the three of them
wanting to be one with them, to be a child with them and invent
things and imagine things. Somehow they don't seem to want it. They
don't--invite it. Your word, they don't--respond. I want them to
open their hearts and let me right inside. Somehow they don't seem
to open their hearts."

She said, "Harry, they're such mites."

He shook his head. "They're not mites, old girl. Only Benji. And
even Benji--It was different when they were wee things. It's lately,
all this. They don't seem to understand, Rosalie--to understand
what it is I want. That's the thing that troubles me. It's an
extraordinary thing to say, but it's been to me sometimes as if
I were the child longing to be--what shall I say?--to have arms
opened to me, and they were the grown-ups, holding me off, not
understanding what it is I want. Not understanding. Rosalie, why
don't they understand?"

She had a hand extended to the fire and she was slowly opening and
shutting her fingers at the flames. This, coming upon the feeling
she had had that afternoon with Huggo, was like a book wherein was
analysed that feeling. But, "I am sure they do understand, dear,"
she said. "I'm sure it's fancy."

"I think you're not sure, Rosalie."

"Oh, yes, I am. If it's anything it's just perhaps their way--all
children have their ways. What I thought about Huggo this afternoon
might perhaps be something what you mean. Harry, if it is, it's
just the little man's way."

"What was it you thought?"

She maintained that movement of the fingers of her hand. "Why, only
things I noticed; tiny things; nothings, I'm sure. Out shopping
with me, Harry. Well, it was his last day and I would have expected
somehow he would have been fonder for that. He wasn't and I rather
felt it. Things like that. I would so like him to have held my arm.
He didn't want to. Not very grateful for the things we bought. But
there, why should he be, dear Huggo? But just his way; that's what
one ought to think. But I felt it a little."

Harry said, "I know. I know. It's that that I have felt--not
responsive. It's what I've thought I've noticed in them all."

Telling him perhaps enlarged, as telling does, her sensibilities.
She said very quickly, "Not Benji!"

"Well, Benji's so very young. But even--But in the other two--"

She said as quickly as before, "Ah, Doda's responsive!"

"You've seen it, dear, in Huggo."

"Oh, Harry, nothing, just his way. I'm sorry now I mentioned it."

He had been watching the flexion of her hand. He said, "I'm glad
you have. When I spoke of it the other day you said you didn't see
it. I think it's generous in you to admit you have."

She murmured, "Generous?"

"It brings up--Rosalie, does this affect a little, alter perhaps,
your decision?"

She shut her fingers sharply. "No." She kept them shut. "There's
nothing at all could alter that, Harry."

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 pass-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
glass.

He said, "Your pass-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
passions, 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 God, my God, 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? God
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?"

Then she wrote:

"I've never taught them any different."

Then she wrote:

"Mother, I am a child again to-night. Darling, in that blue frock
I used to wear. Darling, all that I to-night am thinking is what
you taught me. Oh, look down, beloved! I've been so wrong. I thought
everything was infinitely better for them than you made it, beloved
mother, for me. I didn't realise."

Then she wrote:

"It just means losing everything in God that's human. It must mean
that. All our intelligence, if materialism may be called intelligence;
all modern teaching, if this new stuff that they pontificate
may be called teaching, offers us God the Spirit but, as it seems
to me to-night, denies us God the Father and God the Son. It may
be--reasonable. But things spiritual demand for their recognition
emotions spiritual, and there's a pass that thousands reach when
the spirit is a dead thing. If they are to believe in God only as
a Spirit, a Force, a Power; an Essence to be felt but not seen; an
Element to be absorbed into but not to be visualised--if this, if
these, there needs in them some spirit, some force, some power of
themselves to lift themselves to meet it. They must be of themselves
responsive as hath the sea within itself that which respondeth to
the sublimation of the sun. Well, there are thousands (am I not
one?) that have it not. It once was theirs. Now it is not theirs.
If there is for them only God the Spirit then is there for them
only that to which they have no more power to reach than has one
bedridden power to rise and find a mile away what may restore him.
They have only that, their breaking heart, which would cast itself,
ah, with what bliss of utter abandonment, before God the Father,
a human and a personal Father, quick to succor, and before God the
Son, a human and a personal Son, ardent to intercede. And that is
denied them. That God that existed and that was taught to exist
for my mother and for her day to this day may not exist. It may
be--reasonable. Oh, it is offering a stone where bread was sought."

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