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This Freedom

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




It was "a bit in the wilds" (of Suffolk); "a bit of a tight
fit" (L200 a year) and a bit or two or three other drawbacks; but
it was thousands of miles from Devonshire and from the school and
schooling, that was the great thing; and it was a jolly big rectory
with a ripping big garden; and above all and beyond everything it
was just going to be a jumping-off place while he looked around for
something suitable to his talents and while he got in touch again
with his old friends of the brilliant years.

It was just going to be a jumping-off place, but he never jumped off
from it; a place from which to look around for something suitable,
but instead he sunk in it up to his chin; a place from which to
get in touch again with his friends of the brilliant years, but
his friends were all doing brilliant things and much too busy at
their brilliance to open up with one who had missed fire.

The parish of St. Mary's, Ibbotsfield, had an enormous rectory,
falling to pieces; an enormous church, crumbling away; an enormous
area, purely agricultural; and a cure of a very few hundred
agricultural souls, enormously-scattered. Years and years before,
prior to railways, prior to mechanical reapers and thrashers, and
prior to everything that took men to cities or whirled them and
their produce farther in an hour than they ever could have gone in
a week, Ibbotsfield and its surrounding villages and hamlets were
a reproach to the moral conditions of the day in that they had no
sufficiently enormous church. Well-intentioned persons removed this
reproach, adding in their zeal an enormous rectory; and the time
they chose for their beneficent and lavish action was precisely
the time when Ibbotsfield, through its principal land-owners, was
stoutly rejecting the monstrous idea of encouraging a stinking,
roaring, dangerous railway in their direction, and combining together
by all means in their power to keep the roaring, dangerous atrocity
as far away from them as possible.

It thus, and by like influences, happened that, whereas
one generation of the devoutly intentioned sat stolidly under the
reproach of an enormous and thickly populated area without a church,
later generations with the same stolidity sat under the reproach
of an enormous church, an enormous rectory and an infinitesimal
stipend, in an area which a man might walk all day without meeting
any other man.

But the devout of the day, not having to live in this rectory or
preach in this church or laboriously trudge about this area, did
not unduly worry themselves with this reproach.

That was (in his turn) the lookout of the Rev. Harold Aubyn--also
his outlook.

He is to be imagined, in those days when Rosalie first came to know
him and to think of him as Prospero, as a terribly lonely man. He
stalked fatiguingly about the countryside in search of his parishioners,
and his parishioners were suspicious of him and disliked his fierce,
thrusting nose, and he returned from them embittered with them and
hating them. He genuinely longed to be friendly with them and on
terms of Hail, fellow, well met, with them; but they exasperated him
because they could not meet him either on his own quick intellectual
level or upon his own quick and very sensitive emotional level.
They could not respond to his humour and they could not respond,
in the way he thought they ought to respond, to his sympathy.

He once found a man--a farm labourer--who in conversation disclosed
a surprising interest in the traces of early and mediaeval habitation
of the country. The discovery delighted him. In the catalogue of
a secondhand bookseller of Ipswich he noticed the "Excursions in
the County of Suffolk," two volumes for three shillings, and he
wrote and had them posted to the man. For days he eagerly looked
in the post for the grateful and delighted letter that in similar
circumstances he himself would have written. He composed in his mind
the phrases of the letter and warmed in spirit over anticipation
of reading them. No letter arrived.

When he came into the rectory from visiting he was always asking,
"Has that man Bolas from Hailsham called?" Bolas never called. He
furiously began to loathe Bolas. He was furious with himself for
having "lowered himself" to Bolas. Bolas in his ignorance no doubt
thought the books were a cheap charity of cast-off lumber. Uncouth
clod! Stupid clod! Uncouth parish! Hateful, loathsome parish!
For weeks he kept away from Hailsham and the possible vicinity of
Bolas. One day he met him. Bolas passed with no more than a "Good
day, Mr. Aubyn." He could have killed the man. He swung round and
pushed his dark face and jutty nose into the face of Bolas. "Did
you ever get some books I sent you?"

"Ou, ay, to be sure, they books----"

He rushed with savage strides away from the man. All the way home
he savagely said to himself, aloud, keeping time to it with his
feet, "Uncouth clod, ill-mannered clod, horrible, hateful place!
Uncouth clods, hateful clods, horrible, hateful place!"

That was his attitude to his parishioners. They could not come up
to the level of his sensibilities; he could not get down to the
level of theirs.

With the few gentle families that composed the society of Ibbotsfield
he was little better accommodated. They led contented, well-ordered
lives, busy about their gardens, busy about their duties, busy
about their amusements. His life was ill-ordered and he was never
busy about anything: he was always either neglecting what had to
be done or doing it, late, with a ferocious and exhausting energy
that caused him to groan over it and detest it while he did it.
In the general level of his life he was below the standard of his
neighbours and knew that he was below it; in the sudden bounds and
flights of his intellect and of his imagination he was immeasurably
above the intel-lects of his neighbours and knew that he was
immeasurably above them. Therefore, and in both moods, he commonly
hated and despised them. "Fools, fools! Unread, pompous, petty!"

At the rectory, among his family, he seemed to himself to be
surrounded by incompetent women and herds of children.

He was a terribly lonely man when Rosalie first came to know him
and thought of him as Prospero. He is to be imagined in those days
as a fierce, flying, futile figure scudding about on the face of
the parish and in the vast gaunt spaces of the rectory, with his
burning face and his jutting nose, trying to get away from people,
hungering to meet sympathetic people; trying to get way from
himself, hungering after the things that his self had lost. In his
young manhood he was known for moods of intense reserve alternated
by fits of tremendous gaiety and boisterous high spirits. ("A
fresh start! Hurrah!" when release from the school came. "What does
anything matter? Now we're really off at last! Hurrah! Hurrah!")
In his set manhood, when Rosalie knew him, there were substituted
for the fits of boisterous spirits, paroxysms of violent outburst
against his lot. "Infernal parish! Hateful parish! Forsaken parish!"
after the ignominy of flight before the bull. "Blow the dinner!
Dash the dinner! Blow the dinner!" after wrestling a soggy steak
from his pocket and hurling it half a mile through the air. These
and that single but terrible occasion of "Cambridge! Cambridge! My
youth! My God, my God, my youth!"

A terribly lonely man.






CHAPTER III





The Aubyn family occupied only a portion of the enormous rectory.
There was a whole floor upstairs, and there were several rooms on
the ground and first floors, that were never used, were unfurnished
except for odds and ends of lumber left behind by the previous
vicar, and were never entered. Rosalie once explored them all,
systematically though very fearfully, and also very excitedly. She
was searching for some one, for two people.

In the household she knew her father and her mother, her brothers
and sisters and the servants; but there were two mysterious
inhabitants of whom she often heard but whom she never saw and
never could find. It used to frighten her sometimes, lying awake at
night, or creeping about the house of an evening, to think of those
two mysterious people hidden away somewhere and perhaps likely to
pounce on her out of the dark. What did they eat? Where did they
live? What did they do? What were they?

One of these two eerie and invisible people was heard of from
her father. Several times Rosalie had heard him, when talking to
persons not of the family, speak of "my wife." The other eerie and
invisible creature was heard of from her mother: "My husband."

Where were they? Of all the mysterious things which Rosalie used to
wonder over in those days, this undiscoverable "wife" and "husband"
were the most mysterious of all, and more mysterious than ever after
that day on which, walking on tiptoe for fear of coming upon them
suddenly, holding her breath and pausing in fearful apprehension
before entering the untenanted rooms upstairs, she explored the
whole house in search of them. She got to know all sorts of little
odds and ends about them; that the wife felt the cold very much,
for instance, for she had heard her father say so; and that the
husband did not like mutton, for her mother told that to Mr. Grant
the butcher: and she was often hot on their tracks for she had heard
her father say, "My wife is upstairs" and had rushed upstairs and
searched; and her mother say, "My husband is in the garden," and had
run into the garden and hunted. But all these clues only deepened
the mystery. They were never to be found.

It was mysterious.

Then one day the wife (she heard) fell ill, and through her great
concern about that--for she was profoundly interested in these
people and used to feel awfully sorry for them, hidden away like
that perhaps with no fire and nothing to eat but mutton--the mystery
was explained.

With the family she was going towards church one Sunday morning and
she heard her father tell a lady that "my wife" was not very well
that morning and couldn't come. Rosalie during the service prayed
very earnestly for the wife's recovery and took the opportunity of
praying also that she might be permitted to see the wife "if she
is not very frightening, O Lord, and the husband too, if possible,
for Jesus Christ's sake, amen."

And at lunch, having thought of nothing else all the morning, there
was suddenly shot out of her the question, "Father, is your wife
any better now?"

Rosalie commonly never spoke at all at meals; and as to speaking
to her father, though it is obvious she must have had some sort
of intercourse with him, this famous question (a standing joke in
the house for years) was the single direct speech of those early
years she ever could remember. She spoke to her father when she
was bidden to speak in the form of messages, generally about meals
being ready, or relative to shopping commissions he had been asked
to execute; but he was far too wonderful, powerful and mysterious
for conversation with him on her own initiative. "Father, is your
wife any better now?" stood out in her later recollection, alone
and lonelily startling.

There was from all the company an astounded stare and astounded
gasp; all the table sitting with astounded eyes, forks suspended
in mid-air, mouths half open in astonishment, and Rosalie sitting
in her high chair wonderingly regarding their wonderment. What were
they staring at?

There was then an enormous howl of laughter, led by Rosalie's
father, and repeated, and louder than before, because it was so
very unusual for the family to be laughing in accord with father.
Gertrude, the maid, fled hysterically from the room and laughter
howled back from the kitchen.

Rosalie's father said, "You'd better go and ask your mother." Her
mother had stayed in bed that day with a chill.

Robert "undid" Rosalie--a wooden rod with a fixed knob at one
end went through the arms of her high chair and was fastened by a
removable knob at the other end--and Rosalie slid down very gravely,
and with their laughter still echoing trod upstairs to her mother's
bedside and related what she had been told to ask, and, on inquiry,
why she had asked it. "I only said 'Father, is your wife any better
now?'" and on further inquiry explained her long searching after
the undiscoverable pair.

Rosalie's mother laughed also then, but had a sudden wetness in her
eyes. She put her arms about Rosalie and pressed her to her bosom
and cried, "Oh, my poor darling!" and explained the tremendous
mystery. Wife and husband, Rosalie's mother explained, were the
names used by other people for her father and her mother. A man
and a woman loved one another very, very dearly ("as I loved your
dear father") and then they lived together in a dear house of their
own and then God gave them dear little children of their own to
live with them, said Rosalie's mother.

This thoroughly satisfied Rosalie and completely entranced her,
especially about the presentation of the dear little children. She
would have supposed that naturally it thoroughly satisfied Anna and
Harold and Flora and the others; and the point of interest rests
here, that Rosalie's mother also believed that this explanation
of marriage and procreation completely satisfied Anna at sixteen
and Harold in the Bank at eighteen. She never gave them any other
explanation of the phenomenon of birth; and it is to be supposed
that, just as she instructed them that God sent the dear little
children, so she believed that God, at the right time, in some
mysterious way, communicated the matter to them in greater detail.
Years and years afterwards, Flora told Rosalie that when Rosalie
was born all the children were sent away to stay with a neighbour
and not allowed to return till Rosalie's mother, downstairs, was
able to show them the dear little sister that God had surprisingly
delivered at the house, as it were in a parcel.

One is given pain by a state of affairs so monstrous; but one suffers
that pain proudly because one belongs, proudly, to a day in which
nothing but stark truth may go from mother to child, not even fairy
stories, not even Bible stories. Rosalie's mother is gone and her
kind is no more, and in the graces and the manners of this day's
generation one perceives, proudly, the inestimable benefits of
the passing of her kind. Lamentable specimen of her kind, she had
no interests other than her home and her husband and her children
and the pleasures and the treasures and the friends of her husband
and her children. She belonged to that dark age when duty towards
others was the guiding principle of moral life; she came only to
the threshold of this enlightened age in which duty to oneself is
known to be the paramount and first and last consideration of life
as it should be lived.

Rosalie's mother, whose name had been Anna Escott, kept at the
bottom of a drawer five most exquisite little miniatures. They were
in a case of faded blue plush, and they had been in that case and
at the bottom of one drawer or another ever since the girl Anna
Escott, aged twenty, had placed them in the case, then exquisitely
blue and new and soft, and given up painting miniatures forever, in
order to devote her whole time to looking after her invalid father
and the failing preparatory school that was his livelihood.

Rosalie was herself nearly thirty when she first saw the miniatures. She
was come back to the rectory from the pursuits that then occupied
her to visit, rather impatiently and rather vexedly, her mother
on what proved to be her death bed. She was tidying her mother's
drawers, impatient with the amazing collection of rubbish they
contained and hating herself for being impatient, while her mother,
on the bed, patiently watched her; and she came upon the case and
opened it and stared in astonishment and admiration at the beauty
of the five miniatures.

She asked her mother and her mother told her she had painted them.
"I used to do that when I was a girl," said Rosalie's mother.

All Rosalie's impatience was drowned and utterly engulfed in a
most dreadful flood of emotion. She set down the case on the bed
and flung herself on her knees beside her mother and clasped her
arms about her.

"Oh, mother, mother! Oh, beloved little mother!" But that is out
of its place.

Yes, that girl Anna Escott, who had an exquisite talent, and all
sorts of fond dreams of its development, gave it up wholly and
entirely and forever when her mother died and her father said, "I
would like you, Anna dear, to give up your painting and come and
look after me and the school now."

Anna said, "Of course I will, Papa. It's my duty. Of course I will."

Girls did that, and parents and husbands asked them to do that, in
the days when Rosalie's mother was a girl.

Rosalie's mother gave away everything, first to her father, then
to her husband, then to her children. She believed the whole of the
Bible, literally, as it is written, from the first word of Genesis
to the last word of Revelations. She taught it as literal, final
and initial truth to all her children, and one knows how wickedly
wrong it is now considered to teach children that the Bible-stories
are true. She taught them the whole of the Bible from books called
"Line Upon Line," and "The Child's Bible," and in stories of her
own making, and from the Bible itself. Regrettably, the ignorantly
imposed-upon children loved it! Till each child was eight she
taught them everything at her knee. All the nursery rhymes, and
all the Bible, and reading out of "Step by Step," and then "Reading
Without Tears," and then, in advancing series, the "Royal Readers,"
and writing, first holding their hands, and then--first in pencil
and afterwards with pens having three huge blobs to teach you how
to place your fingers properly--in copybooks graded from enormous
lines which had brick-red covers to astoundingly narrow little lines
enclosing pious and moral maxims which had severe grey covers; and
the multiplication tables and then simple arithmetic; and General
Knowledge out of "The Child's Guide to Knowledge," which asked
you "What is sago?" and required you to reply by heart, "Sago is
a dried, granulated substance prepared from the pith of several
different palms." "Where are these palms found?" "These palms are
found in the East Indies."

Likewise history out of Mrs. Markham and "Little Arthur"; also,
at a ridiculously early age, how to tell the time and how to know
the coinage of the realm and its values; also, whether girl or boy,
the making of kettle-holders by threading brightly coloured wools
through little squares of canvas; also very many pieces of poetry:
"Oft had I heard of Lucy Grey," and "It was the Schooner Hesperus"
and hymns--also learnt by heart and sung while Rosalie's mother
played the piano--"We are but little children weak," and "Gentle
Jesus, meek and mild."

All these things were taught at her knee to each child in turn by
Rosalie's mother, and each was taught out of the self-same books,
miraculously preserved by Rosalie's mother; the backs of most of
them carefully stitched and re-stitched, and marked all through
by the dates of each child's daily lesson, written in pencil by
Rosalie's mother. The dates ranged from 1869 when Harold was being
taught and when the books were fresh and clean, and Rosalie's
mother fresh and ardent with her first-born, to 1884, when Rosalie
was being taught, and the books very old and thumbed and most
terribly crowded with pencil marks, and Rosalie's mother no longer
fresh but rather worn, but teaching as fondly and earnestly as
ever, because it was her duty. Literally at the knee of Rosalie's
mother these things were taught. On her knee with one of her arms
about you for the Bible teaching; and standing at her knee, hands
behind you, for the teaching of most of the rest. Yes, that was
the early education, and the manner of the education, of Rosalie
and of her brothers and sisters, and one perceives with indignation
the spectacle of a mother wasting her time like that and wasting
her children's time like that.

Rosalie's mother did everything in the house and she was always
doing something in the house--for somebody else. She never rested
and she was always worried. Her brows were always wrinkled with
the feverish concentration of one anxiously doing one thing while
anxiously thinking of another thing waiting to be done. She had a
driven and a hunted look.

Now Rosalie's father had a driving and a hunting look.

Rosalie's father in his youth threw away everything. Rosalie's mother
throughout the whole of her life gave away everything. Rosalie's
father was a tragic figure dwelling in a house of bondage; but he
was at least a tragic king, ruling his house and venting his griefs
upon his house. Rosalie's mother was a tragic figure and she was a
tragic slave in the house of bondage. The life of Rosalie's father
was a tragedy, but a tragedy in some measure relieved because he
knew it was a tragedy and could wave his arms and shout and smash
things and hurl beefsteaks through the air because of the tragedy
of it. But the life of Rosalie's mother was an infinitely deeper
tragedy because she never knew or suspected that it was a tragedy.

Still, that is so often the difference between the tragedy of a
woman and the tragedy of a man.






CHAPTER IV





The very great difference between her father and her mother
maintained in Rosalie that early perception of the wondrousness of
her father. She loved her mother, but in the atmosphere surrounding
her mother there was often flurry and worry and there was nothing
whatever in her mother to mystify and entrance by sudden and violent
eruptions of the miraculous. She did not love her father for he
was entirely too remote and awe-ful for love, but he entranced her
with his marvellousness. This maintained in her also her perception
of the altogether greater superiority of all males over all females.

Rosalie came into her family rather like a new little girl first
entering a boarding school. When she was about four, and first
beginning to realise herself, the next in age to her was Robert,
who not only was at the immense distance of ten, but was of the
male sex and therefore had a controlling interest in the world. Then
was Hilda who was twelve, then Flora fourteen, then Anna towering
away in sixteen, and then Harold utterly removed in the enormous
heights of eighteen, second only to Rosalie's father in ownership
of the world and often awfully disputing that supreme ownership.

So they were all immeasurably older than Rosalie; and they were
not only immeasurably older but, which counted for much more, they
all had their fixed and recognised places in their world just as
girls of several terms' experience have their recognised places in
their school, and for Rosalie there seemed to be no place at all,
just as for new girls there is no place. Her brothers and sisters
all had their fixed and recognised places, their interests, their
occupations, their friendships: they all knew their own places and
each other's places; they had learnt to respect and admit each
other's places; they knew the weight of one another's hand in
those places; they were accustomed to one another; they tolerated
one another.

It was all very strange and wonderful and mysterious to Rosalie.

She was, as it were, pitchforked into this established and regulated
order and to find a place for her was like trying to fit a new
spoke into a revolving wheel. It cannot be done; and with Rosalie
it could not be done. The established wheel went on revolving in
its established orbit and the new spoke, which was Rosalie, lay
outside and watched it revolve. Intrusions within the circumference
of the wheel commonly resulted in a sharp knock from one of the
spokes. No one was in any degree unkind to Rosalie, but there was
no proper place for her and everybody's will was in authority over
her will. She rather got in the way. To be with her was not to
enjoy her company or to enjoy battle with her and the putting of
her company to flight. To be with her was to have to look after
her, and in the community of the rectory, every member, when Rosalie
came, was fully occupied in look-ing after itself and defending
itself from the predatory excursions of any other member.

What happened was that in time, just as a slight and negligible
body cannot be in the sphere of a powerful motion without being
affected by it, so Rosalie began to move sympathetically to the
wheel but on her own axis. She moved round with the wheel but she
was not of the wheel and she never became really incorporated with
the wheel. The spokes were revolving with incredible rapidity when
she first, began to notice them and they always remained relatively
faster. There she was, sitting and watching and wondering; and the
twig grows as it is bent or as it is left to bend. She looked on
and absorbed things; and the first and by far the deepest of her
settled perceptions was that, though she was subject to all powers,
all girls and women were themselves subject to the power of all
boys and men.

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