The Green Bough Part 4

And here it was then that the thought leapt upon her like some ambushed thing, bearing her down beneath its weight; beating at her heart, lacerating her mind so that she knew she never in any time to come could hide from herself the scars it made.

"If she had suffered," Mary asked herself--"must she not also have known?" And then, shaking her with the terror of its blasphemy, there sprang upon her mind the words--

"Who was the father of the Son of Man?"

"In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost!" a voice intoned in a far distance and with all the others she rose automatically to her feet. Her eyes were glazed. She scarcely could see the Vicar as he descended from the pulpit. Her heart was thumping in her breast. She could hear only that.

X

They walked home in groups and in couples when the service was over.

Only f.a.n.n.y kept alone. A verse of poetry was building itself in her mind. One couplet already had formed a rounded phrase. It had been revolving in her thoughts all through the sermon. Round and about she had beaten it as with a pestle in a mortar until she had pounded it into shape.

"Were all the trees as green to you As they were green to me?"

It was not so much what rhymed with "you" or "me" that was troubling her as what more she could continue to make the full matter of her verse.

She could think of no more. The whole substance of life was summed up in those two lines to her. She walked alone that morning, cutting words to a measure that would not meet and had no meaning.

Mary walked with Jane. The sound of the voice and the laughter of others behind her in that sharp air was like the breaking of china falling upon a floor as hard as that beaten snow beneath their feet.

She was still in an amaze with the bewilderment of what she had thought.

Every long-trained sense in her was horrified at the knowledge of its blasphemy. She tried to believe she had never thought it. To induce that belief, she would have persuaded herself if she could that the Vicar had never preached his sermon, that it was not to church they had been, that it was all a dream, horrible and more vivid than life itself, but a dream.

For life was peaceful and sweet enough there in Bridnorth.

Notwithstanding the song the hoofs of the coach horses had always beaten out for her on the roads, she had been well content with it. Often doubtless the call of life had come to her there beyond the hill; it came with its cry of pain and joy, its voice of sorrow as well as happiness. But now, here amongst the peace and the sweetness, where none of these vital contrasts had ever existed, there had come something more terrible than pain, more cruel and relentless than sorrow.

In moments she was astonished at herself that she did not dismiss it all with one sweep of her mind, dismiss it all as lies and blasphemy, as machinations of the Devil himself. For what was the good just of telling herself it was a dream, of pretending to hide her thoughts from it as though it were not there? It was there! She had thought it and so had the thought come to her like a light suddenly in dark corners, that she knew it was true. Never now could she cast out its significance from the processes of her mind. In the desperate fear that the very foundations of her religious beliefs were shaken, she might b.u.t.tress her faith with the determined exclusion of all blasphemy in her thoughts. Never again might she allow her mind to dwell upon the origin of the manhood of that figure of Christ, still dearer to her than life itself. With persistent effort of will, she knew she could make blind her vision of that scene in the manger at Bethlehem which the Vicar in his ignorance and the pettiness of his apprehensions had conjured forth so clearly in her sight.

All this she might do, clinging to the faith in which she had been brought up; but never could she efface the change which in those few moments had been made in her. How could she know so soon what that change might be? She knew only it was there. She was a different being. Already she felt apart and aloof from her sisters. Even Jane, walking there beside her, appeared at a strange distance in which was a clearer light for her to see by, a crystal atmosphere through which she could distinguish nothing but the truth.

Suddenly as they walked together, these two in silence, Jane looked up and said--

"I wish some one would kill that bee in the Vicar's bonnet. As if there was the slightest chance of any of us becoming Roman Catholics!"

It was like Jane, that remark. Suddenly Mary knew how like it was. But more she knew in that moment the change had not come to her sisters.

They had not seen what she had seen. No vision such as hers had been vouchsafed to them. Still they were happy, contented, and at peace in their garden of Eden. It was she alone who had tasted of the fruit; she alone who now had knowledge of good and evil.

Already she felt the edge of the sword of the angel of G.o.d turned against her. The gates of that garden they lived in were opened. In the deep consciousness of her heart she felt she was being turned away.

How it would difference her life, where she should go now that she had been driven forth, what even the world outside those gates might be, she did not know.

All she realized was that for twenty-nine years a Mary Throgmorton had been living in Bridnorth, that now she had gone and another Mary Throgmorton had taken her place.

Looking down at Jane beside her when she spoke, she saw for the first time a sad figure of a woman, shrivelled and dried of heart, bitter and resentful of mind. No longer was she the Jane who, with her sharp tongue, had often made them laugh, who, with her shrewd criticisms had often shown them their little weaknesses and the pettiness of their thoughts. In place of her she saw a woman wilted and seared, a body parched with the need of the moisture of life; one who had been cut from the tree to wither and decay, one, the thought then sprang upon her, who had never found favor with G.o.d or man.

XI

They came loitering to the square, white house, pausing at the gate and talking to friends, lingering over the removal of their goloshes indoors. The crisp air was in their lungs. There was the scent of cooking faintly in the hall. It rose pleasantly in their nostrils.

They laughed and chatted like a nestful of starlings. Jane was more amusing than usual. Her comments upon the hat bought by the police sergeant's wife in Exeter and worn that Sunday morning for the first time were shrewd and close of observation; too close to be kind, yet so shrewd as to p.r.i.c.k even the soft heart of Hannah to laughter she would have restrained if she could.

Even f.a.n.n.y, with mind still beating out her meters, lost that far-off look in her eyes and lingered in the hall to listen to Jane's sallies, to every one of which Hannah would murmur between her laughter--

"Jane! Jane--how can you? Fancy your noticing that! Oh dear! we oughtn't to be laughing at all. Poor thing! She can't help her eye or her figure."

"If I were fat," said Jane, "I wouldn't go in stripes. You don't put hoops round a barrel to make it look thin."

Foolish though that might have sounded in London drawing-rooms, it found a burst of laughter in the square, white house.

On her knees above, upstairs in her bedroom, Mary heard the noise of it.

She could guess well the kind of remark from Jane that had evoked it.

Until those moments Jane had been a source of amus.e.m.e.nt to her as much as to any of them. She was a source of amus.e.m.e.nt no longer. Even there on her knees with the sound of their laughter far away in the distance of the house, it was that sad figure of a woman, shrivelled and dried, bitter with the need of sun to ripen her, that came before her eyes.

Then what were the others? With this new vision, she dreaded to think that she in time must look at them. What thoughts to have on one's knee! What thoughts to bring into the sight and mind of G.o.d!

She had come there alone to her bedroom to pray--but what for? How could prayer help? Could she by prayer make numb and dead the motion of her mind? By prayer could she silence her thoughts, inducing oblivion as a drug could induce sleep?

Hastening away alone to her bedroom, she had hoped she could. Even then she cherished the belief of all she had been taught of the efficacy of prayer. But having fallen upon her knees at her bedside, what could she pray? Nothing.

"Oh--G.o.d, my heavenly Father," she began, and staring before her with rigid eyes at the pillow on her bed it became a twisted bundle of straw on which for poor comfort rested the pale face of a woman patient and enduring in her hour.

How could prayer put away such visions as these? With conscious muscular effort she closed her eyes and began repeating in a voice her ears could hear--"Our Father which art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name."

So she would have decoyed herself into the att.i.tude of mind of prayer, but the sound of laughter in the house broke in upon the midst of it.

She saw that thin, withered woman in whom the sap of life had dried to pith, and, casting away the formula of supplication, her voice had cried out for understanding of it all.

"Something's all wrong!" she said aloud as though one were there in the room beside her to hear and oppose her accusations. "I don't know what it is. I've never thought it was wrong before. And perhaps after all it's I who am wrong."

She knew what she meant by that. Wrong she might insist it was for her to have thought what she thought in church. And yet some quality of deliberation seemed necessary to compose the substance of evil. What deliberation had there been in her? Out of the even and placid monotony of life had shrilled this voice into her heart.

"Who was the father of the Son of Man?"

She had not beckoned the voice. It had lifted out of nowhere above the soulless intonation of the Vicar's sermon. But what was more, now once she had heard it, it appeared as though it long had been waiting to cry its message in her ears. She wondered why she had never heard it before. For twenty-nine years she realized as she knelt there on her knees, she had been little more than a child. Now in the lateness of the day she was a woman, knowing more of the world than ever she would have learnt by experience.

The deeper purposes of life they were that had come without seeking upon her imagination. It was not this or that she knew about women, not this or that which had come in revelation to her about men. Only that there was a meaning within herself, pitiably and almost shamefully unfulfilled. Something there was wrong--all wrong. Half she suspected in herself what it was. For those few moments as they walked back from church, she had caught actual sight of it in her sister Jane.

Would she discern it in the others? Discovering it in them would she know what it was in her? Why was she on her knees for thoughts like this? This was not prayer. She could not pray.

The sound of the bell downstairs raised her slowly to her feet. She took off her hat and laid it on the bed. Automatically she crossed to the mirror and began to tidy her hair.

Was there anything in her face that made her heart beat the faster? She stood looking at her reflection, pondering that there was not. What beauty of color was there in her cheeks? What line of beauty in her lips? And why did she look for these things and why, when behind her eyes she saw something in her mind she dared not speak, did her heart set up a beating in every pulse?

With a gesture of impatient self-rebuke, she turned away and went downstairs.