This Freedom Part 29

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 b.u.t.ton, 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, brus.h.i.+ng aside a knife offered by the a.s.sistant 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 a.n.a.lysed 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."