This Freedom Part 31

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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d the Spirit but, as it seems to me to-night, denies us G.o.d the Father and G.o.d the Son. It may be--reasonable. But things spiritual demand for their recognition emotions spiritual, and there's a pa.s.s that thousands reach when the spirit is a dead thing. If they are to believe in G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d the Father, a human and a personal Father, quick to succor, and before G.o.d the Son, a human and a personal Son, ardent to intercede. And that is denied them. That G.o.d 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."

She also wrote:

"Oh, mother, if you could have been here, how you would have loved my darlings, and how you would have given them all that you gave to me! I will now, mother. Mother, I've come back home to them, in the blue frock, and in the pinafore with a hole in it."

That was the spirit in which she came back home to the children, that and all that went with it and that arose out of it. It was nothing at all to her when she did it, the frightful break with Field's. Harry was distressed for her, but there was no need at all for him to be distressed, she told him. There wasn't a sigh in her voice, nor in her inmost thoughts a sigh, when, telling him of the interview with Mr. Field and with Mr. Sturgiss at her resignation of her post, she said with a smile, "Carry on? Of course the department can perfectly well carry on. Dear, it's just the words I said to you a fortnight back on the matter so very different. 'The thing's organised. It runs itself. That is why it is the success it is, because it's organised. That's why I can come away and leave it, because I'm an organiser. Aren't I an organiser?"

He held her immensely long in his arms. "You are my Rosalie," he said.

Immensely long he held her, immensely close; oh, men that marry for a home! Until, come home, she saw Harry's tremendous happiness in the home that now she gave him, she never had realised the longing that must have been his for the home for which he had married, and never till now had had. It was poignant to her, the sight of his tremendous happiness. "Always to find you here!" he would cry, in the first weeks of the new life, coming home to tea and coming in to her in the drawing-room where she would be, all ready for him, with Doda and with Benji. "Always to leave you here!" he would say, taking leave of her in the morning, and she and Doda and Benji coming with him to the hall door to see him off. "Mice and Mumps,"

he used to add in codicil, "Mice and Mumps, I'm a happy chap!" and was for ever bringing home trifles for her and for the children, or plans and pa.s.ses for how and where the Sat.u.r.day and the weekend should be spent, all four together. "Mice and Mumps, I'm gorged with happiness! And you, Rosalie?"

"Oh, happy!" she used to say.

And was. It was poignant to her, his tremendous happiness, and it brimmed up the cup of her own happiness. She was doing virtuously and she had of her virtue that happiness which, as the pious old maxims tell us, comes of being good.

That should have been well; but virtue is a placid condition and the happiness arising out of it placid. It brims no cups, flushes no cheeks, sparkles no eyes. It is of the quality of happiness that one, loving a garden, has from his garden, the happiness of tranquillity, not of stir; of peace, not of thrills; of the country, not of the town. There was more heady stuff than this that Rosalie had out of her new condition, and that was dangerous. She was doing virtuously and she had out of her virtue an intoxication of joy that, in so far as it is at all concerned with virtue, arises, not from virtue's self, but from the consciousness of virtue. That was dangerous. The danger point in stimulants is when they are resorted to, not as concomitant of the pleasures of the table, but be-cause they stimulate. Rosalie, come to her children and her Harry and her home, to the thought of her renunciation and of her happiness constantly was turning for the enormous exhilaration of happiness that there she found. "How glad I am I gave it up! How glad! How glad! How right I'm doing now! How right! How right! How happy I am in this happiness! How happy! How happy!"

Is it not perceived that thus it was not well a.s.sured, this great joy that she had, this cup of hers that brimmed? She started from that danger point at which the drug is drunk for stimulant. On the very first day of her new life she was saying, "How glad I am! How glad I am!" and going on radiant from her gladness. But she, in her resort to this her stimulant, suffered this grave disparity with the drinker's case: he must increase his doses--and he can. She, living upon her stimulant, equally was compelled--but could not.

The renunciation that brimmed her happiness on the first day was available to her in no bigger dose on the succeeding days, the hundredth day and the three hundredth and the five hundredth. It never could increase. It had no capacity of increase. Is it not perceivable that it had, on the contrary, a staling quality?

It would have been all right if it had been all right. It would have been all right if it had not been all wrong. If these absurd premises can be understood, her case can be understood. She used them herself in after years. "It would have been all right," she used to say to herself, twisting her hands together, "if it had been all right." "It would have been all right," she used to say to herself, "if it had not been all wrong." What she meant, and what here is meant, requires it to be recalled that it was in that spirit of that glimpse of herself back a child again in the blue frock and in the pinafore with a hole in it that she came back to the children, came back home to them. Shocked by the thing that had come to pa.s.s, penitential by influence of the old childhood influences that had stirred within her, most strangely and most strongly transported back into that childhood vision of herself, it was in the guise of that child and with that child's guise as her ideal for them that pa.s.sionately she desired to take up her children's lives. Her Huggo, her man child, her first one! Her Doda, her self's own self, her woman-bud, her daughter! Her Benji, her littlest one, her darling! She longed, as it were, to throw open the door, and in that blue frock and in the spirit of that blue frock most ardently to run in to them and hug them, blue frocked, to her breast, and be one with them and tell them the things and the things and the things that were the blue frock's mysteries and joys, and hear from them the things and the things and the things that were the blue frock's all-enchanted world again.

That was what most terribly she wanted and with most br.i.m.m.i.n.g gladness set about to do--and there was borne, in upon her, hinted in weeks, published in months, in seasons sealed and delivered to her, that there was among her children no place for that spirit.

They did not welcome the blue frock; they did not understand the blue frock; they were not children as she had been a child. It was what Harry had said of them, they somehow were not quite like other children; it was what she herself had noticed in Huggo; they did not respond. They'd gone, those children, too long as they'd been left to go. She came to them ardently. They greeted her--not very responsively. They didn't understand.

What happened was that, coming to them great with intention, she was, by what she did not find in them, much dispirited in her intention. What followed from that was that she turned the more frequently to the stimulation of the thought of her renunciation, to the sensation of happiness that arose in her by consciousness that she was doing what she ought to be doing. She would be puzzled, she would be a little pained, she would be a little tired at the effort, fruitless, to call up in the children those lovely childish things that as a child had been hers. She then would feel dispirited.

She then would think, "But how glad I am that I gave it all up; but how right I am to be at home with them; but how happy I am that I am now doing that which is right." That stimulated her. That made her tell herself (as before she had told Harry) that it was just fancy, this apparent difference, this indifference, in the children.

But the more she found necessary that stimulus, the less that stimulus availed; and she began to feel, then, the first faint gnawings after that which had been stimulus indeed, her work, her career.

Of course this is making a case for her, this is special pleading for her, but who so abandoned that in the ultimate judgment a case will not for him be prepared? Try to consider how it went with her. First intoxication of happiness; and must not intoxication in time wear off? Then immense intention and then dispirited in her intention. Then frequent resource to the stimulus of her realisation of virtue and then the natural diminution of that cup's effect. Is she not presented prey for her life's habit's longings? Is she not shown dejected and caused by that dejection (as caused by depression the reclaimed victim of a drug) to desire again that which had been to her the breath of life?

That was how it went with her.

Doda was nine when she began; Huggo, when he was home for his holidays, eleven, rising twelve; Benji only seven. They seemed to her, all of them, wonderfully old for their years and, no getting over that, different. She tried to read them the stories she used to love. They didn't like them. Doda didn't like "The Wide Wide World" and didn't like "Little Women." Huggo thought "The Swiss Family Robinson" awful rot, and argued learnedly with her how grotesque it was to imagine all that variety of animals and all that variety of plants in one same climate. "But, Huggo, you needn't worry whether it was possible. It was just written as a means of telling a family of children natural history things. They didn't have to believe it. They only enjoyed it. I and your uncle Robert never worried about whether it was possible; we simply loved the adventure of it."

"Well, I can't, mother," said Huggo. "It's not possible, and if it isn't possible, I think it's stupid."

And Doda thought Ellen in the "Wide Wide World" silly, and Beth and Jo and the others in "Little Women" dull.

She read them d.i.c.kens, but it was always, "Oh, leave out that part, mother. It's dull." And so was Scott Lamb's "Tales from Shakespeare"

never had a chance at all. They had heard from Miss Prescott, or Huggo had heard at school, that Shakespeare was a lesson. "Oh, not a thing out of lessons, mother." What they liked were what seemed to Rosalie the crudely written stories, and the grotesque and usually rather vulgar comic drawings, in the host of cheap periodicals for children that seemed to have sprung up since her day. They called these exciting or funny and they revelled in them. They were different.

Benji was no more than a baby, but he was extraordinarily devoted to Doda, liked only the things that Doda liked, and did not like the things that Doda didn't like, or, in the language sometimes a little unpleasantly emphatic that always was Doda's and Huggo's, that Doda "simply loathed." Rosalie had some old bound numbers of treasured juvenile periodicals of the rectory days. Even Benji didn't like them. They were markedly different from the books the children did like. Their ill.u.s.trations were mainly of children in domestic scenes. "Don't they look stupid?" was Doda's comment; and Benji, copying, thought they were stupid too.

All this was a very small thing and of itself negligible; even, as Rosalie told herself, natural--naturally children of succeeding generations changed in their tastes. It only is introduced as conveniently showing in an obscure aspect what was noticeable to Rosalie, and felt by her, in many aspects, whose effect was c.u.mulative. "A kind of reserve," Harry had said of them: "a kind of--self-contained." It was what she found. She wanted to be a child with the children; they didn't seem to understand. She wanted to open her heart to them and have their hearts opened to her; they didn't seem to understand. She was always seeing that vision of Rosalie in the blue frock among them, rather like Alice, the real Alice, Tenniel's Alice. She was always feeling that Rosalie, thus guised, was held off from their circle, not welcomed, not understood, as certainly they did not care for the demure, quaint Alice of Tenniel.

She began to have sometimes when she was with the children an extraordinary feeling (just what Harry had said) that she was younger than the children, that it was she who was the child, they that were the grown-ups.

When the step of her renunciation was first taken, ardent to devote herself to them in every moment of the day, she began to give their lessons to Doda and to Benji. It was not a success. The methods of teaching, as the text-books, had changed since she was a child.

The Prescott methods were here and to her own methods the children did not respond. There it was again--did not respond. There was obtained a Miss Dormer who came in daily and who confined herself, Rosalie saw to that, solely to lessons; the walks and all the other hours of the day were Rosalie's.

That's all for that. The picture has been overdrawn if has been given the suggestion that Rosalie was unhappy with the children or the children openly indifferent to her. All of that nature that in fact arose was that, whereas Rosalie had expected an immense and absorbing occupation with the children, she found instead an occupation very loving and very happy but not relieving her of all the interest and all the affection she had desired to pour into it. It was rather like to a hungry person a strange dish that had looked substantial but that, when finished, was found not to have been substantial; still hungry. She had thought the children would have been entirely dependent on her. She found them in many ways independent and wis.h.i.+ng to be independent. It would have been all right if it had been all right. That was it. It would have been all right if it had not been all wrong. That was it.

She began to think of Field's.

When first she began to think of Field's, which was when she had been nine months away from Field's, she would let her mind run upon it freely, as it would. One day, thus thinking upon it, she brought up her thoughts as it were with a round turn. She must not think so much about Field's--not like that. She sighed, and with the same abruptness of mental action checked her sigh; she must not regret Field's--not like that.

It was a fateful prohibition. It was the discovery to herself, as to Eve of the tree by the serpent, of a temptation seductive and forbidden. Thereafter "like that" her mind, missing no day nor no night, was often found by her to be there. The quality that made "like that" not seemly to her, increased, at each return, its potency.

It became very difficult to drag her mind away. It became impossible to drag her mind away.

Her governance of her mind became infected and it became not necessary to think it necessary to drag her mind away.

She had not visited Field's since she had left. Mr. Sturgiss and Mr. Field had written to her reproaching her for carrying to such lengths of neglect her desertion of them, and she had responded banteringly but without a call. One day (she had lain much awake on the previous night) she at breakfast told Harry she had the idea of going that afternoon to see how Field's was getting on.

She was surprised at his supplement to his reply. The children had left the room. He first agreed with her that the idea was good.

"Yes, rather; why not?" was the expression he used. He then said, surprising her, "Rosalie, you've never, have you, regretted?"

Her surprise framed for her her reply. "Why ever should you ask that?"

"I've thought you've not been looking very well lately."

"But what's the connection, Harry?"

"Fretting?"

She smiled. "I'm not the fretting sort."

He was perfectly satisfied. "I knew you'd tell me if you were.

Everything going well?"

"Fine."

He shot out his arms with a luxurious stretching gesture. "Mice and Mumps, it's been fine for me, I can tell you. Fine, fine!"

How happy he looked! How handsome he looked! Her thought was "Dear Harry!"