This Freedom Part 33

She said, "That came out of me. I didn't know I was going to say it. It's a warning. It shows the fear I have."

"Rosalie, of what, of what?"

"Harry, for you."

"You're going to say something you think will hurt me?"

"No, something you'll have to fight--if you want to fight it. Harry, perhaps I can't go on like this. I want to go back to my work."

He expired a breath he had been holding. "I was guessing it."

"Before just now?"

"No, while you've been speaking. Only now. I asked you weeks ago if you ever felt you regretted--"

She leant forward from the couch whereon she sat, and with an extended hand interrupted him. She said intensely, "Look here, Harry, if it was just regret I'd not mind and I would tell you No a hundred times, just not to disturb you, dear. But when you asked me that you spoke, a minute afterwards, of my having--chucked it, as if it was giving up sugar or stopping bridge. Well, that's why I'm warning you to look out for yourself. Because, Harry, I don't regret it. I'm craving to go back to it, craving, craving, craving!"

She stopped. She said, "Do you want me not to go back, Harry?"

He looked steadily at her. "Rosalie, it would be a blow to me."

She said, "Well, then!" and she leaned back in the couch as though all now was explained.

He very gravely asked her, "Are you going back, Rosalie?"

"Would it be a crime, Harry, to go back?"

He said to her, "I believe in my soul it would be a disaster."

She got up. "Come over here to me, Harry."

He went to her and took the hands that she extended to him. "If you think that, a disaster, and if to you it would be what you said, a blow; then that's what I mean by saying, Harry, you look out for yourself. I don't know if I'm going back. I want to go terribly, oh, terribly. There was a woman I once knew told me that if a woman once gives herself to a thing, abandons all else and gives herself to it, she never never can come back from it. 'They don't issue return tickets to women,' she said to me. 'If you give yourself,'

she said, 'you're its. You may think you can get away but you never will get away. You're its.' She was right, Harry. I believe I've got to go back. If you don't want me to, well, you look out for yourself." She drew herself towards him by her hands. "Harry, when I went down to Field's with the children that day last holidays I took them to be a bodyguard to me, to prevent me from being captured.

When they left me there alone for a few minutes, I turned away and wrung my hands because I knew I was going to be terribly tempted.

I am terribly tempted. I'm being dragged." She went into his arms.

"Harry, hold me terribly tight and say you don't want me to go back."

He most tenderly embraced her. "Don't go back, Rosalie."

She disengaged herself, and made a sound, "Ah!" as if, while he had held her body, herself had held the fort of her solicitude for his desires against the horde of her own cravings that swarmed about its walls.

How long?

There was a mirage in her face. While Easter came and Doda, in huge spirits, made her start at school, and Huggo, boisterously elated, his start at Tidborough, and Benji, much dejected at Doda's going, his start at Huggo's former day school; and while the long summer term and the holidays pa.s.sed on, there was never again seen nor heard by Harry the tenderness that had been in her face and in her voice when she had warned him, "Well, Harry, you look out for yourself," and when she had asked him, "Harry, hold me terribly tight in your arms and say you do not want me to go back." There thenceforward did fill up her countenance the boy, mutinous and defiant, that was her other self. It was almost upon the morrow of that pa.s.sage with him (whose poignancy the written word has failed to show) that she had a revulsion from the att.i.tude she had then exposed to him. Avid now to go back to the life she had abandoned, she was ferocious to herself when she remembered she had asked him, "Would it be a crime, Harry, to go back?" A crime! "Horrible traitor to myself that I was" (her thoughts would go) "to question it a crime just to take up my life again! A crime! Horrible fool that I was to be able, with no sense of humour, to give to so natural a desire an epithet so ludicrous as crime! A crime! A right, a right!"

Worst of all, she had invited, she had implored, Harry when her longings were manifest to reason with her. Her longings now always were manifest; but when he reasoned with her it was out of the scorpions of her revulsion that she answered him.

He once said, "It appears to me that your att.i.tude is changed from the night you first mentioned this."

She said, "Harry, what's disturbing me when we talk about it is not my own case, it's the general case. Here's a woman--never mind that it's me--here's a woman that has made a success in life, that has abandoned it and that wants to go back to it. You argue she mustn't. I could say it's monstrous. I don't say that. I choose to say it's pitiful. If it was a man, he'd go. He wouldn't think twice about it. And if he did think twice about it, every opinion and every custom that he consulted would tell him he was right to go. It happens to be a woman, therefore--well, that's the reason!

It's a woman--therefore, No. That's the beginning of the reason and the end of the reason. A woman--therefore, No. Oh, it's pitiful--for women."

Harry questioned: "Every opinion and every custom would tell a man to go? No, no. You're taking too much for granted, Rosalie. He wouldn't go, necessarily, and he wouldn't be advised to go, if he had duties that pulled him the other way."

She gave a note of amus.e.m.e.nt. "But that's the point. He never would have such duties. It's notable that a man always makes his duties and his ambitions go hand in hand. Yes, it's notable, that."

"Well, put it another way. Suppose it wasn't necessary for him to go.... Suppose nothing depended on his going, much on his staying.

That makes the parallel, Rosalie."

She said to him, "Ah, I'll agree to that. Let that make the parallel.

They'd tell a man in such a case, 'Man, take up your ambitions.

You are a man. You have yourself to think of.' That's what they'd say. Well, that's what I'm saying. 'I am a woman. I have myself to think of.'"

He asked, "And shall you, Rosalie?"

She said, "I'm thinking--every day."

The more she thought, the more she stiffened. This was the thought against whose goad she always came--Why should she be hesitant?

What a position! What a light upon the case and upon the status of woman that, just because she was a woman, she must not consider her own, her personal interests! For no other reason; just that; because she was a woman!

"I've shut a gate behind me," she on another day said to Harry.

"That's what I've done. I've come out of a place and shut the gate behind me and because I am a woman I mustn't open it and go back.

That's what a woman's life is--always shutting gates behind her.

There aren't gates for a man. There're just turnstiles. As he came out so he can always go back--even to his youth. When he's fifty he still can go back and have the society of twenty and play the fool as he did at twenty. Can a woman?"

"That's physical," said Harry. "A man much longer keeps his youth."

She said then the first aggressively bitter thing he ever had heard her say. "Ah, keeps his youth!" she said. "So does a dog that's run free. It's the chain and kennel sort that age."

She hardened her heart.

She looked back upon the days when she had discovered for herself the difference between sentiment and sense, between sentimentality and sensibility. She then had made her life, and therefore then her happiness, by putting away sentiment and using sense for spectacles.

She told herself she now was ruining her life, and certainly letting go her happiness, by suffering herself to bear the sentimental handicap.

The summer holidays came. It had been her obvious argument to Harry that, now the elder children were at school, and Benji soon to be the same, that reason for her constant presence in the home no longer was advanceable. It had been Harry's argument to her that there were the holidays to remember. The holidays came. Huggo wrote that he wanted to go straight from school to a topping time in Scotland to which he had been invited by a chum; when that was over he had promised, and he was sure he would be allowed, to have the last three weeks with another friend whose people had a ripping place in Yorks.h.i.+re. Doda came home and Doda's first excitement was that nothing arranged might interfere with an invitation from mid-August to a schoolfellow whose family were going to Brittany.

So much for her holiday necessity! Rosalie thought. So much for Harry's idea of how the children would naturally long to spend the vacation all together! Doda did not seem to have a thought for Huggo, nor Huggo a thought for when he should see Doda. Neither of them, she could not help noticing, had the faintest concern to be with Benji. She and Harry with Benji went down to a furnished house in Devons.h.i.+re, and the other two, their plans in part curtailed, were brought to join them. It was jolly enough. It would have been more truly jolly, she used to think, if Doda had not largely divided her time between writing to apparently innumerable school friends and counting the days to when she might be released for the Brittany expedition; and if Huggo had not for the first few days openly sulked at the veto on the Yorks.h.i.+re invitation. How independent they were, how absorbed in their friends, how--different!

She hardened her heart.

The reopening of the schools drew on and return was made to London.

Huggo and Doda were made ready for school and returned to school.

The Law Courts reopened and Harry took up again his work. October!

You could not take up a paper without reading of the inauguration of the new Sessions at all the universities and seats of education.

October! The newspapers that for months had been padding out vapid nothings became intense with the activities of a nation back to the collar. October! The first brisk breath of winter in the air!

She could not stand this! Could not, could not!

She said suddenly one evening: "Harry, I was down at Field's to-day.

They want me."