This Freedom Part 34

Ever since, by that simile of hers of the dog chained and kenneled, she had put a bitter note into this matter between them, he had by this means or by that contributed no share to it when she had presented it. He once had referred to the dog incident. "I can't talk to you when you talk like that, old girl," he had said. "That's not us. We don't talk like that. You know how I feel about this matter. Talking only vexes it."

"Harry, I was down at Field's to-day. They want me." It was now to be faced.

He put down the paper he had been reading and began to fill his pipe. "This wants a smoke," he said and smiled at her; and he then told her that which the level quality of her voice, a note from end to end of purpose, had informed him. "I think we're getting to the end of this business," he said.

Her voice maintained its quality. "Yes, near the end, Harry."

"Field's want you. What are you going to do?"

"Going back."

"I want you."

"I'm not leaving you. I am with you, as I came to you!"

"The children want you."

"I am not leaving the children."

"It's a question of home, Rosalie. It's the home wants you."

She shook her head.

"What are you going to do?

"Going back."

"You've thought of everything?"

"Everything."

"The children?"

"Harry, the children don't want me in the way that children used to want their mothers when I was a child. They don't display the same affection, not in the same way, that we used to. I wish they did. I came back for it. It wasn't there. They're darlings, but they're self-reliant darlings, self-a.s.sured, self-interested."

"They've a right to a home, Rosalie." He paused. "And, Rosalie, I have a right to a home."

She said, "Have I no rights?"

"There are certain things--" he slowly said and paused again--"established."

She said quickly, "Yes, men think that. They always have. Well, I believe that nothing is."

He looked steadily before him. "If it's not established that woman's part is the home part; if that is going to change, I wonder what's going to happen to the world?"

She said, "Men always do. They always have--wondered, and the future always has changed right out of their wondering. I believe that the future is with woman. I believe that as empires have pa.s.sed, Rome, Greece, Carthage, that seemed to their rulers the pillars of the world, so will pa.s.s man's dominion. Woman's revolt--it's no use talking of it as that, as a revolt. Women aren't and never will be banded. They're like the Jews. They're everywhere but nowhere.

But the Jews have had their day; woman--not yet. They work, not banded, but in single spies. In every generation more single spies and more single spies. In time.... In every generation man's dominion, by like degree, decreased, decreased. In time.... I'm one of this day's single spies, Harry."

He said with a sudden animation, "Look here, let's take it on that level, Rosalie. In your case what's the need? Call it dominion.

I've never exercised nor thought to exercise dominion over you."

"But you've not understood, Harry. I gave up what was my life to me. To you I'd only--chucked it. Oh, but that hurt! That man's supreme indifference, that is dominion."

He said, "I'll know it, dearest, for your sacrifice."

She put out a hand as if to hold that word away. "Oh, trust not that. They talk of the enn.o.blement of sacrifice. Ah, do not believe it. It can go too long, too far, and then like wine too long matured... just acid, Harry. I never said a bitter thing to you until--thus sacrificing. It is the kennel dog again. If I went on I'd grow more bitter yet, more bitter and more bitter. It's why women are so much more bitter than men. It's what they've sacrificed.

I'm going back, Harry. I've got to. You ask me if I've thought of everything. I have; but even if I had not this outrides it all.

I have gone too far. She was right, that woman I told you of, who said that for a woman, once she has given herself to a thing, there is no comeback from it. I have tried. It is not to be done."

There was a very long silence. She said, "It's settled, Harry."

He said, "Nothing's been said, Rosalie, that gets over what I have said. There's no home here while both of us are working. I have a right to a home. The children have a right to a home. Nothing gets over that."

She answered, "Then, Harry, give yourself a home. Give the children a home."

He said, "I am a man."

She answered, "I am a woman."

CHAPTER III

The thing goes now at a most frightful pace for Rosalie. One hates the slow, laborious written word that tries to show it. There needs a pen with wings or that by leaping violence of script, by characters blotched, huge and run together, would symbolise the pace at which the thing now goes. There's no procession of the days.

Immersed in work or lost in pleasure, there never is procession of the days, so hurtling fast goes life. They crowd. They're driven past like snow across a window pane. The calendar astounds. It is the first of the month, and lo, it is the tenth. It's the sixteenth--half gone!--while yet it scarcely had begun; a day after the twentieth is the date; it's next the twenty-fifth; it's next--the month has gone.... The month! It is a season that has flown. Here's Summer where only yesterday the buds of Spring; here's Winter, coming--gone!--while yet the leaves seem falling.

It was like that the thing now went with Rosalie.

They call it a race. It isn't a race, living like that. It's a pursuit. Engaged in it, you're not in rivalry, you are in flight.

You're fleeing all the time the reckoning; and he's a sulky savage, forced to halt to gather up what you have shed, ordered to pause to note the things that you have missed, and at each duty cutting notches in a stick.

That is his tally which, come up, he will present to you.

Well, best perhaps to take that tally stick to try by it to show the pace at which the thing now went. Rosalie, when all was done, could run the tally over (you have to) in thought, that lightning vehicle that makes to crawl the swiftest agency of man's invention: runs through a lifetime while the electric telegraph is stammering a line; reads memory in twenty volumes between the whiff and pa.s.sing of some remembered scent that's opened them; travels a life again, cradle to grave, between the vision's lighting on and lifting from some token of the past.

All's done; some years rush on; she sits in retrospection, that tally stick in hand; and thought, first hovering, would always start for her from when, returned to her career, the thing at frightful pace began to go; and then, from there, away! from scene to scene (the notches cut by reckoning in his stick) rending the womb of memory in dread delivery, as it were flash on flash of lightning bursting the vault of night from east to west across the world.

Her thoughts first hovering: There's Huggo and there's Doda and there's Benji! Her children! Her darling ones! Her lovely ones!

Love's crown; and, what was more, worn in the persons of those darling joys of hers in signal, almost arrogant in her disdain of precedent to the contrary, that woman might be mother and yet live freely and unfettered by her home, precisely as man is father but follows a career. Ah....

Away! The womb of memory is rent, and rent, delivers.