At ten o'clock that night Mary took up her pen.
“First, my dear, to tell you that it is all right. I may stay. I had lunch with the children in the nursery, and just as we had finished a maid came to say that Mrs. Chater would see me in the study. Down I crawled, wishing that I was the heroine of a novel who would have passed firmly down the stairs and into the room, 'pale, but calm and serene.' Oh! I was pale enough, I feel sure. But as to serene!—my heart was flapping about just like a tin ventilator in a wind, and I was jumpy all over. You see what a coward am I.
“Mrs. Chater had grown since last I saw her. Of that I am convinced. She sat, enormous, thunder-browed, bolt upright in a straight chair. I stood and quivered. Books are all wrong, dear. In books the consciousness of virtue gives one complete self-possession in the face of any accusation, however terrible. In books it is the accuser of the innocent who is ill at ease. Oh, don't believe it! Mrs. Chater had the self-possession, I had the jim-jams.
“'I have not seen you since last night,' she said.
“I gave a kind of terrified little squeak. I had no words.
“'Your version of what happened I do not wish to hear,' she went on.
“This relieved me, because for the life of me I could not have told her had she wished to hear it. So I gave another little mouse-squeak.
“'My son has told me.' Her voice was like a deep bell. 'How you can reconcile your conduct with the treatment that you have received at my hands, here beneath my roof'—she was very dramatic at this point—'I do not know.'
“Nor did I—but not in the way she meant. I was thinking how ignoble was my meek attitude in light of what had happened. But you don't know what it was like, facing that woman and dreading the worse fate of being turned out into this awful London again. Another wretched little squeak slipped out of me, and she went on.
“'My boy,' said she, 'has implored me to overlook this matter. My boy has declared there were faults on both sides' (!!!!). 'If I acted rightly as a mother, what would I do?'
“I didn't tell her, Georgie. Could I tell her that if she acted rightly as a mother she would box her boy's fat ears until his nose bled? I couldn't. I squeaked instead.
“'If I acted rightly as a mother,' said she, 'I would send you away. I am not going to.'
“I squeaked.
“'I choose to believe that your behaviour in this matter was a slip. I believe the episode will be a lesson to you. That is all. Go.' I goed.”
George, when he had read thus far, was broadly grinning. Obviously Mrs. Chater was not such a bad sort after all. If—as no doubt—she implicitly believed her son's version of the incident, then her attitude towards Mary was, on the whole, not so bad.
But his Mary, when she had written thus far, laid down her pen, put her pretty head upon the paper and wept.
“Oh, my dear!” she choked. “There, that will make you think it was all right. You shall never know—never—what really happened. Oh, Georgie, Georgie, come very quick and take me away! How can I go on living with these beasts? Oh, Georgie, be quick, be quick!”
Then this silly Mary with handkerchief, with india-rubber, and with pen-knife erased a stain of grief that had fallen upon her pretty story; sniffed back her tears; lifted again her pen.
Now she wrote in an eager scrawl; nib flying. Had her George not been so very ordinary a young man he must have perceived the difference between that first portion so neatly penned—parti-coloured words showing where the ink had dried while the poor little brain puzzled and planned at every syllable—and this where emotion sped the thoughts.
“So that's all right” (she wrote), “and now we've only got to wait, a few, few weeks. Dearest, will they fly or will they drag? What does love do to time, I wonder—whip or brake?—speed or pull? Georgie mine, I feel I don't care. If the days fly I shall be riding in them—galloping to you, wind in the face; shouting them on; standing up all flushed with the swing and the rush of it; waving to the people we go thundering past and gazing along the road where soon I will see you—nearer and nearer and nearer.
“And if the days creep? Well, at first, after that picture, the thought seems melancholy, unbearable. But that is wrong. The realisation will not be unbearable. If they creep, why, then I shall lie in them, very comfortable, very happy; dreaming of you, seeing you, speaking with you, touching you. Yes, touching you. For, my dear, you are here in the room with me as I write. I look up just to my right, and there you are, Georgie mine; sitting on the end of my bed, smiling at me. You have not left me, my dear, since we parted on the seat this morning. Why, I cannot even write that it is only in imagination that I see you. For me it is not imagination. I do, do see you, Georgie mine. You are part of me, never to leave me.
“How new, how different, love makes life! Everything I do, everything I see, everything I hear has a new interest because it is something to share with you, something to save up and tell you. I am in trouble (you understand that I am not, shall never be again; this is only illustration—you must read it 'if I were in trouble'). I am in trouble, and you are sharing it with me, sympathising so that trouble is an unkind word for what is indeed but an opportunity acutely to feel the joy of loving and being loved. I am happy, and the happiness is a thousandfold increased because it comes to me warmed through you. I am amused, and it is something to tell you and to laugh at the more heartily by the compelling sound of your own laughter.
“Everything is new. Why, my very clothes are new. Look, here in my left hand is my handkerchief. Only a handkerchief this morning, and to other eyes still but a handkerchief. But to mine! Why, you have had it in your hand and indeed it speaks to me of you. Here you laid your arm, this was the side upon which you touched me as we sat together, here in my hair your fingers caressed me—each and all they are new—different from this morning.
“Are you thinking me silly when I write like this, or are you dreadfully bored with it? I can't help it, Georgie; love means so much more to us women than to you men. It is essentially different. When a man in love thinks of the woman he thinks of her as 'mine,' and that thrills him—possession. But when the woman thinks of him she thinks of herself as 'his,' and that moves every fibre of her, strikes every chord—capitulation. The man expresses love by saying 'You are mine'; the woman by 'I am yours.' That is how it is with me. I sing to myself that I am yours, yours, yours. I want you to have every bit of me. I want you to know every thought I have. If I had bad thoughts, I would tell them you. If I had desires, I would make them known and would not blush. I want you to see right into my very heart. I want to lay everything before you—to come to you bound and naked. That is what love is with women, dear. Some of us resist it, school it otherwise—but I do not think they are happy; not really happy. It is our nature to be as I have said, and to fight against nature is wearying work, leaving marks: it is to get tossed aside out of the sun.
“Are you thinking me unutterably tiresome and foolish?—but you will not think that; because you love me.
“Ah, let me write that again!-because you love me. And let me write this: I love you.
“My dear, is not that curious?—the precious joy of saying 'I love you,' and the constant yearning to hear it said. Not lovers alone have this joy and this desire. Mothers teach their babies to say 'I love you, mother,' and constantly and constantly they ask, 'Do you love me, baby? '—yes, and are not satisfied until they have the assurance. And babies, too, will get up suddenly from their toys to run to say, 'Mother, I do love you.'
“Why is it? Why is love so doubted that it must for ever be declared? So doubted that even those who do love must constantly be proclaiming the fact to the object of their affections, impelled either by the subconscious fear that that object mistrusts the devotion, or by the subconscious fear that they themselves are under delusion and must protest aloud—just as a child upon the brink of being frightened in the dark will say aloud, 'I'm not afraid!' Why is it?
“Actions are allowed to proclaim hate, deeds suffice to advertise sympathy, but love must be testified by bond. To what crimes must love have been twisted and contorted that it should come to such a pass? How often must it have been used as disguise to be now thus suspected?
“You never knew I thought of things like this, did you?
“My dear dear, I who am so frivolous think of yet deeper things. And I would speak of them to you tonight, for I would have you know my heart and mind as, dearest (how dear to think!), you know my face. Yes, of deeper things. I suppose clever people would laugh at the religion my mother and father lived in, taught me, died in, and now is mine. They believed—and I believe—in what I have heard called the Sunday School God! the God who lives, who listens, and to whom I pray. I have read books attempting to shatter this belief—yes, and I think succeeding because written with a cunning appeal only to the intelligence of man. Can such a Being as God exist? they ask. And since man's intelligence can only grasp proved facts, proofs are heaped upon proof that He cannot. The impossibilities are heaped until man must—of his limitations—cry that it is impossible. But in my belief God is above the possibilities—not to be judged by them, not to be reduced to them. I suppose such a belief is Faith—implicit Faith—the Faith that we are told makes all things possible. Well, fancy, for the sake of having a 'religion' that comes into line with 'reason,' abandoning the sense of comfort that comes after prayer! Fancy receiving a 'reasoned' belief and paying for it the solace of entreating help in the smallest trouble and in the largest!
“Do you know, my dear dear, that I pray for you every night?—for your health, your happiness, and your success?
“Now you know a little more of me. Is there more to learn, I wonder? Not if I can make it clear.
“The candle is in a most melancholy condition: in the last stage of collapse. I have prodded it out from its socket with my knife and set it flabbily on a penny—so it must work to its very last drop of life. That will not be long delayed. I shall suddenly be plunged into darkness and must undress in the dark. I shall be smiling all the time I am undressing, my thoughts with you.
“At eleven—ten minutes' time—I am to be leaning from the window gazing at Orion as you too—so we agreed—will be gazing. Each will know the other has his thoughts, and we will say 'good-night.' How utterly foolish! How contemptibly absurd, common!—and how mystically delightful! You and I with Orion for the apex of eye's sight and our thoughts flying from heart to heart the base!
“Georgie mine, if we had never met could we have ever been so happy? Impossible! Impossible! Before I pray for you to-night, I thank God for you.
“I have kissed the corner where I shall just be able to squeeze in—good-night.”
Such was her letter-disloyal to women in its exposure of those truths of women's love which are theirs by the heritage of ages, by their daily training from childhood upward, and against which they should most desperately battle; simple in its ideas of religion; silly in its baby sentiment.
Such was my Mary.
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