He had called it the principle. She watched him. That attitude in which he sat was of a profundity of meditation not to be looked upon without that sense of awe, of oppression, of misgiving that is aroused by the suggestion in man or nature of brooding forces mysteriously engrossed. There came to her, watching him, a thought that newly disturbed her thoughts. He had called it the principle. She had been astonished but she had not been perturbed. Upon the principle as between man and woman, husband and wife, she was, as she had said, so strong, so confident, accustomed and assured, that there was nothing could be said could touch her there. But it was not the principle. This was the knowledge brought to her by the new thought suddenly appeared in her mind, standing there like a strange face in a council of friends, unbidden and of a suspect look. What if she communicated that knowledge to Harry brooding there? He had called it the principle. What if she put across the shadowed room the sentence that should inform him it was not the principle but was an issue flying the flag of ships whose freights are dangerous? What if she put across the shadowed room the sentence, “Men that marry for a home”?
Ay, that was it! The thing she had always known and never told. Those are keepsakes of our secret selves, those observations, vows, conspiracies with which romantically we plot towards our ideals. This the sole keepsake of her treasury she never had revealed to Harry. Significant she had not. Some instinct must have stayed her. Yes, significant! He had called it the principle. It was not the principle. He was sincere upon the principle and in the examination of eleven years had proved his sincerity. It was not the principle. It was that herein, in her intention to exercise her freedom in a new dimension, she had touched him, not through the principle, but upon the instinct that led him, as she believed men to be led, to marry for a home, a settling-in place, a settling-down place, a cave to enter into and to shut the door upon.
Oh, this was dangerous! There were no lengths to which this might not lead! If at her first essay at that which countered his idea of home she was to be asked to pause, what, in the increasing convolutions of the years, might not she be asked to abandon? Let him attempt restriction of her by appeal to principle and she could stand, and win, unscathed. Let him oppose her by his wish within his home to shut the door, and that was to put upon her an injury that only by giving him pain could be fought. Oh, dangerous! Not less an injury because by sentiment and not by reason done! Much more an injury because so subtly done! Much more! Dangerous! Ah, from this the outset to be withstood!
He spoke and his first words were confirmation of her fears.
“Rosalie, do you feel quite all right about the children?”
Yes, she could see where this was set to lead. He could leave her with the children; but she—men that married for a home—could not leave him with the children.
She said gently, “Dear, there’ll not be the least difficulty. Everything’s perfectly arranged. Everything will perfectly well go on.”
He had not moved his pose and did not move it. His voice presented in tone the profound meditation that his pose presented. He said, “I don’t quite mean that. I mean, do you always feel everything’s quite all right with them?”
How setting now? She answered, “Dear, of course I do.”
His eyes remained upon the fire. “Rosalie, d’you know I sometimes don’t.”
Her motion—a lifting of her face, a questing of her brows—was of a helmsman’s gesture, suspicious to catch before it set a shifting of the breeze. “Harry, in what way? They’re splendid.”
“You feel that?”
“Dear, you know they are.”
He put his pipe to his mouth and with that meditative tapping tapped his teeth. “Splendid, yes, in health, in appearance, in development, in all that kind of thing. I don’t mean that.” He turned his face towards her and spoke directly. “Rosalie, have you ever thought they’re not quite like other children?”
Oh, setting from what quarter this? She said, “They’re better—miles and miles.”
He got up. “Well, that’s all right. If you have noticed nothing, that’s all right.”
“But, Harry. I am at a loss, dear. Of course it’s all right. But what have you noticed, think you’ve noticed?”
He was standing before her, his back against the mantelpiece, looking down at her. “Just that—not quite like other children.”
“But in what way?”
“It’s hard to say, old girl. If you’ve not noticed it, harder still. Not quite so childish as at their age I seem to remember myself with my brothers and sisters being childish. A kind of—reserve. A kind of—self-contained.”
She shook her head, “No, no.”
“You think it’s fancy?”
“I’m sure it is.”
He was silent a moment. “It’s rather worried me. And of course now—If you are going to be away—”
Stand by! She had the drift of this!
She said simply, “Harry, this can’t be.”
“You can’t give up the idea?”
Her hand upon the helm that steered her life constricted. “It is not to be asked of me to give it up.” She paused. She said softly, “Dear, this is a forward step for me. You are asking me to make a sacrifice. I would not ask you.”
He began, “There are sacrifices—”
“They are not asked of men.”
He said, “Rosalie, you said once, when Benji was born, that, if at any time need be, you would give up, not a thing like this, but your work entirely.”
As if to shield or to support her heart she drew her left hand to it. “Would you give up yours, Harry?”
He said quickly, “I’m not suggesting such a thing. It is ridiculous. 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 button, 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, brushing aside a knife offered by the assistant 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 analysed 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.”
He turned aside and began to fill his pipe, with slow movements.
It has been warned that it was in this holidays of Huggo’s from his preparatory school that Time, that bravo of the cloak-and-dagger school, whipped out his-blade and pounced. These, since that warning, were but the doorways and the lurking posts he prowled along.
He now was very close to Rosalie.
Rosalie and Harry both were home to lunch next day. In the afternoon they were to take Huggo to Charing Cross to see him off in the saloon specially reserved for his school. All the children were at lunch for this occasion. Benji in a high chair just like the high chair that had been Rosalie’s years back—what years and years!—at the rectory. Huggo was in boisterous spirits. You would think, you couldn’t help thinking, it was his first day, not his last day home. Rosalie observed him as she had not before observed him. How he talked! Well, that was good. How could Harry have thought him reserved? But he talked a shade loudly and with an air curiously self-opinionated. But he was such a child, and opinions were delightful in a child. Yes, but something not childish in his way of expressing his opinions, something a shade superior, self-satisfied; and she particularly noticed that when anything in the way of information was given him by Harry or by herself he never accepted it but always argued. She grew very silent. She felt she would have given anything to hear him, in the long topic of railways with his father, and then of Tidborough School, say, “Do they, father?” or, “Does it, father?” He never did. He always knew it before or knew different. Once on a subject connected with the famous school Harry said, a shade of rebuke in his voice, “My dear old chap, I was at Tidborough. I ought to know.” Rosalie felt she would have given anything in the world for Huggo to reply, “Sorry, father, of course you ought.” Instead he bent upon his plate a look injured and resentful at being injured. But in a minute she was reproaching herself for such ideas. Her Huggo! and she was sitting here criticising him. Different from other children! Why, if so, only in the way she had affirmed to Harry—miles and miles better. Opinionated? Why, famously advanced for his years. Superior? Why, bright, clever, not a nursery boy. She had been wronging him, she had been criticising him, she had been looking for faults in him, her Huggo! Unkind! Unnatural!
Listen to him! The meal was ended. His father was bantering him about what he learnt, or didn’t learn, at school; was offering him an extra five shillings to his school tip if he could answer three questions. The darling was deliciously excited over it. How his voice rang! He was putting his father off the various subjects suggested. Not Latin—he hadn’t done much Latin; not geography—he simply hated geography. Listen to him!
“Well, scripture,” Harry was saying. “Come, they give you plenty of scripture?”
“Oh, don’t they just! Tons and tons!” Listen to him! How merry he was now! “Tons and tons. First lesson every morning. But don’t ask scripture, father. Father, what’s the use of learning all that stuff, about the Flood, about the Ark, about the Israelites, about Samuel, about Daniel, about crossing the Red Sea, about all that stuff: what’s the use?”
Time closed his fingers on his haft and took a stride to Rosalie.
She sat upright. She stared across the table at the boy.
Harry said, “Here, steady, old man. ‘What’s the use of Scripture?’”
“Well, what is the use? It’s all rot. You know it isn’t true.”
Time flashed his blade and struck her terribly.
She called out dreadfully, “Huggo!”
“Mother, you know it’s all made up!”
She cried out in a girl’s voice and with a girl’s impulsive gesture of her arm across the table towards him, “It isn’t! It isn’t!”
Her voice, her gesture, the look upon her face could not but startle him. He was red, rather frightened. He said mumblingly, “Well, mother, you’ve never taught me any different.”
She was seen by Harry to let fall her extended arm upon the table and draw it very slowly to her and draw her hand then to her heart and slowly lean herself against her chair-back, staring at Huggo. No one spoke. She then said to Huggo, her voice very low, “Darling, run now to see everything is in your playbox. Doda, help him. Take Benji, darlings. Benji, go and see the lovely playbox things.”
When they had gone she was seen by Harry to be working with her fingers at her key-ring. In one hand she held the ring, in the other a key that she seemed to be trying to remove. It was obstinate. She wrestled at it. She looked up at Harry. “I want to get this”—the key came away in her hand—“off.”
He recognised it for her office pass-key.
Caused by that cry of hers to Huggo and by that ges-ture with her cry, and since intensifying, there had been a constraint that he was very glad to break. He remembered how childishly proud she had been of that key on the day it was cut for her. They had had a little dinner to celebrate it, and she had dipped it in her champagne glass.
He said, “Your pass-key? Why?”
She said, “I’m coming home, Harry.”
“Coming home?”
She was sitting back in her chair. She tossed, with a negligent movement of her hand, the key upon the table. “I have done with all that. I am coming home.”
He got up very quickly and came around the table to her.
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