The Green Bough Part 8

It is always a romantic world, that land which lies to the cliff edge beside the sea. The man who farms it is forever at close grips with the elements. He wrestles with Nature as those inland with their screening hedgerows have little knowledge of. The hawthorn and the few scattered trees that grow, all are trained by the prevailing winds into fantastic shapes no hand of man can regulate. Sheep may do well upon those windy pastures, but the cattle, ever at hiding in the hollows, wear a weather-beaten look. Crops are hazardous ventures and, like the sower, scattering his grain, must plant their feet full firmly in the soil if they would stand until their harvest time against the winds that sweep up from the sea.

Up through the belt of pine wood and across the heathered moors, Mary came often those days with her friend. The views from countless places called for his brush. Once she had brought him there to show him her Devon, he sought the golf links no more. They never played their final match.

On the first two occasions of their excursions beyond Penlock Hill, he painted a.s.siduously. Mary brought a book and read. Long whiles between her reading she watched him, smiling, when, with almost childish distress, he a.s.sured her he had done pictures that at least were worth glancing at in a portfolio, if not a permanent frame.

For either it was, as in the first instance, that the atmosphere of a strange country defeated him and tricked his sense of color, or his mind was bent on other things, but both days were fruitless of results. On each of these occasions, as before, he threw the sketches down, unfinished, and fretted at his lack of skill.

"This Devon of yours," said he, "has got more color than I can get out of my box. What really is the matter is that it has more color than I've got in my eyes. If it's not in your eyes, it's not in your box.

You can't squeeze a green field out of a tube of oxide of chromium.

Paint's only the messenger between you and Nature."

Her sympathy was real. Notwithstanding that it gave her more of his attention, she fretted for him too. When the next day they met at the foot of Penlock Hill and she found him without his satchel, she was genuinely disappointed and unhappy.

"Aren't you sufficiently selfish," he asked, "to be sensible of the obvious fact that I'd far sooner talk to you than spend my time in useless efforts?"

"Perhaps it isn't in the nature of women to be really selfish," she said, with a laugh to lighten her meaning.

That set them at discussion upon the comparative selfishness of the s.e.xes as they mounted the hill and took the beaten path across the heather.

For a man, he had strange points of view to her. With an honest bitterness, he complained about the selfishness of men.

"But what else can we be?" said he. "As things are, what else can we be? We run the world and this civilization's our conception of the measures on which it has to be run, and this civilization is built up on a solid rock of egotism and selfishness, with brute force to insist upon the upholding of the standard. I wonder what would happen," he went on, "if fair women, as Meredith visioned, rose in revolt. I wonder what would happen if they suddenly combined to refuse to give the world the material it builds its civilization with. I wonder where our brute force would come in then. What sort of children should we have if women had to be taken by brute force? And should we so take them if really they were to resist? Brute force has been opposed only with brute force. Our highest conception is that the strongest brute force wins. I wonder what brute force would do if it were opposed with the force of the spiritual ideals that women have and scarcely are awake to even yet.

Are you awake to the spiritual ideals in you?"

He looked at her suddenly as they walked and as suddenly and as firmly she said--

"Yes."

"By Jove!" he exclaimed. "You're the first woman I've ever met who would have answered as straight and direct as that. All the rest would have hedged and s.h.i.+lly-shallied. Some would have giggled. Half of them would frankly not have known what I meant."

"I know very well what you mean," she replied. "But if you're surprised at a woman knowing, I don't think you're any more surprised than I am at a man asking the question. How did you know to begin with that women have spiritual ideals at all, strong enough ever to think of their being ranged against brute force?"

She paused, but it was so obvious she had still more to say that he waited rather than interrupt the train of her thought.

"I expect your wife's a very wonderful woman," she said.

In that pause she had wrestled with herself.

It had been the first time she had mentioned his wife in all their conversation. Well she knew what would be the effect of it. It would call her there between them. Inevitably it would thrust him a little away from her to give his wife room in their minds.

It had been an irresistible thought, yet why should she spoil the contact of mind between them by speaking it? Was it inc.u.mbent upon her in any way to remind him of his wife?

Yet partly she was curious to know, and wholly she was honest to speak.

There was his wife. Nothing in Mary's thoughts would be reckoned without her. Did he find a deep interest in speaking to her? She believed he did, but there was his wife. She knew there was no attraction of physical beauty in her, yet had he not made it obvious in the last ten days that still she had attraction for him? It seemed certain to her that he had; but there was his wife.

At every turn in their conversation, at the end of every steadied glance, this woman she had never seen effected some intervention in thought or vision in Mary's mind. More plainly a thousand times it seemed she felt her presence than did he. There were moments when enthusiasm caught him and it appeared he had forgotten every one and everything but Mary there before him.

It became imperative then for her to summon that vision before her mind.

She did it with an effort. But later, when alone at night before she turned to sleep, it came without call, trembling her with emotion at the thought that a moment might happen upon them when they would both forget or come to memory too late.

And what did she mean by that--too late? In all frankness and honesty, she did not know. It were better explained, she would not allow herself to know. Reaching that issue in her conscious thought about it all, emotion would sweep like a hot wind upon her. She would lie, half trembling in the darkness, pressing her hand upon her breast to frighten herself into some sort of terrible joy at the rapid beating of her heart and then, driving all conscious thought away from her, she would straighten her limbs in the bed, exerting her physical control, as when she nerved herself to play her game, thus forcing herself to quietude and ultimately to sleep.

So she came always consciously to a point of thought which, bringing her the vision of his wife and the sense of her own emotion, drifted her towards that subconsciousness of being wherein the pattern of so many a woman's life is made. She thought no more but, had she permitted it, would have lain, silent-minded in an ecstasy. It was no less than physical control, the straightening of her limbs, the clenching of her hands, the beating of her pillow into new resting places for her head, that put the ecstasy away.

Here, in some likeness, was that same moment, in the broad light of day with him beside her and the crisp heather roots beneath their feet. It was almost a physical effort in her throat that gave her strength to say--

"I expect your wife's a very wonderful woman."

She meant him to realize that in her thoughts it was through his wife he had become possessed of such knowledge about women; that there was his wife; that she was there between them; that if he had for the instant forgotten her, she had not. It was as though, in a violent muscular effort, Mary had seized her by the wrist and jerked her into step with them. Almost was she catching for her breath when she had done it.

"My wife is a wonderful woman," said he quietly. "She has as big a heart as all this stretch of acres and that breadth of sea, but to-day is her to-morrow. I didn't learn about the spiritual ideals of women from her."

"Where did you learn it then?" asked Mary.

"Now you're asking me something I couldn't possibly tell you," said he, and then he smiled. He had seen the look leap slanting across her eyes as she thought of the other woman who had taught him.

"Because," he added--"I don't know."

V

If it were f.a.n.n.y who first had sense of what was happening, it was Jane who, when she discovered it, spoke out her mind about the matter.

f.a.n.n.y knew by instinct, long before the first suspicions had fermented her elder sister's thoughts. She detected a sharper, brighter look in Mary's eyes; she calculated a greater distance in Mary's meditative glance.

At first it was as subtle a detection as the record of that weightless rider one straddles on the balance arm. Faintly the scales of her suspecting answered to the application of the signs which she observed.

Faintly the weight of a thought was registered upon her consciousness.

If it was not as yet that Mary was in love, at least her mind was centering on that which any moment might turn to burning thoughts.

They occupied the same room together, these two. This had been a habit from childhood. Since the death of Mr. and Mrs. Throgmorton, the accommodation of that house did not necessitate it. But they had grown used to each other's company. They would have missed the sound of each other's voices those moments before the approach of sleep, the exchange of more lucid conversation in the mornings as they dressed.

It was in unaccustomed pauses as she undressed at night that f.a.n.n.y's mind found the first whispers of her instinct about Mary. It was not that she said to herself--"I used to sit on my bed like that--I used to stare at the wall--I can just remember what I used to think about." Far more it was that, at the sight of Mary doing these things, there came, like an echo into f.a.n.n.y's pulses, the old emotions through which she had pa.s.sed when she had been walking round those cliff paths waiting for the destiny that should declare itself for her.

She watched her sister, even more closely than she knew. It was emotional, not conscious observation. Once the matter had fastened itself upon her imagination, the whole spirit of it emotionalized her.

She noted all the indications of Mary's condition of mind, without looking for them; almost without knowing she had seen them.

The processes of her thought during that first fortnight when at the last Liddiard was meeting Mary every day, were subtle, subliminal and beyond any conscious intent. Often watching her sister as, regarding herself in the mirror while she did her hair, with those indefinite touches of greater care and more calculating consideration, she found a pain fretting at her heart--a hunger-pain as of one who is ill-nourished, keeping life together but no more.

In this it was as also in the choice of the skirts and blouses Mary wore. It needed no great selection of wardrobe to trace this to its source.

f.a.n.n.y could never have dreamt of expressing the knowledge that women dress to the dictation of their emotions even if it be something that is never revealed, the color of a ribbon on their undergarments, even the choice of those undergarments themselves. That which touches their skin means insensibly something to them when their emotions are astir. It was not that f.a.n.n.y had learnt this; she knew it. But it was not that she could speak of her knowledge.

All that happened with f.a.n.n.y those days was that the observation of these things in Mary emotionalized her. Lying in bed there, watching her sister as she dressed, she found her pulses beating more quickly.

She felt a restlessness of body as well as mind. She threw the bedclothes from her and got up, not because she wanted to be dressed herself, but because she could not stay in bed any longer.