Front matter (continued 5)

This was response. The touch of her mind had not yet gone from his. He had emotions yet that answered to her own. The possessive passion had not won him wholly for its own. A heart he had that still could beat with hers, that still could urge the love in him to take her in his arms.

She knew he was going to speak and waited, saying no more herself to prompt the answer he might give, but laying her cheek against his lips, hearing the breath he drew as he replied.

"I don't feel that I've changed, Mater," he murmured to her. "I'm a bit older, that's all. Being up at Oxford makes you see things differently, and it's awfully different at Wenlock Hall from what it is here. You get out of the way of doing things for yourself, there are so many people to do them for you. Why don't you come down there? It's awfully jolly. They'd give you an awfully good time. I know they would. Let me send a wire and say you're coming these holidays, with me, now? Do! Will you?"

She shook her head. He did not know what temptation he offered. But there, in Yarningdale was the citadel of her faith. Deeply as she longed always to be with him, she dared not sally forth on such adventure as that. Only her faith was there to be its garrison. Only by setting her standard there upon its walls did she feel she could defend the fortress of her ideals.

If she could but keep his love, as now in his arms she felt she had it sure, then always there was hope she might draw him back to the life that she had planned for him. A brave hope it was while she rested there in his arms. For one moment it soared high indeed; the next it fluttered like a shot bird to the earth.

"Don't ask me about Lucy," he said as still he held her to him. "You can't expect me to feel the same about her, or that it should grow into anything more than it was. After all, she's only Kemp's daughter."

She looked away. Her hold of him loosened. Scarcely realizing it, she had slipped from his arms and was standing alone.

VI

It was just before the summer vacation, when John was eighteen, that he had written to Mary, saying--

"I've got special leave to come down next Friday and I want to ask you something. There's a girl I've got to know, well, she's twenty-five and I want you to meet her first before they do at Wenlock Hall."

She had come then and so soon. The first woman of John's own choosing now he was become a man. The jealousy she had known concerning Lucy was as nothing to this she felt with a sickness of apprehension in her now. Fate, circumstance, the mere happenings of life, these had brought him his Lucy. But here was one his heart must have sought out, his soul had chosen. She seemed to know there was no chance, but something selective about this. Here the nature that was in him had been called upon. For the first time, with no uncertainty, she was to learn what that nature was.

Mrs. Peverell indeed had spoken true when she had called him a love-child. His response to passion had been swift and soon. And was he coming, awed to love as once she had said she would teach him to come? Or was he tramping with the pride of victory and possession? The moment she saw this girl, she would know. The world was full of women who asked for no more; who judged the affections of their men by just that measure of animal passion which in their hearts and often upon their tongues they professed to despise.

Only the few there were who, never asking but waiting for the love that she had wished to teach him, inspired it. Had his heart sought out one of these? With fear and trembling she read on.

"I can't explain in writing," the letter continued, "but you must see her before any one else."

The degree of her gratitude for that for a moment drove away all fear, but not for long.

"I've told her everything about myself," she read on. "She's wonderful. She doesn't mind a bit. I want you to let me bring her down to Yarningdale. She can have my room and I'll doss out at the Inn. I know you'll like her. You must. She's splendid. I've warned her what the farm is like, that it's a bit rough, but she doesn't care and she's longing to meet you."

All Mary's intuitive impressions of her who did not mind when she had heard about her John, she put away from her and, harnessing the light horse in the spring cart, drove down that Friday to the station.

It was characteristic of John's letters that he had not mentioned her name. Many of his friends at the 'Varsity she knew well by his accounts of them, having no more classification for them in her mind than the nicknames they went by.

John was leaning out of the carriage window as the train drew in. Swift enough she noted the look of eager excitement in his eyes; but it was that figure in the pale blue frock behind him she saw. As they came down the platform towards her, John first with his bounding stride, still it was the figure behind him her heart was watching, notwithstanding that she gave her eyes to him.

"Here's Dorothy Fielding, Mater," he said, scarcely with pause to exchange their kiss of meeting.

She turned with the smile that hid her hurt to meet those eyes her John had chosen to look into.

It was a quiet woman this Dorothy saw, so calm and serene as made her realize how all those subtle preparations she had made for this meeting were wasted here. That she was well gowned, well shod, that her hair was neither too carefully dressed nor untidy in its effect, that her hat showed confidence in her taste, all these preparations over which she had taken such care she knew could not avail here in the judgment of those eyes that met hers.

This was not just a woman she had to please and satisfy; it was something like an element, like fire or like rushing water her soul must meet, all bare and stripped of the disguising superficialities of life.

"This is the first time I've heard your name," said Mary with that smile she gave her. "John never mentioned it in his letter. But then I don't suppose he's ever told you what I was like."

"Mater! I've told Dorothy everything, haven't I, Dee? Described every little detail about you, rather!"

Mary's hands stretched out and held his. Her eyes she kept for Dorothy.

"Well, I hope you're not disappointed," she said, "because I'm not a bit like it--am I?"

She knew so soon, at once. So far beyond the reach of conscious comprehension had been Dorothy's surprise that now it came rushing to the surface of her mind with Mary's detection of it.

"On the contrary," she replied, "I think I'd have known you anywhere."

Then from that moment they knew they shared no thought in common. That first lie was the sound of their challenge. Each for their separate purposes they were at enmity in their claim of John. He stood beside them, there upon the platform, supremely unconscious of the forces he had set free, sublimely happy in his achievement of bringing them together.

There were two women, dearer to him at that moment than any two other people in the world and all he saw was the smiles they gave each other. The spiritual and the material need of him they had, for which already they had cried the challenge to battle, this came no more even to the threshold of his mind than came to his ears, intent on all they said, the short, sharp whistle of the departing train.

Each in that first moment had set up her standard. His soul was the sepulchre for which Mary fought. There between those two, lay John's ideals and visions of life. It was they who had the power to make them what they should be. Through them he was to find stimulus for the emotions that should govern all he did. Still was he for molding, still the plastic spirit needing the highest emotion of the highest ideal to give it noblest purpose.

And here, as ever, his mother was she who in that malleable phase set first the welfare of his soul. No conception or consideration of inheritance was there to hinder her. It was not to a man fit for the world she saw him grow, but to equip him for life she gave the essence of her being.

This from the very first, before ever that cry of his lifted above the wind in the elm trees, had been her sure and certain purpose. No possessions in life there were but him to limit the perspective of her vision; and such a possession was he as for whom, if need be, she could make absolute sacrifice.

Already she had done so. Already once she had given her heart for breaking to let him go. Fear there was in her now she had not had courage enough in her purpose. Fear there was she had not trusted enough to faith.

Would he have lived to rebuke her for the opportunity she had thrown away? Might he not have lived, as she would have taught him, to thank her for the sense of life she had given him in exchange for the world that now was at his feet?

Once she had given her heart for breaking and it had healed in the patient endurance of her soul. She had no thought to give it here. Here in that moment as they met upon the platform, she knew she must fight to the last. Men might make the world, but it was women who created life. Between those two women, laughing like a schoolboy, he stood for his life to be shaped and fashioned and all that appeared upon the surface of things to him was that the world was a happy place.

VII

It would be a false conception of Mary Throgmorton in this phase of her being to picture her as consenting to the common wiles of women.

She fought her battle for her John with weapons the stress of circumstances made ready for her hand. All men have done the same. Guile there may seem to have been in her, but none greater than that which in some one form or another is called forth from all human nature in any conflict. The smiles with which Dorothy greeted her had to be met with smiles; the delicate word she so despised demanded no other than the delicate word from her. To have used blunter, heavier weapons than these might indeed have routed her opponent, yet to have won in such a case would have been worse than loss.

Here was war in the true sense as she knew it; not the flinging of a greater force against a lesser, winning on the field of battle and in the very boastful pride of victory, losing in the field of life. It was not to confound her enemy she sought but to win that issue upon which the full justice of her hope was set. Not for herself to gain or keep it had she made her heart of tempered steel, but for another to find the liberty his soul had need of.

It was for John she fought and none of his pity dared she awaken for his Dorothy, well knowing that though by Nature victors themselves, there was little love in the hearts of men for a triumphant woman.

If this was guile, it was such as life demanded of her then. With all nobility of character to criticize herself, she did not pause here for sentiment. If the weapons she must use were not to her liking, necessity yet fitted them readily to her hold.

Never had John seen his mother so gentle or so kind. For the first time in his conscious mind he appreciated the pain of jealousy he knew must be pricking at her heart. For in some sense it was her defeat it seemed to him he witnessed; a brave defeat with head high in pride and eyes that sadness touched but left no tears. He came to realize the ache of loneliness she felt whenever in the fields, about the farm or through the woods he went with Dorothy alone. After a few days, it was he, unprompted, who asked her to accompany them, and Mary whose wisdom it was so readily to find some duty about the house or with the cows that prevented her acceptance.

Gradually she permitted him to come upon suspicion that these excuses were often invented. Gradually she brought him to consciousness of the sacrifice she made. He found he learnt it with effort or intent and appreciated in himself the breadth of vision his heart had come by.

"Did you realize," he said one day to Dorothy in the woods, "that the Mater just invented that excuse not to come with us?"

She shook her head.

He found amaze at that.

"She did," said he. "Those cow stalls don't want whitewashing again. They're a bit ramshackle compared with ours at Wenlock Hall, but they're as clean as a new pin. Old Peverell told me the inspector said they'd never been so clean before. She invented it."

Suddenly he took Dorothy's arm.

"Do you know you've done that for me?" he whispered.

"Done what?"

"Given me a wider view of things, taught me to realize other people's feelings as well as my own, shown me what she suffers when she sees me go off to Wenlock, what she suffers when I bring you down here and go out with you every day, leaving her alone."

"But why should she suffer?" asked Dorothy. "She's your mother, she must love you. She must want to see you happy. She must be glad you're going to come into that beautiful place in Somersetshire."

He fell to silence, having no answer to that, yet feeling she somehow had not understood what he had meant.

That night he came to Mary's room to say good-night before he went down to the bedroom he had taken at the Crooked Billet. Always hitherto it had been a knock upon the door, a call of good-night and then her listening to the sound of his footsteps down the thinly carpeted stairs. This time he asked if he might come in.

By the light of her candle, Mary was lying in her bed reading one of the books from a little shelf at her bedside. More than she knew, this request of his startled yet spurred her no less to the swift expediency of what she must do.

"Just one moment," she called back, steadying the note in her voice. Quickly then she slipped from her bed, arranging her hair as best she could before the mirror; with a fever almost of speed, changing her night attire for a garment the best she had, fresh with the scent of the lavender she kept with all her things. Not once did her fingers fumble in their haste. Another moment she was back in bed again, her book put back upon the shelf and another, one of those Nature books she used to read when he was a little boy, taken in its place.

"Come in," she said and, because her voice was so low with her control of eagerness, she had to repeat her summons.

It was as the door opened and he entered that she felt like a mistress receiving her lover. Her heart was beating in her throat. Even John found her eyes more bright than he had ever seen them before.

All love of women in that moment she knew was the same. For sons or lovers, if it were their hearts beat too high for the material judgments in a material world, what did that matter if so high they beat as to lift the hearts of men to nobler than material things? This, she realized it, was her function; this the power so many women were denied, having no vision of it in themselves because men did not grant it license in their needs.

Not to give him possession as a lover did she admit him then, but in the sacrifice of her love and of herself to lift him through emotion to the most spiritual conceptions of life that were eternal.

Never in all that relationship between herself and John had she felt the moment so surely placed within her hands as then.

"What is it?" she asked, so gently in her voice that she could have laughed aloud at her own self-possession.

"Just came in to say good-night," said he with an attempt at ease, and came across to the bed and leant over it to kiss her cheek, uplifted to meet his, and found that clean scent of lavender in his nostrils when, before he had really learnt his purpose, he sat down upon the bed at her side and remained there, gazing into her eyes.

"What are you reading?" he asked.

She turned the book round for him to see, making no comment; allowing the memories of childhood to waken in him of their own volition.

He shut the book up, contriving to let his hand find hers as she contrived to let it stay there without seeming of intent.

"What is it, John?" she whispered again.

He shrugged his shoulders.

"Nothing except just what I said. I wanted to say good-night." Yet he still lingered; still, without keeping it, his hand remained in hers.

For some while he stayed there, sitting on her bed, saying nothing, playing only with his fingers that held her hand. With a supreme patience she waited in silence, knowing no words were needed there, her heart throbbing with an expectant pulse that rose to riot as suddenly he slipped on to his knees on the floor and leant his head against her breast.

"I want her, Mater," he whispered. "Haven't you guessed that? I'm terribly in love."

Had she guessed that? Indeed! But had she ever dreamt or hoped for this, that his first love-making would be through her? This was the first love scene, the first passion in the drama of his life and in awe of what it was, he had chosen her to play it with.

Emotions such as were triumphant in Mary Throgmorton then cannot easily be captured. Here in certain fact was the first hour of love her heart had surely known; an hour, albeit not her own, which for the rest of her life was to remain with its burning embers in her memory.

With deep breaths she lay for a moment still, holding him in her arms.

"Haven't you told her, John?" she asked presently.

He shook his head against her breast.

"Why not?"

"I don't know. I can't just tell her I love her. It's more than that. She wouldn't understand. If she did, she might hate me for it."

It might have been youth and the utter lack of his experience. He was only just eighteen. But Mary found in it more than that. In the first great emotion in his life, when he was stirred so deep as to touch those very first impressions she had given him in his childhood, he was setting on one side himself and the demands that Nature made on him.

How little his Dorothy would appreciate that, Mary had made certain estimate the first moment they had met. No awe of love was there in her; no vision his need of her could ever destroy. She, with the many others, was amongst those women who, bowing herself to the possessive passions of men, would sell her soul in slavery to share them if she could.

Whatever of her training it was they had bereft him of at Wenlock, however out of the true line they had bent that green bough her hands had fashioned, still in the vital elements of his being, he sought the clear light above the forest trees about him. In this swift rush of love, a storm that beat and shook him with the force of it, some spiritual impulse still remained. He felt his Dorothy was some sacred thing, too sweet to touch with hands all fierce as his.

How long would that remain with him? In the materialism of his new environment would they let him keep it for long? Another day and drawn by the shrilling call of Nature into the arms of Dorothy, might he not lose it even so soon as that?

He did not know how true he spoke when he had said she would not understand. A product of the laws of man she was, eager and passionate to submit, needing that trampling spirit of possession to give her sense of life, caring little how soon love trod itself into the habit of familiar touch.

No emotion of ideals would she have with which to set her children forth upon their journeys. Into an old and tired world they would be ushered with grudging of the pain they brought and fretting complaint of ugly circumstance. Consequences of passion they would be, no more, with nothing but the magic of youth to give them laughter in their playgrounds.

So well did Mary know that night as he lay there against her breast, John would not keep his spirit long untouched when other arms than hers had held him. Too soon had they taken her from him. Too soon, in that moment's want of faith, had she let him go. Possession of the earth already had brought him scorn of it. Again and again had she seen that in the change of his mind towards their simple life at Yarningdale.

The earth she would have had him labor in, was such as now would soil his hands. It was enjoyment he sought, she knew it well, not life. With that poison of inheritance they had instilled into his blood, fast he was becoming an echo, not a voice. The message of all ideals was being stilled to silence in him. They were teaching him to say what the Liddiards had said one generation upon another--gain and keep, gain and keep--it would be folly to give away.

Only in this, this love that stirred him to the very essence of his being, was he recalling the years of emotion she had given to the fashioning of his soul. Here for that moment as he lay in her arms, he was the man her heart had meant to make him, awed by love, made timorous almost by the power of his passion.

But how long would it survive its contact with that casual materialism his Dorothy would blend it with? How soon before she made his love that habit of the sexes which bore no more than drifting consequences upon its stream?

Neither long would it be, nor had she power now to intervene. Clasping her arm more tightly round him, already she felt him slipping from her, the more because in that brief moment he was so much her own.

"My dearest, need you tell her yet?" she asked. "I know you feel a man, but you're still so young. You're only eighteen, you couldn't marry yet. Liddiard wouldn't want you to marry. Need you tell her yet?"

"I must," he muttered. "Not for a little while yet perhaps. I've told you. That was a help. I don't feel so much of a brute as I did. But sooner or later I shall have to. I can't help being young and I'm not inventing what I feel. Other chaps feel it too, quite decent fellows, but somehow or other I can't do what they do."

"What do they do?"

Frankly she would have admitted that was curiosity, but curious only was she to know what he did not do rather than what they did.

"What do they do, John?" she repeated as he lay there, silent.

"Oh, they go up to London when they get the chance. There are women, you wouldn't understand that, Mater. Probably you've never known there were women like that. How could you have known down here? My God! Fancy one of those women in the fields! She'd drop down in the grass and she'd hide her face. Anyhow in streets they keep their heads up. They look at you in the streets."

"And you couldn't do that, John?"

"No--I tried. I went up to London once. We went to a night-club. All sorts of them were dancing there. I just couldn't, that's all. The fellow I was with, he went away with one of them. I envied him and I hated him. I don't know what I felt. I couldn't. It didn't make me feel sick of it all. I don't think I felt afraid. You kept on coming into my mind, but just you wouldn't have stopped me if I'd really wanted to. I did want to. I had wanted to. That's what we meant to do. But when I got there to that place, and one of those women kissed me, I felt there was something else I wanted more. I think I nearly went mad that night. I had a little bed in a stuffy little room in a poky little hotel. I couldn't sleep. I never slept a wink. I nearly went mad calling myself a fool for not doing what I'd wanted to do. There I'd have done it. Then I didn't care what I did. But it was too late then. I'd lost my chance. I was sorry I'd lost it."

He raised his head and looked at her.

"I'm not sorry now, Mater. I wasn't sorry for long. Aren't men beasts?"

"My dear--my dear," she whispered. "If they were all like you, what a world love could make for us to live in. Oh, keep it all, my dear. Never be sorry. It isn't the right or the wrong of it, John. It's the pity of it. If women had men like you to love them, think what their children would be! Don't tell her yet, John. Wait a little longer if you can."

"I can't!" he moaned. "I can't wait. She knows I care for her. I'm sure she does. I must tell her everything."

If only it had been Lucy he had shrunk from telling, then fear would have met with fear and mingled into love. It was not fear he would meet with in Dorothy. Too wise perhaps she might be to laugh at his timorousness, but swift enough would she turn it to the passion to possess.

* * * * *

That night as John lay in Mary's arms, there reposed with simple state in the Government House at Sarajevo, the two dead bodies of a man and a woman who had found rest in the shadow of the greatest turmoil the world had ever known, which through the minds of millions in central Europe were ringing the words--

"The great questions are to be settled--not by speeches and majority resolutions, but by blood and iron."

VIII

John waited a little as he had said he would. Two days later, keeping his silence, he returned to Oxford. In her first encounter with Mary, Dorothy knew that she had lost. She was no equal, she realized it, to that serene and quiet woman who gave her smile for smile and in whose eyes the smile still lingered when in her own it had faded away.

It was not before the latter end of July that the first whisper of war came to Yarningdale. Conflagrations might burst forth in Europe; the world might be set alight. It mattered little to them at Yarningdale farm. Whatever might happen, the cows had still to be milked, the crops to be gathered, the stacks to be built. How did it effect them what an Emperor might say, or a little gathering of men elect to do? They could not stop the wheat from ripening. They could not stop the earth from giving back a thousandfold that which man had given to the earth.

"War!" exclaimed Mr. Peverell. "Men beant such fools as that! 'Tis all a lot of talk to make the likes of us think mighty fine of them that says they stopped it. We'm have taxes to pay and if those what are in the Government doant make a noise about something, we might begin awonderin' what they did to earn 'em."

It was all very well to talk like that and likely enough it sounded in their parlor kitchen at Yarningdale. But there were other thoughts than these in Mary's mind and not all the confident beliefs of peace amongst those who had nothing to gain and all to lose, could shake her from them.

When once it had become a daily topic of speculation and newspapers in Yarningdale were being read every morning, she formed her own opinions as to what would happen out of the subconscious impulses of her mind.

Deep in her heart, she knew there would be war, a mighty war, a devastating war. Something the spirit of her being had sense of revealed to her that this was the inevitable fruit of that tree of civilization men had trained to the hour of bearing. This was its season. War was its yield. With blood and iron the crop of men's lives must be gathered. Inevitably must the possessive passion turn upon itself and rend the very structure it had made. The homes that had been built with greed, by greed must be destroyed. This, as they had made it, was the everlasting cycle Nature demanded of life. Energy must be consumed to give out energy. To inherit and possess was not enough. It was no more than weeds accumulating and clogging in the mill-wheel. If man had no ambition other than to possess; if in his spirit it was not the emotion of the earth to give, then the great plow of war must drive its furrow through the lives of all of them.

In some untraceable fashion, Mary felt that the whole of her life had been building up to this. Somehow it seemed the consummation of all she had tried and failed to do. At the supreme moment of her life, she had been lacking in faith of her ideals. She had lost the clear sight of her vision. The whole world had done that and now it was faced with the stern justice of retribution.

There must be war. She knew there must. Men and women, all of them had failed. What could there be but the devastating horror of war to cleanse the evil and rid of the folly of weeds the idle fallows of their lives?

"Well, if it is to be war," said the Vicar one day, having tea with Mary and Mrs. Peverell in the parlor kitchen, "Germany's not the nation of shrewd men we've thought her. If she insists upon it," he added, his spirit rising from meekness with a glitter in his eye, "she'll have forgotten we're the richest nation in the world. On the British possessions the sun never sets. She'll have forgotten to take that into account."

Every man was talking in this fashion. She read the papers. It was there as well. Long articles appeared describing the wealth of the German colonies and what their acquisition would mean to England if she were victorious on the sea. Extracts were printed from the German papers exposing her lust and greed because, with envious eyes upon the British Colonies she was already counting the spoils of victory.

There in the quiet and the seclusion at Yarningdale, Mary with many another woman those days, not conscious enough of vision to speak their thoughts, saw the world gone mad in its passion to possess.

It seemed to matter little to her at whose door the iniquity of lighting the firebrand lay. War had been inevitable whoever had declared it. The cry of broken treaties and sullied honor stirred but little in her heart as she heard it. What mattered it if a man was true to his word when all through the years he had been false to the very earth he dwelt on?

That cry of sullied honor through the land was as unreal to her as was the cry of sullied virtue that ever had conscripted women to the needs of men. The principles of possession could never be established with honor, the functions of life could never be circumscribed by virtue. It was not honorable to gain and keep. It was not virtuous to waste and wither.

War was inevitable. By the limitations of their own vision men had made it so. There was horror but no revolt in her mind when, on the morning of that fourth of August, she read the text of the British Ultimatum.

"They must give back now," she muttered to herself as she stood by her dressing table gazing down at a photograph of John in its frame. "They must all give back, sons, homes--everything. They've kept too long. It had to come."

A few days passed and then three letters came for her, one swift upon another. Each one as she received it, so certain had her subconscious knowledge been, she read almost without emotion. The announcement of war had not staggered her. She felt the ache of pain, as when the barren cows were driven out of the farmyard to go to the market, but since she had been at Yarningdale, knew well enough the unerring and merciless power of retribution in Nature upon those who clogged the mill-wheel of life, who broke the impetus of its ceaseless revolutions whereby no speed was left to fling off the water drops of created energy.

Each letter as she received it, she divined its contents. The first was from John.

"DEAR OLD MATER--"

She heard the ring of vitality in that.

"They're all going from here. If I cock on a year or two, they'll take me. I sort of know you'd like me to. Do you know why? Do you remember once my asking you something about a couple of moles the hay knives had chopped? I was thinking of it yesterday, I don't know why, and that made me realize you'd understand. Do you remember what you said about Death, that sometimes it was just a gift when things were worth while? Well--good Lord! It's worth while now, not that the blighters are going to kill me. I've got as much chance as any one of getting through. But you are glad I'm going, aren't you? You're not going to try to stop me. They say the Army's big enough with the French on one side and the Russians on the other to knock Germany into a cocked hat in three months. But I must get out and have one pot at 'em."

All this she had divined as her fingers tore open the envelope, but never had she dared to hope that the impulse of it would have come from his memory of what she had said to him those days when he was in the fashioning of her hands. This, she had made him. She clutched the letter in her hands and held it against her face and thanked God she had not wholly failed. The next two letters came together by the same post on the following day. She knew their handwriting. No envelope could have concealed their contents from her eyes. Liddiard's she opened first.

"MY DEAR MARY--"

"I suppose John has written to you of this preposterous suggestion of his that he should volunteer, and I know you will do all you can to prevent it. To begin with he is not of age. He will have to lie about it before they can accept him and, secondly, War is a job for soldiers and the Army is there to see it through. If they rush him out without proper training as I hear it is likely they may do, it's unfair on him; it's unfair on all of us. We've paid for our Army as a nation and now it's got its work to do. Calling for recruits now as they did in the South African war is not fair to the country. These young boys will go because they're hysterical with excitement for adventure, but where will the country be if they don't come back?

"I rely on you, my dear Mary, to do all you can to dissuade him from this mad project of his. With all the knowledge that one day he is to be master of Wenlock, I know he still looks reliantly towards you in that little farmhouse. Do all you can, my dear. We cannot lose him, neither you nor I."

With a hard line about her lips which, had she seen it, would have reminded her of her sister Jane, she laid the letter down and picked up that from Dorothy.

"Please--please don't let him go," it cried out from the written page to her. "I can't stop him. I've tried. He won't listen to me. I learnt those few days while I stayed at Yarningdale how he will listen to you. He belongs to me. He told me so. Please--please don't let him go."

She picked up the other letter and stood looking at them together, side by side, then dropped them from her hand and from the bosom of her dress drew out the slip of paper John had written on and pressed it once more against her cheek.

Downstairs in the parlor kitchen with the pen and ink that Mr. Peverell used when he kept his farm accounts, Mary sat down and wrote to Liddiard.

"If I could do everything, I would do nothing," she wrote. "This is what I made him. I would not unmake him if I could. You must give. I must give. We must all give now. We've kept too long. Don't you know what this war is? It's not England fighting for her rights or Germany for her needs. It's Nature revolting against man. You've made your chapels and your tithe barns for yourselves. The earth is going to shake them into the dust again. If I could do everything, I would do nothing. He takes my heart with him when he goes. But there is nothing I can do. We must all give now--at last--women as well as men. These things that happen now--these are the consequences of passion."

IX

To Mary Throgmorton, tending and milking Mr. Peverell's cows at Yarningdale Farm, those first few weeks of the Great War were as the resultant dream that shadows the apprehensive mind.

Every morning after her work was done, she would retire to her room with her newspapers, therein to read the countless conflicting reports which they contained. The feverish desire to give active help or be amongst the first of those personally to contribute to the cause found her calm and self-possessed. She had her work to do. So long as the cows were there in Mr. Peverell's meadows, they had to be milked. Her duty it had been for the last eighteen years to milk them. Her duty it seemed to her to continue.

From all the villages round about them, the young men were going up to join the colors. Little processions of them accompanied by their mothers and sweethearts passed along the roads to the station, going to the nearest recruiting office. Most of them had flowers in their caps and went singing on their way, lifting their voices to a cheer at sight of any whom they passed.

Whenever she met them, Mary cheered in fervent response; but looking back over her shoulder when they had gone by, there were tears, hot and stinging in her eyes, so that always their departure to her was through a mist. They vanished, nebulous, like spirits, out of her sight. She looked till she could see no longer. The vision of them trembled as the air trembles over the scorching earth on a summer's day. She felt it was the last vision she would ever have of them.

Only their mothers and their sweethearts came back, little weeping groups of them, along the same road. Whenever she saw these approaching her, she would break her way into the fields or the woods rather than pass them by. For more than the boys themselves with the high light of a strange laughter in their eyes, it was the faces of the mothers as they all went by together, that had dragged, like the warning pains of child-birth, at her heart.

Pale beneath the wind-burnt ruddy skins they were. It was pallor of anger; anger of soul at the senseless waste. The cry of England for her sons was loud indeed. In countless hearts the note of it was shrilling without need of proclamation. These boys had heard it and heard no more. Their mothers had heard it too. No less had it rung its cry in Mary's ears. But deeper and further-reaching was the hearing of the women in those early days of war.

Later, doubtless, their senses became almost numb to the true meaning of that voice flung far across the land. Even the vitality of despair grew still in their breasts. The horrors of war sickened, choked, asphyxiated them. They gave their sons like animals going to the slaughter house with eyes that were staring and wide, and in whose nostrils the heavy smell of blood had acted as a soporific on the brain.

But at first, Mary had little doubt of the look she saw in those mothers' eyes. They were giving up, not what they had got, but what they had made. The created thing they were sacrificing; the thing which in love and pain and energy of soul they had offered out of themselves to give life to. There was little of the fervor of patriotism about them. To those country railway stations they marched with their pale faces, their set lips, the aching pain in their eyes. Each for her son's sake smiled as he looked at her; each for her son's sake smiled as she waved farewell. But on the hollow mask she wore, that smile was but a painted thing. He looked to his sweetheart or he laughed to his companions and it died away.

Somewhere in their buried and inarticulate consciousness, those mothers knew that wrong was being done to them. Vaguely they knew it was man with his laws of force and his passion of possession who had done that wrong; vaguely they knew it, but had no clear vision in their hearts to give them voice to revile.

Such an one Mary came upon, a day when rain had driven her to take shelter and she came back by a foot-path across the fields. On the smooth rail of a well-worn stile the woman was seated, her feet resting for support on the step below, her body faintly swinging to and fro, not for comfort but as though she rocked sorrow like a suffering babe in her arms.

At sound, then sight of Mary who must cross the stile if she passed that way, the woman sat erect and took her feet down from their resting-place.

Once having seen her, she looked no more at Mary as she approached, but set her face outwards with a steady gaze in her eyes. In an impetus of memory, Mary recognized her as one of a little band she had seen marching to the station earlier in the day. She had been alone with her son. No sweetheart was there to share their parting. Alone she had bid farewell to him. Alone she returned.

Had there been others with her, Mary might have turned back; at least she would have hurried by. Now, coming to the stile, she stopped.

"Have you lost your way?" she inquired.

"No, thank you, Miss."

"It was only I saw you coming by the road this morning and this footpath doesn't lead to Lonesome Ford."

"We came by the road because all the boys were going that way. They take it easier when they go all together. Seems they laugh in a crowd. What we have acomin' back seems best alone."

Mary made gentle inquiries, what recruiting office her son had gone to--what regiment he hoped to join--his age--his trade--what other sons she had.

"He's my only--" she replied steadily.

Had she broken into weeping, Mary would have comforted and left her. Tears are their own solace and need no company. But there were no tears here. She sat upon the top rail of the stile, her head high above Mary, her features sharp and almost hard against the sky, her eyes set fast across the rolling fields that dipped and lifted, with elm-treed hollows and uplands all spread gold with corn.

"I have one only," said Mary quietly. "He's in training now."

That made them one, but the calm voice of her who had spoken made the other lean towards that unity for dependence. Impulsively she stretched out her hand and straight and firmly Mary took it.

"I don't know who you are, Ma'am," she said with words her emotion quickened on her lips. "I'm more or less of a stranger to these parts. You may be a grand lady for all I know and judging by your voice, but the way you spoke and all that's happening these days, seems to me we're all just women now."

"All just women," said Mary softly.

She responded eagerly to the gentle encouragement and went swiftly on as though no interruption had been made.

"What I mean," she said, "we've both just parted from what's dearest to us in life--that makes us one. You might be a lord's lady and I just one of common folk--no less, we're one. Something's happened to us that's made us look up like and see each other--it's made you put out your hand to me and what I want to know is what it is that's happened, because with all these talks of England in danger and hatred of those beasts of Germans, there seems something else and I can't get it right. I know, now it's come to it, my son's got to go out and fight. I wouldn't stop him. But I don't think I'd have brought him into the world if I'd known. There are some as like fighting. He doesn't. He cried in my lap last night, but not because he couldn't make up his mind to go. He knew he was going this morning, but he cried in my lap and I heard him say, 'I know I shall fight and hate and go mad with the rest of them when it comes to the time.' I don't rightly know what he meant by that. I hope he does hate but it seemed to me as if it was that he feared most."

"Perhaps he saw himself mad and drunk with blood," said Mary. "Can't you imagine he'd loathe the sight of that? Have you ever seen a woman intoxicated with drink?"

"Once I did--no--twice I did."

"Would you like to think of yourself like that?"

She bent her head.

"You've made that plain," she muttered. "I didn't care asking him at the time. Seemed he just wanted to go talking on with no questions. There'll be hundreds like him, I suppose, thousands perhaps and some as like fighting. 'Twill be an adventure to them, but hell it'll be to him. P'r'aps that's as it must be. The world's all sorts. But I can't help thinking the world's wrong for us women. Be they the fighting kind or not, we didn't bring 'em into the world for this wasting. They say that thousands of our boys were lost during that first retreat from 'Mons' I think they call it. If you saw the thousands of mothers they belong to all come together in a crowd like the boys marching and they had some one to lead 'em, what would they do to them as have made this war? They'd tear them limb from limb. That's what they'd do. I used to think the world was a fair and sweet enough place once. They told us there, those people up in London in the Government there could be no war. The papers said it. Up to the last they said it. Every man said it to you, too. There can't be no war, they said, not a big European war, they said, the world 'd stop still in a month, they said, there'd be no trade. Seems to me men go sweating in labor and toiling with work and half the time they don't know what they're making."

Mary let her talk on. So plain it was to be seen that it gave her ease; so plain that this was the accumulation of her thoughts, flowing over from the full vessel of her heart that could hold no more.

"What's all this," she continued, "all this they've been saying about treaties and what they call International Law? Seems to me we've let men make the world long enough. They've made hell of it. How could there be peace with them making all those guns and ships and weapons which was only invented to destroy peace? I don't believe nothing's made to waste in this world. If you make a thing it'll get itself used somehow and if it don't and goes to rust, then something's wrong in the minds of them as wasted their time on it. If my man had told me before we married I'd got to give him a son as one day would be crying in my lap because he found life horrible, do you think I'd have married him? No--he told me the little home we was going to have and all the things he'd give me to put in it and how when I was going to have a child he'd work so hard as we could afford to get a girl in to help. That's what he told me those evenings we walked up and down the lanes courting, and that's what it seems to me men in high places who make the Government have been telling those thousands of mothers that have their hearts broken now this very hour. Men want to get hold of things in this world. Grasping always they are. And nations are like men, because men have had the making of them. And the nation that has the most men has the most power to grasp, and the more they grasp, the more will others get jealous of them, and the more they get jealous, the more they'll need to fight. But who gives them the power they have? Who gives them the sons they ask for? And what I want to know is why do we go on giving for them to spoil?"

Mary watched her as the last rush of her words lit up her eyes to a sullen anger.

"Countless women will think like you," she said quietly, "when this war's over. They won't listen any more when men tell them there's honor in their slavery or pride in the service that they give. We shall bring children into the world on our own conditions, not on theirs. To our own ideals we shall train them; not to the ideals of men. You're not the first who's thought these things. I've thought them too and hundreds of others are thinking them and we shan't be the last."

She stretched out her hand.

"There's a new world to be made," she said with a thrill in her voice. "Men have had their vision. We can't deny they've had that. Without their vision would they ever have been able to persuade us as they have? They've had their vision while we've had none. They've had their vision and it's brought us so far. When women find a vision of their own; when once they see in a clear picture the thoughts that are aching in their hearts now, nothing will stop them. You see and I see, but we are powerless by ourselves. I know just how powerless we are, even to have faith in our own sight. I thought I had faith once--enough faith to carry me right through--but I hadn't. At the crucial moment that faith failed me. I had trained my son so far in the light of the vision I had and then they came and with all the threats they made of the good things he was losing in life, my courage failed me. I let them have him for their own and little by little I've watched him drift away from me."

"Do you know," she added, coming to a swift realization as she spoke, "do you know I'm almost glad of this War. He volunteered at once, though he's only eighteen. He volunteered against his father's wishes. This war's going to stop him drifting. It's going to stop thousands from drifting as they were. They'll see there's something wrong with the civilization they have built up, that it's an earthquake, a volcano, a state of being which any moment may tumble or burst into flame about their heads. For that, I'm not sorry for the War. We couldn't have shown men how wrong they were without it. It'll be to their mothers they'll go--these boys--when they come back."

She took her hand away and climbed over the stile.

"You'll have him back," she said. "One of these days you'll have his head in your lap again."

For one moment they looked in each other's eyes. There was a compact in that look. In purpose they had found sympathy. Out of the deep bitterness of life they had found a meaning.

Once, as she walked away, Mary looked over her shoulder. The woman still sat there on the stile, still with her features cut sharp in profile against the sky, still gazing across the elm-treed hollows and the uplands all spread with gold of corn.

* * * * *

On Sunday night, October the fourth, in a little force of naval reserves, John marched from Ostend to his battle position on the Nethe.

Mary did not know where he had gone. He had not known himself. In the midst of his training, the order had come for his departure. Two hours he had had with her at Yarningdale; no more. All that time he had laughed and talked in the highest spirits. Constrained to laugh with him, her eyes had been bright, her courage wonderful.

It was not until she drove back alone in the spring cart from the station, that she knew the brightness in her eyes had sunk as in those other women's eyes to the sullen light of anger.

"Oh--the waste--the senseless waste of it!" she had muttered that night as she lay waiting for the relief of sleep.

The next five days had passed in silence. She went about her duties as usual, but none seeing her dared speak about the War. It was whispered only in that parlor kitchen; whispers that fell with sibilant noises into silence whenever she came into the room.

Each morning, as always, she took her papers away to her room to read. Nothing of that which she yearned to know could they tell her. On the ninth of October Antwerp had fallen. Amongst all the strongholds that were crumbling beneath the weight of the German guns, this meant nothing to her. She laid the paper down and went out into the fields.

It was the evening of three days later when she was milking the cows in their stalls, that Mrs. Peverell came, bringing her a telegram into the shed. Her hands were wet with milk as they took it. They slipped on the shiny envelope as, without hesitation, she broke it open.

When she had read it, she looked up, handing it in silence to Mrs. Peverell, then turned with the sense of habit alone remaining in her fingers and continued with her milking.

THE END

* * * * * * * *

Books By E. Temple Thurston

The Green Bough The City of Beautiful Nonsense The World of Wonderful Reality Enchantment The Five-Barred Gate The Passionate Crime Achievement Richard Furlong The Antagonists The Open Window The Apple of Eden Traffic The Realist The Evolution of Katherine Mirage Sally Bishop The Greatest Wish in the World The Patchwork Papers The Garden of Resurrection The Flower of Gloster Thirteen