The Green Bough Part 36

Mary let her talk on. So plain it was to be seen that it gave her ease; so plain that this was the acc.u.mulation 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 h.e.l.l of it. How could there be peace with them making all those guns and s.h.i.+ps 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+ny 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