The Preliminaries Part 13

Clarissa listened, astounded.

The girl stood now at the open window, breathing in the soft spring air in long-drawn, tremulous breaths. The excitement of speech was upon her. Her eyes were liquid, wonderful. And never, in all her life, had she looked so like the woman who watched her breathlessly.

{203}

"These are such big things," she went on, "I hardly know how to talk about them. But I have thought a great deal. I know the world must be made better, and every one must do his share. But, mother, you can't save the world in platoons. Even Christ had but twelve disciples. I'm not denying that thousands of women must work outside the home; I'm not denying that hundreds may be specially called to do work in and for the world. But the mothers are not called. They must not go, unless want drives. They have the homes to make--the part of the homes that is atmosphere. Oh, don't you know what I mean? The women who understand can make a home in a boarding-house or in foreign lodgings; in a camp on the desert or in an eyrie in the mountains. It's the feel of it! Don't you understand it at {204} all,--the warm, comforted, easeful feeling that encompa.s.ses you when you come in the door, or raise the tent-flap? Home is the thing that nourishes, that cherishes, that puts its arms about you and says, Rest here!

"I know--for father and Evelyn made a home for me. Father is like me.

He is lost, s.h.i.+pwrecked, ruined, if his heart is n't sheltered. I don't know what I think about divorces and re-marriages. It is all so perplexing. I do not know at all. But I know you broke up a home, and Evelyn made one. Whatever people do, if they can do that for a child as father and Evelyn did it for me, I should n't wonder if they are justified before G.o.ds and men!"

The rapid sentences fell like hammer-strokes upon Clarissa's naked heart. She felt that she ought to be {205} defending her beliefs, but she could not take her eyes from Marvel's glowing face, and the girl went swiftly on:--

"The people that you follow--they admit the race lives for the child, that the mother must risk her life to give it life. Then, they seem to think, the sacrifice can cease. But if you know about homes, you know better. As she gives her body to be the matrix of another body, so she must give her spirit to make a shelter that shall be the matrix of another spirit. If she refuses to do this, she fails, and all her labor is in vain. It is very simple. As I see the world, the mothers must die daily all their lives. There is no other way. It is a part of life, just as bearing and birth are parts of life. No one denies that they are hard--hard--hard. But that is the glory of it! Nothing is worth while that lacks the {206} labor and the danger, the pain and the difficulty!"

For once in her life Clarissa was speechless. Words would not come.

The inherited weapon of her own fluency had been turned against herself. For as other women had been shaken from their old faiths and allegiances by Clarissa's gift of tongues, even so had she been shaken by her child. The girl's young cogency had struck her dumb.

In the long minutes of silence that followed, Clarissa was, perhaps, more truly a mother than she had been since Marvel first lay in the circle of her arm. She saw a daughter's point of view at last. She knew which proclaimed the deeper doctrine, which was the truer prophet of humanity, her child or she.

Yet when she spoke at last, it was {207} not to discourse of Humanity.

Humanity was forgotten; she and her child were all. Her lips shaped, unbidden, that old, old demand of the hungry heart.

"Marvel--don't you _love_ me at all?"

Marvel hesitated. Her air of detachment was complete.

"You never tried to make me love you, mother. Even love goes by a kind of logic. Domestic life gives you one kind of reward; public life another kind. You get the kind you choose, I take it, and no other. If you want love, you must choose the love-bringing kind," said this austere young judge. "And I've found out another thing by myself. You love ten times as much when you have served with hands and feet as well as brain. I do not know why. I only know you do. {208} If--if I love you at all, mother, it is because of the work I have done for you here--in making it like home!"

Clarissa bowed her head on her hands, in a bitterness made absolute.

This child of hers was her own child. What right, indeed, had she to expect self-sacrifice, tenderness, cheris.h.i.+ng, from the flesh of her flesh? That which she had given was rendered unto her again in overflowing measure, and beholding she saw that it was just.

Marvel, standing at the window in the suns.h.i.+ne, a little excited by her own eloquence and wondering at it still, had no conception of the havoc she had worked. Indeed, she was innocent of the knowledge that any one, least of all herself, had the power to move her mother greatly. She a.s.sumed, after the careless fas.h.i.+on of {209} youth, that her elders were indifferent and unemotional. Suddenly, she heard an unfamiliar and terrifying sound. Her mother was sobbing with harsh, rending sobs, tearless and terrible.

Marvel turned in quick alarm and stood confused before this anguish of her own inflicting. Clarissa's very soul seemed sobbing, and her daughter did not know how to bear the sound.

The girl wrung her hands helplessly. Something struck her heart and quivered down her nerves. Then, as she watched this woman, so like, yet so unlike herself, all at once--she understood! She was suffering with every painful breath her mother drew. In the heart of her heart she felt them. They two were bound together there. It was even as Evelyn had told her,--Evelyn, the beloved, whose truth had never failed her yet! The primal tie {210} that draws G.o.d to his worlds still holds the woman and her child. It was a wonder and a miracle unspeakable--but it was true. Throbbing and palpable, she felt the tie.

It was as if her eyelids were anointed, and all the deep and secret things of life lay clear. Ah, she had not known the half before! How shallow and complacent she must have seemed! She dropped on her knees beside the lounge. No eloquence now! She stammered commonplace words eagerly, pitifully.

"Mother dear! Mother, I didn't mean to hurt you so! I did n't know.

_I did n't know!_ Don't cry! O mother dear, _don't cry!_"

Clarissa lifted a drawn, woeful face, and looked straight into her daughter's eyes. I cannot tell you what she saw there of wonder and newborn {211} tenderness. But she drank of that look thirstily, as might one who had found springs of living water after a desert drought.

Her own child's hand had struck her down. Yet, in her overthrow, she read in Marvel's face the sign all mothers seek. Ungentle and unmerciful the girl had been, yet gentler and more merciful than she!

And by that token she knew her life not wasted utterly. For she had given to this world--this piteous world for which she had labored clumsily and ineffectually in alien ways--the best thing that the woman has to give. Offspring a little better than herself she gave to it. This child of hers, just now so hard, yet now become so pitiful, was her own child and more. Of her flesh and of her spirit had been wrought a finer thing than she.