“Mother, I am a child again to-night. Darling, in that blue frock I used to wear. Darling, all that I to-night am thinking is what you taught me. Oh, look down, beloved! I’ve been so wrong. I thought everything was infinitely better for them than you made it, beloved mother, for me. I didn’t realise.”
Then she wrote:
“It just means losing everything in God that’s human. It must mean that. All our intelligence, if materialism may be called intelligence; all modern teaching, if this new stuff that they pontificate may be called teaching, offers us God the Spirit but, as it seems to me to-night, denies us God the Father and God the Son. It may be—reasonable. But things spiritual demand for their recognition emotions spiritual, and there’s a pass that thousands reach when the spirit is a dead thing. If they are to believe in God only as a Spirit, a Force, a Power; an Essence to be felt but not seen; an Element to be absorbed into but not to be visualised—if this, if these, there needs in them some spirit, some force, some power of themselves to lift themselves to meet it. They must be of themselves responsive as hath the sea within itself that which respondeth to the sublimation of the sun. Well, there are thousands (am I not one?) that have it not. It once was theirs. Now it is not theirs. If there is for them only God the Spirit then is there for them only that to which they have no more power to reach than has one bedridden power to rise and find a mile away what may restore him. They have only that, their breaking heart, which would cast itself, ah, with what bliss of utter abandonment, before God the Father, a human and a personal Father, quick to succor, and before God the Son, a human and a personal Son, ardent to intercede. And that is denied them. That God that existed and that was taught to exist for my mother and for her day to this day may not exist. It may be—reasonable. Oh, it is offering a stone where bread was sought.”
She also wrote:
“Oh, mother, if you could have been here, how you would have loved my darlings, and how you would have given them all that you gave to me! I will now, mother. Mother, I’ve come back home to them, in the blue frock, and in the pinafore with a hole in it.”
That was the spirit in which she came back home to the children, that and all that went with it and that arose out of it. It was nothing at all to her when she did it, the frightful break with Field’s. Harry was distressed for her, but there was no need at all for him to be distressed, she told him. There wasn’t a sigh in her voice, nor in her inmost thoughts a sigh, when, telling him of the interview with Mr. Field and with Mr. Sturgiss at her resignation of her post, she said with a smile, “Carry on? Of course the department can perfectly well carry on. Dear, it’s just the words I said to you a fortnight back on the matter so very different. ‘The thing’s organised. It runs itself. That is why it is the success it is, because it’s organised. That’s why I can come away and leave it, because I’m an organiser. Aren’t I an organiser?”
He held her immensely long in his arms. “You are my Rosalie,” he said.
Immensely long he held her, immensely close; oh, men that marry for a home! Until, come home, she saw Harry’s tremendous happiness in the home that now she gave him, she never had realised the longing that must have been his for the home for which he had married, and never till now had had. It was poignant to her, the sight of his tremendous happiness. “Always to find you here!” he would cry, in the first weeks of the new life, coming home to tea and coming in to her in the drawing-room where she would be, all ready for him, with Doda and with Benji. “Always to leave you here!” he would say, taking leave of her in the morning, and she and Doda and Benji coming with him to the hall door to see him off. “Mice and Mumps,” he used to add in codicil, “Mice and Mumps, I’m a happy chap!” and was for ever bringing home trifles for her and for the children, or plans and passes for how and where the Saturday and the weekend should be spent, all four together. “Mice and Mumps, I’m gorged with happiness! And you, Rosalie?”
“Oh, happy!” she used to say.
And was. It was poignant to her, his tremendous happiness, and it brimmed up the cup of her own happiness. She was doing virtuously and she had of her virtue that happiness which, as the pious old maxims tell us, comes of being good.