Then! Upon that thought—“Dear Harry!”—had come, with a catch at the breath as at an obscure twinge of pain, a tremor of the sense that was its meaning: thereafter flooding all her being as floods a flood a pasture. A longing to be mother, Anna’s longing was! A longing to be mother, to hold a tiny scrap against her breast; to have her heart, bursting for such release, torn out by baby fingers; to have her design of God, insufferably overpacked within her by the remorseless pressure of instinct through a million ages, relieved, discharged, fulfilled by motherhood. Poor Anna! Ah, piteous! “Oh, God, thou knowest how hard it is to be a woman.” Poor, piteous Anna, and poor, piteous every woman that, made vessel of this yearning, must have it unfulfilled.
Not she!
The coronet of love, denied poor Anna, was hers. He’d said “These rooms—the nurseries”; the crown of love; and she had laughed!
Oh, stubborn still! Oh, still not cognisant of nature’s dower to her sex. To wear the coronet and to refuse the crown! To be wife and not to be mother! To think of baby fingers and to think to put away the offer of their baby clutch!
That girl that turned her face to her pillow and began to cry, most frightfully, cried next again when she again lay abed and had a tiny scrap, an ugly, exquisite, grotesque, miraculous scrap, a baby boy, a baby man, along her arm and watched it there. Those had been passionate and rending tears; these did not even flow. Those burned her eyes; these stood within her eyes a lovely welling up of pride and adoration, drawn from her by this newly risen wonder as by the sun at his arising moisture in lovely mists is drawn from earth.
Motherhood! When later he was christened, she and Harry named him Hugh; but it was a caressing diminutive she made out of his name by which he was always known. Her tiny son! His tiny arms hugged you as never tiny arms possibly could have hugged before and so she called him “Huggo.”
“Harry, if you could feel how he’s hugging me! It’s absurd he can have such strength! It’s ridiculous he can love me so! And how can he possibly know that hugging’s a sign of love? Harry, how can he? Take him and hold him up like that and see if he hugs you the same. He is! He is! Isn’t he?”
“Mice and Mumps,” said Harry, “he is; he’s throttling me, the tiger.”
“Ah, give him back, I’m jealous. There’s never, never been a hugger like him since the world began. He’s Huggo. That’s his name. Creature straight out of heaven, you’re Huggo.”
Her love for infant Huggo so maternal; her unity with Harry so exquisitely one; how could she have known were to be met across the waters of the years occasions new and strange, as that already shown, or, onward yet a further voyage, as this?