It was rather a dreadful thought, but Edith could not help thinking that Daisy, in the childish, unformulated manner of eleven years old, was conscious of this. Months ago now she had told Hugh that Daisy did not like her, and was jealous of her, considering that she had taken “her Hugh” away. But to-day it seemed to her that Daisy understood the position better, that she knew now that “her Hugh” very largely remained to her, as indeed, so Edith felt, he did. Not that Daisy for a moment felt anything of malicious or precocious pleasure in it; merely her childish instinct realised that though in a way her aunt had taken Hugh, yet this appropriation had not caused any change in her idol. He still played as beautifully as ever, and took exactly the same comprehending interest in her affairs as he always had done—a trait, in Daisy’s experience, not very common among grown-up people, who merely played as if they were playing, not as if it all were real. To Hugh it was real; that made the line of demarcation between him and her mother or her aunt; or, in other words, he was young. Indeed, only this morning Daisy had said she was busy, for she was going to amuse Hugh. They were found playing Tom Tiddler’s Ground immediately afterward, and Hugh was quite certainly being amused.
And then poor Edith had a very bad quarter of an hour indeed. She suddenly saw that in all those moments in which Hugh had seemed to himself to be most utterly absorbed in her, and to be, in his own phrase, searching after her as she shone above him, he was in truth feeling most keenly the difference in their years. She had said it herself, too, to him; she had told him in that talk they had with regard to the question of Nelson’s letters that there was no impulse of kindness she could give him, it was merely a question of practice in deeds of kindness until the habit was formed, practice in the rejection of anger till the root of anger in the soul had withered. It was as if her words had been steeped in the bitter brine of truth, and had been sent back to her. On all those innumerable occasions when he had besought her to teach him, to show herself to this loving pupil, his words and his feelings interpreted and looked at by the dry light of truth meant simply “Make me older.” She was powerless to do it, and even if she had not been, dearly as she prized his love and companionship, she would not have done so selfish a thing. It was possible indeed to get old in mind and soul quickly, as she at one time had been in danger of doing, in the heat and airlessness of sorrow and bitterness, and she knew well how unremitting the struggle had been to her to get back into kindly ways again. No one could desire for one they loved the forcing heat, so to speak, of pain instead of the slower maturity that was arrived at through the joys of living, and in any case it could not be applied at will. God had bitter drugs in his huge pharmacy, it is true, but none might use them but He.
Her baby, that was to have made their union perfect, that was to have fused them so that there was no joint visible, what of that? There again she had made a mistake, for, as she saw now, she had construed fatherhood by the word motherhood. What it had been to her she had underrated, but (it is as well to say it) she had overrated what it had been to him. As Peggy had said, the morning stars shouted together when a woman saw her child in his father’s arms, but that music of the spheres sounded louder in her ear than in his. Hugh had been delighted, overjoyed at the event, and even a month afterwards it had taken all her persuasion to get him to go away up to Scotland for a few weeks’ shooting, from which he had returned only a couple of days ago, but he had gone, and his letters, so frequent, so long, so full of affection, had all unconsciously reeked of his own immense enjoyment. She had read them over and over again, pleased at his pleasure, thrilled at the excitement of the heavy fish he had played so long, almost stunned by its tragic loss, and revelling in the good time he was having. Yet every now and then, like some faint internal pain, had come the thought, “He can be absorbed in those things!”
Yet the fact that this pained her contradicted all the feelings of her best self. It had required great persuasion to make him go; it required persuasion also to make him stay away and not curtail his visits; and all that was best in her wished him to see his friends, wished him to enjoy himself immensely, for the very simple reason that his pleasure was hers, and that at his age it was natural and proper and right for him to be active and sociable. She would not really have had him tied to her apron strings; nothing was so selfish and unwomanly as that, nothing also, so her worldly wisdom had taught her, was so unwise. Women—it was the old banal simile, but she felt it was applicable—were like the ivy; as long as they could clasp the oak they wanted no more. But how different was the oak; birds built in it, it threw out strong, unsupported branches into the sky, it liked the wind to sing in it, and the rain to cleanse it, and the sun to lighten it. It could not grow without these things. But the ivy wanted to cling only; there was the difference. And the older it grew its instinct was to cling the more tightly.
Yet women, as she had proved, as the crowded playhouse and the tears and laughter which rained over her play had proved, could do more than cling. She until her marriage had been both busy and happy, and never a day passed which did not seem too short for her occupations. She had been used to weed, to garden, to plan the procession of flowers, so that her beds would always have the torch of flower-life burning, and yet all the time she planned the busy current of her mental life would be flowing on still, so that again and again she would stop in her manual employment, or in the exercise of the more superficial ingenuity that the beds demanded, to register some dramatic conclusion, some outcome of the life of her imaginary folk. How intensely she had been absorbed in the ordering of the vegetable life around her, and how much more intensely absorbed in the creations of her mind, and how happy she had been in it all! Then came a much larger happiness, one infinitely more absorbing, more possessing. And—was it from mere indolence, or what?—she had suffered the other to wither, she had let the lights go out in the theatre of her mind, leaving it dark and tenantless. Hugh had called her out into the true sunshine. Often and often during this last year she had gone indoors, so to speak, to look after the theatre of her mind and construct and plan fresh adventure for her puppets, but she had not been able to attend to them with that conscious enthusiasm which alone, as she well knew, is able to make the creations of the brain alive both to their creator and the world; if she propped one up she let another fall down, and left it lying, and if she made one speak she let another yawn. She felt herself not really believing in them; at the best they were only part of herself, and even with them she was alone still. It was that which was the matter with her.
And at that word the very gate of hell began to swing open; no hell of flames and burning, but the hell of cold darkness, which is always ready to be called into being by any soul who believes in it. At that moment she felt hideously alone; in spite of Hugh, in spite of her child, there was nothing that could really bear her company. Her soul was alone.
Then, almost at the first touch of that cold, unpierceable darkness, she, dear gallant soul as she was, refused to believe in it. She sat up quickly, and as a man scares away by some rapid movement the birds that are eating his ripe fruits that he has tended to maturity, so in her mind she scattered the penetrating claws and digging beaks that were preying on her legitimate harvest. Again and again she flapped and clapped her hands at them; whatever they had spoiled in the past they should spoil no more. And those depredations had been her own fault, too; she had gone to sleep in the sun, instead of being active and busy. Who planned the garden now? Hugh. Who planned and delved in the garden of her brain? Nobody. She had been indolent, letting her mind rest and doze, no wonder, as she drowsed and dreamed, the preying flocks had descended, for, of all enemies to happiness, laziness and indolence are the most aggressive. No wonder the very door of hell’s darkness had swung ajar, making her believe for the moment in the loneliness of souls.
And here, as if in reward for her own gallant rejection of that execrable creed, came another beautiful interruption to the further consideration of it, in the shape of Peggy, who had just returned from a mothers’ meeting at St. Olaf’s, where, at the earnest entreaty of Agnes and Canon Alington, she had consented to give an address of some kind. There was going to be a garden-party for mothers (who included sisters and fathers), and in a moment of mental weakness she had promised to talk to them on the importance, so she had said at lunch, of Things in General. Just at this moment that was exactly what Edith wanted to hear about, for the doctrine of the lonely soul excludes things in general; its very creed, in fact, includes the negation of their existence, and she was eager to hear what Peggy had found to say on the subject. She also wanted to confess, to that beloved confessor, to whom all her life she had confessed so much, and also to make spoken and audible resolutions. For to her, as to everybody who lives much in the imagination, the spoken word has almost the authenticity of deed; to say a thing meant that the doing of it was made real.
“Tea, or I die!” said Peggy, seizing the tea-pot. “Where are the children? And Hugh?” she added, clearly as an afterthought. “How are you, Edith? You look slightly melodramatic, sitting on a brocade sofa; very beautiful, but quite alone in the midst of opulent surroundings.”
There were abundant topics to choose from out of this. Edith began at the first that struck her.