The Green Bough

by E. Temple Thurston

Suddenly, in the speaking of that thought, she had learnt something about herself and not herself only but about all women and the whole of life. All that her mother had taught her was wrong. Concealment, deception, fraud, these were not the outward symbols of modesty. Just as for the ailments of her body she could not have gone to a woman doctor, so with the smoldering fever of her inmost thoughts, it was only to a man she could speak.

Then did men understand? With the rest of her sex she had always argued that they did not. If it was not for understanding, then why had she spoken? It must be that they understood; but not with their minds, not cruelly, scorchingly, calculatingly, as women did, judging shrewdly the relation between character and the fact confided, but more spiritually than this; the inner meaning, the deeper purpose, relating that confidence to the soul of the woman who made it, rather than to her conduct.

In that moment she had learnt the indefinable complement between the sexes. In that moment, Mary Throgmorton had for the first time in her life answered to the cry of Nature calling mate to mate.

The heat of the blood lifted in temperature in her cheeks as she came upon her knowledge, but he said nothing of the flush that lingered in them. A woman would have noticed that and to her shrewd observation they would have burnt the more. As he sat there, not looking at her, but staring through the pine trees across the bay, she found a feeling of comfort in being with him as her cheeks grew cool again.

Never looking at her, he asked if women were conscious of that sense of waste, and the tone of his voice was neither searching nor inquisitive. It had no suggestion of personal curiosity behind it. He spoke from inside himself, from inner purposes and from the inner purposes within herself she answered him, feeling no sense of restraint.

"Do you imagine they wouldn't be?" she replied. "Not perhaps in their everyday life, but in moments in those days when even in a crowd you suddenly drop out of existence, like a star falling, and find yourself alone. Of course they feel it. Every energy of man it seems to me has been to keep women from the touch of life. But sometimes they find a loophole and get out and find the sense of it, if it's only in the tips of their fingers. They may be only moments, but every woman has them."

She had never talked like this to any one before. Had there been any one to talk to? Would she have spoken to them in such a fashion if there had? It was only since that sermon, the Christmas before, she had been aware such thoughts were in the composition of her mind and never had they expressed themselves so definitely as this.

Yet her wonder was more of him than of herself. Until that moment she could never have believed a man could have understood. And it was not from what he said that she felt he did. He was sitting up now and he was nursing his knees as he gazed out across the bay towards Kingsnorth. It was in the abstract penetration of his gaze, the silence about him as he listened that she sensed his understanding.

Yet had she known it, he was thinking more of himself than of her. Something echoed in him with all she had said. It was not that he had never gained, but that he had lost his touch with life. The spirit in him was wandering and alone and it had chanced upon hers, wandering also.

This sense of mutual understanding was merely the call of Nature. The hazard of all things had tumbled them together in the crowd of the world. Something had touched. They knew it that second day. She was answering some purpose in him--he in her. And the explanation that Nature vouchsafed to her was that he understood women; and the explanation that Nature vouchsafed to him was that he was beginning to understand himself, and that there was much in him that needed much in her.