The Green Bough

by E. Temple Thurston

Looking out upon the fields as they passed, knowing them as property, to whoever they might belong, again she felt how the right of possession amongst men it was that had made shame of the right of creation amongst women.

"Trespassers will be prosecuted," she read on a passing board that stood out conspicuously in the hedge as they rolled by.

There it was! That was the law! Trespassers upon the rights of man! The law would descend with all its force upon their heads. But had they not trespassed upon the rights of women? Which was the greater? To inherit and possess? To conceive and create? Did not the world reach the utmost marches of its limitations in that grasping passion to possess? Was that not the root of the evil of war, the ugliness of crime, the stagnation of ideals? To possess and to increase his possessions, to number Israel and to keep all he had got, were not these the very letters of the law that held the world in slavery; were not these the chains in which, like bondwomen, she and her sisters had walked wearily through the years of their life?

The last lane they passed along led through a heavily timbered wood before they reached the farm. Some children there were gathering fagots into their aprons. She leant out of the window to watch them, her mind set free for that moment of the encompassing sense of possession.

That was the spirit that should rule the world. She knew how hopeless it was to think that it could be so. It was the spur of possession that urged men to competition. The whip of competition in turn it was that drove out idleness from the hearts of men. And yet, if women had the forming of ideals in the children that were theirs, might they not conceive some higher and more altruistic plane than this? Giving, not keeping, might not this be the deep source of a new civilization other than that which drove the whole world with the stinging lash of distrust?

She was going to bring a child into the world that would have nothing it could call its own, not even a name. The fagots of life it must gather. The berries on the hedgerows which belong to all would be its food. So she would train its heart to wish for only those things that belonged to all. Never should it know the fretting passion of possession. Work was man's justification, not ownership, and a workman he should be; one who gave with the sweat of his brow and who, by the heart to give which she would stir in him, would covet of none the things they called their own.

In this spirit--and little more it was in a grasping world than an ecstasy of thought--Mary Throgmorton came to Yarningdale Farm.

She knew it was a dream she had had; a dream induced in her by the heat of the day, the monotonous vibrations of that old vehicle she had ridden in, the still quiet of the countryside through which she had passed. Yet, nevertheless, for all its ecstasy, for all the dream it might be, such a dream it was as any woman must surely have, so circumstanced as she; so driven to rely upon what she alone could give her child for walking staff to serve him on his journey. Knowing it was a dream, it seemed no less real to her. Lying that night on the hard-mattressed bed, in her little room beneath the eaves of the thatch, she took the dream in purpose into her very soul. Give she must, and all she had, and what else had she to give but this? For that moment and for all the months to follow it could be given in the utmost fullness of her mind. Was it not now and most of all when he was closer to her being than ever it should so chance again, that she could give out of her heart the spirit that should go to make him strong to face the world that lay before him?

Dreams they might be, but such thoughts would she hold with all the tenacity of her mind until, through external means alone, she was compelled to feed him. For all those seven months to come, she herself would work--work in the fields as he must work. The sweat should be on her brow as it should be on his. Her limbs should ache as one day his in happy fatigue of labor should ache as well.

It was thus she would make him while yet the time of creation was all her own and then, when out of her breast he was to take his feed of life, there would be ways by which she alone could train him to his purpose.