Rose and Rose

by E. V. Lucas

And then—I was still fumbling towards an explanation of Rose’s desperate act—then there was the disappointment about the boys. Rose, as I have said, had set her heart on being a mother, and the mother of sons, and there was only one surviving child and that was a girl. I have brought enough children into the world to know something about the part that they play in married life, and I can set it down firmly as a fact that it is all to the bad when the sex of the child is not that which the parents had desired. The girl who ought to have been a boy has to suffer for it; and so, though in a less degree, does the boy who ought to have been a girl, but he is not a common figure. Has it ever been suggested, I wonder, that some of the traditional alleged untrustworthiness of women is due to the fact that they were not wanted. I don’t say that I agree as to this inferiority of the sex, but proverbial lore, which is the wisdom of many and the wit of one, has decided that they are false and fickle, unstable, coy and hard to please, and so forth: and that may be a cause. Certain it is that the nurse who announces that the little pet is a girl is rarely treated as a bringer of good news; whereas if she can say it’s the finest boy she ever had in her arms she is, for the moment, an angel. Why should an unwanted child trouble to be constant and true and without caprice? Some revenge it is entitled to.

Rose, however, does not come within the category of the unwanted, for her sex had been determined by her father and mother months before I assisted at her début, and her name had long been chosen. Why they should have desired a girl instead of another of the lords of creation, I cannot say: probably because the father was an artist, and artists are notoriously eccentric. But there it was: they wanted a girl and they had one, whereas that girl, when her own time of fulfilment came, wanted not only a boy but many boys, and could not bring up one. Rose, I am sure, had a feeling of resentment for the girl who had lived where the boy had died. With that tiny boy baby much of her joy in life was buried. He had lived long enough in the actual world for her to make a little god of him; and before that life had been there was the life he had lived under her heart.

To say that she was not fond of Rose would be to tell an absolute falsehood—she took a grave pleasure in her, although treating her perhaps more as a toy than a daughter, as a wonderful doll whose capacities she never tired of studying—but she was steeped in a deeper rapture when her breast nurtured a son. That is all.

To put it in another way, I don’t believe that when Ronnie arrived and opened the door upon whatever fair prospect he displayed to her or she imagined she saw—whatever avenue of escape—Rose would have stepped through had the child she was to leave behind her been a little boy of five instead of a little girl.

Who knows what women feel? We may guess, but they will never tell us. They won’t even tell each other. As regards Rose and Ronnie, my guess is that his pathetic collapse attracted more than his radiant vigour would have done. Had she found him triumphant, as of old, she would have remained unscathed. Strong and masterful he might have called to her in vain, for she was never a sensualist. It was his dependence that swayed her and decided her. It was the boy Ronnie needing tenderness and care.

Involved and fantastic as it may sound, I have the belief that it was the mother instinct that took Rose off with Ronnie more than love. What I mean is that she did not go with him as most women go with men, through ordinary passion, but because he was fragile and in need of protection and she thought of him as her own, or—subconsciously of course—even as one of those unborn sons which he himself would have begotten. So mystical can women be!

But of course the wild hope of escape was present too: the wish to live a little more fully while there was yet time; the feeling that to endure another moment with Eustace was impossible and wrong.

And again Theodore’s wish came back to me. Was this “beating the band”? Could anything be farther from the ordinary conception of that successful and honourable act than running off with another man and leaving husband and child? And yet, it had required courage, devotion, disregard of the world’s censure—all the things that properly-brought-up and even universally respected people need not possess. What a muddle is our civilization!

“You must forgive this untimely and unprofessional visit,” I said, as I was shown into Mrs. O’Gorman’s over-furnished sitting-room.

“Don’t be foolish, Doctor,” she replied. “Have done with your politeness. Don’t I know why you’re here?”