I should not dream of remonstrance, not if she were to command me to drink sea-water; and I am not complaisant as a rule.
When she comes back I swallow it bravely, but I leave some powder in the glass; she shakes her head, and I finish this too. We sat and talked, or at least she talked and I listened. I don't remember what she said; I only know that she was making clear to me most of the things that had puzzled me for a long time,—questions that arise in silent hours, that one speculates over, and to which one finds no answer in text-books. How she knew just the subjects that worked in me I knew not; some subtile intuitive sympathy, I suppose, enabled her to find it out. It was the same at breakfast; she talked down to the level of the men present (of course they did not see that it might be possible for a woman to do that), and made it a very pleasant meal.
It was in the evening—we had the saloon to ourselves—when she told me about the white elf. I had been talking of myself and of Hans Jörgen.
"I like your Mr. Hans Jörgen," she said; "he has a strong nature and knows what he wants; there is reliability in him. They are rarer qualities than one thinks in men; I have found through life that the average man is weaker than we are. It must be a good thing to have a stronger nature to lean to. I have never had that."
There is a want in the tone of her voice as she ends, and I feel inclined to put out my hand and stroke hers,—she has beautiful long hands,—but I am afraid to do so. I query shyly,—
"Have you no little ones?"
"Children, you mean? No, I am one of the barren ones; they are less rare than they used to be. But I have a white elf at home, and that makes up for it. Shall I tell you how the elf came? Well, its mother is a connection of mine, and she hates me with an honest hatred; it is the only honest feeling I ever discovered in her. It was about the time that she found the elf was to come that it broke out openly, but that was mere coincidence. How she detested me! Those narrow, poor natures are capable of an intensity of feeling concentrated on one object that larger natures can scarcely measure.
"Now I shall tell you something strange. I do not pretend to understand it; I may have my theory, but that is of no physiological value,—I only tell it to you. Well, all the time she was carrying the elf she was full of simmering hatred, and she wished me evil often enough; one feels those things in an odd way. Why did she? Oh, that—that was a family affair, with perhaps a thread of jealousy mixed up in the knot. Well, one day the climax came, and much was said; and I went away and married, and got ill, and the doctors said I would be childless. And in the mean time the little human soul—I thought about it so often—had fought its way out of the darkness. We childless women weave more fancies into the 'mithering o' bairns' than the actual mothers themselves; the poetry of it is not spoiled by nettle-rash or chin-cough any more than our figures. I am a writer by profession—oh, you knew! No, hardly celebrated; but I put my little chips into the great mosaic as best I can. Positions are reversed; they often are now-a-days. My husband stays at home, and grows good things to eat and pretty things to look at, and I go out and win bread and butter. It is a matter not of who has most brains, but whose brains are most salable. Fit in with the housekeeping? Oh, yes. I have a treasure, too, in Belinda. She is one of those women who must have something to love. She used to love cats, birds, dogs, anything. She is one bump of philo-progenitiveness; but she hates men. She says: 'If one could only have a child, ma'm, without a husband or the disgrace! ugh, the disgusting men!' Do you know, I think that is not an uncommon feeling among a certain number of women. I have often drawn her out on the subject; it struck me, because I have often found it in other women. I have known many, particularly older women, who would give anything in God's world to have a child of 'their own' if it could be got, just as Belinda says, 'without the horrid man or the shame.' It seems congenital with some women to have deeply rooted in their innermost nature a smoldering enmity—ay, sometimes a physical disgust—to men. It is a kind of kin feeling to the race-dislike of white men to black. Perhaps it explains why woman, where her own feelings are not concerned, will always make common cause with woman against man. I have often thought about it. You should hear Belinda's 'serve him right' when some fellow comes to grief! I have a little of it myself [meditatively], but in a broader way, you know. I like to cut them out in their own province.
"Well, the elf was born; and now comes the singular part of it. It was a wretched, frail little being, with a startling likeness to me. It was as if the evil the mother had wished me had worked on the child, and the constant thought of me stamped my features on its little face. I was working then on a Finland saga, and I do not know why it was, but the thought of that little being kept disturbing my work. It was worst in the afternoon time, when the house seemed quietest; there is always a lull then, outside and inside. Have you ever noticed that? The birds hush their singing, and the work is done. Belinda used to sit sewing in the kitchen, and the words of a hymn she used to lilt in half tones—something about joy bells ringing, children singing—floated in to me, and the very tick-tock of the old clock sounded like the rocking of wooden cradles. It made me think sometimes that it would be pleasant to hear small, pattering feet and the call of voices through the silent house; and I suppose it acted as an irritant on my imaginative faculty, for the whole room seemed filled with the spirits of little children. They seemed to dance round me with uncertain, lightsome steps, waving tiny, pink, dimpled hands, shaking sunny, flossy curls, and haunting me with their great innocent child-eyes, filled with the unconscious sadness and the infinite questioning that is oftenest seen in the gaze of children. I used to fancy something stirred in me, and the spirits of unborn little ones never to come to life in me troubled me. I was probably over-worked at the time. How we women digress! I am telling you more about myself than my white elf.
"Well, trouble came to their home, and I went and offered to take it. It was an odd little thing, and when I looked at it I could see how like we were. My glasses dimmed somehow, and a lump kept rising in my throat, when it smiled up out of its great eyes and held out two bits of hands like shrivelled white rose-leaves. Such a tiny scrap it was! it was not bigger, she said, than a baby of eleven months. I suppose they can tell that as I can the date of a dialect; but I am getting wiser," with an emotional softening of her face, and quite a proud look. "A child is like one of those wonderful runic alphabets; the signs are simple, but the lore they contain is marvellous. 'She is very like you,' said the mother; 'hold her.' She was only beginning to walk. I did. You never saw such elfin ears, with strands of silk floss ringing round them, and the quaintest, darlingest wrinkles in its forehead, two long, and one short, just as I have"—putting her head forward for me to see. "The other children were strong, and the one on the road she hoped would be healthy. So I took it there and then, 'clothes and baby, cradle and all.' Yes, I have a collection of nursery rhymes from many nations; I was going to put them in a book, but I say them to the elf now.