THE BURGEONING
"Now burgeons every maze of quick
About the flowering squares, and thick
By ashen roots the violets blow."
—Tennyson.
CHAPTER I
TWO OF A KIND
As I said at the beginning, this is my story, and the telling of it must be in my own way. It does not satisfy me to end it with our home-coming, and I hold that no story is complete unless it satisfies, first of all, him who tells it.
Why should love stories end at the altar? For there is that in life which surpasses the altar in sweetness. It is the hearth. And there is that which is greater than love making. It is the home making. And there are those in every marriage that is a marriage, of far greater worth to the world—since only through them may the world's work go on—than the two who joined their lives at the altar, and they are the children who come of the marriage.
If my love for Eloise was great before, it is greater now, for in the sweet years that have passed have I not proved it a thousand times, as hath she, in the little things of life, the knight-errantries of love, the battle and the gauge that tests us all daily? And are not the still, calm depths in the eyes of the wife more satisfying to the soul than the merry frothy shoals that gleam so riotously in the eyes of the sweetheart?
No man has truly loved a woman until she has borne him children; not for the child alone, uplifting as is the first sight of this tiny sweet seed of the blossoming of their doubly growing souls, but as an evidence that there is nothing worth while in the world except love, since not only does it create every great, beautiful, sweet dream that has been given to the world, but even the dreamer himself!
No man has loved until he has seen the child of his love. It is not the row-boat of the calm waters that the sailor loves as his very life, but the good ship of the mid-seas that holds fast and true, even in the throes of the tempest, bringing him to port and to joy in the morning.
And so I have small respect, and a wholesome contempt for those story-tellers who make of married love a marred love; who paint its ending with the coming of children; and who would leave the wife at the last page waiting for a lover's love lost in the husband's love.