Читать книгу The Green Bough - E. Temple Thurston - Страница 5

VIII

It was the Sunday before Christmas of the year 1894. No coach had come to Bridnorth for three weeks. The snow which had fallen there was still lying six inches deep all over the countryside and on the roads where it had been beaten down at all, was as hard as ice. Footmarks had mottled it. It shone in the sun like the skin of a snow leopard.

The hills around Bridnorth and all the fields as far as eye could see were washed the purest white. Every hedge had its mantle, every tree and every branch its sleeves of snow. The whole world seemed buried. Scarce one dark object was to be seen. Only the sea stretched dark and gray like ice water, the little waves in that still air there was, falling on the beach with the brittle noises of breaking glass.

Only for this, a silence had fallen everywhere. Footsteps made no sound. The birds were hidden in the hearts of the hedges and even when hunger drew them forth in search of berries, it was without noise they went, in swift, dipping flights--a dark thing flashing by, no more.

Every one put on goloshes to climb or descend the hill to church. The Vicar and his wife came stepping over from the Vicarage close by like a pair of storks and when the bell stopped ringing it was as though another cloak of silence had been flung over Bridnorth village. The Vicar felt that additional silence as acutely as any one. It seemed to him it fell to prepare the way for worship in the house of God and the sermon he was about to preach.

The attendance that morning was no different from what it would have been had the roads been clear. Going to church in the country is a comfortable habit. At their midday meal afterwards the subject of the attendance would crop up at the Vicar's table as it always did, ever full of interest as is the subject of the booking-office returns to a theatrical manager. He would congratulate himself upon the numbers he had seen below him from that eminence of the pulpit and would have been hurt beyond degree had any one suggested it was largely habit that brought them there.

The Throgmorton family would no more have thought of staying away because of the weather than they would have thought of turning the two portraits in the dining-room with their faces to the wall.

They collected in the square hall of the square, white house. They put on their gloves and their goloshes; they held their prayer books in their hands; they each looked for the last time to see that their threepenny bits were safe in the palms of their gloves. Then they set off.

The church in the country is a meeting place in a sense other than that of worship. You may desire at most times the quietness of your own home, but you like to see the world about you in a public place.

They worshipped God, those people in Bridnorth. Who could hope to maintain that they did not? They were close enough to Him in all conscience and fact on those Devon hills. But that worship was more in the silence of their own hearts, more on the floor at their own bedside than ever it was at the service conducted by the Vicar as so many services are conducted by so many Vicars in so many parishes throughout the length and breadth of the whole country.

The interest of seeing a fresh face, of even seeing an old face if it be under a new hat; the mere interest of human contact, of exchanging a word as they went in or mildly criticizing as they came out; the mild necessity of listening to what the Vicar said from the pulpit, the sterner necessity of trying to understand what he meant; the excitement of wearing a new frock, the speculations upon the new frock worn by another, these were more the causes of a good attendance in the worst of weather, these and that same consciousness of being overlooked, of having one's conduct under the gaze of all who chose to satisfy themselves about it.

As the Vicar climbed the pulpit steps, the congregation settled themselves down with that moving in their pews with all customary signs of that spirit of patience every priest believes to be one of interest. Leaning her square, strong shoulders against the upright back of the Throgmorton pew, Mary composed her mind with mild attention. Fanny shifted her hassock to the most restful position for her feet. That sharp interrogative look of criticism drew itself out in the line of Jane's lips and steadied itself in her eyes. Hannah was the only one upon whose face a rapt expression fell. With all her gray hair and her forty years, she was the youngest of them all, still cherishing her ideals of the infallible priest in the man of cloth; still believing that the voice of God could speak even through the inferior brain of a country Vicar. Above all there were her children who the next morning would ask her what the sermon meant. It was necessary if only for their sakes she should not lose a word that was said.

After that pause on his knees when the Vicar's head was bent in prayer, he rose to his feet and, as he spread out the pages of his sermon before him, cast a significant glance around the church. This was preliminary to every sermon he preached. It was as though he said--"I cannot have any signs of inattention. If your minds have wandered at all during the service, they must wander no more. I feel I have got something to say which is vital to all of you."

All this happened that December morning, just as it had occurred every morning for the twenty years he had been the shepherd of their souls. It was almost as long as Mary could remember.

Having cast that glance about him, he cleared his throat--the same sounds as Jane once caustically remarked they had heard one thousand times, allowing two Sundays in the year for a locum tenens.

Then he gave out his text: "And the Angel said unto her--'Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favor with God.'"

IX

Perhaps it was the sound of her own name there amongst all those people which stirred her mind and added a quicker beat of the pulse to Mary Throgmorton's heart. The full significance of the text, the circumstance to which it referred, these could not have reached her mind so swiftly, even though Fanny with a sharp turn of the head had looked at her.

"'Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favor with God.'"

It was at first the sound of her name, the more as he repeated it. Listening to that habitual intonation of the Vicar's voice, it meant nothing to her as yet that Mary had found favor with her God. The only effect it had was the more completely to arrest her mind in a manner in which she had never been conscious of its arrest before. She folded her hands in her lap. It was a characteristic sign of attention in her. She folded her hands and raised her eyes steadily to the pulpit.

"There are some things," began the Vicar, "which it is necessary for us to understand though they are completely outside the range of our comprehension."

Involuntarily her interest was set back. It was the delivery of such statements as these with which the Vicar had fed the mind of his congregation for the last twenty years. For how could one understand that which was completely outside the range of comprehension? Insensibly Mary's fingers relaxed as they lay in her lap. She drew a long breath of disappointment.

"The immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary," he continued, "is one of those mysteries in the teaching of the Church which passes comprehension but which it is expedient for us to understand, lest we be led away by it towards such false conceptions as are held by the Church of Rome."

There was scarcely a sermon he preached in which the Vicar lost opportunity for such attacks as these. He seemed to fear the Roman Catholic Church as a man fears the alluring attractions of an unscrupulous woman. From the eminence of his pulpit, he would have cursed it if he could and, firmly as she had been brought up to disapprove of the Romish doctrines, Mary often found in her mind a wonder of this fear of his, an inclination to suspect the power of the Roman Catholic Church.

From that moment, fully anticipating all they were going to be told, her mind became listless. She looked about her to see if the Mainwarings were in Church. Often there were moments in the sermon when she would catch the old General's eye which for her appreciation would lift heavenwards with a solemn expression of patient forbearance.

They lived too far out of Bridnorth. It was not to be expected they would have walked all that distance in the snow. Her eyes had scarcely turned back from their empty pew when the Vicar's words arrested her again.

"Because Mary was the sinless mother of Our Lord," he was saying, "is no justification for us to direct our prayers to her. For this is what it is necessary for us to understand. It is necessary for us to understand that Mary was the mother of Our Lord's manhood. His divinity comes from God alone. What is the Trinity to which we attach our faith? It is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, the three in one. Mary, the Virgin, has no place here and it is beyond this in our thoughts of worship we have no power or authority to go.

"The Roman Catholic Church claims the mediation of the Virgin Mary between the hearts of its people and the divine throne of God. Lest we should drift into such distress of error as that, let us understand the mystery of the Immaculate Conception, however much as a mystery we allow it to be beyond our comprehension. Being the Son of God, Christ must have been born without sin, yet being the Son of Man, He must, with His manhood, have shared all the inheritance of suffering which is the accompaniment of our earthly life. How else could He have been tempted in the Wilderness? How else could He have passed through His agony on the Cross?

"To what conclusion then are we thus led? It is to the conclusion that Mary, the Mother of that manhood in Christ, must have suffered as all women suffer. She had found favor with God; but the Angel did not say she had found immunity from that nature which, being born in sin as are we all, was her inevitable portion.

"So, lest we fall into the temptation of raising her in dignity to the very throne of God, lest we succumb to the false teaching of those who would address their prayers to her, it becomes incumbent upon us to see the Virgin Mary in a clear and no uncertain light. Mystery in her conception there must always be, but in her giving birth in that manger of Bethlehem, it is as Mary the wife of Joseph, the carpenter of Nazareth, we must regard her."

To all those present in the congregation this was no more than one of the many tirades the Vicar had so often preached against the Roman Catholic Church. They listened as they had always listened before, with patience but without interest. It was no real matter of concern to them. They had no desire to be converted. They had not in the silence of their homes been reading the works of Roman Catholic authorities as the Vicar had done. They did not entertain the spirit of rivalry or feel the sense of competition as he felt it. They listened because it was their duty to listen and one and all of them except Mary, thinking of their warm firesides, hoped that he would soon make an end.

Only Mary amongst them all sat now with heart and mind attentive to what he said, pursuing not the meaning he intended to convey, but a train of thought, the sudden illumination of an idea which yet she dared not find words in her consciousness to express.

"We must think of her," the Vicar continued, "as a woman passing through the hours of her travail. We must think of her brought in secret haste by the fear of consequence and the expedience of necessity to that manger in Bethlehem, where, upon her bed of straw, with the cattle all about her in their stalls, she gave birth to a man child in all the suffering and all the pain it is the lot of women to endure. For here is the origin of that manhood in which we must place our faith if we are to appreciate the fullness of sacrifice our Savior made upon the Cross. It was a woman, as any one of you, who was the mother of Our Lord. A woman, blessed above all women to be the link between the divinity of God the Father and the manhood of God the Son. It was a woman who had found favor in the eyes of her Creator, such favor as had sought her out to be the instrument of the will and mercy of God.

"And the Angel said unto her--'Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favor with God.'"

So often had Mary's name been repeated that by now no association was left in Fanny's mind with her sister. She turned and looked at her no more. But to Mary herself, with this last reiteration of all, the sound of it throbbed in every vein and beat in violent echoes in her heart. For now no longer could she keep back the conscious words that sought expression of those thoughts in her mind. She knew beyond concealment the idea which had forced itself in a suspicion upon her acceptance.

In all his eagerness to lead their minds away from worship of the Virgin Mary, the Vicar had destroyed for her every shred of that mystery it had been his earnest intention to maintain. Now indeed it seemed she did understand and nothing was left that lay beyond her comprehension.

It was the woman, as he had urged them, whom she saw, the woman on her bed of straw, with that look in the eyes, the look of a woman waiting for her hour which often she had seen in the eyes of others it had been her duty to visit in Bridnorth. It was the woman, eager and suffering, with that eagerness she sometimes had felt as though it were a vision seen within herself. He had substituted a woman--just such a woman it might be as herself.

And here it was then that the thought leapt upon her like some ambushed thing, bearing her down beneath its weight; beating at her heart, lacerating her mind so that she knew she never in any time to come could hide from herself the scars it made.

"If she had suffered," Mary asked herself--"must she not also have known?" And then, shaking her with the terror of its blasphemy, there sprang upon her mind the words--

"Who was the father of the Son of Man?"

"In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost!" a voice intoned in a far distance and with all the others she rose automatically to her feet. Her eyes were glazed. She scarcely could see the Vicar as he descended from the pulpit. Her heart was thumping in her breast. She could hear only that.

X

They walked home in groups and in couples when the service was over. Only Fanny kept alone. A verse of poetry was building itself in her mind. One couplet already had formed a rounded phrase. It had been revolving in her thoughts all through the sermon. Round and about she had beaten it as with a pestle in a mortar until she had pounded it into shape.

"Were all the trees as green to you

As they were green to me?"

It was not so much what rhymed with "you" or "me" that was troubling her as what more she could continue to make the full matter of her verse. She could think of no more. The whole substance of life was summed up in those two lines to her. She walked alone that morning, cutting words to a measure that would not meet and had no meaning.

Mary walked with Jane. The sound of the voice and the laughter of others behind her in that sharp air was like the breaking of china falling upon a floor as hard as that beaten snow beneath their feet. She was still in an amaze with the bewilderment of what she had thought. Every long-trained sense in her was horrified at the knowledge of its blasphemy. She tried to believe she had never thought it. To induce that belief, she would have persuaded herself if she could that the Vicar had never preached his sermon, that it was not to church they had been, that it was all a dream, horrible and more vivid than life itself, but a dream.

For life was peaceful and sweet enough there in Bridnorth. Notwithstanding the song the hoofs of the coach horses had always beaten out for her on the roads, she had been well content with it. Often doubtless the call of life had come to her there beyond the hill; it came with its cry of pain and joy, its voice of sorrow as well as happiness. But now, here amongst the peace and the sweetness, where none of these vital contrasts had ever existed, there had come something more terrible than pain, more cruel and relentless than sorrow.

In moments she was astonished at herself that she did not dismiss it all with one sweep of her mind, dismiss it all as lies and blasphemy, as machinations of the Devil himself. For what was the good just of telling herself it was a dream, of pretending to hide her thoughts from it as though it were not there? It was there! She had thought it and so had the thought come to her like a light suddenly in dark corners, that she knew it was true. Never now could she cast out its significance from the processes of her mind. In the desperate fear that the very foundations of her religious beliefs were shaken, she might buttress her faith with the determined exclusion of all blasphemy in her thoughts. Never again might she allow her mind to dwell upon the origin of the manhood of that figure of Christ, still dearer to her than life itself. With persistent effort of will, she knew she could make blind her vision of that scene in the manger at Bethlehem which the Vicar in his ignorance and the pettiness of his apprehensions had conjured forth so clearly in her sight.

All this she might do, clinging to the faith in which she had been brought up; but never could she efface the change which in those few moments had been made in her. How could she know so soon what that change might be? She knew only it was there. She was a different being. Already she felt apart and aloof from her sisters. Even Jane, walking there beside her, appeared at a strange distance in which was a clearer light for her to see by, a crystal atmosphere through which she could distinguish nothing but the truth.

Suddenly as they walked together, these two in silence, Jane looked up and said--

"I wish some one would kill that bee in the Vicar's bonnet. As if there was the slightest chance of any of us becoming Roman Catholics!"

It was like Jane, that remark. Suddenly Mary knew how like it was. But more she knew in that moment the change had not come to her sisters. They had not seen what she had seen. No vision such as hers had been vouchsafed to them. Still they were happy, contented, and at peace in their garden of Eden. It was she alone who had tasted of the fruit; she alone who now had knowledge of good and evil.

Already she felt the edge of the sword of the angel of God turned against her. The gates of that garden they lived in were opened. In the deep consciousness of her heart she felt she was being turned away. How it would difference her life, where she should go now that she had been driven forth, what even the world outside those gates might be, she did not know.

All she realized was that for twenty-nine years a Mary Throgmorton had been living in Bridnorth, that now she had gone and another Mary Throgmorton had taken her place.

Looking down at Jane beside her when she spoke, she saw for the first time a sad figure of a woman, shrivelled and dried of heart, bitter and resentful of mind. No longer was she the Jane who, with her sharp tongue, had often made them laugh, who, with her shrewd criticisms had often shown them their little weaknesses and the pettiness of their thoughts. In place of her she saw a woman wilted and seared, a body parched with the need of the moisture of life; one who had been cut from the tree to wither and decay, one, the thought then sprang upon her, who had never found favor with God or man.

XI

They came loitering to the square, white house, pausing at the gate and talking to friends, lingering over the removal of their goloshes indoors. The crisp air was in their lungs. There was the scent of cooking faintly in the hall. It rose pleasantly in their nostrils. They laughed and chatted like a nestful of starlings. Jane was more amusing than usual. Her comments upon the hat bought by the police sergeant's wife in Exeter and worn that Sunday morning for the first time were shrewd and close of observation; too close to be kind, yet so shrewd as to prick even the soft heart of Hannah to laughter she would have restrained if she could.

Even Fanny, with mind still beating out her meters, lost that far-off look in her eyes and lingered in the hall to listen to Jane's sallies, to every one of which Hannah would murmur between her laughter--

"Jane! Jane--how can you? Fancy your noticing that! Oh dear! we oughtn't to be laughing at all. Poor thing! She can't help her eye or her figure."

"If I were fat," said Jane, "I wouldn't go in stripes. You don't put hoops round a barrel to make it look thin."

Foolish though that might have sounded in London drawing-rooms, it found a burst of laughter in the square, white house.

On her knees above, upstairs in her bedroom, Mary heard the noise of it. She could guess well the kind of remark from Jane that had evoked it. Until those moments Jane had been a source of amusement to her as much as to any of them. She was a source of amusement no longer. Even there on her knees with the sound of their laughter far away in the distance of the house, it was that sad figure of a woman, shrivelled and dried, bitter with the need of sun to ripen her, that came before her eyes.

Then what were the others? With this new vision, she dreaded to think that she in time must look at them. What thoughts to have on one's knee! What thoughts to bring into the sight and mind of God!

She had come there alone to her bedroom to pray--but what for? How could prayer help? Could she by prayer make numb and dead the motion of her mind? By prayer could she silence her thoughts, inducing oblivion as a drug could induce sleep?

Hastening away alone to her bedroom, she had hoped she could. Even then she cherished the belief of all she had been taught of the efficacy of prayer. But having fallen upon her knees at her bedside, what could she pray? Nothing.

"Oh--God, my heavenly Father," she began, and staring before her with rigid eyes at the pillow on her bed it became a twisted bundle of straw on which for poor comfort rested the pale face of a woman patient and enduring in her hour.

How could prayer put away such visions as these? With conscious muscular effort she closed her eyes and began repeating in a voice her ears could hear--"Our Father which art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name."

So she would have decoyed herself into the attitude of mind of prayer, but the sound of laughter in the house broke in upon the midst of it. She saw that thin, withered woman in whom the sap of life had dried to pith, and, casting away the formula of supplication, her voice had cried out for understanding of it all.

"Something's all wrong!" she said aloud as though one were there in the room beside her to hear and oppose her accusations. "I don't know what it is. I've never thought it was wrong before. And perhaps after all it's I who am wrong."

She knew what she meant by that. Wrong she might insist it was for her to have thought what she thought in church. And yet some quality of deliberation seemed necessary to compose the substance of evil. What deliberation had there been in her? Out of the even and placid monotony of life had shrilled this voice into her heart.

"Who was the father of the Son of Man?"

She had not beckoned the voice. It had lifted out of nowhere above the soulless intonation of the Vicar's sermon. But what was more, now once she had heard it, it appeared as though it long had been waiting to cry its message in her ears. She wondered why she had never heard it before. For twenty-nine years she realized as she knelt there on her knees, she had been little more than a child. Now in the lateness of the day she was a woman, knowing more of the world than ever she would have learnt by experience.

The deeper purposes of life they were that had come without seeking upon her imagination. It was not this or that she knew about women, not this or that which had come in revelation to her about men. Only that there was a meaning within herself, pitiably and almost shamefully unfulfilled. Something there was wrong--all wrong. Half she suspected in herself what it was. For those few moments as they walked back from church, she had caught actual sight of it in her sister Jane.

Would she discern it in the others? Discovering it in them would she know what it was in her? Why was she on her knees for thoughts like this? This was not prayer. She could not pray.

The sound of the bell downstairs raised her slowly to her feet. She took off her hat and laid it on the bed. Automatically she crossed to the mirror and began to tidy her hair.

Was there anything in her face that made her heart beat the faster? She stood looking at her reflection, pondering that there was not. What beauty of color was there in her cheeks? What line of beauty in her lips? And why did she look for these things and why, when behind her eyes she saw something in her mind she dared not speak, did her heart set up a beating in every pulse?

With a gesture of impatient self-rebuke, she turned away and went downstairs.

XII

Jane carved. As their father had always done, she still gave them just portions of fat so that the joint might evenly be consumed. There was not the same necessity to eat it when it was hot as there had been when Mr. Throgmorton was alive; yet even still, Fanny with an unconquerable distaste for it, did her best to leave a clean plate.

When Mary came in, they were already seated at the table. Hannah had said grace. They all asked where she had been.

"Tidying up," said she, and pulling out her chair, sat down, beginning her meal at once with her eyes steady upon her plate. Fanny was opposite to her. Being the eldest, Hannah sat at the head of the table. With the new vision of mind that had come to her, there were long moments before Mary could determine to raise her head and look at them. It was sufficient to hear them talking. The subject of Christmas presents was monopolizing the conversation. They were all going in to Exeter for a day's shopping if the roads permitted. Mary found herself caught in astonishment at the apparent note of happiness in their voices.

Were they happy after all? Had she herself become morbid and supersensitive with the sudden unexpectedness of her revelation? Was it all a mood? Would she wake on the morrow after a night of sleep, finding the whole aspect of life set back again to its old focus?

In a sudden hope and expectancy that it might be so, she raised her head and looked across the table at Fanny seated there with the full light of the window on her face.

It was a moment when, in a pause of the conversation, Fanny's thoughts had slipped back to the labor of her verses.

"Were ever the trees so green to you

As they were green to me?"

The strained expression of fretted composition was settled on her forehead. The far-off look of a memory clutching at the past was a pain in her eyes. In every outline and feature of her pale, thin face were the unmistakable signs of the utter weariness of her soul.

In that one glance, Mary knew her vision was true. It was no mood. All those signs of fatigue she had seen in Fanny's face again and again. It was her health, she had often said to herself. Fanny was not strong. Ill-health it might have been, but the root of the evil was in her spirit, not in her blood.

Sitting there opposite, as in all the countless times from childhood upwards she had seen her, it was another Fanny--the real Fanny--she beheld, just as she knew now it was the real Jane. These three sisters of hers, suddenly they had all become real. Hannah with her heart more in the flow of the Bridnorth stream, to the smooth round edges of contentment, each one of them in her turn they were presented with their new significance in her eyes.

But it was Fanny most of all in whom she felt full sense of the tragedy of circumstance. That episode of the visitor to Bridnorth came now with a fresh meaning upon Mary's mind. They had all felt deeply sorry for Fanny at the time, but one and all they had agreed she had had a lucky escape.

Was it such a lucky escape after all? Did Fanny regard it in that light? Could they be considered fortunate who escaped from life however it might wound and ill-treat them?

Mary realized as she sat there, fascinated by the terribleness of her thoughts, that they all had escaped from life. Not in one of them had there been the moment's fulfillment of their being. They were women, but it was not as women they had lived. One by one the purpose of life was running slower in their veins. She with the rest of them. Her turn would come. First she would become a Fanny, tired with waiting. That eager look of a spirit hunger would come into her eyes, alternating as events came and passed her by with those dull, dead shadows of fatigue. Hope she would cling to as a blind man to the string that is knotted to the collar of his dog. Hope, becoming fainter and weaker year by year, would lead her until, as with Jane, bitter and seared and dry of heart, she sought its services no more. Still like the blind man then she would beat with her stick up and down the unchanging pavements of her life till at last with Hannah she found a numbed contentment in her lot.

Something indeed, as she had cried up there alone in her room, something was wrong. She had come as just a few women do to that conscious realization. But her vision had not power to show her what it was. In those moments it never occurred to her to raise her eyes to the portrait of her father on the wall. She was not didactic enough of mind to argue it with herself or trace the origin of those conventions which had bound and still were binding the lives of those three women her eyes were watching.

Something was wrong. Vaguely she sensed it was the waste of life. It was beyond the function of her mind to follow the reason of that wastage to its source. Her process of thought could not seek out the social laws that had woven themselves about the lives of women until, so much were they the slaves of the law, that they would preach it, earnestly, fervently, believingly as her mother had done.

Something was wrong. That was just all she knew; but in those moments, she knew it well. There were those three women about her to prove how wrong it was. There was she herself nearing that phase when the wrong would be done to her, and she would be powerless as they had been to prevent it.

"Fear not, Mary--" it was as though she heard a voice beckoning within her--"Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favor with God."

Ever since they had come to an age of understanding, their spirits had been warped and twisted with the formalities of life. To fit the plan of those laws man makes by force, they had been bent in their growing to the pattern of his needs. It was those needs of his that had invented the forced virtues of their modesty and self-respect, beneath the pressure of which he kept them as he required them, trained and set back to fulfill the meaning of his self-centered purpose.

Modesty and self-respect, surely these were qualities of all, of men as well as women. By unnatural temperatures to force them in their growth was to produce exotic flowers having none of the simple sweetness of sun-given odors in their scent.

As life was meant, it grew in the open spaces; it was an upright tree, spreading its green boughs under the pure light of heaven. There was nothing artificial about life. It was free.

It was the favor of God. That was the truth she had come by and with her eyes marking that weary look of resignation in Fanny's face, she knew she would not fear it whenever or however it came.

This was the seed, planted in the heart of Mary Throgmorton, which in its season was to bring forth and, for the life of the woman she was, bear the fruit of her being.