A. S. M. Hutchinson

“ She was doing virtuously and she had of her virtue that happiness which, as the pious old maxims tell us, comes of being good.
That should have been well; but virtue is a placid condition and the happiness arising out of it placid. It brims no cups, flushes no cheeks, sparkles no eyes. It is of the quality of happiness that one, loving a garden, has from his garden, the happiness of tranquillity, not of stir; of peace, not of thrills; of the country, not of the town. There was more heady stuff than this that Rosalie had out of her new condition, and that was dangerous. ”

“ There’s nothing to me more detestable in the whole business than the idea that because a woman marries she therefore must give up her work. That’s what is the reason the boarding house and every boarding house and every home and street and city swarms with derelicts—with derelict women—just because their lives are all planned as blind alley occupations, marriage at the end of the alley, no need to do anything, no need to be anything because it’s only a blind alley you’re in. When you reach the end—you reach the end! That’s it, Keggo. ”

“ It is not necessary to expand. Keggo was fast going downhill. Rosalie could have wept to see the downhill signs; but somehow, seeing them, did not weep; was not moved... rather, indeed... impatient. She had herself to think of.
Youth’s an excuse for youth as childhood’s an excuse for childishness. Youth, still, like childhood, but unlike maturity, can be lost in its emotions, absorbed in them to the exclusion of all else, abandoned to them with all else pitched away as a swimmer discards his every stitch and joyously plunges in the stream. ”

“ Rosalie was astonished to think she was leaving; and now the time had come she was sorry to be going. Not very sorry; very excited; but having just enough regret to realise, on looking back, that she had been very happy at school and to realise, actively, happiness in this last term. One knows what it is. It’s always like that. One always was happy; one so seldom is. Happiness to be realised needs faint perception of sadness as needs the egg the touch of salt to manifest its flavour. Flashes of entertainment may enliven the most wretched of us; but that’s pleasure; that’s not happiness. ”

“ Harry’s quite shameless. Harry’s got tears standing on his cheeks and he’s set down the prizes and is stretching both his hands out to the boy. Feel, that’s his hand—her Benji’s hand—snuggled a moment in hers, and then he turns to his father and is eagerly whispering to his father, his spectacles rubbing his father’s head, the darling! He’s more demonstrative to his father than he is to her. She feels it rather sometimes. He’s awfully sweet to her, but, you can’t help noticing it, it’s more his gracious manner than the outpouring she’d give anything to have. ”

“ She replies, as grave as he, as one debating a matter that is weighty but that is before the arbitrament, not of feeling, but of reason, “Harry, you have a home.”
A gesture of his head, much comprehensive, is made by him: “Is this a home?”
“It’s where we live.”
“Ah, where we live, Rosalie!”
She did not reply to this. Himself, and not she, spoke next; but his note was as though she had answered and he were speaking in his turn. “I have a right to a home. The children have a right to a home.”
She said, “Then, Harry, give yourself a home. Give the children a home.” ”

“ And she told Harry: marriage that should be a partnership—not an absorption by the greater of the less; not one part active and the other passive; one giving, the other receiving; one maintaining, the other maintained; none of these, but instead a perfect partnering, a perfect equality that should be equality of place, equality of privilege, equality of duty, equality of freedom. “Harry, each with work and with a career. Harry, each living an own life as every man, away from home, shutting his front door upon that home and off to work, leads an own and separate life. ”

“ Yes, she had proved love not to be incompatible with her freedom; she would show motherhood as beautifully could be joined.
It seemed to her a blessing upon, and an assurance in, her purpose that in the precious person of a little daughter came the embodiment of this reasoning and of this design. A baby girl! A tiny woman-bud to be a woman with her in the house of Harry and of Huggo! A woman treasury into which she could pour her woman love! Her self’s own self, whose earliest speech chose for herself her name—her Doda! ”

“ Parents, being human, must have off moments; are not off moments, indeed, in the total of the day, of greater sum than moments of circumspection? It follows that if children are always with their parents, the more unlovely side cannot fail to be perceived, and, arising out of it, must follow injury by example, harm by environment, smirching of idealism, loss of respect. In those homes where the mother (in Rosalie’s phrase) is the children’s slave, why has the father the children’s greater respect? Why is it fine to do what father does? Why jolly and exciting to be with father? ”

“ Glances go shooting round the awful silences—Uncle Pyke’s atrabilious eye in the burning fiery furnace of his swollen face is a stupendous note of interrogation directed upon Aunt Belle; Aunt Belle’s eyebrows arch to scalp and appear likely to disappear into her scalp and remain there in the effort to express, “I don’t know! I can’t imagine!”; Laetitia—Laetitia’s eyes upon her mother are as a spaniel’s upon one devouring meat at table.
Frightfulness more frightful, awfulness more awful; in Rosalie almost now beyond control the desire to scream, or to burst into tears or wildly into laughter. ”

“ There’s a frightful constraint, a chilly, creepy dreadfulness steals about the party. They go upstairs—Aunt Belle and Rosalie and beautiful Laetitia—and the constraint goes with them. They sit and stare and hardly a word said. Something’s up! What’s up? What’s the matter with everything? Why is everything hanging like this! What’s up? And the men come in—Uncle Pyke swollen with food, swollen with indigestion, swollen with baffled perplexity and ferocious irritation; and Harry—she dare not look at Harry—and the thing is worse, the awfulness more awful. ”

“ Harry had said of them: “a kind of—self-contained.” It was what she found. She wanted to be a child with the children; they didn’t seem to understand. She wanted to open her heart to them and have their hearts opened to her; they didn’t seem to understand. She was always seeing that vision of Rosalie in the blue frock among them, rather like Alice, the real Alice, Tenniel’s Alice. She was always feeling that Rosalie, thus guised, was held off from their circle, not welcomed, not understood, as certainly they did not care for the demure, quaint Alice of Tenniel. ”

“ Rosalie’s father raised a marmalade jar and thumped it down upon the table so that it cracked. “Then what the dickens right have you to talk at all, sir? How dare you try to compare Oxford with Cambridge when you know no more about either than you know of Jupiter or Mars? Athletes!” He went off into record of University contests, cricket scores, running times, football scores, as if his whole life had been devoted to collecting them. They all showed Cambridge first and Oxford beaten and he hurled each one at Harold’s head with a thundering, “What about that, sir?” ”

“ The magnificent fresh start after the magnificent escape from the morass of the moribund father-in-law and the moribund school and the moribund Devonshire town proved to be but a stagger down into morass heavier and more devastating of ambition. He always jumped blindly and wildly into things. Blindly and wildly into the Church, blindly and wildly into marriage, blindly and wildly into the school, blindly and wildly, one might say, into fatherhood on a lavish scale. Blindly and wildly—the magnificent fresh start—into the rectory in which Rosalie was born. ”

“ How, Rosalie had asked, was the seeker after insurance to find the policies best suited to his case? Rosalie had asked; and had been told—he must go round but he never does; he must know what there is to be had but he never does know; he must realise exactly what he really wants but he never does realise it; and if he does realise it he must be able to state it clearly but he never can state it clearly.
Mr. Simcox, detailing this, permitted himself an amused contempt. The public were ignoramuses, mere children; they knew nothing whatever about insurance. ”

“ Immensely long he held her, immensely close; oh, men that marry for a home! Until, come home, she saw Harry’s tremendous happiness in the home that now she gave him, she never had realised the longing that must have been his for the home for which he had married, and never till now had had. It was poignant to her, the sight of his tremendous happiness. “Always to find you here!” he would cry, in the first weeks of the new life, coming home to tea and coming in to her in the drawing-room where she would be, all ready for him, with Doda and with Benji. ”

“ Anna seemed to have stopped praying. There was a light in the room and Rosalie saw that Anna, on her knees, had her head and arms thrown forward on the bed more as if she were asleep than praying. “It is hard for women.” Rosalie had heard Anna say that so often. And she was going to be a woman one day. And she had always known that men were the important and wonderful people of the world. Now Anna said that for women it was hard and that God knew it was hard. Why? She peered across again. Anna certainly had done her prayers. She said, “Anna. Anna. Why is it hard for women?” ”

“ She came to the rectory “to talk it over and see what can be done” for a week’s visit, and she stepped out of the cab, all the family assembled to greet her, a new and most surprising figure such as Rosalie had never seen before. She was dressed in startling fashions of a most wonderful richness, and she had immense plumes in her hat that nodded when she moved and trembled when she stood still, and she was herself either always nodding with glittering animation or straightening her back and quivering as if straining at a leash and just about to burst it and go off. ”

“ That poor, brave, foolish Rosalie that was! Did she protest, that foolish girl, that she was right in what had been her attitude to love? Did she with would-be bitterness recall those views laid down upon the women in the boarding house—that they were derelicts precisely through this love business, abandoned of men, relict of men, footsore and fallen in pursuit of men?
Ah, small, misguided creature! The principles were right but all askew the application. Love! Consider other attributes of life. Consider learning; consider food. ”

“ The thing goes now at a most frightful pace for Rosalie. One hates the slow, laborious written word that tries to show it. There needs a pen with wings or that by leaping violence of script, by characters blotched, huge and run together, would symbolise the pace at which the thing now goes. There’s no procession of the days. Immersed in work or lost in pleasure, there never is procession of the days, so hurtling fast goes life. They crowd. They’re driven past like snow across a window pane. ”

“ Lamentable specimen of her kind, she had no interests other than her home and her husband and her children and the pleasures and the treasures and the friends of her husband and her children. She belonged to that dark age when duty towards others was the guiding principle of moral life; she came only to the threshold of this enlightened age in which duty to oneself is known to be the paramount and first and last consideration of life as it should be lived.
Rosalie’s mother, whose name had been Anna Escott, kept at the bottom of a drawer five most exquisite little miniatures. ”

“ This was the astounding opening of an astounding letter, pages and pages, to Rosalie from Miss Salmon. Pages and pages, having the appearance, each one, of a battlefield or of a riot: a welter of thick, black underscores strewn about like coffins or like corpses, and a bristling pin-cushionful (black pins) of notes of exclamation leaping about like war-dancing Zulus or staggering about like drunken or like wounded men. ”

“ Nearer to press the simile, youth at the feet of experience is as one, experienced, climbing a mountain with the young thing panting behind. “Go on! Go on!” pants the growing young thing. “This is ripping. Go on. Show the way. But I don’t want your hand. I can do it easily by myself—better.” And one evening while Rosalie stumblingly explained, and eagerly received, and sceptically doubted, “But look here, Keggo,” she cried, and stopped and blushed, abashed at her use of the nickname.
Miss Keggs laughed. “Don’t mind, Rosalie. Call me Keggo. I like it. It’s much more friendly. ”

“ Rosalie said in a voice consonant with the grave measure of her nods: “Of course, if it was a man, as you said, looking for a house, he’d go to an agent. A house agent would tell him of houses best suited to his needs that he could choose between. Well, there are insurance agents. You’ve told me about them.”
“Ah, but not the same thing, not the same thing,” corrected Mr. Simcox. “An insurance agent, the ordinary insurance agent, is agent for a particular company. He only knows what his own company can do and he only wants his own company to do it. ”

“ Benjamin she told Harry he must be named; Benji she always called him.
Huggo and Doda and Benji! Her children! Her darling ones, her lovely ones! Love’s crown; and, what was more, worn in the persons of these darling joys of hers (when they were growing up to nine and seven and five years old) in signal, almost arrogant in her disdain of precedent to the contrary, that woman might be mother and yet work freely in the markets of the world precisely as man is father but follows a career. ”

“ It was splendid to Rosalie that her way of life, far from causing her (as prejudice would have prophesied) to neglect her children, enabled her to consider them in their relations with herself as, by their mothers, children in her childhood never were considered. That they should associate nothing—nothing at all—but happiness with her was the basis of it. Children, she held, ought not to see their parents bad-tempered or distressed or in any way out of sorts or out of control. For a child to do so has in two ways a bad effect on the child mind. ”

“ Ponders, Uncle Pyke, Uncle Pyke’s friends—all were infinitely superior and did what they pleased; but, oh, not nice, frightening. It was safe and nice to be only with girls. Girls were in heaps of ways extraordinarily silly and unsatisfactory. Men though not nice, unquestionably did everything better and could do things. Unquestionably theirs was the best time in life. Unquestionably they were to be envied. But—not nice, frightening.
It was like that that her ideas at Oakwood House were shaping.
And all this time, most important and much contributory to the life of Rosalie—Aunt Belle. ”

“ Why, when youth comes bursting out of tutelage there’s not a stable thing beneath its feet nor above its head a sky that stays the same for two hours together! Every stride’s a stepping-stone that tilts and throws you; every dawn a sudden midnight even while it breaks, and every night a blinding brilliance when it’s darkest. New faces, new places, new dresses, new dishes; new foes, new friends; new tasks, new triumphs; never a pause, never a platform; every day a year and every year a day—not life on a firm round world but life in the heart of a whirling avalanche. How youth can live it! ”