Part 36 (1/2)

'I never can help him in his work. I don't understand it enough. I don't understand it at all.' She was ashamed to hedge with this man.

She looked him straight in the eye.

'But he feels your sympathy,' was his reply. 'It's not always necessary to understand. That might only muddle him. You help by wis.h.i.+ng, feeling, sympathising--believing.'

'You really think so?' she asked simply. 'What wonderful thoughts you have I One has read, of course, of wives who inspired their husbands'

work; but it seemed to belong to books rather than to actual life.'

Rogers looked at her thoughtful, pa.s.sionate face a moment before he answered. He realised that his words would count with her. They approached delicate ground. She had an absurd idea of his importance in their lives; she exaggerated his influence; if he said a wrong thing its effect upon her would be difficult to correct.

'Well,' he said, feeling mischief in him, 'I don't mind telling _you_ that I should never have understood that confused idea of his story but for one thing.'

'What was that?' she asked, relieved to feel more solid ground at last.

'That I saw the thing from his own point of view,' he replied; 'because I have had similar thoughts all my life. I mean that he's bagged it all unconsciously out of my own mind; though, of course,' he hastened to add, 'I could never, never have made use of it as he will.

I could never give it shape and form.'

Mother began to laugh too. He caught the twinkle in her eyes. She bounced again a little on the springy sofa as she turned towards him, confession on her lips at last.

'And I do believe you've felt it too, haven't you?' he asked quickly, before she could change her mind.

'I've felt something--yes,' she a.s.sented; 'odd, unsettled; new things rus.h.i.+ng everywhere about us; the children mysterious and up to all sorts of games and wickedness; and bright light over everything, like- like a scene in a theatre, somehow. It's exhilarating, but I can't quite make it out. It can't be right to feel so frivolous and jumpy- about at my age, can it?'

'You feel lighter, eh?

She burst out laughing. Mother was a prosaic person; that is, she had strong common-sense; yet through her sober personality there ran like a streak of light some hint of fairy lightness, derived probably from her Celtic origin. Now, as Rogers watched her, he caught a flash of that raciness and swift mobility, that fluid, protean elasticity of temperament which belonged to the fairy kingdom. The humour and pathos in her had been smothered by too much care. She accepted old age before her time. He saw her, under other conditions, dancing, singing, full of Ariel tricks and mischief--instead of eternally mending stockings and saving centimes for peat and oil and washerwomen. He even saw her feeding fantasy--poetry--to Daddy like a baby with a spoon. The contrast made him laugh out loud.

'You've lived here five years,' he went on, 'but lived too heavily.

Care has swamped imagination. I did the same-in the City-for twenty years. It's all wrong. One has to learn to live carelessly as well as carefully. When I came here I felt all astray at first, but now I see more clearly. The peace and beauty have soaked into me.' He hesitated an instant, then continued. Even if she didn't grasp his meaning now with her brains, it would sink down into her and come through later.

'The important things of life are very few really. They stand out vividly here. You've both vegetated, fossilised, atrophied a bit. I discovered it in my own case when I went back to Crayfield and--'

He told her about his sentimental journey, and how he found all the creations of his childhood's imagination still so alive and kicking in a forgotten backwater of his mind that they all hopped out and took objective form--the sprites, the starlight express, the boundless world of laughter, fun and beauty.

'And, without exactly knowing it, I suppose I've brought them all out here,' he continued, seeing that she drank it in thirstily, 'and-- somehow or other--you all have felt it and responded. It's not my doing, of course,' he added; 'it's simply that I'm the channel as it were, and Daddy, with his somewhat starved artist's hunger of mind, was the first to fill up. It's pouring through him now in a story, don't you see; but we're all in it--'

'In a way, yes, that's what I've felt,' Mother interrupted. 'It's all a kind of dream here, and I've just waked up. The unchanging village, the forests, the Pension with its queer people, the Magic Box--'

'Like a play in a theatre,' he interrupted, 'isn't it?'

'Exactly,' she laughed, yet half-seriously.

'While your husband is the dramatist that writes it down in acts and scenes. You see, his idea is, perhaps, that life as we know it is never a genuine story, complete and leading to a climax. It's all in disconnected fragments apparently. It goes backwards and forwards, up and down, in and out in a wumbled muddle, just anyhow, as it were. The fragments seem out of their proper place, the first ones often last, and _vice versa_. It seems inconsequential, because we only see the sc.r.a.ps that break through from below, from the true inner, deeper life that flows on steadily and dramatically out of sight. That's what he means by ”out of the body” and ”sleep” and ”dreaming.” The great pattern is too big and hidden for us to see it whole, just as when you knit I only see the st.i.tches as you make them, although the entire pattern is in your mind complete. Our daily, external acts are the st.i.tches we show to others and that everybody sees. A spiritual person sees the whole.'

'Ah!' Mother interrupted, 'I understand now. To know the whole pattern in my mind you'd have to get in sympathy with my thought below. Is that it?'

'Sometimes we look over the fence of mystery, yes, and see inside--see the entire stage as it were.'

'It _is_ like a great play, isn't it?' she repeated, grasping again at the a.n.a.logy with relief. 'We give one another cues, and so on---'

'While each must know the whole play complete in order to act his part properly--be in sympathy, that is, with all the others. The tiniest details so important, too,' he added, glancing significantly at the needles on her lap. 'To act your own part faithfully you must carry all the others in your mind, or else--er--get your own part out of proportion.'