John Powys - Rodmoor

“Rachel has spoken to me about that,” she said. “She told me you were displeased with her because she encouraged Linda to meet my son. I don’t like this interference with the feelings of people! My son is of an age to choose for himself and so is your sister. Why should you set yourself to come between them? I don’t like such meddling. It’s interfering with Nature!”

Nance stared at her blankly, watching mechanically the feverish way her fingers closed and unclosed, plucking at a stalk of sea-lavender which she had picked.

“But you said — you said—” she protested feebly, “that Mr. Renshaw was not a suitable companion for young girls.”

“I’ve changed my mind since then,” continued the other, “at any rate in this case.”

“Why?” asked Nance hurriedly. “Why have you?”

“Because,” and the lady raised her voice quite loudly, “because he told me himself the other day that it was possible that he would marry before long.”

She glanced triumphantly at Nance. “So you see what you’ve been doing! You’ve been trying to interfere with the one thing I’ve been praying for for years!”

Nance positively gasped at this. Had Brand really said such a thing? Or if he had, was it possible that it was anything but a blind to cover the tracks of his selfishness? But whatever was the reason of the son’s remark it was clear that Nance could not, especially in the woman’s present mood, justify her dark suspicions of him to his mother. So she did nothing but continue to stare, nervously and helplessly, at the stalk which Mrs. Renshaw’s excited fingers were pulling to pieces.

“I know why you’re so opposed to my son,” continued Mrs. Renshaw in a lower and somewhat gentler tone. “It’s because he’s so much older than your sister. But you’re wrong there, Nance. It’s always better for the man to be older than the woman. Tennyson says that very thing, in one of his poems, I think in ‘The Princess.’ He puts it poetically of course, but he must have felt the truth of it very strongly or he wouldn’t have brought it in. Nance, you’ve no idea how I have been praying and longing for Brand to see some one he felt he could marry! I know it’s what he needs to make him happy. That is to say, of course, if the girl is good and gentle and obedient.”

The use of the word “obedient” in this connection was too much for Nance’s nerves. Her feelings towards Mrs. Renshaw were always undergoing rapid and contradictory changes. When she had talked of Smollett and Dickens in their little sitting room the girl felt she could do anything for her, so exquisitely guileless her soul seemed, so spiritual and, as it were, transparent. But at this moment, as she observed her, there was an obstinate, pinched look about her face and a rigid tightening of all its lines. It was an expression that harmonized only too well with her next remark.

“Your setting yourself against my son,” she said, “is only what I expected. Philippa would be just like you if I said anything to her. All you young people are too much for me. You are too much for me. But I hear what you say and go on just the same.”

The look of dogged and inflexible resolution with which she uttered this last sentence contrasted strangely with her frail aspect and her weary drooping frame.

But that phrase about “obedience” still rankled in Nance’s mind, and she could not help saying,

“Why is it, Mrs. Renshaw, that you always speak as though all the duty and burden of marriage rested upon the woman? I don’t see why it’s more necessary for her to be good and gentle than it is for the man!”

Her companion’s pallid lips quivered at this into a smile of complicated irony and a strange light came into her hollow eyes.

“Ah, my dear, my dear!” she exclaimed, “you are indeed young yet. When you’re a few years older and have come to know better what the world is like, you will understand the truth of what I say. God has ordered, in his inscrutable wisdom, that there should be a different right and wrong for us women, from what there is for men. It may seem unjust. It may be unjust. We can no more alter it or change it than we can alter or change the shape of our bodies. A woman is made to obey. She finds her happiness in obeying. You young people may say what you please, but any deviation from this rule is contrary to Nature. Even the cleverest people,” she added with a smile, “can’t interfere with Nature without suffering for it.”

Nance felt absolutely nonplussed. The woman’s words fell from her with such force and were uttered with such a melancholy air of finality, that her indignation died down within her like a flame beneath the weight of a rain-soaked garment. Mrs. Renshaw looked sadly over the brightly-rocking expanse of sunlit water, dotted with white sails.

“It may appear to us unjust,” she went on. “It may be unjust. God does not seem in his infinite pleasure to have considered our ideas of justice in making the world. Perhaps if he had there would be no women in the world at all! Ah, Nance, my dear, it’s no use kicking against the pricks. We were made to bear, to endure, to submit, to suffer. Any attempt to escape this great law necessarily ends in misery. Suffering is not the worst evil in the world. Yielding to brutal force is not the worst, either. I sometimes think, from what I’ve observed in my life, that there are depths of horror known to men, depths of horror through which men are driven, compared with which all that we suffer at their hands is paradise!”

Her eyes had so strange and illumined an expression as she uttered these words that Nance could not help shuddering.

“We, too,” she murmured, “fall into depths of horror sometimes and it is men who drive us into them.”

Mrs. Renshaw did not seem to hear her. She went on dreamily.

“We can console ourselves. We have our duties. We have our little things which must be done. God has given to these little things a peculiar consecration. He has touched them with his breath so that they are full of unexpected consolations. There are horizons and vistas in them such as no one who hasn’t experienced what I mean can possibly imagine. They are like tiny ferns or flowers — our ‘little things,’ Nance, growing at the bottom of a precipice.”

The girl could restrain herself no longer.

“I don’t agree with you! I don’t, I don’t!” she cried. “Life is large and infinite and splendid and there are possibilities in it for all of us — for women just as much as men; just, just as much!”

Mrs. Renshaw smiled at her with a look in her face that was half pitiful and half ironical. “You don’t like my talk of ‘little things.’ You want great things. You want Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus! Even your sacrifice — if you do sacrifice yourself — must be striking, stirring, wonderful! Ah, my dear, my dear, wait a little, wait a little. A time will come when you’ll learn what the secret is of a woman’s life on this earth.”

Nance made a desperate gesture of protest. Something treacherous in her own heart seemed to yield to her companion’s words but she struggled vigorously against it.

“What we women have to do,” Mrs. Renshaw continued pitilessly, “is to make some one need us — need us with his whole nature. That is what is meant by loving a man. Everything else is mere passion and tends to misery. The more submissive we are, the more they need us. I tell you, Nance, the deepest instinct in our blood is the instinct to be needed. When a person needs us we love him. Everything else is mere animal instinct and burns itself out.”

Nance fumbled vaguely and helplessly in her mind, as she listened, to get back something of the high, inspiring tone of Mr. Traherne’s mystical doctrine. That had thrilled her and strengthened her, while this flung her into the lowest depths of despondency. Yet, in a certain sense, as she was compelled to admit to herself, there was very little practical difference between the two points of view. It was only that, with Mrs. Renshaw, the whole thing took on a certain desolate and disastrous colour as if high spirits and gaiety and adventurousness were wrong in themselves and as if nothing but what was pitched in a low unhappy key could possibly be the truth of the universe. The girl had a curious feeling, all the while she was speaking, that in some subtle way the unfortunate woman was deriving a morbid pleasure from putting thrilling and exalted things upon a ground that annihilated the emotion of heroism.