Motherhood! When later he was christened, she
and Harry named him Hugh; but it was a caressing diminutive
she made out of his name by which he was always known.
Her tiny son! His tiny arms hugged you as never
tiny arms possibly could have hugged before and so
she called him “Huggo.”
“Harry, if you could feel how he’s hugging
me! It’s absurd he can have such strength!
It’s ridiculous he can love me so! And how
can he possibly know that hugging’s a sign of
love? Harry, how can he? Take him and hold
him up like that and see if he hugs you the same.
He is! He is! Isn’t he?”
“Mice and Mumps,” said Harry, “he
is; he’s throttling me, the tiger.”
“Ah, give him back, I’m jealous.
There’s never, never been a hugger like him
since the world began. He’s Huggo.
That’s his name. Creature straight out
of heaven, you’re Huggo.”
Her love for infant Huggo so maternal; her unity with
Harry so exquisitely one; how could she have known
were to be met across the waters of the years occasions
new and strange, as that already shown, or, onward
yet a further voyage, as this?
The matter between them touched the same as when,
“I have a right to a home; the children have
a right to a home,” Harry had said. But
their tones not the same; in Harry’s voice a
quality of dulness as of one reciting a lesson too
often conned yet never understood; in hers a certain
weariness as with instruction too often given.
They had been talking a very long time. Harry
hadn’t any arguments. He just kept coming
back and coming back to the one thing. He said
again, the twentieth time, in that dull voice, “We
are responsible for the children. We have a duty
towards them.”
The twentieth time! She made a gesture, not impatient,
just tired, that was of repletion with this thing.
“Ah, you say ‘we’ have a duty.
You say ‘we’; but, Harry, you mean me.
Why I a duty more than you? Why am I the accused?”
Harry’s dull note: “Because you are
a woman.” Ineffable weariness was in the
murmur that was her reply. “Ah, my God,
that reason!” No, she had never anticipated
this.
How did it happen? Within her face abode the
explanation of how it happened.
There was a mirage in her face.
If she were taken (for a moment) when she had been
married ten years, her age thirty-two, and then taken
again when she was forty-six, when she had done, when,
in 1922, she said, “I have done,” and her
story ceases, it is material to a portrait of her that
in those fourteen years her appearance did not greatly
change. Events inscribed it; but these writings
were in two scripts, rendered in the two natures that
were hers, and, as it were, a balance was maintained
between them; there remained constant the aspect that
her face presented to the world; constant, that is
to say, the spirit that looked out of her face.
