SAINTS' PROGRESS By JOHN GALSWORTHY GOLD AND IRON By JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER ELI OF THE DOWNS MISER'S MONEY By EDEN PHILLPOTTS THE EVE OF PASCUA By RICHARD DEHAN A WOMAN NAMED SMITH By MARIE CONWAY OEMLER BRUTE GODS By LOUIS WILKINSON "Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life." Proverbs. London; William Heinemann, 1920. A WOMAN'S MAN CHAPTER I "Weigh me the weight of the fire, or measure me the blast of the wind, or call me again the day that is past.” Esdras II. THE first thing I remember in the penumbra of childhood is waking in the morning and listening to the footsteps that passed through our street. A secret and quite reasonless joy would possess me as I heard the pit-pat of the world outside my window. "Qu'est qui passe si tôt matin "Compagnon de la Marjolaine ?" says the old nursery rhyme. Yes, who was it who was passing to the echo of the street? Someone I might know perhaps when I grew to be a man when I went out and took my place in life-in life that was to make me happy, rich, famous and very dear to my mother-life that I feared and fearfully loved, whose rumours filled me with a delicious trepidation and made me thankful for the long cloistered years of childhood. I do not know if many children are born with the preoc cupation of greatness, the sense that they must set a seal on their time, but as for me with the first gropings of my mind came the obsession of responsibility, the feeling that I owed the world some debt, that above all I owed it to my mother to make a name for us both. Mother-there is the word that tuned all my young boy hood, there was the influence that moulded me. This woman, ambitious and austere, who saw in me not only her son but the last of her house, she was the maker of me. Had my mother been of this generation, she would have acquired fame of some kind, for there was in her the rigorous stuff of which celebrity is made, but she belonged to the age that still spoke of the "weaker sex"; she was old-fashioned enough to feel she had conquered her world if she had inspired her men to conquer it for her. I know now it was she who built up my father. She made of him, who had been a provincial doctor, one of the biggest surgeons of his day. She drew her breath for him and when he died there was in her tears, I believe, as much gall as sorrow. It was not only her husband she had lost but her life's work. When he died she left Paris where he had settled after his rise into fame; she came back to Tours to the home of her girlhood, to the house she had left to be married. She paced from kitchen to pantry, from cupboard to cupboard, to the jingling of the keys she wore at her châtelaine, and her genius of organisation weighed on her—a wasting talent. I was so little then that it hardly seemed to her that I could ever be of use as a pawn. I believe it was the day she cut my hair short that she began to love me really. I was the man-child to her then and just as Hannah dedicated Samuel in the Temple so I think my mother vowed in her heart to form me to redeem all the efforts, all the striving that my father's death had wasted. Now when a woman determines to exert her influence over child, husband, father, she sets to work as a mesmerist might, she filters herself somehow into the innermost nature of the being she would subjugate. It was not so much filial love I felt for this woman as veneration, as a cult—she had taken a profound root in me. The thought "is this right or is this wrong" never occurred to me; it was always "will this please my mother," or "will this displease my mother." I |