‘You have heard?’ she said; and in her beloved face there was that look which I have seen three or four times in my life, when great sorrow or great joy has brought us into that union which, so I verily believe, can only exist between mother and son. I knew that she had guessed what unspoken word to Margery had been on my lips.
‘Be a man, then,’ said she, seeing that I knew that she knew. ‘And God bless you, my darling, and comfort you.’
It was but a step to where Margery sat, and I held out both hands.
‘Oh, Jack, I am so happy!’ she said, and with that she rose on tiptoe, put her arms round my neck, and kissed me. It was all right, you see, that she should do that now, for she was my friend, and I was Dick’s friend, and she loved Dick.
There is but little more to say about that May, since even in a diary one has to avoid certain depths of egotism, in order to avoid being unbearable. The pentathlon was played, and I won. Also I had ten minutes with my mother that night, while Dick and Margery were together. Nothing much was said on either side, but I knew again, with the vividness that usually comes only with a thing heretofore unrealized, that she was my mother and that I was her son--part of her being, born from her body, indivisibly, while the ages lasted, hers. Hers was every little effort that I made towards ordinary human decency of behaviour; hers was the resolve I made then, and have tried (with how many failures!) to keep since, to realize that these things could not have happened with any but a benignant purpose, blind and incomprehensible as it might seem to me or to her; and that to become in the least degree embittered, or to fail in the smallest particle of friendship to my friend, or of love to the woman whom I loved, was to miss the Divine purpose, and to make of one’s self a senseless animal. For then, and even now as I write, and do know the human outcome of that love, who knows now what the meaning and the great purpose of all this is? A flaw, a failure--can one say that? Not so do I believe, for I _know_ it is all a fragment of the circumference of that great circle, the centre of which and the whole of which--you and me, and the drunkard in the street, and the prostitute in the street, and summer rain, and love and death, are included, and none higher or lower than another--is God.