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By Root 1914 0

know how she could stretch her love so far—though he saw very clearly that she did so. He had no experience of it. They were sitting on the beach, picking at a dish of strawberries. Olive said that children connected you to the earth, and therefore weighed you down, a little. She felt, she said, like a farmyard hen, clucking. (Though it was Violet, at a little distance, who was wiping Florian’s sandy face after a fall, and sponging Robin where he had dirtied his pants.) Methley said the family must be of inestimable value when it came to writing tales for children. She wrote with such insight into the hopes and fears of childish minds. Olive said that she did not believe having children was necessarily helpful. It was enough to have been a child…

“I do not know,” said Methley. “I am childless, and sometimes, these days, I lose touch with the child I once was. Do you think there is an age when we become completely adult, Mrs. Wellwood, with no child left in us? When is that, do you think? I am not referring to second childhood that comes to all of us who don’t die early enough.”

His voice was dropped and very serious. He spoke to a thought Olive had had. She wrote for the child she had been, the child she was. In a kind of flurry she asked Methley whether he regretted having no children. The moment she had spoken she regretted the question. There were many reasons why marriages were childless. They were best left unmentioned.

He bent towards her.

“I have observed that there are childless marriages in which the unique pair are everything to each other, everything. They enact the absent children, they love the child in each other, they have a capacity for play and innocence which often—I have noticed—disappears from more fecund relations. Though they can also be—to use Blake’s term—experienced with each other, uninhibited by any watching presence …”

Olive could not think of a quick answer. Herbert Methley went on

“It is not quite true that my marriage is childless. I feel I can trust you, Mrs. Wellwood—like all good writers, you let your private self be seen in public, and I know you are wise and kind. I myself have no children. My wife has three daughters. She was the wife of—a vicar in Batley—happily married but unawakened. Living in a dream world of good deeds and pretty dresses. We met—she and I—and tried to deny for two years what had struck into us and struck us down. She was ill. I could not write. She had a mysterious fatigue, she could barely stand or walk. I went to tell her that I was leaving Batley—I thought of emigrating to Canada—and I took her hand—and we saw, together, as one, that I could not leave, not alone, not ever again. So she came with me, and we live happily here, and are, as I said, everything to each other. We do not tell most people of this. Her husband refuses to divorce her. Or to allow her to see her daughters—which may be as well—she has chosen another life, and any step back into the old one would be painful, very painful.”

Two or three days later, Herbert Methley came alone to the old vicarage. He found Olive in the orchard, sitting at a folding table, writing. She was wearing a simple straw hat and a loose, butcher-blue dress, not unlike her daughters’ aprons. He stood easily before her—his body was always at ease, even if his voice was not.

“Do not let me disturb you, dear Mrs. Wellwood. No one knows better than myself the horror—the vein-freezing unpleasantness—of having the flow of writing disrupted. I came merely to bring you a little present—here it is—I have taken the liberty of writing in it—it is possibly the best of my work—but you shall be the judge.”

He handed her a wrapped book, and went away. Olive was moved. Almost nobody knew how painful it was to have the inky thread of sentences snapped by others. He was a considerate man.

The book was Daughters of Men by Herbert Methley. Inside, he had written

“For Olive Wellwood, a wise woman and a gifted writer. From her good friend, Herbert Methley.”

Olive finished her writing stint, and began to read Daughters of Men as she