Mamma was planting another row of asters in the garden in the place of those that had died last September.
The outline of the map of South Africa had gone from the wall at the bottom. Roddy's bit was indistinguishable from the rest.
And always you knew what would happen. Outside, on the Green, the movements of the village repeated themselves like the play of a clock-work toy. Always the same figures on the same painted stand, marked with the same pattern of slanting roads and three-cornered grass-plots. Half-way through prayers the Morfe bus would break loose from High Row with a clatter, and the brakes would grind on the hill. An hour after tea-time it would come back with a mournful tapping and scraping of hoofs.
She had left off watching for the old red mail-cart to come round the corner at the bottom. Sometimes, at long intervals, there would be a letter for her from Aunt Lavvy or Dan or Mrs. Sutcliffe. She couldn't tell when it would come, but she knew on what days the long trolleys would stop by Mr. Horn's yard loaded with powdery sacks of flour, and on what days the brewer's van would draw up to the King's Head and the Farmers' Arms. When she looked out across the Green she caught the hard stare of the Belks' house, the tall, lean, grey house blotched with iron stains. It stood on the sheer edge where the platform dropped to the turn of the road. Every morning at ten o'clock its little door would open and Mr. Belk would come out and watch for his London paper. Every evening at ten minutes past ten the shadow of Mr. Belk would move across the yellow blind of the drawing-room window on the right; the light would go out, and presently a blond blur would appear behind the blind of the bedroom window on the left.
Every morning at twelve Mrs. Belk would hurry along, waddling and shaking, to leave the paper with her aunt, old Mrs. Heron, in the dark cottage that crouched at the top of the Green. Every afternoon at three Dorsy would bring it back again.
When Mary came in from the village Mamma would look up and say "Well?" as if she expected her to have something interesting to tell. She wished that something would happen so that she might tell Mamma about it. She tried to think of something, something to say that would interest Mamma.
"I met Mr. James on the Garthdale Road. Walking like anything."
"Did you?" Mamma was not interested in Mr. James.
She wondered, "Why can't I think of things like other people?" She had a sense of defeat, of mournful incapacity.
One day Catty came bustling in with the tea-things, looking important.She had brought news from the village.
Mrs. Heron had broken her thigh. She had slipped on the landing. Mrs.Belk was with her and wouldn't go away.
Catty tried to look sorry, but you could see she was pleased because she had something to tell you.
They talked about it all through tea-time. They were sorry for Mrs. Heron. They wondered what poor Dorsy would do if anything should happen to her. And through all their sorrow there ran a delicate, secret thrill of satisfaction. Something had happened. Something that interested Mamma.
Two days later Dorsy came in with her tale; her nose was redder, her hare's eyes were frightened.
"Mrs. Belk's there still," she said. "She wants to take Aunt to live with her. She wants her to send me away. She says it wouldn't have happened if I'd looked after her properly. And so it wouldn't, Mary, if I'd been there. But I'd a bad headache, and I was lying down for a minute when she fell…. She won't go. She's sitting there in Aunt's room all the time, talking and tiring her. Trying to poison Aunt's mind against me. Working on her to send me away."
Dorsy's voice dropped and her face reddened.
"She thinks I'm after Aunt's money. She's always been afraid of her leaving it to me. I'm only her husband's nephew's daughter. Mrs. Belk's her real niece….
"I'd go to-morrow, Mary, but Aunt wants me there. She doesn't like Mrs. Belk; I think she's afraid of her. And she can't get away from her. She just lies there with her poor leg in the splints; there's the four-pound weight from the kitchen scales tied on to keep it on the stretch. If you could see her eyes turning to me when I come….
"One thing—Mrs. Belk's afraid for her life of me. That's why she's trying to poison Aunt's mind."
When they saw Mrs. Belk hurrying across the Green to Mrs. Heron's house they knew what she was going for.
"Poor Dorsy!" they said.
"Poor Dorsy!"
They had something to talk to each other about now.
Winter and spring passed. The thorn-trees flowered on Greffington Edge: dim white groves, magically still under the grey, glassy air.
May passed and June. The sleek waves of the hay-fields shone with the brushing of the wind, ready for mowing.
The elder tree by the garden wall was a froth of greenish white on green.
At the turn of the schoolhouse lane the flowers began: wild geraniums and rose campion, purple and blue and magenta, in a white spray of cow's parsley: standing high against the stone walls, up and up the green lane.
Down there, where the two dales spread out at the bottom, a tiny Dutch landscape. Flat pastures. Trees dotted about. A stiff row of trees at the end. No sky behind them. Trees green on green, not green on blue. The great flood of the sky dammed off by the hills.
She shut her eyes and saw the flat fields of Ilford, and the low line of flying trees; a thin, watery mirage against the hill.
Since Mark died she had begun to dream about Ilford. She would struggle and break through out of some dream about Morfe and find herself in Ley Street, going to Five Elms. She would get past the corner and see the red brick gable end. Sometimes, when she came up to the gate, the house would turn into Greffington Hall. Sometimes it would stand firm with its three rows of flat windows; she would go up the flagged path and see the sumach tree growing by the pantry window; and when the door was opening she would wake.
Sometimes the door stood open. She would go in. She would go up the stairs and down the passages, trying to find the schoolroom. She would know that Mark was in the schoolroom. But she could never find it. She never saw Mark. The passages led through empty, grey-lit rooms to the bottom of the kitchen stairs, and she would find a dead baby lying among the boots and shoes in the cat's cupboard.
Autumn and winter passed. She was thirty-two.
When your mind stopped and stood still it could feel time. Time going fast, going faster and faster. Every year its rhythm swung on a longer curve.
Your mind stretched to the span of time. There was something exciting about this stretch, like a new sense growing. But in your dreams your mind shrank again; you were a child, a child remembering and returning; haunting old stairs and passages, knocking at shut doors. This child tried to drag you back, it teased you to make rhymes about it. You were not happy till you had made the rhymes.
There was something in you that went on, that refused to turn back, to look for happiness in memory. Your happiness wasnow, in the moment that you lived, while you made rhymes; while you looked at the white thorn-trees; while the black-purple cloud passed over Karva.
Yesterday she had said to Dorsy Heron, "What I can't stand is seeing the same faces every day."
But the hill world had never the same face for five minutes. Its very form changed as the roads turned. The swing of your stride put in play a vast, mysterious scene-shifting that disturbed the sky. Moving through it you stood still in the heart of an immense being that moved. Standing still you were moved, you were drawn nearer and nearer to its enclosing heart.
She swung off the road beyond the sickle to the last moor-track that led to the other side of Karva. She came back by the southern slope, down the twelve fields, past the four farms.
The farm of the thorn-tree, the farm of the ash, the farm of the three firs and the farm all alone.
Four houses. Four tales to be written.
There was something in you that would go on, whatever happened. Whatever happened it would still be happy. Its happiness was not like the queer, sudden, uncertain ecstasy. She had never knownwhatthat was. It came and went; it had gone so long ago that she was sure that whatever it had been it would never come again. She could only remember its happening as you remember the faint ecstasies of dreams. She thought of it as something strange and exciting. Sometimes she wondered whether it had really happened, whether there wasn't a sort of untruthfulness in supposing it had.
But that ecstasy and this happiness had one quality in common; they belonged to some part of you that was free. A you that had no hereditary destiny; that had got out of the net, or had never been caught in it.
You could stand aside and look on at its happiness with horror, it didn't care. It was utterly indifferent to your praise or blame, and the praise or blame of other people; or to your happiness and theirs. It was open to you to own it as your self or to detach yourself from it in your horror. It was stronger and saner than you. If you chose to set up that awful conflict in your soul that was your own affair.
Perhaps not your own. Supposing the conflict in you was the tug of the generations before you, trying to drag you back to them? Supposing the horror wastheirhorror, their fear of defeat?
She had left off being afraid of what might happen to her. It might never happen. And supposing it did, supposing it had to happen when you were forty-five, you had still thirteen years to write in.
"It shan't happen. I won't let it. I won't let them beat me."
Last year the drawer in the writing-table was full. This year it had overflowed into the top left-hand drawer of the dressing-table. She had to turn out all the handkerchiefs and stockings.
Her mother met her as she was carrying them to the wardrobe in the spare room. You could see she felt that there was something here that must be enquired into.
"I should have thought," she said, "that writing-table drawer was enough."
"It isn't."
"Tt-t—" Mamma nodded her head in a sort of exasperated resignation.
"Do you mean to say you're going tokeepall that?"
"All that? You should see what I've burnt."
"I should like to know what you're going to do with it!"
"So should I. That's just it—I don't know."
That night the monstrous thought came to her in bed: Supposing I published those poems—I always meant to do it some day. Why haven't I? Because I don't care? Or because I care too much? Because I'm afraid? Afraid that if somebody reads them the illusion they've created would be gone?
How do I know my writing isn't like my playing?
This is different. There's nothing else. If it's taken from me I shan't want to go on living.
You didn't want to go on living when Mark died. Yet you went on. As ifMark had never died…. And if Mamma died you'd go on—in your illusion.
If it is an illusion I'd rather know it.
HowcanI know? There isn't anybody here who can tell me. Nobody you could believe if they told you—I can believemyself. I've burnt everything I've written that was bad.
You believe yourself to-day. You believed yesterday. How do you know you'll believe to-morrow?
To-morrow—
Aunt Lavvy had come to stay.
When she came you had the old feeling of something interesting about to happen. Only you knew now that this was an illusion.
She talked to you as though, instead of being thirty-three, you were still very small and very young and ignorant of all the things that really mattered. She was vaguer and greyer, more placid than ever, and more content with God.
Impossible to believe that Papa used to bully her and that Aunt Lavvy had revolted.
"For thirty-three years, Emilius, thirty-three years"—
Sunday supper at Five Elms; on the table James Martineau'sEndeavoursAfter the Christian Life.
She wondered why she hadn't thought of Aunt Lavvy. Aunt Lavvy knew Dr. Martineau. As long as you could remember she had always given a strong impression of knowing him quite well.
But when Mary had made it clear what she wanted her to ask him to do, it turned out that Aunt Lavvy didn't know Dr. Martineau at all.
And you could see she thought you presumptuous.
When old Martha brought the message for her to go to tea with Miss Kendal, Mary slunk out through the orchard into the Back Lane. At that moment the prospect of talking two hours with Miss Kendal was unendurable.
And there was no other prospect. As long as she lived in Morfe there would be nothing—apart from her real, secret life there would be nothing—to look forward to but that. If it was not Miss Kendal it would be Miss Louisa or Dorsy or old Mrs. Heron. People talked about dying of boredom who didn't know that you could really die of it.
If only you didn't keep on wanting somebody—somebody who wasn't there. If, before it killed you, you could kill the desire to know another mind, a luminous, fiery crystal, to see it turn, shining and flashing. To talk to it, to listen to it, to love the human creature it belonged to.
She envied her youth its capacity for day-dreaming, for imagining interminable communions. Brilliant hallucinations of a mental hunger. Better than nothing…. If this went on the breaking-point must come. Suddenly you would go smash. Smash. Your mind would die in a delirium of hunger.
"It's a pity we can't go to his lecture," said Miss Kendal.
The train was moving out of Reyburn station. It was awful to think how nearly they had missed it. If Dr. Charles had stayed another minute at the harness-maker's.
Miss Kendal sat on the edge of the seat, very upright in her black silk mantle with the accordion-pleated chiffon frills. She had sat like that since the train began to pull, ready to get out the instant it stopped at Durlingham.
"I feel sure it's going to be all right," she said.
The white marabou feather nodded.
Her gentle mauve and sallow face was growing old, with soft curdlings and puckerings of the skin; but she still carried her head high, nodding at you with her air of gaiety, of ineffable intrigue.
"I wouldn't bring you, Mary, if I didn't feel sure."
If she had not felt sure she wouldn't have put on the grey kid gloves, the mantle and the bonnet with the white marabou feather. You don't dress like that to go shopping in Durlingham.
"You mean," Mary said, "that we shall see him."
Her heart beat calmly, stilled by the sheer incredibility of the adventure.
"Of course we shall see him. Mrs. Smythe-Caulfield will manage that. It might have been a little difficult if the Professor had been staying anywhere else. But I know Mrs. Smythe-Caulfield very well. No doubt she's arranged for you to have a long talk with him."
"Does she know what I want to see him about?"
"Well—yes—I thought it best, my dear, to tell her just what you told me, so that she might see how important it is…. There's no knowing what may come of it…. Did you bring them with you?"
"No, I didn't. If he won't look at them I should feel such an awful fool."
"Perhaps," said Miss Kendal, "it is wiser not to assume beforehand.Nothing may come of it. Still, I can't help feeling something will….When you're famous, Mary, I shall think of how we went into Durlinghamtogether."
"Whatever comes of it I shall think ofyou."
The marabou feather quivered slightly.
"How long have we known each other?"
"Seventeen years."
"Is it so long?… I shall never forget the first day you came with your mother. I can see you now, Mary, sitting beside my poor father with your hand on his chair…. And that evening when you played to us, and dear Mr. Roddy was there…."
She thought: "Why can't I be kind—always? Kindness matters more than anything. Some day she'll die and she'll never have said or thought one unkind thing in all her poor, dreadful little life…. Why didn't I go to tea with her on Wednesday?"
On Wednesday her mind had revolted against its destiny of hunger. She had hated Morfe. She had felt angry with her mother for making her live in it, for expecting her to be content, for thinking that Dorsy and Miss Louisa and Miss Kendal were enough. She had been angry with Aunt Lavvy for talking about her to Miss Kendal.
Yet if it weren't for Miss Kendal she wouldn't be going into Durlingham to see Professor Lee Ramsden.
Inconceivable that she should be taken by Miss Kendal to see ProfessorLee Ramsden. Yet this inconceivable thing appeared to be happening.
She tried to remember what she knew about him. He was Professor ofEnglish literature at the University of London. He had edited Anthologiesand written Introductions. He had written aHistory of EnglishLiteraturefrom Chaucer to Tennyson and a monograph on Shelley.
She thought of his mind as a luminous, fiery crystal, shining.
Posters on the platform at Durlingham announced in red letters that Professor Lee Ramsden, M.A., F.R.S.L., would lecture in the Town Hall at 8 P.M. She heard Miss Kendal saying, "If it had been at three instead of eight we could have gone." She had a supreme sense of something about to happen.
Heavenly the long, steep-curved glass roof of the station, the iron arches and girders, the fanlights. Foreign and beautiful the black canal between the purplish rose-red walls, the white swans swaying on the black water, the red shaft of the clock-tower. It shot up high out of the Market-place, topped with the fantastically large, round, white eye of its clock.
She kept on looking up to the clock-tower. At four she would see him.
They walked about the town. They lunched and shopped. They sat in thePark. They kept on looking at the clock-tower.
At the bookseller's in the Market-place she bought a second-hand copy ofWalt Whitman'sLeaves of Grass….
A black-grey drive between bushes of smutty laurel and arbutus. A black-grey house of big cut stones that stuck out. Gables and bow windows with sharp freestone facings that stuck out. You waited in a drawing-room stuffed with fragile mahogany and sea-green plush. Immense sea-green acanthus leaves, shaded in myrtle green, curled out from the walls. A suggestion of pictures heaved up from their places by this vigorous, thrusting growth.
Curtains, cream-coloured net, sea-green plush, veiled the black-grey walks and smutty lawns of the garden.
While she contemplated these things the long hand of the white marble tombstone clock moved from the hour to the quarter.
She was reading the inscription, in black letters, on the golden plinth:"Presented to Thomas Smythe-Caulfield, Esqr., M.P., by the Council andTeachers of St. Paul's Schools, Durlingham"—"Presented"—when Mrs.Smythe-Caulfield came in.
A foolish, overblown, conceited face. Grey hair arranged with art and science, curl on curl. Three-cornered eyelids, hutches for small, malevolently watching eyes. A sharp, insolent nose. Fish's mouth peering out above the backward slope of cascading chins.
Mrs. Smythe-Caulfield shook hands at a sidelong arm's-length, not looking at you, holding Miss Kendal in her sharp pointed stare. They were Kate and Eleanor: Eleanor and Kate.
"You're going to the lecture?"
"If it had been at three instead of eight—"
"The hour was fixed for the townspeople's convenience."
In five minutes you had gathered that you would not be allowed to see Professor Lee Ramsden; that Professor Lee Ramsden did not desire to see or talk to anybody except Mrs. Smythe-Caulfield; that he kept his best things for her; thatall sorts of peoplewere trying to get at him, and that he trusted her to protect him from invasion; that you had been admitted in order that Mrs. Smythe-Caulfield might have the pleasure of telling you these things.
Mary saw that the moment was atrocious; but it didn't matter. A curious tranquillity possessed her: she felt something there, close to her, like a person in the room, giving her a sudden security. The moment that was mattering so abominably to her poor, kind friend belonged to a time that was not her time.
She heard the tinkle of tea cups outside the hall; then a male voice, male footsteps. Mrs. Smythe-Caulfield made a large encircling movement towards the door. Something interceptive took place there.
As they went back down the black-grey drive between the laurel and arbutus Miss Kendal carried her head higher than ever.
"That is the first time in my life, Mary, that I've asked a favour."
"You did it for me." ("She hated it, but she did it for me.")
"Never mind. We aren't going to mind, are we? We'll do without them…. That's right, my dear. Laugh. I'm glad you can. I dare say I shall laugh myself to-morrow."
"I don'twantto laugh," Mary said. She could have cried when she looked at the grey gloves and the frilled mantle, and the sad, insulted face in the bonnet with the white marabou feather. (And that horrible woman hadn't even given her tea.)
The enormous eye of the town clock pursued them to the station.
As they settled into their seats in the Reyburn train Miss Kendal said,"It's a pity we couldn't go to the lecture."
She leaned back, tired, in her corner. She closed her eyes.
Mary opened Walt Whitman'sLeaves of Grass.
The beginning had begun.
"What are you reading, Mary?"
"The New Testament…. Extraordinary how interesting it is."
"Interesting!"
"Frightfully interesting."
"You may say what you like, Mary; you'll change your mind some day. I pray every night that you may come to Christ; and you'll find in the end you'll have to come…."
No. No. Still, he said, "The Kingdom of God is within you." If the Greek would bear it—within you.
Did they understand their Christ? Had anybody ever understood him? Their "Prince of Peace" who said he hadn't come to send peace, but a sword? The sword of the Self. He said he had come to set a man against his father and the daughter against her mother, and that because of him a man's foes should be those of his own household. "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild."
He was not meek and mild. He was only gentle with children and women and sick people. He was brave and proud and impatient and ironic. He wouldn't stay with his father and mother. He liked happy people who could amuse themselves without boring him. He liked to get away from his disciples, and from Lazarus and Martha and Mary of Bethany, and go to the rich, cosmopolitan houses and hear the tax-gatherer's talk and see the young Roman captains swaggering with their swords and making eyes at Mary of Magdala.
He was the sublimest rebel that ever lived.
He said, "The spirit blows where it wills. You hear the sound of it, but you can't tell where it comes from or where it goes to. Everybody that is born from the spirit is like that." The spirit blows where it wants to.
He said it was a good thing for them that he was going away. If he didn't the Holy Ghost wouldn't come to them; they would never have any real selves; they would never be free. They would set him up as a god outside themselves and worship Him, and forget that the Kingdom of God was within them, that God was their real self.
Their hidden self was God. It was their Saviour. Its existence was the hushed secret of the world.
Christ knew—he must have known—it was greater than he was.
It was a good thing for them that Christ died. That was how he saved them. By going away. By a proud, brave, ironic death. Not at all the sort of death you had been taught to believe in.
And because they couldn't understand a death like that, they went and made a god of him just the same.
But the Atonement was that—Christ's going away.
February: grey, black-bellied clouds crawling over Greffington Edge, over Karva, swelling out: swollen bodies crawling and climbing, coming together, joining. Monstrous bodies ballooning up behind them, mounting on top of them, flattening them out, pressing them down on to the hills; going on, up and up the sky, swelling out overhead, coming together.
One cloud, grey as sink water, over all the sky, shredded here and there, stirred by slight stretchings, and spoutings of thin steam.
Then the whole mass coming down, streaming grey sink water.
She came down the twelve fields on the south slope of Karva: she could say them by heart: the field with the big gap, the field above the four firs farm, the field below the farm of the ash-tree, the bare field, the field with the thorn tree, the field with the sheep's well, the field with the wild rose bush, the steep field of long grass, the hillocky field, the haunted field with the ash grove, the field with the big barn, the last field with the gap to the road.
She thought of her thirty-four years; of the verses she had sent to the magazines and how they had come back again; of the four farms on the hill, of the four tales not written.
The wet field grasses swept, cold, round her ankles.
Mamma sat waiting in her chair, in the drawing-room, in the clear, grey, glassy dusk of the cross-lights. She waited for the fine weather to come when she would work again in the garden. She waited for you to come to her. Her forehead unknitted itself; her dove's eyes brightened; she smiled, and the rough feathers of her eyebrows lay down, appeased.
At the opening of the door she stirred in her chair. She was glad when you came.
Catty brought in the lamp. When she turned up the wick the rising flame carved Mamma's face out of the dusk. Her pretty face, delicately dinted, whitened with a powdery down; stained with faint bistres of age. Her little, high-bridged nose stood up from the softness, clear and young, firm as ivory.
The globed light showed like a ball of fire, hung out in the garden, on the black, glassy darkness, behind the pane. Catty drew down the blind and went. You heard the click of the latch falling to behind her. The evening had begun.
They took up their books. Mamma hid her face behind Anthony Trollope, Mary hers behind Thomas Hardy. Presently she would hear Mamma sigh, then yawn.
Horrible tension.
Under the edge of her book she would see Anthony Trollope lying in Mamma's lap and Mamma's fingers playing with the fringe of her shawl. She would put Thomas Hardy down and take up Anthony Trollope and read aloud till Mamma's head began bowing in a doze. Then she would take up Thomas Hardy. When Mamma waked Hardy would go down under Trollope; when she dozed he would come to the top again.
After supper Mamma would be wide awake. She would sit straight up in her chair, waiting, motionless, ready. You would pick up your book but you would have no heart in it. You knew what she wanted. She knew that you knew. You could go on trying to read if you chose; but she would still sit there, waiting. You would know what she was thinking of.
The green box in the cabinet drawer.
The green box. You began to think of it, too, hidden, hidden in the cabinet drawer. You were disturbed by the thought of the green box, of the little figures inside it, white and green. You would get up and go to the cabinet drawer.
Mamma would put out her hands on the table, ready. She smiled with shut lips, pouting, half ashamed, half delighted. You would set out the green and white chequer board, the rows of pawns. And the game of halma would begin. White figures leap-frogging over green, green over white. Your hand and your eyes playing, your brain hanging inert, remembering, forgetting.
In the pauses of the game you waited; for the clock to strike ten, forCatty to bring in the Bible and the Prayer-book, for the evening to end.Old verses, old unfinished verses, coming and going.
In the long pauses of the game, when Mamma sat stone-still, hypnotised by the green and white chequers, her curved hand lifted, holding her pawn, her head quivering with indecision.
In dreams He has made you wiseWith the wisdom of silence and prayer….
Coming and going, between the leap-frogging of the green figures and the white.
God, Who has blinded your eyesWith the dusk of your hair….
Brown hair, sleek and thin, brown hair that wouldn't go grey.
And the evening would go on, soundless and calm, with soft, annihilating feet, with the soft, cruel feet of oblivion.
One day, when she came in, she heard the sound of the piano. The knocking of loose hammers on dead wires, the light, hacking clang of chords rolling like dead drum taps: Droom—Droom, Droom-era-room.
Alone in the dusk, Mamma was playing the Hungarian March, bowing and swaying as she played.
When the door opened she started up, turning her back on the piano, frightened, like a child caught in a play it is ashamed of. The piano looked mournful and self-conscious.
Then suddenly, all by itself, it shot out a cry like an arrow, a pinging, stinging, violently vibrating cry.
"I'm afraid," Mamma said, "something's happened to the piano."
They were turning out the cabinet drawer, when they found the bundle of letters. Mamma had marked it in her sharp, three cornered hand-writing: "Correspondence, Mary."
"Dear me," she said, "I didn't know I'd kept those letters."
She slipped them from the rubber band and looked at them. You could see Uncle Victor's on the top, then Maurice Jourdain's. You heard the click of her tongue that dismissed those useless, unimportant things. The slim, yellowish letter at the bottom was Miss Lambert's.
"Tt-tt—"
"Oh, let me see that."
She looked over her mother's shoulder. They read together.
"We don't want her to go…. She made us love her more in one fortnight than girls we've had with us for years…. Perhaps some day we may have her again."
The poor, kind woman. The kind, dead woman. Years ago dead; her poor voice rising up, a ghostlike wail over your "unbelief."
That was only the way she began.
"I say—I say!"
The thin voice was quivering with praise. Incredible, bewildering praise. "Remarkable.—remarkable".—You would have thought there had never been such a remarkable child as Mary Olivier.
It came back to her. She could see Miss Lambert talking to her father on the platform at Victoria. She could see herself, excited, running up the flagged walk at Five Elms. And Mamma coming down the hall. And what happened then. The shock and all the misery that came after.
"That was the letter you wouldn't let me read."
"What do you mean?"
"The day I came back. I asked you to let me read it and you wouldn't."
"Really, Mary, you accuse me of the most awful things. I don't believe I wouldn't let you read it."
"You didn't. I remember. You didn't want me to know—"
"Well," her mother said, giving in suddenly, "if I didn't, it was because I thought it would make you even more conceited than you were. I don't suppose I was very well pleased with you at the time."
"Still—you kept it."
But her mother was not even going to admit that she had kept it.
She said, "I must have overlooked it. But we can burn it now."
She carried it across the room to the fire. She didn't want even now—even now. You saw again the old way of it, her little obstinate, triumphant smile, the look that paid you out, that said, "See how I've sold you."
The violet ashen sheet clung to the furred soot of the chimney: you could still see the blenched letters.
She couldn't really have thought it would make you conceited. That was only what she wanted to think she had thought.
"It wasn't easy to make you pleased with me all the time…. Still, I can't think why on earth you weren't pleased."
She knelt before the fire, watching the violet ashen bit of burnt-out paper, the cause, the stupid cause of it all.
Her mother had settled again, placidly, in her chair.
"Even if Iwasa bit conceited…. I don't think I was, really. I only wanted to know whether I could do things. I wanted people to tell me just because I didn't know. But even if I was, what did it matter? You must have known I loved you—desperately—all the time."
"I didn't know it, Mary."
"Then you were stup—"
"Oh, say I was stupid. It's what you think. It's what you always have thought."
"You were—you were, if you didn't see it."
"See what?"
"How I cared—I can remember—when I was a kid—the awful feeling. It used to make me ill."
"I didn't know that. If you did care you'd a queer way of showing it."
"That was because I thought you didn't."
"Who told you I didn't care for you?"
"I didn't need to be told. I could see the difference."
Her mother sat fixed in a curious stillness. She held her elbows pressed tight against her sides. Her face was hard and still. Her eyes looked away across the room.
"You were different," she said. "You weren't like any of the others. I was afraid of you. You used to look at me with your little bright eyes. I felt as if you knew everything I was thinking. I never knew what you'd say or do next."
No. Her face wasn't hard. There was something else. Something clear.Clear and beautiful.
"I suppose I—I didn't like your being clever. It was the boys I wanted to do things. Not you."
"Don't—Mamma darling—don't."
The stiff, tight body let go its hold of itself. The eyes turned to her again.
"I was jealous of you, Mary. And I was afraid for my life you'd find it out."
Eighteen ninety-eight. Eighteen ninety-nine. Nineteen hundred. Thirty-five—thirty-six—thirty-seven. Three years. Her mind kept on stretching; it held three years in one span like one year. The large rhythm of time appeased and exalted her.
In the long summers while Mamma worked in the garden she translatedEuripides.
TheBacchae. You could do it after you had read Whitman. If you gave up the superstition of singing; the little tunes of rhyme. If you left off that eternal jingling and listened, you could hear what it ought to be.
Something between talking and singing. If you wrote verse that could be chanted: that could be whispered, shouted, screamed as they moved. Agave and her Maenads. Verse that would go with a throbbing beat, excited, exciting; beyond rhyme. That would be nearest to the Greek verse.
* * * * *
September, nineteen hundred.
Across the room she could see the pale buff-coloured magazine, on the table where, five minutes ago, Mamma had laid it down. She could see the black letters of its title and the squat column of the table of contents. The magazine with her poem in it.
And Mamma, sitting very straight, very still.
You would never know what she was thinking. She hadn't said anything. You couldn't tell whether she was glad or sorry; or whether she was afraid.
The air tingled with the thought of the magazine with your poem in it.But you would never know what she was thinking.
A long letter from Uncle Edward. Uncle Edward was worrying Mamma.
"He never could get on with your poor father. Or your Uncle Victor. He did his best to prevent him being made trustee…. And now he comes meddling, wanting to upset all their arrangements."
"Why?"
"Just because poor Victor's business isn't doing quite so well as it did."
"Yes, but why's he botheringyouabout it?"
"Well, he says I ought to make another will, leaving half the boys' money to you. That would be taking it from Dan. He always had a grudge against poor Dan."
"But you mustn't do anything of the sort."
"Well—he knows your father provided for you. You're to have the Five Elms money that's in your Uncle Victor's business. You'd suppose, to hear him talk, that it wasn't safe there."
"Just tell him to mind his own business," Mary said.
"Actually," Mamma went on, "advising me not to pay back any more ofVictor's money. I shall tell him I sent the last of it yesterday."
There would be no more debts to Uncle Victor. Mark had paid back his; Mamma had paid back Roddy's, scraping and scraping, Mark and Mamma, over ten years, over twenty.
A long letter from Uncle Victor. Uncle Victor was worrying Mamma.
"Don't imagine that I shall take this money. I have invested it for you, in sound securities. Not in my own business. That, I am afraid I ought to tell you, is no longer a sound security."
"Poor Victor—"
"It almost looks," Mamma said, "as if Edward might be right."
So right that in his next letter Uncle Victor prepared you for his bankruptcy.
"It will not affect you and Mary," he wrote. "I may as well tell you now that all the Five Elms money has been reinvested, and is safe. As for myself, I can assure you that, after the appalling anxiety of the last ten years, the thought of bankruptcy is a relief. A blessed relief, Caroline."
All through September and October the long letters came from UncleVictor.
Then Aunt Lavvy's short letter that told you of his death.
Then the lawyer's letters.
It seemed that, after all, Uncle Victor had been mistaken. His affairs were in perfect order.
Only the Five Elms money was gone; and the money Mark and Mamma had paid back to him. He had taken it all out of his own business, and put it into the Sheba Mines and Joe's Reef, and the Golconda Company where he thought it would be safe.
The poor dear. The poor dear.
So that you knew—
Mamma might believe what Aunt Lavvy told her, that he had only gone to look out of the window and had turned giddy. Aunt Lavvy might believe that he didn't know what he was doing.
But you knew.
He had been afraid. Afraid. He wouldn't go up to the top-landing after they took Aunt Charlotte away; because he was afraid.
Then, at last, after all those years, he had gone up. When he knew he was caught in the net and couldn't get out. He had found that they had moved the linen cupboard from the window back into the night nursery. And he had bolted the staircase door on himself. He had shut himself up. And the great bare, high window was there. And the low sill. And the steep, bare wall, dropping to the lane below.
She must have been sitting there twenty minutes.
She was afraid to look up at the clock, afraid to move an eyelid lest she should disturb him.
The library had the same nice, leathery, tobaccoey smell. Rough under her fingers the same little sharp tongue of leather scratched up from the arm of her chair. The hanging, half-open fans of the ash-tree would be making the same Japanese pattern in the top left hand pane of the third window. She wanted to see it again to make sure of the pattern, but she was afraid to look up.
If she looked up she would see him.
She mustn't. It would disturb him horribly. He couldn't write if he thought you were looking at him.
It was wonderful that he could go on like that, with somebody in the room, that he let you sit in it when he was writing. The big man.
She had asked him whether she hadn't better go away and come back again, and he had said No, he didn't want her to go away. He wouldn't keep her waiting more than five minutes.
It was unbelievable that she should be sitting there, in that room, as if nothing had happened; as iftheywere there; as if they might come in any minute; as if they had never gone. A week ago she would have said it was impossible, she couldn't do it, for anybody, no matter how big or how celebrated he was.
Why, after ten years—it must be ten years—she couldn't even bear to go past the house while other people were in it. She hated them, the people who took Greffington Hall for the summer holidays and the autumn shooting. She would go round to Renton by Jackson's yard and the fields so as not to see it. But when the brutes were gone and the yellow blinds were down in the long rows of windows that you saw above the grey garden wall, she liked to pass it and look up and pretend that the house was only waiting for them, only sleeping its usual winter sleep, resting till they came back.
Itwasten years since they had gone.
No. If Richard Nicholson hadn't been Mr. Sutcliffe's nephew, she couldn't, no matter how big and how celebrated he was, or how badly he wanted her help or she wanted his money.
No matter how wonderful and important it would feel to be RichardNicholson's secretary.
It wasn't really his money that she wanted. It would be worth while doing it for nothing, for the sake of knowing him. She had read hisEuripides.
She wondered: Supposing he kept her, how long would it last? He was in the middle of his First Series ofStudies in Greek Literature; and there would be two, or even three if he went on.
He had taken Greffington Hall for four months. When he went back to London he would have to have somebody else.
Perhaps he would tell her that, after thinking it over, he had found he didn't want her. Then to-day would be the end of it.
If she looked up she would see him.
She knew what she would see: the fine, cross upper lip lifted backwards by the moustache, the small grizzled brown moustache, turned up, that made it look crosser. The narrow, pensive lower lip, thrust out by its light jaw. His nose—quite a young nose—that wouldn't be Roman, wouldn't be Sutcliffe; it looked out over your head, tilted itself up to sniff the world, obstinate, alert. His eyes, young too, bright and dark, sheltered, safe from age under the low straight eyebrows. They would never have shabby, wrinkled sagging lids. Dark brown hair, grey above his ears, clipped close to stop its curling like his uncle's. He liked to go clipped and clean. You felt that he liked his own tall, straight slenderness.
The big library rustled with the quick, irritable sound of his writing.
It stopped. He had finished. He looked at the clock. She heard a small, commiserating sound.
"Forgive me. I really thought it would only take five minutes. How on earth do you manage to keep so quiet? I should have known if a mouse had moved."
He turned towards her. He leaned back in his chair. "You don't mind my smoking?"
He was settling himself. Now she would know.
"Well," he said, "if I did keep you waiting forty minutes, it was a good test, wasn't it?"
He meditated.
"I'm always changing my secretaries because of something. The last one was admirable, but I couldn't have stood her in the room when I was writing…. Besides, you work better."
"Can you tell? In a week?"
"Yes. I can tell…. Are you sure you can spare me four months?"
"Easily."
"Five? Six?"
"If you were still here."
"I shan't be. I shall be in London…. Couldn't you come up?"
"I couldn't, possibly."
His cross mouth and brilliant, irritated eyes questioned her.
"I couldn't leave my mother."
Five weeks of the four months gone. And to-morrow he was going up toLondon.
Only till Friday. Only for five days. She kept on telling herself he would stay longer. Once he was there you couldn't tell how many days he might stay. But say he didn't come back till the middle of July, still there would be the rest of July and all August and September.
To-day he was walking home with her, carrying the books. She liked walking with him, she liked to be seen walking with him, as she used to like being seen walking with Roddy and Mark, because she was proud of them, proud of belonging to them. She was proud of Richard Nicholson because of what he had done.
The Morfe people didn't know anything about what he had done; but they knew he was something wonderful and important; they knew it was wonderful and important that you should be his secretary. They were proud of you, glad that they had provided him with you, proud that he should have found what he was looking for in Morfe.
Mr. Belk, for instance, coming along the road. He used to pass you with a jaunty, gallant, curious look as if you were seventeen and he were saying, "There's a girl who ought to be married. Why isn't she?" He had just sidled past them, abashed and obsequious, a little afraid of the big man. Even Mrs. Belk was obsequious.
And Mr. Spencer Rollitt. He was proud because Richard Nicholson had asked him about a secretary and he had recommended you. Funny that people could go on disapproving of you for twenty years, and then suddenly approve because of Richard Nicholson.
And Mamma. Mamma thought you wonderful and important, too.
Mamma liked Mr. Nicholson. Ever since that Sunday when he had called and brought the roses and stayed to tea. She had gone out of the room and left them abruptly because she was afraid of his "cleverness," afraid that he would begin to talk about something that she didn't understand.
And he had said, "How beautiful she is—"
After he had gone she had told Mamma that Richard Nicholson had said she was beautiful; and Mamma had pretended that it didn't matter what he said; but she had smiled all the same.
He carried himself like Mr. Sutcliffe when he walked, straight and tall in his clean cut grey suit. Only he was lighter and leaner. His eyes looked gentle and peaceable now under the shadow of the Panama hat.
The front door stood open. She asked him to come in for tea.
"May I? … What are you doing afterwards?"
"Going for a walk somewhere."
"Will you let me come too?…"
He was standing by the window looking at the garden. She saw him smile when he heard Catty say that Mamma had gone over to Mrs. Waugh's and wouldn't be back for tea. He smiled to himself, a secret, happy smile, looking out into the garden…. She took him out through the orchard. He went stooping under the low apple boughs and laughing. Down the Back Lane and through the gap in the lower fields, along the flagged path to the Bottom Lane and through the Rathdale fields to the river. Over the stepping stones.
She took the stones at a striding run. He followed, running and laughing.
Up the Rathdale fields to Renton Moor. Not up the schoolhouse lane, or on the Garthdale Road, or along the fields by the beck. Not up Greffington Edge or Karva. Because of Lindley Vickers and Maurice Jourdain; and Roddy and Mark.
No. She was humbugging herself. Not up Karva because of her secret happiness. She didn't want to mix him up withthator with the self that had felt it. She wanted to keep him in the clear spaces of her mind, away from her memories, away from her emotions.
They sat down on the side of the moor in the heather.
Indoors when he was working he was irritable and restless. You would hear a gentle sighing sound: "D-amn"; and he would start up and walk about the room. There would be shakings of his head, twistings of his eyebrows, shruggings of his shoulders, and tormented gestures of his hands. But not out here. He sat in the heather as quiet, as motionless as you were, every muscle at rest. His mind was at rest.
The strong sunlight beat on him; it showed up small surface signs. Perhaps you could see now that he might really be forty, or even forty-five.
No, you couldn't. You couldn't see or feel anything but the burning, inextinguishable youth inside him. The little grey streaks and patches might have been powder put on for fun.
"I want to finish with all my Greek stuff," he said suddenly. "I want to go on to something else—studies in modern French literature. Then English. I want to get everything clean and straight in five pages where other people would take fifty…. I want to go smash through some of the traditions. The tradition of the long, grey paragraph…. We might learn things from France. But we're a proud island people. We won't learn…. We're a proud island people, held in too tight, held in till we burst. That's why we've no aesthetic restraint. No restraint of any sort. Take our economics. Take our politics. We've had to colonise, to burst out over continents. When our minds begin moving it's the same thing. They burst out. All over the place…. When we've learned restraint we shall take our place inside Europe, not outside it."
"We do restrain our emotions quite a lot."
"We do. We do. That's precisely why we don't restrain our expression of them. Really unrestrained emotion that forces its way through and breaks down your intellectual defences and saturates you with itself—it hasn't any words…. It hasn't any words; or very few."
* * * * *
The mown fields over there, below Greffington Edge, were bleached with the sun: the grey cliffs quivered in the hot yellow light.
"It might be somewhere in the South of France."
"NotAgaye."
"No. Not Agaye. The limestone country…. I can't think why I never came here. My uncle used to ask me dozens of times. I suppose I funked it…. What the poor old chap must have felt like shut up in that house all those years with my aunt—"
"Please don't. I—I liked her."
"You mean you liked him and put up with her because of him. We all did that."
"She was kind to me."
"Who wouldn't be?"
"Oh, but you don't know how kind."
"Kind? Good Lord, yes. There are millions of kind people in the world.It's possible to be kind and at the same time not entirely brainless."
"He wouldn't mind that. He wouldn't think she was brainless—"
"He wasn't in love with her—there was another woman—a girl. It was so like the dear old duffer to put it off till he was forty-five and then come a cropper over a little girl of seventeen."
"That isn't true. I knew him much better than you do. He never cared for anybody but her…. Besides, if it was true you shouldn't have told me. I've no business to know it…."
"Everybody knew it. The poor dear managed so badly that everybody in the place knew it. She knew, that's why she dragged him away and made him live abroad. She hated living abroad, but she liked it better than seeing him going to pieces over the girl."
"I don't believe it. If there was anything in it I'd have been sure to have heard of it…. Why, there wasn't anybody here but me—"
"It must have been years before your time," he said. "You could hardly even have come in for the sad end of it."
* * * * *
Dorsy Heron said it was true.
"It was you he was in love with. Everybody saw it but you."
She remembered. His face when she came to him. In the library. And what he had said.
"A man might be in love with you for ten years and you wouldn't know about it if he held his tongue."
Andherface. Her poor face, so worried when people saw them together. And that last night when she stroked your arm and when she saw him looking at it and stopped. And her eyes. Frightened. Frightened.
"How I must have hurt him. How I must have hurt them both."
* * * * *
Mr. Nicholson had come back on Friday as he had said.
He put down his scratching pen and was leaning back in his chair, looking at her.
She wondered what he was thinking. Sometimes the space of the room was enormous between her table by the first tall window and his by the third; sometimes it shrank and brought them close. It was bringing them close now.
"You can't see the text for the footnotes," she said. "The notes must go in the Appendix."
She wanted to make herself forget that all her own things, the things she had saved from the last burning, were lying there on his table, staring at her. She was trying not to look that way, not to let herself imagine for a moment that he had read them.
"Never mind the notes and the Appendix."
He had got up. He was leaning now against the tall shutter of her window, looking down at her.
"Why didn't you tell me? Before I let you in for that horrible drudgery? All that typing and indexing—If I'd only known you were doing anything like this…. Why couldn't you have told me?"
"Because I wasn't doing it. It was done ages ago."
"It's my fault. I ought to have known. I did know there was something. I ought to have attended to it and found out what it was."
He began walking up and down the room, turning on her again and again, making himself more and more excited.
"That translation of theBacchae—what made you think of doing it like that?"
"I'd been reading Walt Whitman—It showed me you could do without rhyme. I knew it must sound as if it was all spoken—chanted—that they mustn't sing. Then I thought perhaps that was the way to do it."
"Yes. Yes. It is the way to do it. The only way…. You see, that's what my Euripides book's about. The very thing I've been trying to ram down people's throats, for years. And all the time you were doing it—down here—all by yourself—for fun … I wish I'd known … What are you going to do about it?"
"I didn't think anything could be done."
He sat down to consider that part of it.
* * * * *
He was going to get it published for her.
He was going to write the Introduction.
"And—the other things?"
"Oh, well, that's another matter. There's not much of it that'll stand."
He knew. He would never say more or less than he meant.
Not much of it that would stand. Now that she knew, it was extraordinary how little she minded.
"Still, there are a few things. They must come out first. In the spring. Then theBacchaein the autumn. I want it to be clear from the start that you're a poet translating; not the other way on."
He walked home with her, discussing gravely how it would be done.
It had come without surprise, almost without excitement; the quiet happening of something secretly foreseen, present to her mind as long as she could remember.
"I always meant that this should happen: something like this."
Now that it had happened she was afraid, seeing, but not so clearly, what would come afterwards: something that would make her want to leave Morfe and Mamma and go away to London and know the people Richard Nicholson had told her about, the people who would care for what she had done; the people who were doing the things she cared about. To talk to them; to hear them talk. She was afraid of wanting that more than anything in the world.
She saw her fear first in Mamma's eyes when she told her.
And there was something else. Something to do with Richard Nicholson. Something she didn't want to think about. Not fear exactly, but a sort of uneasiness when she thought about him.
His mind really was the enormous, perfect crystal she had imagined. It had been brought close to her; she had turned it in her hand and seen it flash and shine. She had looked into it and seen beautiful, clear things in it: nothing that wasn't beautiful and clear. She was afraid of wanting to look at it again when it wasn't there. Because it had made her happy she might come to want it more than anything in the world.
In two weeks it would be gone. She would want it and it would not be there.
When she passed the house and saw the long rows of yellow blinds in the grey front she thought of him. He would not come back. He had never come before, so it wasn't likely he would come again.
His being there was one of the things that only happened once. Perhaps those were the perfect things, the things that would never pass away; they would stay for ever, beautiful as you had seen them, fixed in their moment of perfection, wearing the very air and light of it for ever.
You would see themsub specie ceternitatis. Under the form of eternity.
So that Richard Nicholson would always be like that, the same whenever you thought of him.
Look at the others: the ones that hadn't come back and the ones that had. Jimmy Ponsonby, Harry Craven, Mr. Sutcliffe. And Maurice Jourdain and Lindley Vickers. If Maurice Jourdain had never come back she would always have seen him standing in the cornfield. If Lindley Vickers had never come back she wouldn't have seen him with Nannie Learoyd in the schoolhouse lane; the moment when he held her hands in the drawing-room, standing by the piano, would have been their one eternal moment.
Because Jimmy Ponsonby had gone away she had never known the awful thing he had done. She would go through the Ilford fields for ever and ever with her hot hand in his; she happy and he innocent; innocent for ever and ever. Harry Craven, her playmate of two hours, he would always be playing, always laughing, always holding her hand, like Roddy, without knowing that he held it.
Suppose Mr. Sutcliffe had come back. She would have hurt them more and more. Mrs. Sutcliffe would have hated her. They would have been miserable, all three. All three damned for ever and ever.
She was not sure she wanted Richard Nicholson to come back.
She was not sure he wasn't spoiling it by writing. She hadn't thought he would do that.
A correspondence? Prolonging the beautiful moment, stretching it thin; thinner and thinner; stretching it so thin that it would snap? You would come to identify him with his letters, so that in the end you would lose what had been real, what had been perfect. You would forget. You would have another and less real kind of memory.
But his letters were not thin; they were as real as his voice. Theywerehis voice talking to you; you could tell which words would take the stress of it. "I don't know howmuchthere is of you, whether this is all of it or only a little bit. You gave me an impression—you made me feel that there might be anyamountgone under that you can't get at, that you mayneverget at if you go on staying where you are. I believe if you got clean away it might come to the top again.
"But I don'tknow. I don't know whether you're at the end or the beginning. I could tell better if you were here."
She counted the months till April when her poems would come out. She counted the days till Tuesday when there might be a letter from Richard Nicholson.