Olivier

10. Maturity

III.

She was going up the schoolhouse lane towards Karva, because Roddy and she had gone that way together on Friday, his last evening.

It was Sunday now; six o'clock: the time he used to bring Papa home. His ship would have left Queenstown, it would be steering to the west.

She wondered how much he had really minded going. Perhaps he had only been afraid he wouldn't be strong enough; for after he had seen the doctor he had been different. Pleased and excited. Perhaps he didn't mind so very much.

If she could only remember how he had looked and what he had said. He had talked about the big Atlantic liner, and the Canadian forests. With luck the voyage might last eleven or twelve clear days. You could shoot moose and wapiti. Wapiti and elk. Elk. With his eyes shining. He was not quite sure about the elk. He wished he had written to the High Commissioner for Canada about the elk. That was what the Commissioner was there for, to answer questions, to encourage you to go to his beastly country.

She could hear Roddy's voice saying these things as they walked over Karva. He was turning it all into an adventure, his imagination playing round and round it. And on Saturday morning he had been sick and couldn't eat his breakfast. Mamma had been sorry, and at the same time vexed and irritable as if she were afraid that the arrangements might, after all, be upset. But in the end he had gone off, pleased and excited, with Jem Alderson in the train.

She could see Jem's wide shoulders pushing through the carriage door after Roddy. He had a gentle, reddish face and long, hanging moustaches like a dying Gladiator. Little eyes that screwed up to look at you. He would be good to Roddy.

It would be all right.

She stood still in the dark lane. A disturbing memory gnawed its way through her thoughts that covered it: the way Roddy had looked at Mamma, that Wednesday, the way he had spoken to her. "Oh wise. Oh right!"

That was because he believed she wanted him to go away. He couldn't believe that she really cared for him; that Mamma really cared for anybody but Mark; he couldn't believe that anybody cared for him.

"'Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell,
Rode the six hundred.'"

Roddy's chant pursued her up the lane.

The gate at the top fell to behind her. Moor grass showed grey among black heather. She half saw, half felt her way along the sheep tracks. There, where the edge of the round pit broke away, was the place where Roddy had stopped suddenly in front of her.

"I wouldn't mind a bit if I hadn't been such a brute to little Mamma. Why are we such brutes to her?" He had turned in the narrow moor-track and faced her with his question: "Why?"

"'Forward, the Light Brigade!
Was there a man dismayed?
Not though the soldier knew
Someone had blundered'"--

Hunderd--blundered. Did Tennyson really call hundred hunderd?

The grey curve of the high road glimmered alongside the moor. From the point where her track joined it she could see three lights, two moving, one still. The still light at the turn came from the Aldersons' house. The moving lights went with the klomp-klomp of hoofs on the road.

Down in the darkness beyond the fields Garthdale lay like a ditch under the immense wall of Greffington Edge. Roddy hated Greffington Edge. He hated Morfe. He wanted to get away.

It would be all right.

The klomp-klomping sounded close behind her. Two shafts of light shot out in front, white on the grey road. Dr. Kendal drove past in his dog-cart. He leaned out over the side, peering. She heard him say something to himself.

The wheels slowed down with a grating noise. The lights stood still. He had pulled up. He was waiting for her.

She turned suddenly and went back up the moor by the way she had come. She didn't want to see Dr. Kendal. She was afraid he would say something about Roddy.



XXIII

I.

The books stood piled on the table by her window, the books Miss Wray of Clevehead had procured for her, had given and lent her. Now Roddy had gone she had time enough to read them: Hume's Essays, the fat maroon Schwegler, the two volumes of Kant in the hedgesparrow-green paper covers.

"Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Kritik der reinen Vernunft." She said it over and over to herself. It sounded nicer than "The Critique of Pure Reason." At the sight of the thick black letters on the hedgesparrow-green ground her heart jumped up and down with excitement. Lucky it was in German, so that Mamma couldn't find out what Kant was driving at. The secret was hidden behind the thick black bars of the letters.

In Schwegler, as you went on you went deeper. You saw thought folding and unfolding, thought moving on and on, thought drawing the universe to itself, pushing the universe away from itself to draw it back again, closer than close.

Space and Time were forms of thought. They were infinite. So thought was infinite; it went on and on for ever, carrying Space, carrying Time.

If only you knew what the Thing-in-itself was.

II.

"Mamma--"

The letter lay between them on the hall table by the study door. Her mother put her hand over it, quick. A black, long-tailed M showed between her forefinger and her thumb.

They looked at each other, and her mother's mouth began to pout and smile as it used to when Papa said something improper. She took the letter and went, with soft feet and swinging haunches like a cat carrying a mouse, into the study. Mary stared at the shut door.

Maurice Jourdain. Maurice Jourdain. What on earth was he writing to Mamma for?

Five minutes ago she had been quiet and happy, reading Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Now her heart beat like a hammer, staggering with its own blows. The blood raced in her brain.

III.

"Mamma, if you don't tell me I shall write and ask him." Her mother looked up, frightened.

"You wouldn't do that, Mary?"

"Oh, wouldn't I though! I'd do it like a shot."

She wondered why she hadn't thought of it an hour ago.

"Well--If there's no other way to stop you--"

Her mother gave her the letter, picking it up by one corner, as though it had been a dirty pocket-handkerchief.

"It'll show you," she said, "the sort of man he is."

Mary held the letter in both her hands, gently. Her heart beat gently now with a quiet feeling of happiness and satisfaction. She looked a long time at the characters, the long-tailed M's, the close, sharp v's, the t's crossed with a savage, downward stab. She was quiet as long as she only looked. When she read the blood in her brain raced faster and confused her. She stopped at the bottom of the first page.

"I can't think what he means."

"It's pretty plain what he means," her mother said.

"About all those letters. What letters?"

"Letters he's been writing to your father and me and your Uncle Victor."

"When?"

"Ever since you left school. You were sent to school to keep you out of his way; and you weren't back before he began his persecuting. If you want to know why we left Ilford, that's why. He persecuted your poor father. He persecuted your Uncle Victor. And now he's persecuting me."

"Persecuting?"

"What is it but persecuting? Threatening that he won't answer for the consequences if he doesn't get what he wants. He's mistaken if he thinks that's the way to get it."

"What--does he want?"

"I suppose," her mother said, "he thinks he wants to marry you."

"Me? He doesn't say that. He only says he wants to come and see me. Why shouldn't he?"

"Because your father didn't wish it, and your uncle and I don't wish it."

"You don't like him."

"Do you?"

"I--love him."

"Nonsense. You don't know what you're talking about. You'd have forgotten all about him if you hadn't seen that letter."

"I thought he'd forgotten me. You ought to have told me. It was cruel not to tell me. He must have loved me all the time. He said I was to wait three years and I didn't know what he meant. He must have loved me then and I didn't know it."

The sound of her voice surprised her. It came from her whole body; it vibrated like a violin.

"How could he love you? You were a child then."

"I'm not a child now. You'll have to let him marry me."

"I'd rather see you in your coffin. I'd rather see you married to poor Norman Waugh. And goodness knows I wouldn't like that."

"Your mother didn't like your marrying Papa."

"You surely don't compare Maurice Jourdain with your father?"

"He's faithful. Papa was faithful. I'm faithful too."

"Faithful! To a horrid man like that!"

"He isn't horrid. He's kind and clever and good. He's brave, like Mark. He'd have been a soldier if he hadn't had to help his mother. And he's honourable. He said he wouldn't see me or write to me unless you let him. And he hasn't seen me and he hasn't written. You can't say he isn't honourable."

"I suppose," her mother said, "he's honourable enough."

"You'll have to let him come. If you don't, I shall go to him."

"I declare if you're not as bad as your Aunt Charlotte."

IV.

Incredible; impossible; but it had happened.

And it was as if she had known it--all the time, known that she would come downstairs that morning and see Maurice Jourdain's letter lying on the table. She always had known that something, some wonderful, beautiful, tremendous thing would happen to her. This was it.

It had been hidden in all her happiness. Her happiness was it. Maurice Jourdain.

When she said "Maurice Jourdain" she could feel her voice throb in her body like the string of a violin. When she thought of Maurice Jourdain the stir renewed itself in a vague, exquisite vibration. The edges of her mouth curled out with faint throbbing movements, suddenly sensitive, like eyelids, like finger-tips.

Odd memories darted out at her. The plantation at Ilford. Jimmy's mouth crushing her face. Jimmy's arms crushing her chest. A scarlet frock. The white bridge-rail by the ford. Bertha Mitchison, saying things, things you wouldn't think of if you could help it. But she was mainly aware of a surpassing tenderness and a desire to immolate herself, in some remarkable and noble fashion, for Maurice Jourdain. If only she could see him, for ten minutes, five minutes, and tell him that she hadn't forgotten him. He belonged to her real life. Her self had a secret place where people couldn't get at it, where its real life went on. He was the only person she could think of as having a real life at all like her own. She had thought of him as mixed up for ever with her real life, so that whether she saw him or not, whether she remembered him or not, he would be there. He was in the songs she made, he was in the Sonata Appassionata; he was in the solemn beauty of Karva under the moon. In the Critique of Pure Reason she caught the bright passing of his mind.

Perhaps she had forgotten a little what he looked like. Smoky black eyes. Tired eyelids. A crystal mind, shining and flashing. A mind like a big room, filled from end to end with light. Maurice Jourdain.

V.

"I don't think I should have known you, Mary."

Maurice Jourdain had come. In the end Uncle Victor had let him. He was sitting there, all by himself, on the sofa in the middle of the room.

It was his third evening. She had thought it was going to pass exactly like the other two, and then her mother had got up, with an incredible suddenness, and left them.

Through the open window you could hear the rain falling in the garden; you could see the garden grey and wet with rain.

She sat on the edge of the fender, and without looking up she knew that he was watching her from under half-shut eyelids.

His eyelids were so old, so tired, so very tired and old.

"What did you cut it all off for?"

"Oh, just for fun."

Without looking at him she knew that he had moved, that his chin had dropped to his chest; there would be a sort of puffiness in his cheeks and about his jaw under the black, close-clipped beard. When she saw it she felt a little creeping chill at her heart.

But that was unfaithfulness, that was cruelty. If he knew it--poor thing--how it would hurt him! But he never would know. She would behave as though she hadn't seen any difference in him at all.

If only she could set his mind moving; turn the crystal about; make it flash and shine.

"What have they been doing to you?" he said. "You used to be clever. I wonder if you're clever still."

"I don't think I am, very."

She thought: "I'm stupid. I'm as stupid as an owl. I never felt so stupid in all my life. If only I could think of something to say to him."

"Did they tell you what I've come for?"

"Yes."

"Are you glad?"

"Very glad."

"Why do you sit on the fender?"

"I'm cold."

"Cold and glad."

A long pause.

"Do you know why your mother hates me, Mary?"

"She doesn't. She only thought you'd killed Papa."

"I didn't kill him. It wasn't my fault if he couldn't control his temper.... That isn't what she hates me for.... Do you know why you were sent to school--the school my aunt found for you?"

"Well--to keep me from seeing you."

"Yes. And because I asked your father to let me educate you, since he wasn't doing it himself. I wanted to send you to a school in Paris for two years."

"I didn't know. They never told me. What made you want to do all that for me?"

"It wasn't for you. It was for the little girl who used to go for walks with me.... She was the nicest little girl. She said the jolliest things in the dearest little voice. 'How can a man like you care to talk to a child like me?'"

"Did I say that? I don't remember."

"She said it."

"It sounds rather silly of her."

"She wasn't silly. She was clever as they make them. And she was pretty too. She had lots of hair, hanging down her back. Curling.... And they take her away from me and I wait three years for her. She knew I was waiting. And when I come back to her she won't look at me. She sits on the fender and stares at the fire. She wears horrible black clothes."

"Because Papa's dead."

"She goes and cuts her hair all off. That isn't because your father's dead."

"It'll grow again."

"Not for another three years. And I believe I hear your mother coming back."

His chin dropped to his chest again. He brooded morosely. Presently Catty came in with the coffee.

The next day he was gone.

VI.

"It seems to me," her mother said, "you only care for him when he isn't there."

He had come again, twice, in July, in August. Each time her mother had said, "Are you sure you want him to come again? You know you weren't very happy the last time." And she had answered, "I know I'm going to be this time."

"You see," she said, "when he isn't there you remember, and when he is there he makes you forget."

"Forget what?"

"What it used to feel like."

Mamma had smiled a funny, contented smile. Mamma was different. Her face had left off being reproachful and disapproving. It had got back the tender, adorable look it used to have when you were little. She hated Maurice Jourdain, yet you felt that in some queer way she loved you because of him. You loved her more because of Maurice Jourdain.

The engagement happened suddenly at the end of August. You knew it would happen some day; but you thought of it as happening to-morrow or the day after rather than to-day. At three o'clock you started for a walk, never knowing how you might come back, and at five you found yourself sitting at tea in the orchard, safe. He would slouch along beside you, for miles, morosely. You thought of his mind swinging off by itself, shining where you couldn't see it. You broke loose from him to run tearing along the road, to jump water-courses, to climb trees and grin down at him through the branches. Then he would wake up from his sulking. Sometimes he would be pleased and sometimes he wouldn't. The engagement happened just after he had not been pleased at all.

She could still hear his voice saying "What do you do it for?" and her own answering.

"You must do something."

"You needn't dance jigs on the parapets of bridges."

They slid through the gap into the fields. In the narrow path he stopped suddenly and turned.

"How can a child like you care for a man like me?" Mocking her sing-song.

He stooped and kissed her. She shut her eyes so as not to see the puffiness.

"Will you marry me, Mary?"

VII.

After the engagement, the quarrel. It lasted all the way up the schoolhouse lane.

"I do care for you, I do, really."

"You don't know what you're talking about. You may care for me as a child cares. You don't care as a woman does. No woman who cared for a man would write the letters you do. I ask you to tell me about yourself--what you're feeling and thinking--and you send me some ghastly screed about Spinoza or Kant. Do you suppose any man wants to hear what his sweetheart thinks about Space and Time and the Ding-an-sich?"

"You used to like it."

"I don't like it now. No woman would wear those horrible clothes if she cared for a man and wanted him to care for her. She wouldn't cut her hair off."

"How was I to know you'd mind so awfully? And how do you know what women do or don't do?"

"Has it never occurred to you that I might know more women than you know men? That I might have women friends?"

"I don't think I've thought about it very much."

"Haven't you? Men don't live to be thirty-seven without getting to know women; they can't go about the world without meeting them.... There's a little girl down in Sussex. A dear little girl. She's everything a man wants a woman to be."

"Lots of hair?"

"Lots of hair. Stacks of it. And she's clever. She can cook and sew and make her own clothes and her sisters'. She's kept her father's house since she was fifteen. Without a servant."

"How awful for her. And you like her?"

"Yes, Mary."

"I'm glad you like her. Who else?"

"A Frenchwoman in Paris. And a German woman in Hamburg. And an Englishwoman in London; the cleverest woman I know. She's unhappy, Mary. Her husband behaves to her like a perfect brute."

"Poor thing. I hope you're nice to her."

"She thinks I am."

Silence. He peered into her face.

"Are you jealous of her, Mary?"

"I'm not jealous of any of them. You can marry them all if you want to."

"I was going to marry one of them."

"Then why didn't you?"

"Because the little girl in Essex wouldn't let me."

"Little beast!"

"So you're jealous of her, are you? You needn't be. She's gone. She tried to swallow the Kritik der reinen Vernunft and it disagreed with her and she died.

"'Nur einmal doch mächt' ich dich sehen, Und sinken vor dir auf's Knie, Und sterbend zu dir sprechen, Madam, ich liebe Sie!'"

"What's that? Oh, what's that?"

"That--Madam--is Heine."

VIII.

"My dearest Maurice--"

It was her turn for writing. She wondered whether he would like to hear about the tennis party at the Vicarage. Mr. Spencer Rollitt's nephew, Harry Craven, had been there, and the two Acroyd girls from Renton Lodge, and Norman Waugh.

Harry Craven's fawn face with pointed chin; dust-white face with black accents. Small fawn's mouth lifting upwards. Narrow nostrils slanting upwards. Two lobes of white forehead. Half-moons of parted, brushed-back hair.

He smiled: a blunt V opening suddenly on white teeth, black eyes fluttering. He laughed: all his features made sudden, upward movements like raised wings.

The Acroyds. Plump girls with pink, blown cheeks and sulky mouths. You thought of sullen, milk-fed babies, of trumpeting cherubs disgusted with their trumpets. They were showing their racquets to Harry Craven, bending their heads. You could see the backs of their privet-white necks, fat, with no groove in the nape, where their hair curled in springy wires, Minna's dark, Sophy's golden. They turned their backs when you spoke and pretended not to hear you.

She thought she would like Maurice to know that Harry Craven and she had beaten Minna Ackroyd and Norman Waugh. A love set.

Afterwards--Harry Craven playing hide-and-seek in the dark. The tennis net, coiled like a grey snake on the black lawn. "Let's hide together." Harry Craven, hiding, crouching beside you under the currant bushes. The scramble together up the water-butt and along the scullery roof. The last rush across the lawn.

"I say, you run like the wind."

He took your hand. You ran faster and faster. You stood together, under the ash tree, panting, and laughing, safe. He still held your hand.

Funny that you should remember it when you hadn't noticed it at the time. Hands were funny things. His hand had felt like Mark's hand, or Roddy's. You didn't think of it as belonging to him. It made you want to have Mark and Roddy back again. To play with them.

Perhaps, after all, it wouldn't be kind to tell Maurice about the tennis party. He couldn't have played like that. He couldn't have scrambled up the water-butt and run with you along the scullery roof.

"My dearest Maurice: Nothing has happened since you left, except that there was a tennis party at the Vicarage yesterday. You know what tennis parties are like. You'll be shocked to hear that I wore my old black jersey--the one you hated so--"

IX.

"'Mein Kind, wir waren Kinder.'"

She shut her eyes. She wanted nothing but his voice. His voice was alive. It remembered. It hadn't grown old and tired. "My child, we once were children, two children happy and small; we crept in the little hen-house and hid ourselves under the straw."

"Kikeriküh! sie glaubten Es wäre Hahnen geschrei."

"...It's all very well, Mary, I can't go on reading Heine to you for ever. And--après?"

He had taken her on his knees. That happened sometimes. She kept one foot on the floor so as not to press on him with her whole weight. And she played with his watch chain. She liked to touch the things he wore. It made her feel that she cared for him; it staved off the creeping, sickening fear that came when their hands and faces touched.

"Do you know," he said, "what it will be like--afterwards?"

She began, slowly, to count the buttons of his waistcoat.

"Have you ever tried to think what it will be like?"

"Yes."

Last night, lying awake in the dark, she had tried to think. She had thought of shoulders heaving over her, of arms holding her, of a face looking into hers, a honey-white, beardless face, blue eyes, black eyebrows drawn close down on to the blue. Jimmy's face, not Maurice Jourdain's.

That was in September. October passed. She began to wonder when he would come again.

He came on the last day of November.

X.

"Maurice, you're keeping something from me. Something's happened. Something's made you unhappy."

"Yes. Something's made me unhappy."

The Garthdale road. Before them, on the rise, the white highway showed like a sickle curving into the moor. At the horn of the sickle a tall ash tree in the wall of the Aldersons' farm. Where the road dipped they turned.

He slouched slowly, his head hung forward, loosening the fold of flesh about his jaw. His eyes blinked in the soft November sunshine. His eyelids were tight as though they had been tied with string.

"Supposing I asked you to release me from our engagement?"

"For always?"

"Perhaps for always. Perhaps only for a short time. Till I've settled something. Till I've found out something I want to know. Would you, Mary?"

"Of course I would. Like a shot."

"And supposing--I never settled it?"

"That would be all right. I can go on being engaged to you; but you needn't be engaged to me."

"You dear little thing.... I'm afraid, I'm afraid that wouldn't do."

"It would do beautifully. Unless you're really keeping something back from me."

"I am keeping something back from you.... I've no right to worry you with my unpleasant affairs. I was fairly well off when I asked you to marry me, but, the fact is, it looks as if my business was going to bits. I may be able to pull it together again. I may not--"

"Is that all? I'm glad you've told me. If you'd told me before it would have saved a lot of bother."

"What sort of bother?"

"Well, you see, I wasn't quite sure whether I really wanted to marry you--just yet. Sometimes I thought I did, sometimes I thought I didn't. And now I know I do."

"That's it. I may not be in a position to marry you. I can't ask you to share my poverty."

"I shan't mind that. I'm used to it."

"I may not be able to keep a wife at all."

"Of course you will. You're keeping a housekeeper now. And a cook and a housemaid."

"I may have to send two of them away."

"Send them all away. I'll work for you all my life. I shall never want to do anything else. It's what I always wanted. When I was a child I used to imagine myself doing it for you. It was a sort of game I played."

"It's a sort of game you're playing now, my poor Mary.... No. No. It won't do."

"What do you think I'm made of? No woman who cared for a man could give him up for a thing like that."

"There are other things. Complications.... I think I'd better write to your mother. Or your brother."

"Write to them--write to them. They won't care a rap about your business. We're not like that, Maurice."

XI.

"You'd better let me see what he says, Mamma."

Her mother had called to her to come into the study. She had Maurice Jourdain's letter in her hand. She looked sad and at the same time happy.

"My darling, he doesn't want you to see it."

"Is it as bad as all that?"

"Yes. If I'd had my way you should never have had anything to do with him. I'd have forbidden him the house if your Uncle Victor hadn't said that was the way to make you mad about him. He seemed to think that seeing him would cure you. And so it ought to have done....

"He says you know he wants to break off the engagement, but he doesn't think he has made you understand why."

"Oh, yes, he did. It's because of his business."

"He doesn't say a word about his business. I'm to break it to you that he doesn't care for you as he thought he cared. As if he wasn't old enough to know what he wanted. He might have made up his mind before he drove your father into his grave."

"Tell me what he says."

"He just says that. He says he's in an awful position, and whatever he does he must behave dishonourably.... I admit he's sorry enough. And he's doing the only honourable thing."

"He would do that."

She fixed her mind on his honour. You could love that. You could love that always.

"He says he asked you to release him. Did he?"

"Yes."

"Then why on earth didn't you?"

"I did. But I couldn't release myself."

"But that's what you ought to have done. Instead of leaving him to do it."

"Oh, no. That would have been dishonourable to myself."

"You'd rather be jilted?"

"Much rather. It's more honourable to be jilted than to jilt."

"That's not the world's idea of honour."

"It's my idea of it.... And, after all, he was Maurice Jourdain."

XII.

The pain hung on to the left side of her head, clawing. When she left off reading she could feel it beat like a hammer, driving in a warm nail.

Aunt Lavvy sat on the parrot chair, with her feet on the fender. Her fingers had left off embroidering brown birds on drab linen.

In the dying light of the room things showed fuzzy, headachy outlines. It made you feel sick to look at them.

Mamma had left her alone with Aunt Lavvy.

"I suppose you think that nobody was ever so unhappy as you are," Aunt Lavvy said.

"I hope nobody is. I hope nobody ever will be."

"Should you say I was unhappy?"

"You don't look it. I hope you're not."

"Thirty-three years ago I was miserable, because I couldn't have my own way. I couldn't marry the man I cared for."

"Oh--that. Why didn't you?"

"My mother and your father and your Uncle Victor wouldn't let me."

"I suppose he was a Unitarian?"

"Yes. He was a Unitarian. But whatever he'd been I couldn't have married him. I couldn't do anything I liked. I couldn't go where I liked or stay where I liked. I wanted to be a teacher, but I had to give it up."

"Why?"

"Because your Uncle Victor and I had to look after your Aunt Charlotte."

"You could have got somebody else to look after Aunt Charlotte. Somebody else has to look after her now."

"Your Grandmamma made us promise never to send her away as long as it was possible to keep her. That's why your Uncle Victor never married."

"And all the time Aunt Charlotte would have been better and happier with Dr. Draper. Aunt Lavvy--t's too horrible."

"It wasn't as bad as you think. Your Uncle Victor couldn't have married in any case."

"Didn't he love anybody?"

"Yes, Mary; he loved your mother."

"I see. And she didn't love him."

"He wouldn't have married her if she had loved him. He was afraid."

"Afraid?"

"Afraid of going like your Aunt Charlotte. Afraid of what he might hand on to his children."

"Papa wasn't afraid. He grabbed. It was poor little Victor and you who got nothing."

"Victor has got a great deal."

"And you--you?"

"I've got all I want. I've got all there is. When everything's taken away, then God's there."

"If he's there, he's there anyhow."

"Until everything's taken away there isn't room to see that he's there."

When Catty came in with the lamp Aunt Lavvy went out quickly.

Mary got up and stretched herself. The pain had left off hammering. She could think.

Aunt Lavvy--to live like that for thirty-three years and to be happy at the end. She wondered what happiness there could be in that dull surrender and acquiescence, that cold, meek love of God.

"Kikeriküh! sie glaubten Es wäre Hahnen geschrei."



XXIV

I.

Everybody in the village knew you had been jilted. Mrs. Waugh and Miss Frewin knew it, and Mr. Horn, the grocer, and Mr. Oldshaw at the bank. And Mr. Belk, the Justice of the Peace--little pink and flaxen gentleman, carrying himself with an air of pompous levity--eyes slewing round as you passed; and Mrs. Belk--hard, tight rotundity, little iron-grey eyes twinkling busily in a snub face, putty-skinned with a bilious gleam; curious eyes, busy eyes saying, "I'd like to know what she did to be jilted."

Minna and Sophy Acroyd, with their blown faces and small, disgusted mouths: you could see them look at each other; they were saying, "Here's that awful girl again." They were glad you were jilted.

Mr. Spencer Rollitt looked at you with his hard, blue eyes. His mouth closed tight with a snap when he saw you coming. He had disapproved of you ever since you played hide-and-seek in his garden with his nephew. He thought it served you right to be jilted.

And there was Dr. Charles's kind look under his savage, shaggy eyebrows, and Miss Kendal's squeeze of your hand when you left her, and the sudden start in Dorsy Heron's black hare's eyes. They were sorry for you because you had been jilted.

Miss Louisa Wright was sorry for you. She would ask you to tea in her little green-dark drawing-room; she lived in the ivy house next door to Mrs. Waugh; the piano would be open, the yellow keys shining; from the white title page enormous black letters would call to you across the room: "Cleansing Fires." That was the song she sang when she was thinking about Dr. Charles. First you played for her the Moonlight Sonata, and then she sang for you with a feverish exaltation:

"For as gold is refined in the fi-yer, So a heart is tried by pain."

She sang it to comfort you.

Her head quivered slightly as she shook the notes out of her throat in ecstasy.

She was sorry for you; but she was like Aunt Lavvy; she thought it was a good thing to be jilted; for then you were purified; your soul was set free; it went up, writhing and aspiring, in a white flame to God.

II.

"Mary, why are you always admiring yourself in the glass?"

"I'm not admiring myself. I only wanted to see if I was better-looking than last time."

"Why are you worrying about it? You never used to."

"Because I used to think I was pretty."

Her mother smiled. "You were pretty." And took back her smile. "You'd be pretty always if you were happy, and you'd be happy if you were good. There's no happiness for any of us without Christ."

She ignored the dexterous application.

"Do you mean I'm not, then, really, so very ugly?"

"Nobody said you were ugly."

"Maurice Jourdain did."

"You don't mean to say you're still thinking of that man?"

"Not thinking exactly. Only wondering. Wondering what it was he hated so."

"You wouldn't wonder if you knew the sort of man he is. A man who could threaten you with his infidelity."

"He never threatened me."

"I suppose it was me he threatened, then."

"What did he say?"

"He said that if his wife didn't take care to please him there were other women who would."

"He ought to have said that to me. It was horrible of him to say it to you."

She didn't know why she felt that it was horrible.

"I can tell you one thing," said her mother, as if she had not told her anything. "It was those books you read. That everlasting philosophy. He said it was answerable for the whole thing."

"Then it was the--the whole thing he hated."

"I suppose so," her mother said, dismissing a matter of small interest. "You'd better change that skirt if you're going with me to Mrs. Waugh's."

"Do you mind if I go for a walk instead?"

"Not if it makes you any more contented."

"It might. Are you sure you don't mind?"

"Oh, go along with you!"

Her mother was pleased. She was always pleased when she scored a point against philosophy.

III.

Mr. and Mrs. Belk were coming along High Row. She avoided them by turning down the narrow passage into Mr. Horn's yard and the Back Lane. From the Back Lane you could get up through the fields to the school-house lane without seeing people.

She hated seeing them. They all thought the same thing: that you wanted Maurice Jourdain and that you were unhappy because you hadn't got him. They thought it was awful of you. Mamma thought it was awful, like--like Aunt Charlotte wanting to marry the piano-tuner, or poor Jenny wanting to marry Mr. Spall.

Maurice Jourdain knew better than that. He knew you didn't want to marry him any more than he wanted to marry you. He nagged at you about your hair, about philosophy--she could hear his voice nag-nagging now as she went up the lane--he could nag worse than a woman, but he knew. She knew. As far as she could see through the working of his dark mind, first he had cared for her, cared violently. Then he had not cared.

That would be because he cared for some other woman. There were two of them. The girl and the married woman. She felt no jealousy and no interest in them beyond wondering which of them it would be and what they would be like. There had been two Mary Oliviers; long-haired-- short-haired, and she had been jealous of the long-haired one. Jealous of herself.

There had been two Maurice Jourdains, the one who said, "I'll understand. I'll never lose my temper"; the one with the crystal mind, shining and flashing, the mind like a big room filled from end to end with light. But he had never existed.

Maurice Jourdain was only a name. A name for intellectual beauty. You could love that. Love was "the cle-eansing fi-yer!" There was the love of the body and the love of the soul. Perhaps she had loved Maurice Jourdain with her soul and not with her body. No. She had not loved him with her soul, either. Body and soul; soul and body. Spinoza said they were two aspects of the same thing. What thing? Perhaps it was silly to ask what thing; it would be just body and soul. Somebody talked about a soul dragging a corpse. Her body wasn't a corpse; it was strong and active; it could play games and jump; it could pick Dan up and carry him round the table; it could run a mile straight on end. It could excite itself with its own activity and strength. It dragged a corpse-like soul, dull and heavy; a soul that would never be excited again, never lift itself up again in any ecstasy.

If only he had let her alone. If only she could go back to her real life. But she couldn't. She couldn't feel any more her sudden, secret happiness. Maurice Jourdain had driven it away. It had nothing to do with Maurice Jourdain. He ought not to have been able to take it from you.

She might go up to Karva Hill to look for it; but it would not be there. She couldn't even remember what it had been like.

IV.

New Year's night. She was lying awake in her white cell.

She hated Maurice Jourdain. His wearily searching eyes made her restless. His man's voice made her restless with its questions. "Do you know what it will be like--afterwards?" "Do you really want me?"

She didn't want him. But she wanted Somebody. Somebody. Somebody. He had left her with this ungovernable want.

Somebody. If you lay very still and shut your eyes he would come to you. You would see him. You knew what he was like. He had Jimmy's body and Jimmy's face, and Mark's ways. He had the soul of Shelley and the mind of Spinoza and Immanuel Kant.

They talked to each other. Her reverie ran first into long, fascinating conversations about Space and Time and the Thing-in-itself, and the Transcendental Ego. He could tell you whether you were right or wrong; whether Substance and the Thing-in-itself were the same thing or different.

"Die--If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek." He wrote that. He wrote all Shelley's poems except the bad ones. He wrote Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon. He could understand your wanting to know what the Thing-in-itself was. If by dying to-morrow, to-night, this minute, you could know what it was, you would be glad to die. Wouldn't you?

The world was built up in Space and Time. Time and Space were forms of thought--ways of thinking. If there was thinking there would be a thinker. Supposing--supposing the Transcendental Ego was the Thing-in-itself?

That was his idea. She was content to let him have the best ones. You could keep him going for quite a long time that way before you got tired.

The nicest way of all, though, was not to be yourself, but to be him; to live his exciting, adventurous, dangerous life. Then you could raise an army and free Ireland from the English, and Armenia from the Turks. You could go away to beautiful golden cities, melting in sunshine. You could sail in the China Sea; you could get into Central Africa among savage people with queer, bloody gods. You could find out all sorts of things.

You were he, and at the same time you were yourself, going about with him. You loved him with a passionate, self-immolating love. There wasn't room for both of you on the raft, you sat cramped up, huddled together. Not enough hard tack. While he was sleeping you slipped off. A shark got you. It had a face like Dr. Charles. The lunatic was running after him like mad, with a revolver. You ran like mad. Morfe Bridge. When he raised his arm you jerked it up and the revolver went off into the air. The fire was between his bed and the door. It curled and broke along the floor like surf. You waded through it. You picked him up and carried him out as Sister Dora carried the corpses with the small-pox. A screw loose somewhere. A tap turned on. Your mind dribbled imbecilities.

She kicked. "I won't think. I won't think about it any more!"

Restlessness. It ached. It gnawed, stopping a minute, beginning again, only to be appeased by reverie, by the running tap.

Restlessness. That was desire. It must be.

Desire: imeros. Eros. There was the chorus in the Antigone:

"Eros anikate machan, Eros os en ktaemasi pipteis."

There was Swinburne:

"...swift and subtle and blind as a flame of fire, Before thee the laughter, behind thee the tears of desire."

There was the song Minna Acroyd sang at the Sutcliffes' party. "Sigh-ing and sad for des-ire of the bee." How could anybody sing such a silly song?

Through the wide open window she could smell the frost; she could hear it tingle. She put up her mouth above the bedclothes and drank down the clear, cold air. She thought with pleasure of the ice in her bath in the morning. It would break under her feet, splintering and tinkling like glass. If you kept on thinking about it you would sleep.

V.

Passion Week.

Her mother was reading the Lessons for the Day. Mary waited till she had finished.

"Mamma--what was the matter with Aunt Charlotte?"

"I'm sure I don't know. Except that she was always thinking about getting married. Whatever put Aunt Charlotte in your head?"

Her mother looked up from the Prayer Book as she closed it. Sweet and pretty; sweet and pretty; young almost, as she used to look, and tranquil.

"It's my belief," she said, "there wouldn't have been anything the matter with her if your Grandmamma Olivier hadn't spoiled her. Charlotte was as vain as a little peacock, and your Grandmamma was always petting and praising her and letting her have her own way."

"If she'd had her own way she'd have been married, and then perhaps she wouldn't have gone mad."

"She might have gone madder," said her mother. "It was a good thing for you, my dear, you didn't get your way. I'd rather have seen you in your coffin than married to Maurice Jourdain."

"Whoever it had been, you'd have said that."

"Perhaps I should. I don't want my only daughter to go away and leave me. It would be different if there were six or seven of you."

Her mother's complacence and tranquillity annoyed her. She hated her mother. She adored her and hated her. Mamma had married for her own pleasure, for her passion. She had brought you into the world, without asking your leave, for her own pleasure. She had brought you into the world to be unhappy. She had planned for you to do the things that she did. She cared for you only as long as you were doing them. When you left off and did other things she left off caring.

"I shall never go away and leave you," she said.

She hated her mother and she adored her.

An hour later, when she found her in the garden kneeling by the violet bed, weeding it, she knelt down beside her, and weeded too.