Olivier

6. Adolescence

IX.

The Church Service was open at the Thirty-Nine Articles. Mamma had pushed Dr. Smith's "History of England" away.

"Do you think," she said, "you could say the Catechism and the Athanasian Creed straight through without stopping?"

"I daresay I could if I tried. Why?"

"Because Mr. Farmer will want to examine you."

"Whatever for?"

"Because," her mother said, "there's going to be a Confirmation. It's time you were thinking about being confirmed."

"Confirmed? Me?"

"And why not you?"

"Well--I haven't got to be, have I?"

"You will have, sooner or later. So you may as well begin to think about it now."

Confirmation. She had never thought about it as a real thing that might happen to her, that would happen, sooner or later, if she didn't do something to stop Mr. Farmer and Mamma.

"I am thinking. I'm thinking tight."

Tight. Tight. Her mind, in agony, pinned itself to one point: how she could stop her mother without telling her.

Beyond that point she couldn't see clearly.

"You see--you see--I don't want to be confirmed."

"You don't want? You might as well say you didn't want to be a Christian."

"Don't worry, Mamma darling. I only want to stay as I am."

"I must worry. I'm responsible for you as long as you're not confirmed. You forget that I'm your godmother as well as your mother."

She had forgotten it. And Papa and Uncle Victor were her godfathers. "What did your godfathers and godmothers then for you?--They did promise and vow three things in my name--" they had actually done it. "First: that I should renounce"--renounce--renounce--"Secondly: that I should believe all the Articles of the Christian Faith--"

The Christian Faith--the Catholic Faith. "Which Faith except everyone do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly"--

--"And the Catholic Faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity."

They had promised and vowed all that. In her name. What right had they? What right had they?

"You're not a baby any more," her mother said.

"That's what I mean. I was a baby when you went and did it. I knew nothing about it. You can't make me responsible."

"It's we who are responsible," her mother said.

"I mean for your vows and promises, Mamma darling. If you'll let me off my responsibility I'll let you off yours."

"Now," her mother said, "you're prevaricating."

"That means you'll never let me off. If I don't do it now I'll have to do it next year, or the next?"

"You may feel more seriously about it next year. Or next week," her mother said. "Meanwhile you'll learn the Thirty-Nine Articles. Read them through first."

"--'Nine. Of Original or Birth-sin. Original Sin ... is the fault and corruption of the Nature of every man ... whereby man is far gone from original righteousness and is of his own nature inclined to evil, so that the flesh lusteth always contrary to the spirit; and therefore in every person born into this world it deserveth God's wrath and damnation.'"

"Don't look like that," her mother said, "as if your wits were wool-gathering."

"Wool?" She could see herself smiling at her mother, disagreeably.

Wool-gathering. Gathering wool. The room was full of wool; wool flying about; hanging in the air and choking you. Clogging your mind. Old grey wool out of pew cushions that people had sat on for centuries, full of dirt.

Wool, spun out, wound round you, woven in a net. You were tangled and strangled in a net of unclean wool. They caught you in it when you were a baby a month old. Mamma, Papa and Uncle Victor. You would have to cut and tug and kick and fight your way out. They were caught in it themselves, they couldn't get out. They didn't want to get out. The wool stopped their minds working. They hated it when their minds worked, when anybody's mind worked. Aunt Lavvy's--yours.

"'Thirteen. Of Works before Justification. Works done before the grace of Christ, and the Inspiration of His Spirit, are not pleasant to God, forasmuch as they spring not of faith in Jesus Christ...: yea, rather, for that they are not done as God hath willed and commanded them to be done, we doubt not but they have the nature of sin.'"

"Do you really believe that, Mamma?"

"Of course I believe it. All our righteousness is filthy rags."

--People's goodness. People's kindness. The sweet, beautiful things they did for each other. The brave, noble things, the things Mark did: filthy rags.

This--this religion of theirs--was filthy; ugly, like the shiny black covers of their Bibles where their fingers left a grey, greasy smear. Filthy and frightful; like funerals. You might as well be buried alive, five coffins deep in a pit of yellow clay.

Mamma couldn't really believe it. You would have to tell her it wasn't true. Not telling her meant that you didn't think she cared about the truth. You insulted her if you supposed she didn't care. Mark would say you insulted her. Even if it hurt her a bit at first, you insulted her if you thought she couldn't bear it. And afterwards she would be happy, because she would be free.

"It's no use, Mamma. I shan't ever want to be confirmed."

"Want--want--want! You ought to want, then. You say you believe the Christian Faith--"

Now--now. A clean quick cut. No jagged ends hanging.

"That's it. I don't believe a single word of it."

She couldn't look at her mother. She didn't want to see her cry.

"You've found that out, have you? You've been mighty quick about it."

"I found it out ages ago. But I didn't mean to tell you."

Her mother was not crying.

"You needn't tell me now," she said. "You don't suppose I'm going to believe it?"

Not crying. Smiling. A sort of cunning and triumphant smile.

"You just want an excuse for not learning those Thirty-Nine Articles."



XIV

I.

Mamma was crying.

Papa had left the dining-room. Mary sat at the foot of the table, and her mother at the head. The space between was covered and piled with Mark's kit: the socks, the pocket-handkerchiefs, the vests, the fine white pyjamas. The hanging white globes of the gaselier shone on them. All day Mary had been writing "M.E. Olivier, M.E. Olivier," in clear, hard letters, like print. The iridescent ink was grey on the white linen and lawn, black when you stamped with the hot iron: M.E. Olivier. Mamma was embroidering M.E.O. in crimson silk on a black sock.

Mark was in the Army now; in the Royal Field Artillery. He was going to India. In two weeks, before the middle of April, he would be gone. They had known this so long that now and then they could forget it; they could be glad that Mark should have all those things, so many more, and more beautiful, than he had ever had. They were appeased with their labour of forming, over and over again, the letters, clear and perfect, of his name.

Then Papa had come in and said that Dan was not going to live at home any more. He had taken rooms in Bloomsbury with young Vickers.

Dan had not gone to Cambridge when he left Chelmsted, as Mamma had intended. There hadn't been enough money.

Uncle Victor had paid for Mark's last year at Woolwich and for his outfit now. Some day Mamma would pay him back again.

Dan had gone first into Papa's office; then into Uncle Edward's office. He was in Uncle Victor's office now. Sometimes he didn't get home till after midnight. Sometimes when you went into his room to call him in the morning he wasn't there; but there were the bed-clothes turned down as Catty had left them, with his nightshirt folded on the top.

Her mother said: "I hope you're content now you've finished your work."

"My work?" her father said.

"Yes, yours. You couldn't rest till you'd got the poor boy out of your office, and now you've turned him out of the house. I suppose you thought that with Mark going you'd better make a clean sweep. It'll be Roddy next."

"I didn't turn him out of the house. But it was about time he went. The young cub's temper is getting unbearable."

"I daresay. You ruined Dan's temper with your silly tease--tease--tease--from morning till night. You can't see a dog without wanting to make it snap and snarl. It was the same with all the children. And when they turned you bullied them. Just because you couldn't break Mark's spirit you tried to crush Dan's. It's a wonder he has any temper left."

Emilius stroked his beard.

"That's right. Stroke your beard as if nothing mattered but your pleasure. You'll be happy enough when Mark's gone."

Emilius left off stroking his beard.

"You say I turned him out of the office," he said. "Did he stay with Edward?"

"Nobody could stay with Edward. You couldn't yourself."

"Ask Victor how long he thinks he'll keep him."

"What do you mean, Emilius?"

He didn't answer. He stood there, his lips pouting between his moustache and beard, his eyes smiling wickedly, as if he had just found out he could torment her more by not saying what he meant.

"If Dan went to the bad," she said, "I wouldn't blame him. It would serve you right.

"Unless," she added, "that's what you want."

And she began to cry.

She cried as a child cries, with spasms of sobbing, her pretty mouth spoiled, stretched wide, working, like india-rubber; dull red blotches creeping up to the brown stains about her eyes. Her tears splashed on to the fine, black silk web of the sock and sparkled there.

Emilius had gone from the room, leaving the door open. Mary got up and shut it. She stood, hesitating. The helpless sobbing drew her, frightened her, stirred her to exasperation that was helpless too. Her mother had never been more intolerably dear.

She went to her. She put her arm round her.

"Don't, Mamma darling. Why do you let him torture you? He didn't turn Dan out of the office. He let him go because he can't afford to pay him enough."

"I know that as well as you," her mother said surprisingly.

She drew herself from the protecting arm.

"Well, then--But, oh, what a brute he is. What a brute!"

"For shame to talk that way of your father. You've no right. You're the one that always goes scot-free."

And, beginning to cry again, she rose and went out, grasping Mark's sock in her convulsive hand.

"Mary, did you hear your mother say I bullied you?"

Her father had come back into the room.

"Yes," she said.

"Have I ever bullied you?"

She looked at him steadily.

"No. You would have done if Mamma had loved me as much as she loves Mark. I wish you had. I wish you'd bullied the life out of me. I shouldn't have cared. I wish you'd hated me. Then I should have known she loved me."

He looked at her in silence, with round, startled eyes. He understood.

II.

"Ubique--"

The gunner's motto. Mark's motto, stamped on all the letters he would write. A blue gun on a blue gun-carriage, the muzzle pointing to the left. The motto waving underneath:

"UBIQUE."

At soldiers' funerals the coffin was carried on a gun-carriage and covered with a flag.

"Ubique quo fas et gloria ducunt." All through the excitement of the evening it went on sounding in her head.

It was Mark's coming of age party in the week before he went. The first time she could remember being important at a party. Her consciousness of being important was intense, exquisite. She was Sub-Lieutenant Mark Olivier's sister. His only one.

And, besides, she looked nice.

Last year's white muslin, ironed out, looked as good as new. The blue sash really was new; and Mamma had lent her one of her necklets, a turquoise heart on a thin gold chain. In the looking-glass she could see her eyes shining under her square brown fringe: spots of gold darting through brown crystal. Her brown hair shone red on the top and gold underneath. The side pieces, rolled above her ears and plaited behind, made a fillet for her back hair. Her back hair was too short. She tried to make it reach to her waist by pulling the curled tips straight; but they only sprang back to her shoulder-blades again. It was unfortunate.

Catty, securing the wonderful fillet with a blue ribbon told her not to be unhappy. She would "do."

Mamma was beautiful in her lavender-grey silk and her black jet cross with the diamond star. They all had to stand together, a little behind her, near the door, and shake hands with the people as they came in. Mary was surprised that they should shake hands with her before they shook hands with Mark; it didn't seem right, somehow, when it was his birthday.

Everybody had come except Aunt Charlotte; even Mr. Marriott, though he was supposed to be afraid of parties. (You couldn't ask Aunt Charlotte because of Mr. Marriott.) There were the two Manistys, looking taller and leaner than ever. And there was Mrs. Draper with Dora and Effie. Mrs. Draper, black hawk's eyes in purple rings; white powder over crushed carmines; a black wing of hair folded over grey down. Effie's pretty, piercing face; small head poised to strike. Dora, a young likeness of Mrs. Draper, an old likeness of Effie, pretty when Effie wasn't there.

When they looked at you you saw that your muslin was not as good as new. When they looked at Mamma you saw that her lavender silk was old-fashioned and that nobody wore black jet crosses now. You were frilly and floppy when everybody else was tight and straight in Princess dresses.

Mamma was more beautiful than Mrs. Draper; and her hair, anyhow, was in the fashion, parted at the side, a soft brown wing folded over her left ear.

But that made her look small and pathetic--a wounded bird. She ought not to have been made to look like that.

You could hear Dora and Effie being kind to Mamma. "Dear Mrs. Olivier"--Indulgence--Condescension. As if to an unfortunate and rather foolish person. Mark could see that. He was smiling: a hard, angry smile.

Mrs. Draper was Mamma's dearest friend. They could sit and talk to each other about nothing for hours together. In the holidays Mrs. Draper used to be always coming over to talk to Mamma, always bringing Dora and Effie with her, always asking Mark and Dan and Roddy to her house, always wondering why Mark never went.

Dan went. Dan seemed as if he couldn't keep away.

This year Mrs. Draper had left off asking Mark and Dan and Roddy. She had left off bringing Dora and Effie with her.

Mary wondered why she had brought them now, and why her mother had asked them.

The Manistys. She had brought them for the Manistys. She wanted Mamma to see what she had brought them for. And Mamma had asked them because she didn't care, and wanted them to see that she didn't care, and that Mark didn't care either.

If they only knew how Mark detested them with their "Dear Mrs. Olivier"!

Something was going on. She heard Uncle Victor saying to Aunt Lavvy, "Mark's party is a bit rough on Dan."

Dan was trying to get to Effie through a gap in the group formed by the Manistys and two young subalterns, Mark's friends. Each time he did it Mrs. Draper stopped him by moving somehow so as to fill the gap. He gave it up at last, to sit by himself at the bottom of the room, jammed into a corner between the chimney-piece and the rosewood cabinet, where he stared at Effie with hot, unhappy eyes.

Supper. Mamma was worried about the supper. She would have liked to have given them a nicer one, but there wasn't enough money; besides, she was afraid of what Uncle Victor would think if they were extravagant. That was the worst of borrowing, Mark said; you couldn't spend so much afterwards. Still, there was enough wine yet in the cellar for fifty parties. You could see, now, some advantage in Papa's habit of never drinking any but the best wine and laying in a large stock of it while he could.

Mary noticed that Papa and Dan drank the most. Perhaps Dan drank more than Papa. The smell of wine was over all the supper, spoiling it, sending through her nerves a reminiscent shiver of disgust.

Mark brought her back into the dining-room for the ice she hadn't had. Dan was there, by himself, sitting in the place Effie had just left. Effie's glass had still some wine in it. You could see him look for the wet side of the rim and suck the drops that had touched her mouth. Something small and white was on the floor beside him. Effie's pocket-handkerchief. He stooped for it. You could hear him breathing up the scent on it with big, sighing sobs.

They slunk back into the drawing-room.

Mark asked her to play something.

"Make a noise, Minky. Perhaps they'll go."

"The Hungarian March." She could play it better than Mamma. Mamma never could see that the bass might be even more important than the treble. She was glad that she could play it better than Mamma, and she hated herself for being glad.

Mark stood by the piano and looked at her as she played. They talked under cover of the "Droom--Droom--Droom-era-room."

"Mark, am I looking too awful?"

"No. Pretty Minx. Very pretty Minx."

"We mustn't, Mark. They'll hear us. They'll think us idiots."

"I don't care if they do. Don't you wish they'd go? Clever Minx. Clever paws."

Mamma passed and looked at them. Her face shrank and sharpened under the dropped wing of her hair. She must have heard what Mark said. She hated it when Mark talked and looked like that. She hated it when you played her music.

Beethoven, then. The "Sonata Eroica" was bound up with "Violetta," the "Guards" and "Mabel" Waltzes and the "Pluie des Perles."

"Ubique quo fas et gloria ducunt." That was the meaning of the noble, serious, passionate music.

Roddy called out, "Oh, not that dull old thing."

No. Not that. There was the Funeral March in it: sulle morte d'un eroe. Mark was going away.

"Waldteufel," then. One--two--three. One--two--three. Sustained thrum in the bass. One--two--three. Thursday--Friday--One--two--three. Saturday--Sunday. Beat of her thoughts, beat of the music in a sort of syncopated time. One--two--three, Monday.

On Tuesday Mark would be gone.

His eyes made her break off to look round. Dan had come back into the room, to his place between the cabinet and the chimney-piece. He stooped forward, his head hanging as if some weight dragged it. His eyes, turned up, staring at Effie, showed half circles of blood-shot white. His face was flushed. A queer, leaden grey flush.

Aunt Lavvy sat beside him. She had her hand on his arm, to keep him quiet there in his corner.

"Mark--what's the matter with Dan?"

One--two--three. One--two--three. Something bumped against the glass door of the cabinet. A light tinkling crash of a broken pane. She could see slantwise as she went on playing. Dan was standing up. He swayed, feeling for the ledge of the cabinet. Then he started to come down the room, his head lowered, thrust forward, his eyes heavy with some earnest, sombre purpose.

He seemed to be hours coming down the room by himself. Hours standing in the middle of the room, holding on to the parrot chair.

"Mark!"

"Go on playing."

He went to him. Roddy sprang up from somewhere. Hours while they were getting Dan away from the parrot chair to the door beside the piano. Hours between the opening and sudden slamming of the door.

But she had not played a dozen bars. She went on playing.

"Wait a minute, Effie."

Effie was standing beside her with her hand on the door.

"I've lost my pocket-handkerchief. I must have left it in the dining-room. I know I left it in the dining-room," she said, fussing.

Mary got up. "All right. I'll fetch it."

She opened the door and shut it again quickly.

"I can't go--yet."

III.

Friday, Saturday and Sunday passed, each with a separate, hurrying pace that quickened towards bed-time.

Mark's last night. She had left her door open so that she could hear him come upstairs. He came and sat on her bed as he used to do years ago when she was afraid of the ghost in the passage.

"I shan't be away for ever, Minky. Only five years."

"Yes, but you'll be twenty-six then, and I shall be nineteen. We shan't be ourselves."

"I shall be my self. Five years isn't really long."

"You--you'll like it, Mark. There'll be jungles with bisons and tigers."

"Yes. Jungles."

"And polo."

"Shan't be able to go in for polo."

"Why not?"

"Ponies. Too expensive."

They sat silent.

"What I don't like," Mark said in a sleepy voice, "is leaving Papa."

"Papa?"

He really meant it. "Wish I'd been decenter to him," he said.

And then: "Minky--you'll be kind to little Mamma."

"Oh, Mark--aren't I?"

"Not always. Not when you say funny things about the Bible."

"You say funny things yourself."

"Yes; but she thinks I don't mean them, so it doesn't matter."

"She thinks I don't mean them, either."

"Well--let her go on thinking it. Do what she wants--even when it's beastly."

"It's all very well for you. She doesn't want you to learn the Thirty-Nine Articles. What would you do if she did?"

"Learn them, of course. Lie about them, if that would please her."

She thought: "Mamma didn't want him to be a soldier."

As if he knew what she was thinking, he said, "She doesn't really mind my going into the Army. I knew she wouldn't. Besides, I had to."

"Yes."

"I'll make it up to her," he said. "I won't do any other thing she wouldn't like. I won't marry. I won't play polo. I'll live on my pay and give poor Victor back his money. And there's one good thing about it. Papa'll be happier when I'm not here."

IV.

"Mark!"

"Minky!"

"He had said good-night and gone to his room and come back again to hold her still tighter in his arms.

"What?"

"Nothing," he said. "Only--good-night."

To-morrow no lingering and no words. Mark's feet quick in the passage. A door shut to, a short, crushing embrace before he turned from her to her mother.

Her mother and she alone together in the emptied room, turning from each other, without a word.

V.

The wallflowers had grown up under the south side of the garden wall; a hedge of butterfly-brown and saffron. They gave out a hot, velvet smell, like roses and violets laced with mignonette.

Mamma stood looking at the wallflowers, smiling at them, happy, as if Mark had never gone.

As if Mark had never gone.



XV

I.

Mamma whispered to Mrs. Draper, and Aunt Bella whispered to Mamma: "Fourteen." They always made a mystery about being fourteen. They ought to have told her.

Her thoughts about her mother went up and down. Mamma was not helpless. She was not gentle. She was not really like a wounded bird. She was powerful and rather cruel. You could only appease her with piles of hemmed sheets and darned stockings. If you didn't take care she would get hold of you and never rest till she had broken you, or turned and twisted you to her own will. She would say it was God's will. She would think it was God's will.

They might at least have told you about the pain. The knives of pain. You had to clench your fists till the fingernails bit into the palms. Over the ear of the sofa cushions she could feel her hot eyes looking at her mother with resentment.

She thought: "You had no business to have me. You had no business to have me."

Somebody else's eyes. Somebody else's thoughts. Not yours. Not yours.

Mamma got up and leaned over you and covered you with the rug. Her white face quivered above you in the dusk. Her mouth pushed out to yours, making a small sound like a moan. You heard yourself cry: "Mamma, Mamma, you are adorable!"

That was you.

II.

And as if Mark had never gone, as if that awful thing had never happened to Dan, as if she had never had those thoughts about her mother, her hidden happiness came back to her. Unhappiness only pushed it to a longer rhythm. Nothing could take it away. Anything might bring it: the smell of the white dust on the road; the wind when it came up out of nowhere and brushed the young wheat blades, beat the green flats into slopes where the white light rippled and ran like water, set the green field shaking and tossing like a green sea; the five elm trees, stiff, ecstatic dancers, holding out the broken-ladder pattern of their skirts; haunting rhymes, sudden cadences; the grave "Ubique" sounding through the Beethoven Sonata.

Its thrill of reminiscence passed into the thrill of premonition, of something about to happen to her.



XVI

I.

Poems made of the white dust, of the wind in the green corn, of the five trees--they would be the most beautiful poems in the world.

Sometimes the images of these things would begin to move before her with persistence, as if they were going to make a pattern; she could hear a thin cling-clang, a moving white pattern of sound that, when she tried to catch it, broke up and flowed away. The image pattern and the sound pattern belonged to each other, but when she tried to bring them together they fell apart.

That came of reading too much Byron.

How was it that patterns of sound had power to haunt and excite you? Like the "potnia, potnia nux" that she found in the discarded Longfellow, stuck before his "Voices of the Night."

Potnia, potnia nux, hypnodoteira ton polyponon broton, erebothen ithi, mole, mole katapteros ton Agamemnonion epi domon.

She wished she knew Greek; the patterns the sounds made were so hard and still.

And there were bits of patterns, snapt off, throbbing wounds of sound that couldn't heal. Lines out of Mark's Homer.

Mark's Greek books had been taken from her five years ago, when Rodney went to Chelmsted. And they had come back with Rodney this Easter. They stood on the shelf in Mark's bedroom, above his writing-table.

One day she found her mother there, dusting and arranging the books. Besides the little shabby Oxford Homers there were an Aeschylus, a Sophocles, two volumes of Aristophanes, clean and new, three volumes of Euripides and a Greek Testament. On the table a well-preserved Greek Anthology, bound in green, with the owner's name, J.C. Ponsonby, stamped on it in gilt letters. She remembered Jimmy giving it to Mark.

She took the Iliad from its place and turned over the torn, discoloured pages.

Her mother looked up, annoyed and uneasy, like a child disturbed in the possession of its toys.

"Mark's books are to be kept where Mark put them," she said.

"But, Mamma, I want them."

Never in her life had she wanted anything so much as those books.

"When will you learn not to want what isn't yours?"

"Mark doesn't want them, or he'd have taken them. He'd give them me if he was here."

"He isn't here. I won't have them touched till he comes back."

"But, Mamma darling, I may be dead. I've had to wait five years as it is."

"Wait? What for, I should like to know?"

"To learn Greek, of course."

Her mother's face shivered with repugnance. It was incredible that anybody should hate a poor dead language so.

"Just because Mark learnt Greek, you think you must try. I thought you'd grown out of all that tiresome affectation. It was funny when you were a little thing, but it isn't funny now."

Her mother sat down to show how tired she was of it.

"It's just silly vanity."

Mary's heart made a queer and startling movement, as if it turned over and dashed itself against her ribs. There was a sudden swelling and aching in her throat. Her head swam slightly. The room, Mark's room, with Mark's white bed in one corner and Dan's white bed in the other, had changed; it looked like a room she had never been in before. She had never seen that mahogany washstand and the greyish blue flowers on the jug and basin. The person sitting on the yellow-painted bedroom chair was a stranger who wore, unaccountably, a brown dress and a gold watch-chain with a gold tassel that she remembered. She had an odd feeling that this person had no right to wear her mother's dress and her chain.

The flash of queerness was accompanied by a sense of irreparable disaster. Everything had changed; she heard herself speaking, speaking steadily, with the voice of a changed and unfamiliar person.

"Mark doesn't think it's vanity. You only think it is because you want to."

The mind of this unfamiliar self had a remorseless lucidity that seemed to her more shocking than anything she could imagine. It went on as if urged by some supreme necessity. "You're afraid. Afraid."

It seemed to her that her mother really was afraid.

"Afraid? And what of?" her mother said.

The flash went out, leaving her mind dark suddenly and defeated.

"I don't know what of. I only know you're afraid."

"That's an awful thing for any child to say to any mother. Just because I won't let you have your own way in everything. Until your will is resigned to God's will I may well be afraid."

"How do you know God doesn't want me to know Greek? He may want it as much as I do."

"And if you did know it, what good would it do you?"

She stood staring at her mother, not answering. She knew the sound patterns were beautiful, and that was all she knew. Beauty. Beauty could be hurt and frightened away from you. If she talked about it now she would expose it to outrage. Though she knew that she must appear to her mother to be stubborn and stupid, even sinful, she put her stubbornness, her stupidity, her sinfulness, between it and her mother to defend it.

"I can't tell you," she said.

"No. I don't suppose you can."

Her mother followed up the advantage given her. "You just go about dreaming and mooning as if there was nothing else in the wide world for you to do. I can't think what's come over you. You used to be content to sit still and sew by the hour together. You were more help to me when you were ten than you are now. The other day when I asked you to darn a hole in your own stocking you looked as if I'd told you to go to your funeral.

"It's time you began to take an interest in looking after the house. There's enough to keep you busy most of your time if you only did the half of it."

"Is that what you want me to be, Mamma? A servant, like Catty?"

"Poor Catty. If you were more like Catty," her mother said, "you'd be happier than you are now, I can tell you. Catty is never disagreeable or disobedient or discontented."

"No. But perhaps Catty's mother thinks she is."

She thought: She is afraid.

"Do you suppose," her mother said, "it's any pleasure to me to find fault with my only daughter? If you weren't my only daughter, perhaps I shouldn't find fault."

Her new self answered again, implacable in its lucidity. "You mean, if you'd had a girl you could do what you liked with you'd have let me alone? You'd have let me alone if you could have done what you liked with Mark?"

She noticed, as if it had a separate and significant existence, her mother's hand lying on the green cover of the Greek Anthology.

"If you were like Mark--if you were only like him!"

"If I only were!"

"Mark never hurt me. Mark never gave me a minute's trouble in his life."

"He went into the Army."

"He had a perfect right to go into the Army."

Silence. "Minky--you'll be kind to little Mamma." A hard, light sound; the vexed fingers tap-tapping on the book. Her mother rose suddenly, pushing the book from her.

"There--take Mark's books. Take everything. Go your own way. You always have done; you always will. Some day you'll be sorry for it."

She was sorry for it now, miserable, utterly beaten. Her new self seemed to her a devil that possessed her. She hated it. She hated the books. She hated everything that separated her and made her different from her mother and from Mark.

Her mother went past her to the door.

"Mamma--I didn't mean it--Mamma--"

Before she could reach the door it shut between them.

II.

The library at Five Elms was very small. Emilius used it as a smoking-room; but it was lined with books. Where the rows of shelves met the shutter cases a fold of window-curtain overlapped their ends.

On the fifth shelf, covered by the curtain, she found the four volumes of Shelley's Poetical Works, half-bound in marble-paper and black leather. She had passed them scores of times in her hunt for something to read. Percy Bysshe Shelley. Percy Bysshe--what a silly name. She had thought of him as she thought of Allison's History of Europe in seventeen volumes, and the poems of Cornwall and Leigh Hunt. Books you wouldn't read if you were on a desert island.

There was something about Shelley in Byron's Life and Letters. Something she had read and forgotten, that persisted, struggled to make itself remembered.

Shelley's Pantheism.

The pages of Shelley were very clean; they stuck together lightly at the edges, like the pages of the Encyclopaedia at "Pantheism" and "Spinoza." Whatever their secret was, you would have to find it for yourself.

Table of Contents--Poems written in 1816--"Hymn to Intellectual Beauty." She read that first.

"Sudden thy shadow fell on me:--
I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!"

It had happened to Shelley, too. He knew how you felt when it happened. (Only you didn't shriek.) It was a real thing, then, that did happen to people.

She read the "Ode to a Skylark," the "Ode to the West Wind" and "Adonais."

All her secret happiness was there. Shelley knew about the queerness of the sharp white light, and the sudden stillness, when the grey of the fields turns to violet: the clear, hard stillness that covers the excited throb-throbbing of the light.

"Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity"--

Colours were more beautiful than white radiance. But that was because of the light. The more light there was in them the more beautiful they were; it was their real life.

One afternoon Mr. Propart called. He came into the library to borrow a book.

"And what are you so deep in?" he said.

"Shelley."

"Shelley? Shelley?" He looked at her. A kind, considering look. She liked his grey face with its tired keenness. She thought he was going to say something interesting about Shelley; but he only smiled his thin, drooping smile; and presently he went away with his book.

Next morning the Shelleys were not in their place behind the curtain. Somebody had moved them to the top shelf. Catty brought the step-ladder.

In the evening they were gone. Mr. Propart must have borrowed them.