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Mary Olivier: A Life

M >> May Sinclair >> Mary Olivier: A Life




"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."

And _her_ face. 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.


III.

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 the _Bacchae_--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 the _Bacchae_ in 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.


IV.

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.


V.

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 them _sub 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. They
_were_ his voice talking to you; you could tell which words would take
the stress of it. "I don't know how _much_ there 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 any _amount_ gone under that you can't get at,
that you may _never_ get 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't _know_. 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.

If only he would not keep on telling you you ought to come to London.
That was what made you afraid. He might have seen how impossible it was.
He had seen Mamma.

"Don't try to dig me out of my 'hole.' I _can_ 'go on living in it for
ever' if I'm never taken out. But if I got out once it would be awful
coming back. It isn't awful now. Don't make it awful."

He only wrote: "I'll make it awfuller and _aw_fuller, until out you
come."




XXXII


I.

Things were happening in the village.

The old people were dying. Mr. James had died in a fit the day after
Christmas Day. Old Mrs. Heron had died of a stroke in the first week of
January. She had left Dorsy her house and furniture and seventy pounds a
year. Mrs. Belk got the rest.

The middle-aged people were growing old. Louisa Wright's hair hung in a
limp white fold over each ear, her face had tight lines in it that pulled
it into grimaces, her eyes had milky white rings like speedwell when it
begins to fade. Dorsy Heron's otter brown hair was striped with grey; her
nose stood up sharp and bleak in her red, withering face; her sharp,
tender mouth drooped at the corners. She was forty-nine.

It was cruel, cruel, cruel; it hurt you to see them. Rather than own it
was cruel they went about pulling faces and pretending they were happy.
Their gestures had become exaggerated, tricks that they would never grow
out of, that gave them the illusion of their youth.

The old people were dying and the middle-aged people were growing old.
Nothing would ever begin for them again.

Each morning when she got out of bed she had the sacred, solemn certainty
that for her everything was beginning. At thirty-nine.

What was thirty-nine? A time-feeling, a feeling she hadn't got. If you
haven't got the feeling you are not thirty-nine. You can be any age you
please, twenty-nine, nineteen.

But she had been horribly old at nineteen. She could remember what it had
felt like, the desperate, middle-aged sadness, the middle-aged certainty
that nothing interesting would ever happen. She had got hold of life at
the wrong end.

And all the time her youth had been waiting for her at the other end, at
the turn of the unknown road, at thirty-nine. All through the autumn and
winter Richard Nicholson had kept on writing. Her poems would be out on
the tenth of April.

On the third the note came.

"Shall I still find you at Morfe if I come down this week-end?--R.N."

"You will never find me anywhere else.--M.O."

"I shall bike from Durlingham. If you've anything to do in Reyburn it
would be nice if you met me at The King's Head about four. We could have
tea there and ride out together.--R.N."


II.

"I'm excited. I've never been to tea in an hotel before."

She was chattering like a fool, saying anything that came into her head,
to break up the silence he made.

She was aware of something underneath it, something that was growing more
and more beautiful every minute. She was trying to smash this thing lest
it should grow more beautiful than she could bear.

"You see how I score by being shut up in Morfe. When I do get out it's no
end of an adventure." (Was there ever such an idiot?)

Suddenly she left off trying to smash the silence.

The silence made everything stand out with a supernatural clearness, the
square, white-clothed table in the bay of the window, the Queen Anne
fluting on the Britannia metal teapot, the cups and saucers and plates,
white with a gentian blue band, The King's Head stamped in gold like a
crest.

Sitting there so still he had the queer effect of creating for both of
you a space of your own, more real than the space you had just stepped
out of. There, there and not anywhere else, these supernaturally clear
things had reality, a unique but impermanent reality. It would last as
long as you sat there and would go when you went. You knew that whatever
else you might forget you would remember this.

The rest of the room, the other tables and the people sitting at them
were not quite real. They stood in another space, a different and
inferior kind of space.

"I came first of all," he said, "to bring you _that_."

He took out of his pocket and put down between them the thin, new white
parchment book of her _Poems_.

"Oh ... Poor thing, I wonder what'll happen to it?" Funny--it was the
least real thing. If it existed at all it existed somewhere else, not in
this space, not in this time. If you took it up and looked at it the
clearness, the unique, impermanent reality would be gone, and you would
never get it again.

* * * * *

They had finished the run down Reyburn hill. Their pace was slackening on
the level.

He said, "That's a jolly bicycle of yours."

"Isn't it? I'm sure you'll like to know I bought it with the wonderful
cheque you gave me. I should never have had it without that."

"I'm glad you got something out of that awful time."

"Awful? It was one of the nicest times I've ever had.... Nearly all my
nice times have been in that house."

"I know," he said. "My uncle would let you do anything you liked if you
were young enough. He ought to have had children of his own. They'd have
kept him out of mischief."

"I can't think," she said to the surrounding hills, "why people get into
mischief, or why they go and kill themselves. When they can ride bicycles
instead."


III.

Mamma was sitting upright and averted, with an air of self-conscious
effacement, holding the thin white book before her like a fan.

Every now and then you could see her face swinging round from behind the
cover and her eyes looking at Richard Nicholson, above the rims of her
glasses. Uneasy, frightened eyes.


IV.

The big pink roses of the chintzes and the gold bordered bowls of the
black mirrors looked at you rememberingly.

There was a sort of brutality about it. To come here and be happy, to
come here in order to be happy, when _they_ were gone; when you had hurt
them both so horribly.

"I'm sitting in her chair," she thought.

Richard Nicholson sat, in a purely temporary attitude, by the table in
the window. Against the window-pane she could see his side face drawn in
a brilliant, furred line of light. His moustache twitched under the
shadow of his nose. He was smiling to himself as he wrote the letter to
Mamma.

There was a brutality about that, too. She wondered if he had seen old
Baxter's pinched mouth and sliding eyes when he took the letter. He was
watching him as he went out, waiting for the click of the latch.

"It's all right," he said. "They expect you. They think it's work."

He settled himself (in Mr. Sutcliffe's chair).

"It's the best way," he said. "I want to see you and I don't want to
frighten your mother. She _is_ afraid of me."

"No. She's afraid of the whole thing. She wishes it hadn't happened.
She's afraid of what'll happen next. I can't make her see that nothing
need happen next."

"She's cleverer than you think. She sees that something's got to happen
next. I couldn't stand another evening like the last."

"You couldn't," she agreed. "You couldn't possibly."

"We can't exactly go on like--like this, you know."

"Don't let's think about it. Here we are. Now this minute. It's an hour
and a half till dinner time. Why, even if I go at nine we've got three
hours."

"That's not enough.... You talk as though we could think or not think, as
we chose. Even if we left off thinking we should have to go on living.
Your mother knows that."

"I don't think she knows more than we do."

"She knows enough to frighten her. She knows what _I_ want.... I want to
marry you, Mary."

(This then was what she had been afraid of. But Mamma wouldn't have
thought of it.)

"I didn't think you wanted to do that. Why should you?"

"It's the usual thing, isn't it? When you care enough."

"_Do_ you care enough?"

"More than enough. Don't you? ... It's no use saying you don't. I know
you do."

"Can you tell?"

"Yes."

"Do I go about showing it?"

"No; there hasn't been time. You only began yesterday."

"When? _When_?"

"In the hotel. When you stopped talking suddenly. And when I gave you
your book. You looked as though you wished I hadn't. As though I'd
dragged you away from somewhere where you were happy."

"Yes.... If it only began yesterday we can stop it. Stop it before it
gets worse."

"I can't. I've been at it longer than that."

"How long?"

"Oh--I don't know. It might have been that first week. After I'd found
out that there was peace when you came into the room; and no peace when
you went out. When you're there peace oozes out of you and soaks into me
all the time."

"Does it feel like that?"

"Just like that."

"But--if it feels like that now, we should spoil it by marrying."

"Oh no we shouldn't."

"Yes.... If it's peace you want. There won't be _any_ peace.... Besides,
you don't know. Do you remember telling me about your uncle?"

"What's he got to do with it?"

"And that girl. You said I couldn't have known anything about it.... You
said I couldn't even have come in for the sad end of it."

"Well?"

"Well.... I did.... I _was_ the sad end of it.... The girl was me."

"But you told me it wasn't true."

...He had got up. He wanted to stand. To stand up high above you.

"You _know_," he said, "you told me it wasn't true."

* * * * *

They would have to go through with it. Dining. Drinking coffee. Talking
politely; talking intelligently; talking. Villiers de L'Isle Adam,
Villiers de L'Isle Adam. "The symbolistes are finished ... Do you know
Jean Richepin? 'Il était une fois un pauvre gars Qui aimait celle qui ne
l'aimait pas'? ... 'Le coeur de ta mère pour mon chien.'" He thinks I
lied. "You ought to read Henri de Regnier and Remy de Gourmont. You'd
like them." ... Le coeur de ta mère. He thinks I lied. Goodness knows
what he doesn't think.

The end of it would come at nine o'clock.

* * * * *

"Are you still angry?"

He laughed. A dreadful sniffling laugh that came through his nostrils.

"_I_'m not. If I were I should let you go on thinking I lied. You see, I
didn't know it was true. I didn't know I was the girl."

"You didn't _know_?"

"How could I when he never said a word?"

"I can't understand your not seeing it."

"Would you like me better if I had seen it?"

"N-no.... But I wish you hadn't told me. Why did you?"

"I was only trying to break the shock. You thought I couldn't be old
enough to be that girl. I meant you to do a sum in your head: 'If she was
that girl and she was seventeen, then she must be thirty-nine now.'"

"Is _that_ what you smashed up our evening for?"

"Yes."

"I shouldn't care if you were fifty-nine. I'm forty-five."

"You're sorry. You're sorry all the same."

"I'm sorry because there's so little time, Mary. Sorry I'm six years
older than you...."

Nine o'clock.

She stood up. He turned to her. He made a queer sound. A sound like a
deep, tearing sigh.

* * * * *

"If I were twenty I couldn't marry you, because of Mamma. That's one
thing. You can't marry Mamma."

"We can talk about your mother afterwards."

"No. Now. There isn't any afterwards. There's only this minute that
we're in. And perhaps the next.... You haven't thought what it'll be
like. You can't leave London because of your work. I can't leave this
place because of Mamma. She'd be miserable in London. I can't leave
her. She hasn't anybody but me. I promised my brother I'd look after
her.... She'd have to live with me."

"Why not?"

"You couldn't live with her."

"I could, Mary."

"Not you. You said you couldn't stand another evening like yesterday....
_All the evenings would be like yesterday_.... Please.... Even if there
wasn't Mamma, you don't want to marry. If you'd wanted to you'd have
done it long ago, instead of waiting till you're forty-five. Think of
two people tied up together for life whether they both like it or not.
It isn't even as if one of them could be happy. How could you if the
other wasn't? Look at the Sutcliffes. Think how he hated it.... And _he_
was a kind, patient man. You know you wouldn't dream of marrying me if
you didn't think it was the only possible way."

"Well--isn't it?"

"No. The one impossible way. I'd do anything for you but that....
Anything."

"Would you, Mary? Would you have the courage?"

"It would take infinitely more courage to marry you. We should be risking
more. All the beautiful things. If it wasn't for Mamma.... But there _is_
Mamma. So--you see."

She thought: "He _hasn't_ kissed me. He _hasn't_ held me in his arms.
He'll be all right. It won't hurt him."


V.

That was Catty's white apron.

Catty stood on the cobbled square by the front door, looking for her.
When she saw them coming she ran back into the house.

She was waiting in the passage as Mary came in.

"The mistress is upset about something," she said. "After she got Mr.
Nicholson's letter."

"There wasn't anything to upset her in that, Catty."

"P'raps not, Miss Mary; but I thought I'd tell you."

Mamma had been crying all evening. Her pocket-handkerchief lay in her
lap, a wet rag.

"I thought you were never coming back again," she said.

"Why, where did you think I'd gone?"

"Goodness knows where. I believe there's nothing you wouldn't do. I've no
security with you, Mary.... Staying out till all hours of the night....
Sitting up with that man.... You'll be the talk of the place if you don't
take care."

(She thought: "I must let her go on. I won't say anything. If I do it'll
be terrible.")

"I can't think what possessed you...."

("Why did I do it? _Why_ did I smash it all up? Uncle Victor suicided.
That's what I've done.... I've killed myself.... This isn't me.")

"If that's what comes of your publishing I'd rather your books were sunk
to the bottom of the sea. I'd rather see you in your coffin."

"I _am_ in my coffin."

"I wish I were in mine," her mother said.

* * * * *

Mamma was getting up from her chair, raising herself slowly by her arms.

Mary stooped to pick up the pocket-handkerchief. "Don't, Mamma; I've got
it."

Mamma went on stooping. Sinking, sliding down sideways, clutching at the
edge of the table.

Mary saw terror, bright, animal terror, darting up to her out of Mamma's
eyes, and in a place by themselves the cloth sliding, the lamp rocking
and righting itself.

She was dragging her up by her armpits, holding her up. Mamma's arms were
dangling like dolls' arms.

And like a machine wound up, like a child in a passion, she still
struggled to walk, her knees thrust out, doubled up, giving way, her feet
trailing.


VI.

Not a stroke. Well, only a slight stroke, a threatening, a warning.
"Remember she's getting old, Mary."

Any little worry or excitement would do it.

She was worried and excited about me. Richard worried and excited her.

If I could only stay awake till she sleeps. She's lying there like a
lamb, calling me "dear" and afraid of giving me trouble.... Her little
hands dragged the bedclothes up to her chin when Dr. Charles came. She
looked at him with her bright, terrified eyes.

She isn't old. She can't be when her eyes are so bright.

She thinks it's a stroke. She won't believe him. She thinks she'll die
like Mrs. Heron.

Perhaps she knows.

Perhaps Dr. Charles really thinks she'll die and won't tell me. Richard
thought it. He was sorry and gentle, because he knew. You could see by
his cleared, smoothed face and that dreadfully kind, dreadfully wise
look. He gave into everything--with an air of insincere, provisional
acquiescence, as if he knew it couldn't be for very long. Dr. Charles
must have told him.

Richard wants it to happen.... Richard's wanting it can't make it happen.

It might, though. Richard might get at her. His mind and will might be
getting at her all the time, making her die. He might do it without
knowing he was doing it, because he couldn't help it. He might do it in
his sleep.

But I can stop that.... If Richard's mind and will can make her die, my
mind and will can keep her from dying.... There was something I did
before.

That time I wanted to go away with the Sutcliffes. When Roddy was coming
home. Something happened then.... If it happened then it can happen now.

If I could remember how you do it. Flat on your back with your eyes shut;
not tight shut. You mustn't feel your eyelids. You mustn't feel any part
of you at all. You think of nothing, absolutely nothing; not even think.
You keep on not feeling, not thinking, not seeing things till the
blackness comes in waves, blacker and blacker. That's how it was before.
Then the blackness was perfectly still. You couldn't feel your breathing
or your heart beating.... It's coming all right.... Blacker and blacker.

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