Chapter XIV: Book FIVE: Middle Age (1900-1910) (1)

XXXI

I.

She must have been sitting there twenty minutes.

She was afraid to look up at the clock, afraid to move an eyelid lest she should disturb him.

The library had the same nice, leathery, tobaccoey smell. Rough under her fingers the same little sharp tongue of leather scratched up from the arm of her chair. The hanging, half-open fans of the ash-tree would be making the same Japanese pattern in the top left hand pane of the third window. She wanted to see it again to make sure of the pattern, but she was afraid to look up.

If she looked up she would see him.

She mustn't. It would disturb him horribly. He couldn't write if he thought you were looking at him.

It was wonderful that he could go on like that, with somebody in the room, that he let you sit in it when he was writing. The big man.

She had asked him whether she hadn't better go away and come back again, and he had said No, he didn't want her to go away. He wouldn't keep her waiting more than five minutes.

It was unbelievable that she should be sitting there, in that room, as if nothing had happened; as if _they_ were there; as if they might come in any minute; as if they had never gone. A week ago she would have said it was impossible, she couldn't do it, for anybody, no matter how big or how celebrated he was.

Why, after ten years--it must be ten years--she couldn't even bear to go past the house while other people were in it. She hated them, the people who took Greffington Hall for the summer holidays and the autumn shooting. She would go round to Renton by Jackson's yard and the fields so as not to see it. But when the brutes were gone and the yellow blinds were down in the long rows of windows that you saw above the grey garden wall, she liked to pass it and look up and pretend that the house was only waiting for them, only sleeping its usual winter sleep, resting till they came back.

It _was_ ten years since they had gone.

No. If Richard Nicholson hadn't been Mr. Sutcliffe's nephew, she couldn't, no matter how big and how celebrated he was, or how badly he wanted her help or she wanted his money.

No matter how wonderful and important it would feel to be Richard Nicholson's secretary.

It wasn't really his money that she wanted. It would be worth while doing it for nothing, for the sake of knowing him. She had read his _Euripides_.

She wondered: Supposing he kept her, how long would it last? He was in the middle of his First Series of _Studies in Greek Literature_; and there would be two, or even three if he went on.

He had taken Greffington Hall for four months. When he went back to London he would have to have somebody else.

Perhaps he would tell her that, after thinking it over, he had found he didn't want her. Then to-day would be the end of it.

If she looked up she would see him.

She knew what she would see: the fine, cross upper lip lifted backwards by the moustache, the small grizzled brown moustache, turned up, that made it look crosser. The narrow, pensive lower lip, thrust out by its light jaw. His nose--quite a young nose--that wouldn't be Roman, wouldn't be Sutcliffe; it looked out over your head, tilted itself up to sniff the world, obstinate, alert. His eyes, young too, bright and dark, sheltered, safe from age under the low straight eyebrows. They would never have shabby, wrinkled sagging lids. Dark brown hair, grey above his ears, clipped close to stop its curling like his uncle's. He liked to go clipped and clean. You felt that he liked his own tall, straight slenderness.

The big library rustled with the quick, irritable sound of his writing.

It stopped. He had finished. He looked at the clock. She heard a small, commiserating sound.

"Forgive me. I really thought it would only take five minutes. How on earth do you manage to keep so quiet? I should have known if a mouse had moved."

He turned towards her. He leaned back in his chair. "You don't mind my smoking?"

He was settling himself. Now she would know.

"Well," he said, "if I did keep you waiting forty minutes, it was a good test, wasn't it?"

He meditated.

"I'm always changing my secretaries because of something. The last one was admirable, but I couldn't have stood her in the room when I was writing.... Besides, you work better."

"Can you tell? In a week?"

"Yes. I can tell.... Are you sure you can spare me four months?"

"Easily."

"Five? Six?"

"If you were still here."

"I shan't be. I shall be in London.... Couldn't you come up?"

"I couldn't, possibly."

His cross mouth and brilliant, irritated eyes questioned her.

"I couldn't leave my mother."

II.

Five weeks of the four months gone. And to-morrow he was going up to London.

Only till Friday. Only for five days. She kept on telling herself he would stay longer. Once he was there you couldn't tell how many days he might stay. But say he didn't come back till the middle of July, still there would be the rest of July and all August and September.

To-day he was walking home with her, carrying the books. She liked walking with him, she liked to be seen walking with him, as she used to like being seen walking with Roddy and Mark, because she was proud of them, proud of belonging to them. She was proud of Richard Nicholson because of what he had done.

The Morfe people didn't know anything about what he had done; but they knew he was something wonderful and important; they knew it was wonderful and important that you should be his secretary. They were proud of you, glad that they had provided him with you, proud that he should have found what he was looking for in Morfe.

Mr. Belk, for instance, coming along the road. He used to pass you with a jaunty, gallant, curious look as if you were seventeen and he were saying, "There's a girl who ought to be married. Why isn't she?" He had just sidled past them, abashed and obsequious, a little afraid of the big man. Even Mrs. Belk was obsequious.

And Mr. Spencer Rollitt. He was proud because Richard Nicholson had asked him about a secretary and he had recommended you. Funny that people could go on disapproving of you for twenty years, and then suddenly approve because of Richard Nicholson.

And Mamma. Mamma thought you wonderful and important, too.

Mamma liked Mr. Nicholson. Ever since that Sunday when he had called and brought the roses and stayed to tea. She had gone out of the room and left them abruptly because she was afraid of his "cleverness," afraid that he would begin to talk about something that she didn't understand.

And he had said, "How beautiful she is--"

After he had gone she had told Mamma that Richard Nicholson had said she was beautiful; and Mamma had pretended that it didn't matter what he said; but she had smiled all the same.

He carried himself like Mr. Sutcliffe when he walked, straight and tall in his clean cut grey suit. Only he was lighter and leaner. His eyes looked gentle and peaceable now under the shadow of the Panama hat.

The front door stood open. She asked him to come in for tea.

"May I? ... What are you doing afterwards?"

"Going for a walk somewhere."

"Will you let me come too?..."

He was standing by the window looking at the garden. She saw him smile when he heard Catty say that Mamma had gone over to Mrs. Waugh's and wouldn't be back for tea. He smiled to himself, a secret, happy smile, looking out into the garden.... She took him out through the orchard. He went stooping under the low apple boughs and laughing. Down the Back Lane and through the gap in the lower fields, along the flagged path to the Bottom Lane and through the Rathdale fields to the river. Over the stepping stones.

She took the stones at a striding run. He followed, running and laughing.

Up the Rathdale fields to Renton Moor. Not up the schoolhouse lane, or on the Garthdale Road, or along the fields by the beck. Not up Greffington Edge or Karva. Because of Lindley Vickers and Maurice Jourdain; and Roddy and Mark.

No. She was humbugging herself. Not up Karva because of her secret happiness. She didn't want to mix him up with _that_ or with the self that had felt it. She wanted to keep him in the clear spaces of her mind, away from her memories, away from her emotions.

They sat down on the side of the moor in the heather.

Indoors when he was working he was irritable and restless. You would hear a gentle sighing sound: "D-amn"; and he would start up and walk about the room. There would be shakings of his head, twistings of his eyebrows, shruggings of his shoulders, and tormented gestures of his hands. But not out here. He sat in the heather as quiet, as motionless as you were, every muscle at rest. His mind was at rest.

The strong sunlight beat on him; it showed up small surface signs. Perhaps you could see now that he might really be forty, or even forty-five.

No, you couldn't. You couldn't see or feel anything but the burning, inextinguishable youth inside him. The little grey streaks and patches might have been powder put on for fun.

"I want to finish with all my Greek stuff," he said suddenly. "I want to go on to something else--studies in modern French literature. Then English. I want to get everything clean and straight in five pages where other people would take fifty.... I want to go smash through some of the traditions. The tradition of the long, grey paragraph.... We might learn things from France. But we're a proud island people. We won't learn.... We're a proud island people, held in too tight, held in till we burst. That's why we've no aesthetic restraint. No restraint of any sort. Take our economics. Take our politics. We've had to colonise, to burst out over continents. When our minds begin moving it's the same thing. They burst out. All over the place.... When we've learned restraint we shall take our place inside Europe, not outside it."

"We do restrain our emotions quite a lot."

"We do. We do. That's precisely why we don't restrain our expression of them. Really unrestrained emotion that forces its way through and breaks down your intellectual defences and saturates you with itself--it hasn't any words.... It hasn't any words; or very few."

* * * * *

The mown fields over there, below Greffington Edge, were bleached with the sun: the grey cliffs quivered in the hot yellow light.

"It might be somewhere in the South of France."

"_Not_ Agaye."

"No. Not Agaye. The limestone country.... I can't think why I never came here. My uncle used to ask me dozens of times. I suppose I funked it.... What the poor old chap must have felt like shut up in that house all those years with my aunt--"

"Please don't. I--I liked her."

"You mean you liked him and put up with her because of him. We all did that."

"She was kind to me."

"Who wouldn't be?"

"Oh, but you don't know how kind."

"Kind? Good Lord, yes. There are millions of kind people in the world. It's possible to be kind and at the same time not entirely brainless."

"He wouldn't mind that. He wouldn't think she was brainless--"

"He wasn't in love with her--there was another woman--a girl. It was so like the dear old duffer to put it off till he was forty-five and then come a cropper over a little girl of seventeen."

"That isn't true. I knew him much better than you do. He never cared for anybody but her.... Besides, if it was true you shouldn't have told me. I've no business to know it...."

"Everybody knew it. The poor dear managed so badly that everybody in the place knew it. She knew, that's why she dragged him away and made him live abroad. She hated living abroad, but she liked it better than seeing him going to pieces over the girl."

"I don't believe it. If there was anything in it I'd have been sure to have heard of it.... Why, there wasn't anybody here but me--"

"It must have been years before your time," he said. "You could hardly even have come in for the sad end of it."

* * * * *

Dorsy Heron said it was true.

"It was you he was in love with. Everybody saw it but you."

She remembered. His face when she came to him. In the library. And what he had said.

"A man might be in love with you for ten years and you wouldn't know about it if he held his tongue."

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.

It wasn't like this before.

_This_ is an awful feeling. Dying must be like this. One thing going after another. Something holding down your heart, stopping its beat; something holding down your chest, crushing the breath out of it.... Don't think about the feeling. Don't feel. Think of the blackness....

It isn't the same blackness. There are specks and shreds of light in it; you can't get the light away.... Don't think about the blackness and the light. Let everything go except yourself. Hold on to yourself.... But you felt your self going.

Going and coming back; gathered together; incredibly free; disentangled from the net of nerves and veins. It didn't move any more with the movement of the net. It was clear and still in the blackness; intensely real.

Then it willed. Your self willed. It was free to will. You knew that it had never been free before except once; it had never willed before except once. Willing was this. Waves and waves of will, coming on and on, making your will, driving it through empty time.... "The time of time": that was the Self.... Time where nothing happens except this. Where nothing happens except God's will. God's will in your will. Self of your self. Reality of reality.... It had felt like that.

Mamma had waked up. She was saying she was better.

* * * * *

Mamma was better. She said she felt perfectly well. She could walk across the room. She could walk without your holding her.

It couldn't have been that. It couldn't, possibly. It was a tiny haemorrhage and it had dried up. It would have dried up just the same if you hadn't done anything. Those things _don't happen_.

What did happen was extraordinary enough. The queer dying. The freedom afterwards. The intense stillness, the intense energy; the certainty.

Something was there.

* * * * *

That horrible dream. Dorsy oughtn't to have made me go and see the old woman in the workhouse. A body without a mind. That's what made the dream come. It was Mamma's face; but she was doing what the old woman did.

"Mamma!"--That's the second time I've dreamed Mamma was dead.

The little lamb, lying on her back with her mouth open, making that funny noise: "Cluck-cluck," like a hen.

Why can't I dream about something I want to happen? Why can't I dream about Richard? ... Poor Richard, how can he go on believing I shall come to him?

VII.

Dear Dr. Charles, with his head sticking out between the tubes of the stethoscope, like a ram. His poor old mouth hung loose as he breathed. He was out late last night; there was white stubble on his chin.

"It won't do it when you want it to."

"It's doing quite enough.... Let me see, it's two years since your mother had that illness. You must go away, Mary. For a month at least. Dorsy'll come and take care of your mother."

"Does it matter where I go?"

"N-no. Not so much. Go where you'll get a thorough change, my dear. I wouldn't stay with relations, if I were you."

"All right, I'll go if you'll tell me what's the matter with me."

"You've got your brother Rodney's heart. But it won't kill you if you'll take care of yourself."

(Roddy's heart, the net of flesh and blood drawing in a bit of your body.)

XXXIII

I.

Richard had gone up into his own flat and left her to wash and dress and explore. He had told her she was to have Tiedeman's flat. Not knowing who Tiedeman was made it more wonderful that God should have put it into his head to go away for Easter and lend you his flat.

If you wanted anything you could ring and they would come up from the basement and look after you.

She didn't want them to come up yet. She wanted to lie back among her cushions where Richard had packed her, and turn over the moments and remember what they had been like: getting out of the train at King's Cross and finding Richard there; coming with him out of the thin white April light into the rich darkness and brilliant colours of the room; the feeling of Richard's hands as they undid her fur stole and peeled the sleeves of her coat from her arms; seeing him kneel on the hearthrug and make tea with an air of doing something intensely interesting, an air of security and possession. He went about in Tiedeman's rooms as if they belonged to him.

She liked Tiedeman's flat: the big outer room, curtained with thick gentian blue and thin violet. There was a bowl of crimson and purple anemones on the dark oval of the oak table.

Tiedeman's books covered the walls with their coloured bands and stripes and the illuminated gold of their tooling. The deep bookcases made a ledge all round half-way up the wall, and the shallow bookcases went on above it to the ceiling.

But--those white books on the table were Richard's books. _Mary Olivier--Mary Olivier. My_ books that I gave him.... They're Richard's rooms.

She got up and looked about. That long dark thing was her coat and fur stretched out on the flat couch in the corner where Richard had laid them; stretched out in an absolute peace and rest.

She picked them up and went into the inner room that showed through the wide square opening. The small brown oak-panelled room. No furniture but Richard's writing table and his chair. A tall narrow French window looking to the backs of houses, and opening on a leaded balcony. Spindle-wood trees, green balls held up on ramrod stems in green tubs. Richard's garden.

Curtains of thin silk, brilliant magenta, letting the light through. The hanging green bough of a plane tree, high up on the pane, between. A worn magentaish rug on the dark floor.

She went through the door on the right and found a short, narrow passage. Another French window opening from it on to the balcony. A bathroom on the other side; a small white panelled bedroom at the end.

She had no new gown. Nothing but the black chiffon one (black because of Uncle Victor) she had bought two years ago with Richard's cheque. She had worn it at Greffington that evening when she dined with him. It had a long, pointed train. Its thin, open, wide spreading sleeves fell from her shoulders in long pointed wings. It made her feel slender.

* * * * *

There was no light in the inner room. Clear glassy dark twilight behind the tall window. She stood there waiting for Richard to come down.

Richard loved all this. He loved beautiful books, beautiful things, beautiful anemone colours, red and purple with the light coming through them, thin silk curtains that let the light through like the thin silky tissues of flowers. He loved the sooty brown London walls, houses standing back to back, the dark flanks of the back wings jutting out, almost meeting across the trenches of the gardens, making the colours in his rooms brilliant as stained glass.

He loved the sound of the street outside, intensifying the quiet of the house.

It was the backs that were so beautiful at night; the long straight ranges of the dark walls, the sudden high dark cliffs and peaks of the walls, hollowed out into long galleries filled with thick, burning light, rows on rows of oblong casements opening into the light. Here and there a tree stood up black in the trenches of the gardens.

The tight strain in her mind loosened and melted in the stream of the pure new light, the pure new darkness, the pure new colours.

Richard came in. They stood together a long time, looking out; they didn't say a word.

Then, as they turned back to the lighted outer room, "I thought I was to have had Tiedeman's flat?"

"Well, he's up another flight of stairs and the rain makes a row on the skylight. It was simpler to take his and give you mine. I want you to have mine."

II.

She turned off the electric light and shut her eyes and lay thinking. The violent motion of the express prolonged itself in a ghostly vibration, rocking the bed. In still space, unshaken by this tremor, she could see the other rooms, the quiet, beautiful rooms.

I wonder how Mamma and Dorsy are getting on.... I'm not going to think about Mamma. It isn't fair to Richard. I shan't think about anybody but Richard for this fortnight. One evening of it's gone already. It might have lasted quite another hour if he hadn't got up and gone away so suddenly. What a fool I was to let him think I was tired.

There will be thirteen evenings more. Thirteen. You can stretch time out by doing a lot of things in it; doing something different every hour. When you're with Richard every minute's different from the last, and he brings you the next all bright and new.

Heaven would be like that. Imagine an eternity of heaven; being with Richard for ever and ever. But nobody ever did imagine an eternity of heaven. People only talk about it because they can't imagine it. What they mean is that if they had one minute of it they would remember that for ever and ever.

* * * * *

This is Richard's life. This is what I'd have taken from him if I'd let him marry me.

I daren't even think what it would have been like if I'd tried to mix up Mamma and Richard in the same house.... And poor little Mamma in a strange place with nothing about it that she could remember, going up and down in it, trying to get at me, and looking reproachful and disapproving all the time. She'd have to be shut in her own rooms because Richard wouldn't have her in his. Sitting up waiting to be read aloud to and played halma with when Richard wanted me. Saying the same things over and over again. Sighing.

Richard would go off his head if he heard Mamma sigh.

He wants to be by himself the whole time, "working like blazes." He likes to feel that the very servants are battened down in the basement so that he doesn't know they're there. He couldn't stand Tiedeman and Peters if they weren't doing the same thing. Tiedeman working like blazes in the flat above him and Peters working like blazes in the flat below.

Richard slept in this room last night. He will sleep in it again when I'm gone.

She switched the light on to look at it for another second: the privet-white panelled cabin, the small wine-coloured chest of drawers, the small golden-brown wardrobe, shining.

My hat's in that wardrobe, lying on Richard's waistcoat, fast asleep.

If Tiedeman's flat's up there, that's Richard walking up and down over my head.... If it rains there'll be a row on the skylight and he won't sleep. He isn't sleeping now.

III.

It would be much nicer to walk home through Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park.

She was glad that they were going to have a quiet evening. After three evenings at the play and Richard ruining himself in hansoms and not sleeping.... After this unbelievable afternoon. All those people, those terribly important people.

It was amusing to go about with Richard and feel important yourself because you were with him. And to see Richard's ways with them, his nice way of behaving as if _he_ wasn't important in the least, as if it was you they had made all that fuss about.

To think that the little dried up schoolmasterish man was Professor Lee Ramsden, prowling about outside the group, eager and shy, waiting to be introduced to you, nobody taking the smallest notice of him. The woman who had brought him making soft, sentimental eyes at you through the gaps in the group, and trying to push him in a bit nearer. Then Richard asking you to be kind for one minute to the poor old thing. It hurt you to see him shy and humble and out of it.

And when you thought of his arrogance at Durlingham.

It was the women's voices that tired you so, and their nervous, snapping eyes.

The best of all was going away from them quietly with Richard into Kensington Gardens.

"Did you like it, Mary?"

"Frightfully. But not half so much as this."

IV.

She was all alone in the front room, stretched out on the flat couch in the corner facing the door.

He was still writing his letter in the inner room. When she heard him move she would slide her feet to the floor and sit up.

She wanted to lie still with her hands over her shut eyes, making the four long, delicious days begin again and go on in her head.

Richard _would_ take hansoms. You couldn't stop him. Perhaps he was afraid if you walked too far you would drop down dead. When it was all over your soul would still drive about London in a hansom for ever and ever, through blue and gold rain-sprinkled days, through poignant white evenings, through the streaming, steep, brown-purple darkness and the streaming flat, thin gold of the wet nights.

They were not going to have any more tiring parties. There wasn't enough time.

When she opened her eyes he was sitting on the chair by the foot of the couch, leaning forward, looking at her. She saw nothing but his loose, hanging hands and straining eyes.

"Oh, Richard--what time is it?" She swung her feet to the floor and sat up suddenly.

"Only nine."

"Only nine. The evening's nearly gone."

* * * * *

"Is that why you aren't sleeping, Richard? ... I didn't know. I didn't know I was hurting you."

"What-did-you-think? What-did-you-think? Isn't it hurting you?"

"Me? I've got used to it. I was so happy just being with you."

"So happy and so quiet that I thought you didn't care.... Well, what was I to think? If you won't marry me."