Mary Olivier: a Life Part 107

Catty couldn't bear it being so different. You could see she thought you were unfaithful not to have kept the piano when Mamma had played on it.

Catty's faithfulness was unsurpa.s.sable. She had wanted to marry Blenkiron, the stonemason at Morfe, but first she wouldn't because of Mamma and then she wouldn't because of Miss Mary. When you told her to go back and marry him at once she would only laugh and say, "There's your husband, and there's your children. You're my child, Miss Mary. Master Roddy was Jenny's child and you was always mine."

You were only ten years younger than Catty, but like Richard she couldn't see that you were old.

You would never know whether Catty knew about Richard; or whether Dorsy knew. Whatever you did they would love you, Catty because you were her child, and Dorsy because you were Mark's sister.

IV.

The sun had been s.h.i.+ning for a fortnight. She could sit out all day now in the garden.

It was nonsense to talk about time standing still if you kept on moving.

Just now, in the garden, when the light came through the thin green silk leaves of the lime tree, for a moment, while she sat looking at the lime tree, time stood still.

Catty had taken away the tea-things and was going down the four steps into the house. It happened between the opening and shutting of the door.

She saw that the beauty of the tree was its real life, and that its real life was in her real self and that her real self was G.o.d. The leaves and the light had nothing to do with it; she had seen it before when the tree was a stem and bare branches on a grey sky; and that beauty too was the real life of the tree.

V.

If she could only dream about Mark. But if she dreamed about any of them it was always Mamma. She had left her in the house by herself and she had got out of her room to the stair-head. Or they were in London at the crossing by the Bank and Mamma was frightened. She had to get her through the thick of the traffic. The horses pushed at Mamma and you tried to hold back their noses, but she sank down and slid away from you sideways under the wheel.

Or she would come into this room and find her in it. At first she would be glad to see that Mamma was still there; then she would be unhappy and afraid. She would go on to a clear thought: if Mamma was still there, then she had got back somehow to Morfe. The old life was still going on; it had never really stopped. But if that was real, then this was not real. Her secure, s.h.i.+ning life of last year and now wasn't real; nothing could make it real; her exquisite sense of it was not real. She had only thought it had happened.

Nothing had happened but what had happened before; it was happening now; it would go on and on till it frightened you, till you could not bear it.

When she woke up she was glad that the dream had been nothing but a dream.

But that meant that you were glad Mamma was not there. The dream showed you what you were hiding from yourself. Supposing the dead knew?

Supposing Mamma knew, and Mark knew that you were glad--

VI.

It came to her at queer times, in queer ways. After that horrible evening at the Dining Club when the secretary woman put her as far as possible from Richard, next to the little Jew financier who smelt of wine.

She couldn't even hear what Richard was saying; the little wine-lapping Jew went on talking about Women's Suffrage and his collection of Fragonards and his wife's portrait by Sargent. His tongue slid between one overhanging and one dropping jaw, in and out like a shuttle.

She tried not to hate him, not to shrink back from his puffing, wine-sour breath, to be kind to him and listen and smile and remember that his real secret self was G.o.d, and was holy; not to attend to Richard's voice breaking the beat of her heart.

She had gone away before Richard could get up and come to her. She wanted to be back in her house by herself. She had pushed open the French windows of the study to breathe the air of the garden and see the tall sycamore growing deep into the thick blue night. Half the room, reflected on the long pane, was thrown out into the garden. She saw it thinning away, going off from the garden into another s.p.a.ce, existing there with an unearthly reality of its own. She had sat down at last, too tired to go upstairs, and had found herself crying, incredibly crying; all the misery, all the fear, all the boredom of her life gathered together and discharging now.

"If I could get out of it all"--Her crying stopped with a start as if somebody had come in and put a hand on her shoulder. Everything went still. She had a sense of happiness and peace suddenly there with her in the room. Not so much her own as the happiness and peace of an immense, invisible, intangible being of whose life she was thus aware. She knew, somehow through It, that there was no need to get away; she was out of it all now, this minute. There was always a point where she could get out of it and into this enduring happiness and peace.

VII.

They were talking to-night about Richard and his wife. They said he wasn't happy; he wasn't in love with her.

He never had been; she knew it; yet she took him, and tied him to her, an old woman, older than Richard, with grey hair.

Oh well--she had had to wait for him longer than he waited for me, and she's in love with him still. She's making it impossible for him to see me.

Then I shan't see him. I don't want him to see me if it hurts her. I don't want her to be hurt.

I wonder if she knows? _They_ know. I can hear them talking about me when I've gone.

..."Mary Olivier, the woman who translated Euripides."

..."Mary Olivier, the woman Nicholson discovered."

..."Mary Olivier, the woman who was Nicholson's mistress."

Richard's mistress--I know that's what they say, but I can't feel that they're saying it about _me_. It must be somebody else, some woman I never heard of.

VIII.

Mr. Sutcliffe is dead. He died two weeks ago at Agaye.

I can see now how beautiful they were; how beautiful he was, going away like that, letting her take him away so that the sight of me shouldn't hurt her.

I can see that what I thought so ugly was really beautiful, their sticking to each other through it all, his faithfulness and her forgiveness, their long life of faithfulness and forgiveness.

But my short life with Richard was beautiful too; my coming to him and leaving him free. I shall never go back on that; I shall never be sorry for it.

The things I'm sorry for are not caring more for Papa, being unkind to Mamma, not doing enough for her, not knowing what she was really like.

I'd give anything to have been able to think about her as Mark thought, to feel about her as he felt. If only I had known what she was really like. Even now I don't know. I never shall.

But going to Richard--No. If it was to be done again to-morrow I'd do it.

And I don't humbug myself about it. If I made Richard happy I made myself happy too; _he_ made me happy. Still, if I had had no happiness in it, if I'd hated it, I'd have done it for Richard all the same.

IX.

All this religious resignation. And the paradox of prayer: people praying one minute, "Thy will be done," then praying for things to happen or not happen, just as they please.

G.o.d's will be done--as if it wouldn't be done whatever they did or didn't do. G.o.d's will was your fate. The thing was to know it and not waste your strength in the illusion of resistance.

If you were part of G.o.d your will was G.o.d's will at the moment when you really willed. There was always a point when you knew it: the flash point of freedom. You couldn't mistake your flash when it came. You couldn't doubt away that certainty of freedom any more than you could doubt away the certainty of necessity and determination. From the outside they were part of the show of existence, the illusion of separation from G.o.d. From the inside they were G.o.d's will, the way things were willed. Free-will was the reality underneath the illusion of necessity. The flash point of freedom was your consciousness of G.o.d.

Then praying would be willing. There would be no such thing as pa.s.sive prayer. There could be no surrender.... And yet there was. Not the surrender of your will, but of all the things that entangle and confuse it; that stand between it and you, between G.o.d and you. When you lay still with your eyes shut and made the darkness come on, wave after wave, blotting out your body and the world, blotting out everything but your self and your will, that was a dying to live; a real dying, a real life.

The Christians got hold of real things and turned them into something unreal, impossible to believe. The grace of G.o.d was a real thing. It was that miracle of perfect happiness, with all its queerness, its divine certainty and uncertainty. The Christians knew at least one thing about it; they could see it had nothing to do with deserving. But it had nothing to do with believing, either, or with being good and getting into heaven. It _was_ heaven. It had to do with beauty, absolutely un-moral beauty, more than anything else.

She couldn't see the way of it beyond that. It had come to her when she was a child in brilliant, clear flashes; it had come again and again in her adolescence, with more brilliant and clearer flashes; then, after leaving her for twenty-three years, it had come like this--streaming in and out of her till its ebb and flow were the rhythm of her life.