Mary Olivier: a Life Part 38

Suddenly she felt hard and strong, grown-up in her sad wisdom. Her mother didn't love her. She never had loved her. Nothing she could ever do would make her love her. Miracles didn't happen.

She thought: "I wonder why she won't let me see Miss Lambert's letter?"

She went upstairs to her room. She leaned on the sill of the open window, looking out, drinking in the sweet air of the autumn fields. The five elms raised golden heads to a blue sky.

Her childhood had died with a little gasp.

Catty came in to unpack her box. Catty, with wet cheeks, kissed a dead child.

XIX

I.

In the train from Bristol to Paddington for the last time: July, eighteen-eighty.

She would never see any of them again: Ada and Geraldine; Mabel and Florrie and little Lena and Kate; Miss Wray with her pale face and angry eyes; never hear her sudden, cold, delicious praise. Never see the bare, oblong schoolroom with the brown desks, seven rows across for the lower school, one long form along the wall for Cla.s.s One where she and Ada and Geraldine sat apart. Never look through the bay windows over the lea to the Channel, at sunset, Lundy Island flattened out, floating, gold on gold in the offing. Never see magenta valerian growing in hot white grey walls.

Never hear Louie Prichard straining the little music room with Chopin's _Fontana_ Polonaise. Never breathe in its floor-dust with the _Adagio_ of the "Pathetic Sonata."

She was glad she had seen it through to the end when the clergymen's and squires' daughters went and the daughters of Bristol drapers and publicans and lodging-house keepers came.

("What do you think! Bessie Parson's brother marked all her underclothing. In the shop!")

But they taught you quite a lot of things: Zoology, Physiology, Paley's Evidences, British Law, Political Economy. It had been a wonderful school when Mrs. Propart's nieces went to it. And they kept all that up when the smash came and the b.u.t.ter gave out, and you ate cheap bread that tasted of alum, and potatoes that were fibrous skeletons in a green pulp.

Oh--she had seen it through. A whole year and a half of it.

Why? Because you promised Mamma you'd stick to the Clevehead School whatever it was like? Because they taught you German and let you learn Greek by yourself with the old arithmetic master? (Ada Clark said it was a mean trick to get more marks.) Because of the Beethoven and Schumann and Chopin, and Lundy Island, and the valerian? Because nothing mattered, not even going hungry?

She was glad she hadn't told about that, nor why she asked for the "room to herself" that turned out to be a servants' garret on a deserted floor.

You could wake at five o'clock in the light mornings and read Plato, or s.n.a.t.c.h twenty minutes from undressing before Miss Payne came for your candle. The tall sycamore swayed in the moonlight, tapping on the window pane; its shadow moved softly in the room like a ghost.

II.

She would like to see the valerian again, though. Mamma said it didn't grow in Yorks.h.i.+re.

Funny to be going back to Ilford after Roddy and Papa and Mamma had left it. Funny to be staying at Five Elms with Uncle Victor. Nice Uncle Victor, buying the house from Papa and making Dan live with them. That was to keep him from drinking. Uncle Victor was hurt because Papa and Mamma would go to Morfe when he wanted you all to live with him. But you couldn't imagine Emilius and Victor living together or Mamma and Aunt Lavvy.

Bristol to Paddington. This time next week it would be King's Cross to Reyburn for Morfe.

She wondered what it would be like. Aunt Bella said it was a dead-and-alive place. Morfe--Morfe. It did sound rather as if people died in it. Aunt Bella was angry with Mrs. Waugh and Miss Frewin for making Mamma go there. But Aunt Bella had never liked Mrs. Waugh and Miss Frewin. That was because they had been Mamma's friends at school and not Aunt Bella's.

She wondered what they would be like, and whether they would disapprove of her. They would if they believed she had been expelled from Dover and had broken Mamma's heart. All Mamma's friends thought that.

She didn't mind going to Morfe so much. The awful thing was leaving Ilford. Ilford was part of Mark, part of her, part of her and Mark together. There were things they had done that never in all their lives they could do again. Waldteufel Waltzes played on the old Cramer piano, standing in its place by the door, waltzes that would never sound the same in any other place in any other room. And there was the sumach tree.

It would die if you transplanted it.

III.

The little thin, sallow old man, coming towards her on the platform at Paddington, turned out to be Uncle Victor. She had not seen him since Christmas, for at Easter he had been away somewhere on business.

He came slowly, showing a smile of jerked muscles, under cold fixed eyes.

He was not really glad to see her. That was because he disapproved of her. They all believed she had been expelled from the Dover school, and they didn't seem able to forget it. Going down from Liverpool Street to Ilford he sat bowed and dejected in his corner, not looking at her unless he could help it.

"How's Aunt Charlotte?" She thought he would be pleased to think that she had remembered Aunt Charlotte; but he winced as if she had hit him.

"She is--not so well." And then: "How have you been getting on?"

"Oh, all right. I've got the Literature prize again, and the French prize and the German prize; and I might have got the Good Conduct prize too."

"And why didn't you get it?"

"Because I gave it up. Somebody else had to have a prize, and Miss Wray said she knew it was the one I could best bear to part with."

Uncle Victor frowned as if he were displeased.

"You don't seem to consider that I gave it up," she said. But he had turned his eyes away. He wasn't listening any more, as he used to listen.

The train was pa.s.sing the City of London Cemetery. She thought: "I must go and see Jenny's grave before I leave. I wish I hadn't teased her so to love me." She thought: "If I die I shall be put in the gra.s.s plot beside Grandpapa and Grandmamma Olivier. Papa will bring me in a coffin all the way from Morfe in the train." Little birch bushes were beginning to grow among the graves. She wondered how she could ever have been afraid of those graves and of their dead.

Uncle Victor was looking at the graves too; queerly, with a sombre, pa.s.sionate interest. When the train had pa.s.sed them he sighed and shut his eyes, as if he wanted to keep on seeing them--to keep on.

As Mr. Parish's wagonette drove up Ley Street he pointed to a field where a street of little houses had begun.

"Some day they'll run a street over Five Elms. But I shan't know anything about it," he said.

"No. It won't be for ages."

He smiled queerly.

They drew up at the gate. "You must be prepared for more changes," he said.

Aunt Lavvy was at the gate. She was sweet as if she loved you, and sad as if she still remembered your disgrace.

"No. Not that door," she said.

The dining-room and drawing-room had changed places, and both were filled with the large mahogany furniture that had belonged to Grandpapa.

"Why, you've turned it back to front."

Strips of Mamma's garden shone between the dull maroon red curtains.

Inside the happy light was dead.

There seemed to her something sinister about this change. Only the two spare rooms still looked to the front. They had put her in one of them instead of her old room on the top floor; Dan had the other instead of his. It was very queer.