Mary Olivier: a Life Part 82

It would have been all right if she could have told her about Nannie; then Mamma would have seen why Lindley couldn't come.

"I don't care," she thought. "She may think what she likes. I can't tell her."

XI.

Lindley Vickers had gone. Nothing was left of him but Mamma's silence and Dan's, and Nannie's flush as she slunk by and her obscene smirk of satisfaction.

Then Nannie forgot him. As if nothing had happened she hung about Horn's yard and the Back Lane, waiting for young Horn. She smiled her trusting smile again. As long as you lived in Morfe you would remember.

Mary didn't blame her mother and Dan for their awful att.i.tude. She couldn't blink the fact that she had begun to care for a man who was no better than young Horn, who had shown her that he didn't care for her by going to Nannie. If he could go to Nannie he was no better than young Horn.

She thought of Lindley's communion with Nannie as a part of him, essential, enduring. Beside it, her own communion with him was not quite real. She remembered his singing; she remembered playing to him and sitting beside him on the bracken as you remember things that have happened to you a long time ago (if they had really happened). She remembered phrases broken from their context (if they had ever had a context): "Das man vom liebsten was man hat...." "If you don't know I can't tell you--Dear." ... "And when--when--Then you won't think, you'll _know_."

She said to herself, "I must have been mad. It couldn't have happened. I must have made it up."

But, if you made up things like that you _were_ mad. It was what Aunt Charlotte had done. She had lived all her life in a dream of loving and being loved, a dream that began with clergymen and ended with the piano-tuner and the man who did the clocks. Mamma and Dan knew it. Uncle Victor knew it and he had been afraid. Maurice Jourdain knew it and he had been afraid. Perhaps Lindley Vickers knew it, too.

There must be something in heredity. She thought: "If there is I'd rather face it. It's cowardly not to."

Lindley Vickers had told her what to read. Herbert Spencer she knew.

Haeckel and Ribot were in the London Library Catalogue at Greffington Hall. And Maudsley: she had seen the name somewhere. It was perhaps lucky that Mr. Sutcliffe had gone abroad early this year; for he had begun to follow her through Balzac and Flaubert and Maupa.s.sant, since when he had sometimes interfered with her selection.

The books came down in two days: Herbert Spencer's _First Principles_, the _Principles of Biology_, the _Principles of Psychology_; Haeckel's _History of Evolution_; Maudsley's _Body and Mind, Physiology and Pathology of Mind, Responsibility in Mental Disease_; and Ribot's _Heredity_. Your instinct told you to read them in that order, controlling personal curiosity.

For the first time in her life she understood what Spinoza meant by "the intellectual love of G.o.d." She saw how all things work together for good to those who, in Spinoza's sense, love G.o.d. If it hadn't been for Aunt Charlotte and Lindley Vickers she might have died without knowing anything about the exquisite movements and connections of the live world.

She had spent most of her time in the pa.s.sionate pursuit of things under the form of eternity, regardless of their actual behaviour in time. She had kept on for fifteen years trying to find out the reality--if there was any reality--that hid behind appearances, piggishly obtuse to the interest of appearances themselves. She had cared for nothing in them but their beauty, and its exciting play on her emotions. When life brought ugly things before her she faced them with a show of courage, but inwardly she was sick with fear.

For the first time she saw the ugliest facts take on enchantment, a secret and terrible enchantment. Dr. Mitch.e.l.l's ape-faced idiot; Dr.

Browne's girl with the goose-face and goose-neck, billing her shoulders like a bird.

There was something in Heredity. But the sheer interest of it made you forget about Papa and Mamma and Aunt Charlotte; it kept you from thinking about yourself. You could see why Ribot was so excited about his laws of Heredity: "They it is that are real...." "To know a fact thoroughly is to know the quality and quant.i.ty of the laws that compose it ... facts are but appearances, laws the reality."

There was Darwin's Origin of Species. According to Darwin, it didn't seem likely that anything so useless as insanity could be inherited at all; according to Maudsley and Ribot, it seemed even less likely that sanity could survive. To be sure, after many generations, insanity was stamped out; but not before it had run its course through imbecility to idiocy, infecting more generations as it went.

Maudsley was solemn and exalted in his desire that there should be no mistake about it. "There is a destiny made for a man by his ancestors, and no one can elude, were he able to attempt it, the tyranny of his organisation."

You had been wrong all the time. You had thought of your family, Papa and Mamma, perhaps Grandpapa and Grandmamma, as powerful, but independent and separate ent.i.ties, in themselves sacred and inviolable, working against you from the outside: either with open or secret and inscrutable hostility, hindering, thwarting, crus.h.i.+ng you down. But always from the outside. You had thought of yourself as a somewhat less powerful, but still independent and separate ent.i.ty, a sacred, inviolable self, struggling against them for completer freedom and detachment. Crushed down, but always getting up and going on again; fighting a more and more successful battle for your own; beating them in the end. But it was not so. There were no independent, separate ent.i.ties, no sacred, inviolable selves. They were one immense organism and you were part of it; you were nothing that they had not been before you. It was no good struggling. You were caught in the net; you couldn't get out.

And so were they. Mamma and Papa were no more independent and separate than you were. Dan had gone like Papa, but Papa had gone like Grandpapa and Grandmamma Olivier. n.o.body ever said anything about Grandpapa Olivier; so perhaps there had been something queer about him. Anyhow, Papa couldn't help drinking any more than Mamma could help being sweet and gentle; they hadn't had a choice or a chance.

How senseless you had been with your old angers and resentments. Now that you understood, you could never feel anger or resentment any more. As long as you lived you could never feel anything but love for them and compa.s.sion. Mamma, Papa and Aunt Charlotte, Dan and Roddy, they were caught in the net. They couldn't get out.

Dan and Roddy--But Mark had got out. Why not you?

They were not all alike. Papa and Uncle Victor were different; and Aunt Charlotte and Aunt Lavvy. Papa had married and handed it on; he hadn't cared. Uncle Victor hadn't married; he had cared too much; he had been afraid.

And Maurice Jourdain and Lindley Vickers had been afraid; everybody who knew about Aunt Charlotte would be afraid, and if they didn't know you would have to tell them, supposing--

You would be like Aunt Lavvy. You would live in Morfe with Mamma for years and years as Aunt Lavvy had lived with Grandmamma. First you would be like Dorsy Heron; then like Louisa Wright; then like Aunt Lavvy.

No; when you were forty-five you would go like Aunt Charlotte.

XII.

Anyhow, she had filled in the time between October and March when the Sutcliffes came back.

If she could talk to somebody about it--But you couldn't talk to Mamma; she would only pretend that she hadn't been thinking about Aunt Charlotte at all. If Mark had been there--But Mark wasn't there, and Dan would only call you a little fool. Aunt Lavvy? She would tell you to love G.o.d. Even Aunt Charlotte could tell you that.

She could see Aunt Charlotte sitting up in the big white bed and saying "Love G.o.d and you'll be happy," as she scribbled letters to Mr. Marriott and hid them under the bedclothes.

Uncle Victor? Uncle Victor was afraid himself.

Dr. Charles--He looked at you as he used to look at Roddy. Perhaps he knew about Aunt Charlotte and wondered whether you would go like her. Or, if he didn't wonder, he would only give you the iron pills and a.r.s.enic he gave to Dorsy.

Mrs. Sutcliffe? You couldn't tell a thing like that to Mrs. Sutcliffe.

She wouldn't know what you were talking about; or if she did know she would gather herself up, spiritually, in her shawl, and trail away.

Mr. Sutcliffe--He would know. If you could tell him. You might take back Maudsley and Ribot and ask him if he knew anything about heredity, and what he thought of it.

She went to him one Wednesday afternoon. He was always at home on Wednesday afternoons. She knew how it would be. Mrs. Sutcliffe would be shut up in the dining-room with the sewing-party. You would go in. You would knock at the library door. He would be there by himself, in the big arm-chair, smoking and reading; the small armchair would be waiting for you on the other side of the fireplace. He would be looking rather old and tired, and when he saw you he would jump up and pull himself together and be young again.

The library door closed softly. She was in the room before he saw her.

He was older and more tired than you could have believed. He stooped in his chair; his long hands rested on his knees, slackly, as they had dropped there. Grey streaks in the curly lock of hair that _would_ fall forward and be a whisker.

His mouth had tightened and hardened. It held out; it refused to become old and tired.

"It's Mary," she said.

"My dear--"

He dragged himself to his feet, making his body very straight and stiff.

His eyes glistened; but they didn't smile. Only his eyelids and his mouth smiled. His eyes were different, their blue was shrunk and flattened and drawn back behind the lense.

When he moved, pus.h.i.+ng forward the small arm-chair, she saw how lean and stiff he was.

"I've been ill," he said.

"Oh--!"

"I'm all right now."

"No. You oughtn't to have come back from Agaye."

"I never do what I ought, Mary."