Mary Olivier: a Life Part 95

"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 pa.s.s 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 s.p.a.ces 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--"