Mary Olivier: a Life Part 96

"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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.h.i.+ne. 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.