Mary Olivier: a Life Part 97

In two weeks it would be gone. She would want it and it would not be there.

V.

When she pa.s.sed the house and saw the long rows of yellow blinds in the grey front she thought of him. He would not come back. He had never come before, so it wasn't likely he would come again.

His being there was one of the things that only happened once. Perhaps those were the perfect things, the things that would never pa.s.s away; they would stay for ever, beautiful as you had seen them, fixed in their moment of perfection, wearing the very air and light of it for ever.

You would see them _sub specie ceternitatis_. Under the form of eternity.

So that Richard Nicholson would always be like that, the same whenever you thought of him.

Look at the others: the ones that hadn't come back and the ones that had.

Jimmy Ponsonby, Harry Craven, Mr. Sutcliffe. And Maurice Jourdain and Lindley Vickers. If Maurice Jourdain had never come back she would always have seen him standing in the cornfield. If Lindley Vickers had never come back she wouldn't have seen him with Nannie Learoyd in the schoolhouse lane; the moment when he held her hands in the drawing-room, standing by the piano, would have been their one eternal moment.

Because Jimmy Ponsonby had gone away she had never known the awful thing he had done. She would go through the Ilford fields for ever and ever with her hot hand in his; she happy and he innocent; innocent for ever and ever. Harry Craven, her playmate of two hours, he would always be playing, always laughing, always holding her hand, like Roddy, without knowing that he held it.

Suppose Mr. Sutcliffe had come back. She would have hurt them more and more. Mrs. Sutcliffe would have hated her. They would have been miserable, all three. All three d.a.m.ned for ever and ever.

She was not sure she wanted Richard Nicholson to come back.

She was not sure he wasn't spoiling it by writing. She hadn't thought he would do that.

A correspondence? Prolonging the beautiful moment, stretching it thin; thinner and thinner; stretching it so thin that it would snap? You would come to identify him with his letters, so that in the end you would lose what had been real, what had been perfect. You would forget. You would have another and less real kind of memory.

But his letters were not thin; they were as real as his voice. They _were_ his voice talking to you; you could tell which words would take the stress of it. "I don't know how _much_ there is of you, whether this is all of it or only a little bit. You gave me an impression--you made me feel that there might be any _amount_ gone under that you can't get at, that you may _never_ get at if you go on staying where you are. I believe if you got clean away it might come to the top again.

"But I don't _know_. I don't know whether you're at the end or the beginning. I could tell better if you were here."

She counted the months till April when her poems would come out. She counted the days till Tuesday when there might be a letter from Richard Nicholson.

If only he would not keep on telling you you ought to come to London.

That was what made you afraid. He might have seen how impossible it was.

He had seen Mamma.

"Don't try to dig me out of my 'hole.' I _can_ 'go on living in it for ever' if I'm never taken out. But if I got out once it would be awful coming back. It isn't awful now. Don't make it awful."

He only wrote: "I'll make it awfuller and _aw_fuller, until out you come."

x.x.xII

I.

Things were happening in the village.

The old people were dying. Mr. James had died in a fit the day after Christmas Day. Old Mrs. Heron had died of a stroke in the first week of January. She had left Dorsy her house and furniture and seventy pounds a year. Mrs. Belk got the rest.

The middle-aged people were growing old. Louisa Wright's hair hung in a limp white fold over each ear, her face had tight lines in it that pulled it into grimaces, her eyes had milky white rings like speedwell when it begins to fade. Dorsy Heron's otter brown hair was striped with grey; her nose stood up sharp and bleak in her red, withering face; her sharp, tender mouth drooped at the corners. She was forty-nine.

It was cruel, cruel, cruel; it hurt you to see them. Rather than own it was cruel they went about pulling faces and pretending they were happy.

Their gestures had become exaggerated, tricks that they would never grow out of, that gave them the illusion of their youth.

The old people were dying and the middle-aged people were growing old.

Nothing would ever begin for them again.

Each morning when she got out of bed she had the sacred, solemn certainty that for her everything was beginning. At thirty-nine.

What was thirty-nine? A time-feeling, a feeling she hadn't got. If you haven't got the feeling you are not thirty-nine. You can be any age you please, twenty-nine, nineteen.

But she had been horribly old at nineteen. She could remember what it had felt like, the desperate, middle-aged sadness, the middle-aged certainty that nothing interesting would ever happen. She had got hold of life at the wrong end.

And all the time her youth had been waiting for her at the other end, at the turn of the unknown road, at thirty-nine. All through the autumn and winter Richard Nicholson had kept on writing. Her poems would be out on the tenth of April.

On the third the note came.

"Shall I still find you at Morfe if I come down this week-end?--R.N."

"You will never find me anywhere else.--M.O."

"I shall bike from Durlingham. If you've anything to do in Reyburn it would be nice if you met me at The King's Head about four. We could have tea there and ride out together.--R.N."

II.

"I'm excited. I've never been to tea in an hotel before."

She was chattering like a fool, saying anything that came into her head, to break up the silence he made.

She was aware of something underneath it, something that was growing more and more beautiful every minute. She was trying to smash this thing lest it should grow more beautiful than she could bear.

"You see how I score by being shut up in Morfe. When I do get out it's no end of an adventure." (Was there ever such an idiot?)

Suddenly she left off trying to smash the silence.

The silence made everything stand out with a supernatural clearness, the square, white-clothed table in the bay of the window, the Queen Anne fluting on the Britannia metal teapot, the cups and saucers and plates, white with a gentian blue band, The King's Head stamped in gold like a crest.

Sitting there so still he had the queer effect of creating for both of you a s.p.a.ce of your own, more real than the s.p.a.ce you had just stepped out of. There, there and not anywhere else, these supernaturally clear things had reality, a unique but impermanent reality. It would last as long as you sat there and would go when you went. You knew that whatever else you might forget you would remember this.

The rest of the room, the other tables and the people sitting at them were not quite real. They stood in another s.p.a.ce, a different and inferior kind of s.p.a.ce.

"I came first of all," he said, "to bring you _that_."

He took out of his pocket and put down between them the thin, new white parchment book of her _Poems_.

"Oh ... Poor thing, I wonder what'll happen to it?" Funny--it was the least real thing. If it existed at all it existed somewhere else, not in this s.p.a.ce, not in this time. If you took it up and looked at it the clearness, the unique, impermanent reality would be gone, and you would never get it again.