brings you the next all bright and new.
Heaven would be like that. Imagine an eternity of heaven; being with Richard for ever and ever. But nobody ever did imagine an eternity of heaven. People only talk about it because they can’t imagine it. What they mean is that if they had one minute of it they would remember that for ever and ever.
* * * * *
This is Richard’s life. This is what I’d have taken from him if I’d let him marry me.
I daren’t even think what it would have been like if I’d tried to mix up Mamma and Richard in the same house…. And poor little Mamma in a strange place with nothing about it that she could remember, going up and down in it, trying to get at me, and looking reproachful and disapproving all the time. She’d have to be shut in her own rooms because Richard wouldn’t have her in his. Sitting up waiting to be read aloud to and played halma with when Richard wanted me. Saying the same things over and over again. Sighing.
Richard would go off his head if he heard Mamma sigh.
He wants to be by himself the whole time, “working like blazes.” He likes to feel that the very servants are battened down in the basement so that he doesn’t know they’re there. He couldn’t stand Tiedeman and Peters if they weren’t doing the same thing. Tiedeman working like blazes in the flat above him and Peters working like blazes in the flat below.
Richard slept in this room last night. He will sleep in it again when I’m gone.
She switched the light on to look at it for another second: the privet-white panelled cabin, the small wine-coloured chest of drawers, the small golden-brown wardrobe, shining.
My hat’s in that wardrobe, lying on Richard’s waistcoat, fast asleep.
If Tiedeman’s flat’s up there, that’s Richard walking up and down over my head…. If it rains there’ll be a row on the skylight and he won’t sleep. He isn’t sleeping now.
III.
It would be much nicer to walk home through Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park.
She was glad that they were going to have a quiet evening. After three evenings at the play and Richard ruining himself in hansoms and not sleeping…. After this unbelievable afternoon. All those people, those terribly important people.
It was amusing to go about with Richard and feel important yourself because you were with him. And to see Richard’s ways with them, his nice way of behaving as if _he_ wasn’t important in the least, as if it was you they had made all that fuss about.
To think that the little dried up schoolmasterish man was Professor Lee Ramsden, prowling about outside the group, eager and shy, waiting to be introduced to you, nobody taking the smallest notice of him. The woman who had brought him making soft, sentimental eyes at you through the gaps in the group, and trying to push him in a bit nearer. Then Richard asking you to be kind for one minute to the poor old thing. It hurt you to see him shy and humble and out of it.
And when you thought of his arrogance at Durlingham.
It was the women’s voices that tired you so, and their nervous, snapping eyes.
The best of all was going away from them quietly with Richard into Kensington Gardens.
“Did you like it, Mary?”
“Frightfully. But not half so much as this.”
IV.
She was all alone in the front room, stretched out on the flat couch in the corner facing the door.
He was still writing his letter in the inner room. When she heard him move she would slide her feet to the floor and sit up.
She wanted to lie still with her hands over her shut eyes, making the four long, delicious days begin again and go on in her head.
Richard _would_ take hansoms. You couldn’t stop him. Perhaps he was afraid if you walked too far you would drop down dead. When it was all over your soul would still drive about London in a hansom for ever and ever, through blue and gold rain-sprinkled days, through poignant white evenings, through the streaming, steep, brown-purple darkness and the streaming flat, thin gold of the wet nights.
They were not going to have any more tiring parties. There wasn’t enough time.
When she opened her eyes he was sitting on the chair by the foot of the couch, leaning forward, looking at her. She saw nothing but his loose, hanging hands and straining eyes.
“Oh, Richard–what time is it?” She swung her feet to the floor and sat up suddenly.
“Only nine.”
“Only nine. The evening’s nearly gone.”
* * * * *
“Is that why you aren’t sleeping, Richard? … I didn’t know. I didn’t know I was hurting you.”
“What-did-you-think? What-did-you-think? Isn’t it hurting you?”
“Me? I’ve got used to it. I was so happy just being with you.”
“So happy and so quiet that I thought you didn’t care…. Well, what was I to think? If you won’t marry me.”
“That’s because I care so frightfully. Don’t let’s rake that up again.”
“Well, there it is.”
She thought: “I’ve no business to come here to his rooms, turning him out, making him so wretched that he can’t sleep. No business…. Unless–“
“And we’ve got to go on living with it,” he said.
He thinks I haven’t the courage … I can’t _tell_ him.
“Yes,” she said, “there it is.”
Why shouldn’t I tell him? … We’ve only ten days. As long as I’m here nothing matters but Richard … If I keep perfectly still, still like this, if I don’t say a word he’ll think of it….
“Richard–would you rather I hadn’t come?”
“No.”
“You remember the evening I came–you got up so suddenly and left me? What did you do that for?”
“Because if I’d stayed another minute I couldn’t have left you at all.”
He stood up.
“And you’re only going now because you can’t see that I’m not a coward.”
* * * * *
This wouldn’t last, the leaping and knocking of her heart, the eyelids screwing themselves tight, the jerking of her nerves at every sound: at the two harsh rattling screams of the curtain rings along the pole, at the light click of the switches. Only the small green-shaded lamp still burning on Richard’s writing table in the inner room. She could hear him moving about, softly and secretly, in there.
He was Richard. That was Richard, moving about in there.
V.
Richard thought his flat was a safe place. But it wasn’t. People creeping up the stairs every minute and standing still to listen. People would come and try the handle of the door.
“They won’t, dear. Nobody ever comes in. It has never happened. It isn’t going to happen now.”
Yet you couldn’t help thinking that just this night it would happen.
She thought that Peters knew. He wouldn’t come out of his door till you had turned the corner of the stairs.
She thought the woman in the basement knew. She remembered the evening at Greffington: Baxter’s pinched mouth and his eyes sliding sideways to look at you. She knew now what Baxter had been thinking. The woman’s look was the female of Baxter’s.
As if that could hurt you!
VI.
“Mary, do you know you’re growing younger every minute?”
“I shall go on growing younger and younger till it’s all over.”
“Till what’s all over?”
“This. So will you, Richard.”
“Not in the same way. My hair isn’t young any more. My face isn’t young any more.”
“I don’t want it to be young. It wasn’t half so nice a face when it was young…. Some other woman loved it when it was young.”
“Yes. Another woman loved it when it was young.”
“Is she alive and going about?”
“Oh, yes; she’s alive and she goes about a lot.”
“Does she love you now?”
“I suppose she does.”
“I wish she didn’t.”
“You needn’t mind her, Mary. She was never anything to me. She never will be.”
“But I do mind her. I mind her awfully. I can’t bear to think of her going about and loving you. She’s no business to…. Why do I mind her loving you more than I’d mind your loving her?”
“Because you like loving more than being loved.”
“How do you know?”
“I know every time I hold you in my arms.”
There have been other women then, or he wouldn’t know the difference. There must have been a woman that he loved.
I don’t care. It wasn’t the same thing.
“What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking nothing was ever the same thing as this.”
“No…. Whatever we do, Mary, we mustn’t go back on it…. If we could have done anything else. But I can’t see…. It’s not as if it could last long. Nothing lasts long. Life doesn’t last long.”
He sounded as if he were sorry, as if already, in his mind, he had gone back on it. After three days.
“You’re not _sorry_, Richard?”
“Only when I think of you. The awful risks I’ve made you take.”
“Can’t you see I _like_ risks? I always have liked risks. When we were children my brothers and I were always trying to see just how near we could go to breaking our necks.”
“I know you’ve courage enough for anything. But that was rather a different sort of risk.”
“No. No. There are no different sorts of risk. All intense moments of danger are the same. It’s always the same feeling. I don’t know whether I’ve courage or not, but I do know that when danger comes you don’t care. You’re hoisted up above caring.”
“You _do_ care, Mary.”
“About my ‘reputation ‘? You wouldn’t like to think I didn’t care about it…. Of course, I care frightfully. If I didn’t, where’s the risk?”
“I hate your having to take it all. I don’t risk anything.”
“I wish you did. Then you’d be happier. Poor Richard–so safe in his man’s world…. You can be sorry about that, if you like. But not about me. I shall never be sorry. Nothing in this world can make me sorry…. I shouldn’t like Mamma to know about it. But even Mamma couldn’t make me sorry…. I’ve always been happy about the things that matter, the real things. I hate people who sneak and snivel about real things…. People who have doubts about God and don’t like them and snivel. I had doubts about God once, and they made me so happy I could hardly bear it…. Mamma couldn’t bear it making me happy. She wouldn’t have minded half so much if I had been sorry and snivelled. She wouldn’t mind so much if I was sorry and snivelled about this.”
“You _said_ you weren’t going to think about your mother.”
“I’m not thinking about her. I’m thinking about how happy I have been and am and shall be.”
Even thinking about Mamma couldn’t hurt you now. Nothing could hurt the happiness you shared with Richard. What it was now it would always be. Pure and remorseless.
VII.
Delicious, warm, shining day. She had her coat and hat on ready to go down with him. The hansom stood waiting in the street.
They were looking up the place on the map, when the loud double knock came.
“That’s for Peters. He’s always getting wires–“
“If we don’t go to-day we shall never go. We’ve only got five more now.”
The long, soft rapping on the door of the room. Knuckles rapping out their warning. “You can’t say I don’t give you time.”
Richard took the orange envelope.
“It’s for you, Mary.”
“Oh, Richard, ‘_Come at once. Mother ill.–DORSY_.'”
She would catch the ten train. That was what the hansom was there for.
“I’ll send your things on after you.”
The driver and the slog-slogging horse knew that she would catch the train. Richard knew.
He had the same look on his face that was there before when Mamma was ill. Sorrow that wasn’t sorrow. And the same clear thought behind it.
XXXIV
I.
Dorsey’s nerves were in a shocking state. You could see she had been afraid all the time; from the first day when Mamma had kept on saying, “Has Mary come back?”
Dorsy was sure that was how it began; but she couldn’t tell you whether it was before or afterwards that she had forgotten the days of the week.
Anybody could forget the days of the week. What frightened Dorsy was hearing her say suddenly, “Mary’s _gone_.” She said it to herself when she didn’t know Dorsy was in the room. Then she had left off asking and wondering. For five days she hadn’t said anything about you. Not anything at all. When she heard your name she stared at them with a queer, scared look.
Catty said that yesterday she had begun to be afraid of Dorsy and couldn’t bear her in the room. That was what made them send the wire.
* * * * *
What had she been thinking of those five days? It was as though she knew.
Dorsy said she didn’t believe she was thinking anything at all. Dorsy didn’t know.
II.
Somebody knew. Somebody had been talking. She had found Catty in the room making up the bed for her in the corner. Catty was crying as she tucked in the blankets. “There’s some people,” she said, “as had ought to be poisoned.” But she wouldn’t say why she was crying.
You could tell by Mr. Belk’s face, his mouth drawn in between claws of nose and chin; by Mrs. Belk’s face and her busy eyes, staring. By the old men sitting on the bench at the corner, their eyes coming together as you passed.
And Mr. Spencer Rollitt, stretching himself straight and looking away over your head and drawing in his breath with a “Fivv-vv-vv” when he asked how Mamma was. His thoughts were hidden behind his bare, wooden face. He was a just and cautious man. He wouldn’t accept any statement outside the Bible without proof.
You had to go down and talk to Mrs. Waugh. She had come to see how you would look. Her mouth talked about Mamma but her face was saying all the time, “I’m not going to ask you what you were doing in London in Mr. Nicholson’s flat, Mary. I’m sure you wouldn’t do anything you’d be sorry to think of with your poor mother in the state she’s in.”
I don’t care. I don’t care what they think.
There would still be Catty and Dorsy and Louisa Wright and Miss Kendal and Dr. Charles with their kind eyes that loved you. And Richard living his eternal life in your heart.
And Mamma would never know.
III.
Mamma was going backwards and forwards between the open work-table and the cabinet. She was taking out the ivory reels and thimbles and button boxes, wrapping them in tissue paper and hiding them in the cabinet. When she had locked the doors she waited till you weren’t looking to lift up her skirt and hide the key in her petticoat pocket.
She was happy, like a busy child at play.
She was never ill, only tired like a child that plays too long. Her face was growing smooth and young and pretty again; a pink flush under her eyes. She would never look disapproving or reproachful any more. She couldn’t listen any more when you read aloud to her. She had forgotten how to play halma.
One day she found the green box in the cabinet drawer. She came to you carrying it with care. When she had put it down on the table she lifted the lid and looked at the little green and white pawns and smiled.
“Roddy’s soldiers,” she said.
* * * * *
Richard doesn’t know what he’s talking about when he asks me to give up Mamma. He might as well ask me to give up my child. It’s no use his saying she “isn’t there.” Any minute she may come back and remember and know me.
She must have known me yesterday when she asked me to go and see what Papa was doing.
As for “waiting,” he may have to wait years and years. And I’m forty-five now.
IV.
The round black eye of the mirror looked at them. Their figures would be there, hers and Richard’s, at the bottom of the black crystal bowl, small like the figures in the wrong end of a telescope, very clear in the deep, clear swirl of the glass.
They were sitting close together on the old rose-chintz-covered couch. _Her_ couch. You could see him putting the cushions at her back, tucking the wide Victorian skirt in close about the feet in the black velvet slippers. And she would lie there with her poor hands folded in the white cashmere shawl.
Richard knew what you were thinking.
“You can’t expect me,” he was saying, “to behave like my uncle…. Besides, it’s a little too late, isn’t it?… We said, whatever we did we wouldn’t go back on it. If it wasn’t wrong then, Mary, it isn’t wrong now.”
“It isn’t that, Richard.”
(No. Not that. Pure and remorseless then. Pure and remorseless now.)
She wondered whether he had heard it. The crunching on the gravel walk under the windows, stopping suddenly when the feet stepped on to the grass. And the hushed growl of the men’s voices. Baxter and the gardener. They had come to see whether the light would go out again behind the yellow blinds as it had gone out last night.
If you were a coward; if you had wanted to get off scot-free, it was too late.
Richard knows I’m not a coward. Funk wouldn’t keep me from him. It isn’t _that_.
“What is it, then?”
“Can’t you see, can’t you feel that it’s no use coming again, just for this? It’ll never be what it was then. It’ll always be like last night, and you’ll think I don’t care. Something’s holding me back from you. Something that’s happened to me. I don’t know yet what it is.”
“Nerves. Nothing but nerves.”
“No. I thought it was nerves last night. I thought it was this room. Those two poor ghosts, looking at us. I even thought it might be Mark and Roddy–all of them–tugging at me to get me away from you…. But it isn’t that. It’s something in me.”
“You’re trying to tell me you don’t want me.”
“I’m trying to tell you what happened. I did want you, all last year. It was so awful that I had to stop it. You couldn’t go on living like that…. I willed and willed not to want you.”
“So did I. All the willing in the world couldn’t stop me.”
“It isn’t that sort of willing. You might go on all your life like that and nothing would happen. You have to find it out for yourself; and even that might take you all your life…. It isn’t the thing people call willing at all. It’s much queerer. Awfully queer.”
“How–_queer_?”
“Oh–the sort of queerness you don’t like talking about.”
“I’m sorry, Mary. You seem to be talking about something, but I haven’t the faintest notion what it is. But you can make yourself believe anything you like if you keep on long enough.”
“No. Half the time I’m doing it I don’t believe it’ll come off…. But it always does. Every time it’s the same. Every time; exactly as if something had happened.”
“Poor Mary.”
“But, Richard, it makes you absolutely happy. That’s the queer part of it. It’s how you know.”
“Know _what_?”
He was angry.
“That there’s something there. That it’s absolutely real.”
“Real?”
“Why not? If it makes you happy without the thing you care most for in the whole world…. There must be something there. It must be real. Real in a way that nothing else is.”
“You aren’t happy now,” he said.
“No. And you’re with me. And I care for you more than anything in the whole world.”
“I thought you said that was all over.”
“No. It’s only just begun.”
“I can’t say I see it.”
“You’ll see it all right soon…. When you’ve gone.”
V.
It was no use not marrying him, no use sending him away, as long as he was tied to you by his want.
You had no business to be happy. It wasn’t fair. There was he, tied to you tighter than if you _had_ married him. And there you were in your inconceivable freedom. Supposing you could give him the same freedom, the same happiness? Supposing you could “work” it for him, make It (whatever it was) reach out and draw him into your immunity, your peace?
VI.
Whatever It was It was there. You could doubt away yourself and Richard, but you couldn’t doubt away It.
It might leave you for a time, but it came back. It came back. Its going only intensified the wonder of its return. You might lose all sense of it between its moments; but the thing was certain while it lasted. Doubt it away, and still what had been done for you lasted. Done for you once for all, two years ago. And that wasn’t the first time.
Even supposing you could doubt away the other times.–You might have made the other things happen by yourself. But not that. Not giving Richard up and still being happy. That was something you couldn’t possibly have done yourself. Or you might have done it in time–time might have done it for you–but not like that, all at once, making that incredible, supernatural happiness and peace out of nothing at all, in one night, and going on in it, without Richard. Richard himself didn’t believe it was possible. He simply thought it hadn’t happened.
Still, even then, you might have said it didn’t count so long as it was nothing but your private adventure; but not now, never again now when it had happened to Richard.
His letter didn’t tell you whether he thought there was anything in it. He saw the “queerness” of it and left it there:
“Something happened that night after you’d gone. You know how I felt. I couldn’t stop wanting you. My mind was tied to you and couldn’t get away. Well–that night something let go–quite suddenly. Something went.
“It’s a year ago and it hasn’t come back.
“I didn’t know what on earth you meant by ‘not wanting and still caring’; but I think I see now. I don’t ‘want’ you any more and I ‘care’ more than ever….
“Don’t ‘work like blazes.’ Still I’m glad you like it. I can get you any amount of the same thing–more than you’ll care to do.”
VII.
He didn’t know how hard it was to “work like blazes.” You had to keep your eyes ready all the time to see what Mamma was doing. You had to take her up and down stairs, holding her lest she should turn dizzy and fall. If you left her a minute she would get out of the room, out of the house and on to the Green by herself and be frightened.
Mamma couldn’t remember the garden. She looked at her flowers with dislike.
You had brought her on a visit to a strange, disagreeable place and left her there. She was angry with you because she couldn’t get away.
Then, suddenly, for whole hours she would be good: a child playing its delicious game of goodness. When Dr. Charles came in and you took him out of the room to talk about her you would tell her to sit still until you came back. And she would smile, the sweet, serious smile of a child that is being trusted, and sit down on the parrot chair; and when you came back you would find her sitting there, still smiling to herself because she was so good.
Why do I love her now, when she is like this–when “_this_” is what I was afraid of, what I thought I could not bear–why do I love her more, if anything, now than I’ve ever done before? Why am I happier now than I’ve ever been before, except in the times when I was writing and the times when I was with Richard?
VIII.
Forty-five. Yesterday she was forty-five, and to-day. To-morrow she would be forty-six. She had come through the dreadful, dangerous year without thinking of it, and nothing had happened. Nothing at all. She couldn’t imagine why she had ever been afraid of it; she could hardly remember what being afraid of it had felt like.
Aunt Charlotte–Uncle Victor–
If I were going to be mad I should have gone mad long ago: when Roddy came back; when Mark died; when I sent Richard away. I should be mad now.
It was getting worse.
In the cramped room where the big bed stuck out from the wall to within a yard of the window, Mamma went about, small and weak, in her wadded lavender Japanese dressing-gown, like a child that can’t sit still, looking for something it wants that nobody can find. You couldn’t think because of the soft pad-pad of the dreaming, sleepwalking feet in the lamb’s-wool slippers.
When you weren’t looking she would slip out of the room on to the landing to the head of the stairs, and stand there, vexed and bewildered when you caught her.
IX.
Mamma was not well enough now to get up and be dressed. They had moved her into Papa’s room. It was bright all morning with the sun. She was happy there. She remembered the yellow furniture. She was back in the old bedroom at Five Elms.
Mamma lay in the big bed, waiting for you to brush her hair. She was playing with her white flannel dressing jacket, spread out before her on the counterpane, ready. She talked to herself.
“Lindley Vickers–Vickers Lindley.”
But she was not thinking of Lindley Vickers; she was thinking of Dan, trying to get back to Dan.
“Is Jenny there? Tell her to go and see what Master Roddy’s doing.” She thought Catty was Jenny…. “Has Dan come in?”
Sometimes it would be Papa; but not often; she soon left him for Dan and Roddy.
Always Dan and Roddy. And never Mark.
Never Mark and never Mary. Had she forgotten Mark or did she remember him too well? Or was she afraid to remember? Supposing there was a black hole in her mind where Mark’s death was, and another black hole where Mary had been? Had she always held you together in her mind so that you went down together? Did she hold you together now, in some time and place safer than memory?
She was still playing with the dressing-jacket. She smoothed it, and patted it, and folded it up and laid it beside her on the bed. She took up her pocket-handkerchief and shook it out and folded it and put it on the top of the dressing-jacket.
“What are you doing, you darling?”
“Going to bed.”
She looked at you with a half-happy, half-frightened smile, because you had found her out. She was putting out the baby clothes, ready. Serious and pleased and frightened.
“Who will take care of my little children when I’m laid aside?”
She knew what she was lying in the big bed for.
X.
It was really bedtime. She was sitting up in the armchair while Catty who was Jenny made her bed. The long white sheet lay smooth and flat on the high mattress; it hung down on the floor.
Mamma was afraid of the white sheet. She wouldn’t go back to bed.
“There’s a coffin on the bed. Somebody’s died of cholera,” she said.
Cholera? That was what she thought Mark had died of.
* * * * *
She knows who I am now.
XI.
Richard had written to say he was married. On the twenty-fifth of February. That was just ten days after Mamma died.
“We’ve known each other the best part of our lives. So you see it’s a very sober middle-aged affair.”
He had married the woman who loved him when he was young. “A very sober middle-aged affair.” Not what it would have been if you and he–He didn’t want you to think that _that_ would ever happen again. He wanted you to see that with him and you it had been different, that you had loved him and lived with him in that other time he had made for you where you were always young.
He had only made it for you. She, poor thing, would have to put up with other people’s time, time that made them middle-aged, made them old.
You had got to write and tell him you were glad. You had got to tell him Mamma died ten days ago. And he would say to himself, “If I’d waited another ten days–” There was nothing he could say to you.
That was why he didn’t write again. There was nothing to say.
XXXV
I.
She would never get used to the house.
She couldn’t think why she had been such a fool as to take it. On a seven years’ lease, too; it would feel like being in prison for seven years.
That was the worst of moving about for a whole year in boats and trains, and staying at hotels; it gave you an unnatural longing to settle down, in a place of your own.
Your own–Undying lust of possession. If you _had_ to have things, why a house? Why six rooms when two would have done as well and left you your freedom? After all that ecstasy of space, that succession of heavenly places with singing names: Carcassone and Vezelay; Rome and Florence and San Gimignano; Marseilles and Arles and Avignon; filling up time, stretching it out, making a long life out of one year.
If you could go moving on and on while time stood still.
Oh this damned house. It would be you sitting still while time tore by, as it used to tear by at Morfe before Richard came, and in the three years after he had gone, when Mamma–
II.
It was rather attractive, when you turned the corner and came on it suddenly, flat-roofed and small, clean white and innocent. The spring twilight gave it that look of being somewhere in Italy, the look that made you fall in love with it at first sight.
As for not getting used to it, that was precisely the effect she wanted: rooms that wouldn’t look like anything in the house at Morfe, things that she would always come on with a faint, exquisite surprise: the worn magentaish rug on the dark polished floor, the oak table, the gentian blue chair, the thin magenta curtains letting the light through: the things Richard had given her because in their beginning they had been meant for her. Richard knew that you were safe from unhappiness, that you had never once “gone back on it,” if you could be happy with his things.
He had thought, too, that if you had a house you would settle down and work.
You would have to; you would have to work like blazes, after spending all the money Aunt Charlotte left you on rushing about, and half the money Aunt Lavvy left you on settling down. It was horrible this living on other people’s deaths.
III.
Catty couldn’t bear it being so different. You could see she thought you were unfaithful not to have kept the piano when Mamma had played on it.
Catty’s faithfulness was unsurpassable. She had wanted to marry Blenkiron, the stonemason at Morfe, but first she wouldn’t because of Mamma and then she wouldn’t because of Miss Mary. When you told her to go back and marry him at once she would only laugh and say, “There’s your husband, and there’s your children. You’re my child, Miss Mary. Master Roddy was Jenny’s child and you was always mine.”
You were only ten years younger than Catty, but like Richard she couldn’t see that you were old.
You would never know whether Catty knew about Richard; or whether Dorsy knew. Whatever you did they would love you, Catty because you were her child, and Dorsy because you were Mark’s sister.
IV.
The sun had been shining for a fortnight. She could sit out all day now in the garden.
It was nonsense to talk about time standing still if you kept on moving. Just now, in the garden, when the light came through the thin green silk leaves of the lime tree, for a moment, while she sat looking at the lime tree, time stood still.
Catty had taken away the tea-things and was going down the four steps into the house. It happened between the opening and shutting of the door.
She saw that the beauty of the tree was its real life, and that its real life was in her real self and that her real self was God. The leaves and the light had nothing to do with it; she had seen it before when the tree was a stem and bare branches on a grey sky; and that beauty too was the real life of the tree.
V.
If she could only dream about Mark. But if she dreamed about any of them it was always Mamma. She had left her in the house by herself and she had got out of her room to the stair-head. Or they were in London at the crossing by the Bank and Mamma was frightened. She had to get her through the thick of the traffic. The horses pushed at Mamma and you tried to hold back their noses, but she sank down and slid away from you sideways under the wheel.
Or she would come into this room and find her in it. At first she would be glad to see that Mamma was still there; then she would be unhappy and afraid. She would go on to a clear thought: if Mamma was still there, then she had got back somehow to Morfe. The old life was still going on; it had never really stopped. But if that was real, then this was not real. Her secure, shining life of last year and now wasn’t real; nothing could make it real; her exquisite sense of it was not real. She had only thought it had happened.
Nothing had happened but what had happened before; it was happening now; it would go on and on till it frightened you, till you could not bear it. When she woke up she was glad that the dream had been nothing but a dream.
But that meant that you were glad Mamma was not there. The dream showed you what you were hiding from yourself. Supposing the dead knew? Supposing Mamma knew, and Mark knew that you were glad–
VI.
It came to her at queer times, in queer ways. After that horrible evening at the Dining Club when the secretary woman put her as far as possible from Richard, next to the little Jew financier who smelt of wine.
She couldn’t even hear what Richard was saying; the little wine-lapping Jew went on talking about Women’s Suffrage and his collection of Fragonards and his wife’s portrait by Sargent. His tongue slid between one overhanging and one dropping jaw, in and out like a shuttle.
She tried not to hate him, not to shrink back from his puffing, wine-sour breath, to be kind to him and listen and smile and remember that his real secret self was God, and was holy; not to attend to Richard’s voice breaking the beat of her heart.
She had gone away before Richard could get up and come to her. She wanted to be back in her house by herself. She had pushed open the French windows of the study to breathe the air of the garden and see the tall sycamore growing deep into the thick blue night. Half the room, reflected on the long pane, was thrown out into the garden. She saw it thinning away, going off from the garden into another space, existing there with an unearthly reality of its own. She had sat down at last, too tired to go upstairs, and had found herself crying, incredibly crying; all the misery, all the fear, all the boredom of her life gathered together and discharging now.
“If I could get out of it all”–Her crying stopped with a start as if somebody had come in and put a hand on her shoulder. Everything went still. She had a sense of happiness and peace suddenly there with her in the room. Not so much her own as the happiness and peace of an immense, invisible, intangible being of whose life she was thus aware. She knew, somehow through It, that there was no need to get away; she was out of it all now, this minute. There was always a point where she could get out of it and into this enduring happiness and peace.
VII.
They were talking to-night about Richard and his wife. They said he wasn’t happy; he wasn’t in love with her.
He never had been; she knew it; yet she took him, and tied him to her, an old woman, older than Richard, with grey hair.
Oh well–she had had to wait for him longer than he waited for me, and she’s in love with him still. She’s making it impossible for him to see me.
Then I shan’t see him. I don’t want him to see me if it hurts her. I don’t want her to be hurt.
I wonder if she knows? _They_ know. I can hear them talking about me when I’ve gone.
…”Mary Olivier, the woman who translated Euripides.”
…”Mary Olivier, the woman Nicholson discovered.”
…”Mary Olivier, the woman who was Nicholson’s mistress.”
Richard’s mistress–I know that’s what they say, but I can’t feel that they’re saying it about _me_. It must be somebody else, some woman I never heard of.
VIII.
Mr. Sutcliffe is dead. He died two weeks ago at Agaye.
I can see now how beautiful they were; how beautiful he was, going away like that, letting her take him away so that the sight of me shouldn’t hurt her.
I can see that what I thought so ugly was really beautiful, their sticking to each other through it all, his faithfulness and her forgiveness, their long life of faithfulness and forgiveness.
But my short life with Richard was beautiful too; my coming to him and leaving him free. I shall never go back on that; I shall never be sorry for it.
The things I’m sorry for are not caring more for Papa, being unkind to Mamma, not doing enough for her, not knowing what she was really like. I’d give anything to have been able to think about her as Mark thought, to feel about her as he felt. If only I had known what she was really like. Even now I don’t know. I never shall.
But going to Richard–No. If it was to be done again to-morrow I’d do it.
And I don’t humbug myself about it. If I made Richard happy I made myself happy too; _he_ made me happy. Still, if I had had no happiness in it, if I’d hated it, I’d have done it for Richard all the same.
IX.
All this religious resignation. And the paradox of prayer: people praying one minute, “Thy will be done,” then praying for things to happen or not happen, just as they please.
God’s will be done–as if it wouldn’t be done whatever they did or didn’t do. God’s will was your fate. The thing was to know it and not waste your strength in the illusion of resistance.
If you were part of God your will was God’s will at the moment when you really willed. There was always a point when you knew it: the flash point of freedom. You couldn’t mistake your flash when it came. You couldn’t doubt away that certainty of freedom any more than you could doubt away the certainty of necessity and determination. From the outside they were part of the show of existence, the illusion of separation from God. From the inside they were God’s will, the way things were willed. Free-will was the reality underneath the illusion of necessity. The flash point of freedom was your consciousness of God.
Then praying would be willing. There would be no such thing as passive prayer. There could be no surrender…. And yet there was. Not the surrender of your will, but of all the things that entangle and confuse it; that stand between it and you, between God and you. When you lay still with your eyes shut and made the darkness come on, wave after wave, blotting out your body and the world, blotting out everything but your self and your will, that was a dying to live; a real dying, a real life.
The Christians got hold of real things and turned them into something unreal, impossible to believe. The grace of God was a real thing. It was that miracle of perfect happiness, with all its queerness, its divine certainty and uncertainty. The Christians knew at least one thing about it; they could see it had nothing to do with deserving. But it had nothing to do with believing, either, or with being good and getting into heaven. It _was_ heaven. It had to do with beauty, absolutely un-moral beauty, more than anything else.
She couldn’t see the way of it beyond that. It had come to her when she was a child in brilliant, clear flashes; it had come again and again in her adolescence, with more brilliant and clearer flashes; then, after leaving her for twenty-three years, it had come like this–streaming in and out of her till its ebb and flow were the rhythm of her life.
Why hadn’t she known that this would happen, instead of being afraid that she would “go like” Aunt Charlotte or Uncle Victor? People talked a lot about compensation, but nobody told you that after forty-five life would have this exquisite clearness and intensity.
Why, since it _could_ happen when you were young–reality breaking through, if only in flashes coming and going, going altogether and forgotten–why had you to wait so long before you could remember it and be aware of it as one continuous, shining background? She had never been aware of it before; she had only thought about and about it, about Substance, the Thing-in-itself, Reality, God. Thinking was not being aware.
She made it out more and more. For twenty-three years something had come between her and reality. She could see what it was now. She had gone through life wanting things, wanting people, clinging to the thought of them, not able to keep off them and let them go.
X.
All her life she had gone wrong about happiness. She had attached it to certain things and certain people: Mamma and Mark, Jenny, visits to Aunt Bella, the coming of Aunt Charlotte and Aunt Lavvy and Uncle Victor, the things people would say and do which they had not said and not done: when she was older she had attached it to Maurice Jourdain and to Mark still and Mamma; to going back to Mamma after Dover; to the unknown houses in Morfe; to Maurice Jourdain’s coming; then to Mark’s coming, to Lindley Vickers. And in the end none of these things had brought her the happiness she had seemed to foresee in them.
She knew only one thing about perfect happiness: it didn’t hide; it didn’t wait for you behind unknown doors. There were little happinesses, pleasures that came like that: the pleasure of feeling good when you sat with Maggie’s sister; the pleasure of doing things for Mamma or Dorsy; all the pleasures that had come through the Sutcliffes. The Sutcliffes went, and yet she had been happy. They had all gone, and yet she was happy.
If you looked back on any perfect happiness you saw that it had not come from the people or the things you thought it had come from, but from somewhere inside yourself. When you attached it to people and things they ceased for that moment to be themselves; the space they then seemed to inhabit was not their own space; the time of the wonderful event was not their time. They became part of the kingdom of God within you.
Not Richard. He had become part of the kingdom of God without ceasing to be himself.
That was because she had loved him more than herself. Loving him more than herself she had let him go.
Letting go had somehow done the trick.
XI.
I used to think there was nothing I couldn’t give up for Richard.
Could I give up this? If I had to choose between losing Richard and losing this? (I suppose it would be generally considered that I _had_ lost Richard.) If I had had to choose seven years ago, before I knew, I’d have chosen Richard; I couldn’t have helped myself. But if I had to choose now–knowing what reality is–between losing Richard in the way I have lost him and losing reality, absolutely and for ever, losing, absolutely and for ever, my real self, knowing that I’d lost it?…
If there’s anything in it at all, losing my real self would be losing Richard, losing Richard’s real self absolutely and for ever. Knowing reality is knowing that you can’t lose it. That or nothing.
XII.
Supposing there isn’t anything in it? Supposing–Supposing–
Last night I began thinking about it again. I stripped my soul; I opened all the windows and let my ice-cold thoughts in on the poor thing; it stood shivering between certainty and uncertainty.
I tried to doubt away this ultimate passion, and it turned my doubt into its own exquisite sting, the very thrill of the adventure.
Supposing there’s nothing in it, nothing at all?
That’s the risk you take.
XIII.
There isn’t any risk. This time it was clear, clear as the black pattern the sycamore makes on the sky. If it never came again I should remember.
THE END