But that made her look small and pathetic--a wounded bird. She ought not
to have been made to look like that.

You could hear Dora and Effie being kind to Mamma. "Dear Mrs.
Olivier"--Indulgence--Condescension. As if to an unfortunate and rather
foolish person. Mark could see that. He was smiling: a hard, angry smile.

Mrs. Draper was Mamma's dearest friend. They could sit and talk to each
other about nothing for hours together. In the holidays Mrs. Draper used
to be always coming over to talk to Mamma, always bringing Dora and Effie
with her, always asking Mark and Dan and Roddy to her house, always
wondering why Mark never went.

Dan went. Dan seemed as if he couldn't keep away.

This year Mrs. Draper had left off asking Mark and Dan and Roddy. She had
left off bringing Dora and Effie with her.

Mary wondered why she had brought them now, and why her mother had asked
them.

The Manistys. She had brought them for the Manistys. She wanted Mamma to
see what she had brought them for. And Mamma had asked them because she
didn't care, and wanted them to see that she didn't care, and that Mark
didn't care either.

If they only knew how Mark detested them with their "_Dear_ Mrs.
Olivier"!

Something was going on. She heard Uncle Victor saying to Aunt Lavvy,
"Mark's party is a bit rough on Dan."

Dan was trying to get to Effie through a gap in the group formed by the
Manistys and two young subalterns, Mark's friends. Each time he did it
Mrs. Draper stopped him by moving somehow so as to fill the gap. He gave
it up at last, to sit by himself at the bottom of the room, jammed into a
corner between the chimney-piece and the rosewood cabinet, where he
stared at Effie with hot, unhappy eyes.

Supper. Mamma was worried about the supper. She would have liked to have
given them a nicer one, but there wasn't enough money; besides, she was
afraid of what Uncle Victor would think if they were extravagant. That
was the worst of borrowing, Mark said; you couldn't spend so much
afterwards. Still, there was enough wine yet in the cellar for fifty
parties. You could see, now, some advantage in Papa's habit of never
drinking any but the best wine and laying in a large stock of it while he
could.

Mary noticed that Papa and Dan drank the most. Perhaps Dan drank more
than Papa. The smell of wine was over all the supper, spoiling it,
sending through her nerves a reminiscent shiver of disgust.

Mark brought her back into the dining-room for the ice she hadn't had.
Dan was there, by himself, sitting in the place Effie had just left.
Effie's glass had still some wine in it. You could see him look for the
wet side of the rim and suck the drops that had touched her mouth.
Something small and white was on the floor beside him. Effie's
pocket-handkerchief. He stooped for it. You could hear him breathing up
the scent on it with big, sighing sobs.

They slunk back into the drawing-room.

Mark asked her to play something.

"Make a noise, Minky. Perhaps they'll go."

"The Hungarian March." She could play it better than Mamma. Mamma never
could see that the bass might be even more important than the treble. She
was glad that she could play it better than Mamma, and she hated herself
for being glad.

Mark stood by the piano and looked at her as she played. They talked
under cover of the "Droom--Droom--Droom-era-room."

"Mark, am I looking too awful?"

"No. Pretty Minx. Very pretty Minx."

"We mustn't, Mark. They'll hear us. They'll think us idiots."

"I don't care if they do. Don't you wish they'd go? Clever Minx. Clever
paws."

Mamma passed and looked at them. Her face shrank and sharpened under the
dropped wing of her hair. She must have heard what Mark said. She hated
it when Mark talked and looked like that. She hated it when you played
_her_ music.

Beethoven, then. The "Sonata Eroica" was bound up with "Violetta," the
"Guards" and "Mabel" Waltzes and the "Pluie des Perles."

"_Ubique quo fas et gloria ducunt_." That was the meaning of the noble,
serious, passionate music.

Roddy called out, "Oh, _not that_ dull old thing."

No. Not that. There was the Funeral March in it: _sulle morte d'un eroe_.
Mark was going away.

"Waldteufel," then. _One_--two--three. _One_--two--three. Sustained thrum
in the bass. One--two--three. Thursday--Friday--_One_--two--three.
Saturday--Sunday. Beat of her thoughts, beat of the music in a sort of
syncopated time. _One_--two--three, Monday.

On Tuesday Mark would be gone.

His eyes made her break off to look round. Dan had come back into the
room, to his place between the cabinet and the chimney-piece. He stooped
forward, his head hanging as if some weight dragged it. His eyes, turned
up, staring at Effie, showed half circles of blood-shot white. His face
was flushed. A queer, leaden grey flush.

Aunt Lavvy sat beside him. She had her hand on his arm, to keep him quiet
there in his corner.

"Mark--what's the matter with Dan?"

_One_--two--three. _One_--two--three. Something bumped against the glass
door of the cabinet. A light tinkling crash of a broken pane. She could
see slantwise as she went on playing. Dan was standing up. He swayed,
feeling for the ledge of the cabinet. Then he started to come down the
room, his head lowered, thrust forward, his eyes heavy with some earnest,
sombre purpose.

He seemed to be hours coming down the room by himself. Hours standing in
the middle of the room, holding on to the parrot chair.

"Mark!"

"Go on playing."

He went to him. Roddy sprang up from somewhere. Hours while they were
getting Dan away from the parrot chair to the door beside the piano.
Hours between the opening and sudden slamming of the door.

But she had not played a dozen bars. She went on playing.

"Wait a minute, Effie."

Effie was standing beside her with her hand on the door.

"I've lost my pocket-handkerchief. I must have left it in the dining-room.
I _know_ I left it in the dining-room," she said, fussing.

Mary got up. "All right. I'll fetch it."

She opened the door and shut it again quickly.

"I can't go--yet."


III.

Friday, Saturday and Sunday passed, each with a separate, hurrying pace
that quickened towards bed-time.

Mark's last night. She had left her door open so that she could hear him
come upstairs. He came and sat on her bed as he used to do years ago when
she was afraid of the ghost in the passage.

"I shan't be away for ever, Minky. Only five years."

"Yes, but you'll be twenty-six then, and I shall be nineteen. We shan't
be ourselves."

"I shall be my self. Five years isn't really long."

"You--you'll like it, Mark. There'll be jungles with bisons and tigers."

"Yes. Jungles."

"And polo."

"Shan't be able to go in for polo."

"Why not?"

"Ponies. Too expensive."

They sat silent.

"What I _don't_ like," Mark said in a sleepy voice, "is leaving Papa."

"Papa?"

He really meant it. "Wish I'd been decenter to him," he said.

And then: "Minky--you'll be kind to little Mamma."

"Oh, Mark--aren't I?"

"Not always. Not when you say funny things about the Bible."

"You say funny things yourself."

"Yes; but she thinks I don't mean them, so it doesn't matter."

"She thinks I don't mean them, either."

"Well--let her go on thinking it. Do what she wants--even when it's
beastly."

"It's all very well for you. She doesn't want _you_ to learn the
Thirty-Nine Articles. What would you do if she did?"

"Learn them, of course. Lie about them, if that would please her."

She thought: "Mamma didn't want him to be a soldier."

As if he knew what she was thinking, he said, "She doesn't really mind my
going into the Army. I knew she wouldn't. Besides, I had to."

"Yes."

"I'll make it up to her," he said. "I won't do any other thing she
wouldn't like. I won't marry. I won't play polo. I'll live on my pay and
give poor Victor back his money. And there's one good thing about it.
Papa'll be happier when I'm not here."


IV.

"Mark!"

"Minky!"

"He had said good-night and gone to his room and come back again to hold
her still tighter in his arms.

"What?"

"Nothing," he said. "Only--good-night."

To-morrow no lingering and no words. Mark's feet quick in the passage. A
door shut to, a short, crushing embrace before he turned from her to her
mother.

Her mother and she alone together in the emptied room, turning from each
other, without a word.


V.

The wallflowers had grown up under the south side of the garden wall; a
hedge of butterfly-brown and saffron. They gave out a hot, velvet smell,
like roses and violets laced with mignonette.

Mamma stood looking at the wallflowers, smiling at them, happy, as if
Mark had never gone.

As if Mark had never gone.




XV


I.

Mamma whispered to Mrs. Draper, and Aunt Bella whispered to Mamma:
"Fourteen." They always made a mystery about being fourteen. They ought
to have told her.

Her thoughts about her mother went up and down. Mamma was not helpless.
She was not gentle. She was not really like a wounded bird. She was
powerful and rather cruel. You could only appease her with piles of
hemmed sheets and darned stockings. If you didn't take care she would get
hold of you and never rest till she had broken you, or turned and twisted
you to her own will. She would say it was God's will. She would think it
was God's will.

They might at least have told you about the pain. The knives of pain. You
had to clench your fists till the fingernails bit into the palms. Over
the ear of the sofa cushions she could feel her hot eyes looking at her
mother with resentment.

She thought: "You had no business to have me. You had no business to have
me."

Somebody else's eyes. Somebody else's thoughts. Not yours. Not yours.

Mamma got up and leaned over you and covered you with the rug. Her white
face quivered above you in the dusk. Her mouth pushed out to yours,
making a small sound like a moan. You heard yourself cry: "Mamma, Mamma,
you are adorable!"

That was you.


II.

And as if Mark had never gone, as if that awful thing had never happened
to Dan, as if she had never had those thoughts about her mother, her
hidden happiness came back to her. Unhappiness only pushed it to a longer
rhythm. Nothing could take it away. Anything might bring it: the smell of
the white dust on the road; the wind when it came up out of nowhere and
brushed the young wheat blades, beat the green flats into slopes where
the white light rippled and ran like water, set the green field shaking
and tossing like a green sea; the five elm trees, stiff, ecstatic
dancers, holding out the broken-ladder pattern of their skirts; haunting
rhymes, sudden cadences; the grave "_Ubique_" sounding through the
Beethoven Sonata.

Its thrill of reminiscence passed into the thrill of premonition, of
something about to happen to her.




XVI


I.

Poems made of the white dust, of the wind in the green corn, of the five
trees--they would be the most beautiful poems in the world.

Sometimes the images of these things would begin to move before her with
persistence, as if they were going to make a pattern; she could hear a
thin cling-clang, a moving white pattern of sound that, when she tried to
catch it, broke up and flowed away. The image pattern and the sound
pattern belonged to each other, but when she tried to bring them together
they fell apart.

That came of reading too much Byron.

How was it that patterns of sound had power to haunt and excite you? Like
the "potnia, potnia nux" that she found in the discarded Longfellow,
stuck before his "Voices of the Night."

Potnia, potnia nux, hypnodoteira ton polyponon broton, erebothen ithi,
mole, mole katapteros ton Agamemnonion epi domon.

She wished she knew Greek; the patterns the sounds made were so hard and
still.

And there were bits of patterns, snapt off, throbbing wounds of sound
that couldn't heal. Lines out of Mark's Homer.

Mark's Greek books had been taken from her five years ago, when Rodney
went to Chelmsted. And they had come back with Rodney this Easter. They
stood on the shelf in Mark's bedroom, above his writing-table.

One day she found her mother there, dusting and arranging the books.
Besides the little shabby Oxford Homers there were an Aeschylus, a
Sophocles, two volumes of Aristophanes, clean and new, three volumes of
Euripides and a Greek Testament. On the table a well-preserved Greek
Anthology, bound in green, with the owner's name, J.C. Ponsonby, stamped
on it in gilt letters. She remembered Jimmy giving it to Mark.

She took the _Iliad_ from its place and turned over the torn, discoloured
pages.

Her mother looked up, annoyed and uneasy, like a child disturbed in the
possession of its toys.

"Mark's books are to be kept where Mark put them," she said.

"But, Mamma, I want them."

Never in her life had she wanted anything so much as those books.

"When will you learn not to want what isn't yours?"

"Mark doesn't want them, or he'd have taken them. He'd give them me if he
was here."

"He isn't here. I won't have them touched till he comes back."

"But, Mamma darling, I may be dead. I've had to wait five years as it
is."

"Wait? What for, I should like to know?"

"To learn Greek, of course."

Her mother's face shivered with repugnance. It was incredible that
anybody should hate a poor dead language so.

"Just because Mark learnt Greek, you think _you_ must try. I thought
you'd grown out of all that tiresome affectation. It was funny when you
were a little thing, but it isn't funny now."

Her mother sat down to show how tired she was of it.

"It's just silly vanity."

Mary's heart made a queer and startling movement, as if it turned over
and dashed itself against her ribs. There was a sudden swelling and
aching in her throat. Her head swam slightly. The room, Mark's room, with
Mark's white bed in one corner and Dan's white bed in the other, had
changed; it looked like a room she had never been in before. She had
never seen that mahogany washstand and the greyish blue flowers on the
jug and basin. The person sitting on the yellow-painted bedroom chair was
a stranger who wore, unaccountably, a brown dress and a gold watch-chain
with a gold tassel that she remembered. She had an odd feeling that this
person had no right to wear her mother's dress and her chain.

The flash of queerness was accompanied by a sense of irreparable
disaster. Everything had changed; she heard herself speaking, speaking
steadily, with the voice of a changed and unfamiliar person.

"Mark doesn't think it's vanity. You only think it is because you want
to."

The mind of this unfamiliar self had a remorseless lucidity that seemed
to her more shocking than anything she could imagine. It went on as if
urged by some supreme necessity. "You're afraid. Afraid."

It seemed to her that her mother really was afraid.

"Afraid? And what of?" her mother said.

The flash went out, leaving her mind dark suddenly and defeated.

"I don't know what _of_. I only know you're afraid."

"That's an awful thing for any child to say to any mother. Just because I
won't let you have your own way in everything. Until your will is
resigned to God's will I may well be afraid."

"How do you know God doesn't want me to know Greek? He may want it as
much as I do."

"And if you did know it, what good would it do you?"

She stood staring at her mother, not answering. She knew the sound
patterns were beautiful, and that was all she knew. Beauty. Beauty could
be hurt and frightened away from you. If she talked about it now she
would expose it to outrage. Though she knew that she must appear to her
mother to be stubborn and stupid, even sinful, she put her stubbornness,
her stupidity, her sinfulness, between it and her mother to defend it.

"I can't tell you," she said.

"No. I don't suppose you can."

Her mother followed up the advantage given her. "You just go about
dreaming and mooning as if there was nothing else in the wide world for
you to do. I can't think what's come over you. You used to be content to
sit still and sew by the hour together. You were more help to me when you
were ten than you are now. The other day when I asked you to darn a hole
in your own stocking you looked as if I'd told you to go to your funeral.

"It's time you began to take an interest in looking after the house.
There's enough to keep you busy most of your time if you only did the
half of it."

"Is that what you want me to be, Mamma? A servant, like Catty?"

"Poor Catty. If you were more like Catty," her mother said, "you'd be
happier than you are now, I can tell you. Catty is never disagreeable or
disobedient or discontented."

"No. But perhaps Catty's mother thinks she is."

She thought: She _is_ afraid.

"Do you suppose," her mother said, "it's any pleasure to me to find fault
with my only daughter? If you weren't my only daughter, perhaps I
shouldn't find fault."

Her new self answered again, implacable in its lucidity. "You mean, if
you'd had a girl you could do what you liked with you'd have let me
alone? You'd have let me alone if you could have done what you liked with
Mark?"

She noticed, as if it had a separate and significant existence, her
mother's hand lying on the green cover of the Greek Anthology.

"If you were like Mark--if you were only like him!"

"If I only were!"

"Mark never hurt me. Mark never gave me a minute's trouble in his life."

"He went into the Army."

"He had a perfect right to go into the Army."

Silence. "Minky--you'll be kind to little Mamma." A hard, light sound;
the vexed fingers tap-tapping on the book. Her mother rose suddenly,
pushing the book from her.

"There--take Mark's books. Take everything. Go your own way. You always
have done; you always will. Some day you'll be sorry for it."

She was sorry for it now, miserable, utterly beaten. Her new self seemed
to her a devil that possessed her. She hated it. She hated the books. She
hated everything that separated her and made her different from her
mother and from Mark.

Her mother went past her to the door.

"Mamma--I didn't mean it--Mamma--"

Before she could reach the door it shut between them.


II.

The library at Five Elms was very small. Emilius used it as a
smoking-room; but it was lined with books. Where the rows of shelves met
the shutter cases a fold of window-curtain overlapped their ends.

On the fifth shelf, covered by the curtain, she found the four volumes of
Shelley's _Poetical Works_, half-bound in marble-paper and black leather.
She had passed them scores of times in her hunt for something to read.
Percy Bysshe Shelley. Percy Bysshe--what a silly name. She had thought
of him as she thought of Allison's _History of Europe_ in seventeen
volumes, and the poems of Cornwall and Leigh Hunt. Books you wouldn't
read if you were on a desert island.

There was something about Shelley in Byron's _Life and Letters_.
Something she had read and forgotten, that persisted, struggled to make
itself remembered.

Shelley's Pantheism.

The pages of Shelley were very clean; they stuck together lightly at the
edges, like the pages of the Encyclopaedia at "Pantheism" and "Spinoza."
Whatever their secret was, you would have to find it for yourself.

Table of Contents--Poems written in 1816--"Hymn to Intellectual Beauty."
She read that first.

   "Sudden thy shadow fell on me:--
    I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!"

It had happened to Shelley, too. He knew how you felt when it happened.
(Only you didn't shriek.) It was a real thing, then, that did happen to
people.

She read the "Ode to a Skylark," the "Ode to the West Wind" and
"Adonais."

All her secret happiness was there. Shelley knew about the queerness of
the sharp white light, and the sudden stillness, when the grey of the
fields turns to violet: the clear, hard stillness that covers the excited
throb-throbbing of the light.

   "Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
    Stains the white radiance of eternity"--

Colours were more beautiful than white radiance. But that was because of
the light. The more light there was in them the more beautiful they were;
it was their real life.

One afternoon Mr. Propart called. He came into the library to borrow a
book.

"And what are _you_ so deep in?" he said.

"Shelley."

"Shelley? Shelley?" He looked at her. A kind, considering look. She liked
his grey face with its tired keenness. She thought he was going to say
something interesting about Shelley; but he only smiled his thin,
drooping smile; and presently he went away with his book.

Next morning the Shelleys were not in their place behind the curtain.
Somebody had moved them to the top shelf. Catty brought the step-ladder.

In the evening they were gone. Mr. Propart must have borrowed them.


III.

"To this, then, comes our whole argument respecting the fourth kind of
madness, on account of which anyone, who, on seeing the beauty in this
lower world, being reminded of the true, begins to recover his wings,
and, having recovered them, longs to soar aloft, but, being unable to do
it, looks upwards like a bird, and despising things below, is deemed to
be affected with madness."

Beauty in itself. In itself--Beauty in beautiful things. She had never
thought about it that way before. It would be like the white light in the
colours.

Plato, discovered in looking for the lost Shelleys, thus consoled her.
The Plato of Bohn's Library. Cary's English for Plato's Greek. Slab upon
slab. No hard, still sound-patterns. Grey slabs of print, shining with an
inner light--Plato's thought.

Her happiness was there, too.




XVII


I.

The French nephew was listening. He had been listening for quite a long
time, ten minutes perhaps; ever since they had turned off the railway
bridge into Ley Street.

They had known each other for exactly four hours and seventeen minutes.
She had gone to the Drapers for tea. Rodney had left her on their
doorstep and he had found her there and had brought her into the
dining-room. That, he declared, was at five o'clock, and it was now
seventeen minutes past nine by his watch which he showed her.

It had begun at tea-time. When he listened he turned round, excitedly, in
his chair; he stooped, bringing his eyes level with yours. When he talked
he tossed back his head and stuck out his sharp-bearded chin. She was not
sure that she liked his eyes. Hot black. Smoky blurs like breath on
glass. Old, tired eyelids. Or his funny, sallowish face, narrowing to the
black chin-beard. Ugly one minute, nice the next.

It moved too much. He could say all sorts of things with it and with his
shoulders and his hands. Mrs. Draper said that was because he was half
French.

He was showing her how French verse should be read when Rodney came for
her, and Dr. Draper sent Rodney away and kept her for dinner.

The French nephew was taking her home now. They had passed the crook of
the road.

"And all this time," she said, "I don't know your name."

"Maurice. Maurice Jourdain. I know yours--Mary Olivier. I like it."

"You wouldn't if you were me and your father kept on saying, 'Mary, Mary,
quite contrary,' and 'Mary had a little lamb.'"

"Fathers will do these cruel things. It's a way they have."

"Papa isn't cruel. Only he's so awfully fond of Mamma that he can't think
about _us_. He doesn't mind me so much."

"Oh--he doesn't mind you so much?"

"No. It's Mark he can't stand."

"Who is Mark?"

"My brother. Mark is a soldier--Royal Artillery."

"Lucky Mark. I was to have been a soldier."

"Why weren't you?"

"My mother wouldn't have liked it. So I had to give it up."

"How you must have loved her. Mark loves my mother more than anything;
but he couldn't have done that."

"Perhaps Mark hasn't got to provide for his mother and his sisters. I
had. And I had to go into a disgusting business to do it."

"Oh-h--"

He was beautiful inside. He did beautiful things. She was charmed,
suddenly, by his inner, his immaterial beauty. She thought: "He must be
ever so old."

"But it's made them love you awfully, hasn't it?" she said.

His shoulders and eyebrows lifted; he made a queer movement with his
hands, palms outwards. He stood still in the path, turned to her,
straight and tall. He looked down at her; his lips jerked; the hard,
sharp smile bared narrow teeth.

"The more you do for people the less they love you," he said.

"Your people must be very funny."

"No. No. They're simply pious, orthodox Christians, and I don't believe
in Christianity. I'm an atheist. I don't believe their God exists. I hope
he doesn't. They wouldn't mind so much if I were a villain, too, but
it's awkward for them when they find an infidel practising any of the
Christian virtues. My eldest sister, Ruth, would tell you that I _am_ a
villain."

"She doesn't really think it."

"Doesn't she! My dear child, she's got to think it, or give up her
belief."

She could see the gable end of Five Elms now. It would soon be over. When
they got to the garden gate.

It _was_ over.

"I suppose," he said, "I must shut the prison door."

They looked at each other through the bars and laughed.

"When shall I see you again?" he said.


II.

She had seen him again. She could count the times on the fingers of one
hand. Once, when he came to dinner with Dr. and Mrs. Draper; once at
Sunday supper with the Drapers after Church; once on a Saturday when Mrs.
Draper asked her to tea again; and once when he called to take her for a
walk in the fields.

Mamma had lifted her eyebrows and Mrs. Draper said, "Nonsense. He's old
enough to be her father."

The green corn stood above her ankles then. This was the fifth time. The
corn rose to her waist. The ears were whitening.

"You're the only person besides Mark who listens. There was Jimmy. But
that was different. He didn't know things. He's a darling, but he doesn't
know things."

"Who is Jimmy?"

"Mark's friend and mine."

"_Where_ is he?"

"In Australia. He can't ever come back, so I shall never see him again."

"I'm glad to hear it."

A sudden, dreadful doubt. She turned to him in the narrow path.

"You aren't laughing at me, are you? You don't think I'm shamming and
showing off?"

"I? I? Laughing at you? My poor child--No--"

"They don't understand that you can really love words--beautiful sounds.
And thoughts. Love them awfully, as if they were alive. As if they were
people."

"They are alive. They're better than people. You know the best of your
Shelley and Plato and Spinoza. Instead of the worst."

"I should have liked to have known them, too. Sometimes I pretend that I
do know them. That they're alive. That they're here. Saying things and
listening. They're kind. They never misunderstand. They never lose their
tempers."

"You mustn't do that," he said sharply.

"Why not?"

"It isn't good for you. Talk to me. I'm alive. I'm here, I'll listen.
I'll never misunderstand. I'll never lose my temper."

"You aren't always here."

He smiled, secretly, with straight lips, under the funny, frizzy, French
moustache. And when he spoke again he looked old and wise, like an uncle.

"Wait," he said. "Wait a bit. Wait three years."

"Three years?" she said. "Three years before we can go for another walk?"

He shouted laughter and drew it back with a groan.

She couldn't tell him that she pretended he was there when he was not
there; that she created situations.

He was ill, and she nursed him. She could feel the weight of his head
against her arm, and his forehead--hot--hot under her hand. She had felt
her hands to see whether they would be nice enough to put on Mr.
Jourdain's forehead. They were rather nice; cool and smooth; the palms
brushed together with a soft, swishing sound like fine silk.

He was poor and she worked for him.

He was in danger and she saved him. From a runaway horse; from a furious
dog; from a burning house; from a lunatic with a revolver.

It made her sad to think how unlikely it was that any of these things
would ever happen.


III.

"Mr. Jourdain, I am going to school."

The corn was reaped and carried. The five elms stood high above the
shallow stubble.

"My poor Mary, is it possible?"

"Yes. Mamma says she's been thinking of it for a long time."

"Don't be too hard on your mother till you're quite sure it wasn't my
aunt."

"It may have been both of them. Anyhow, it's awful. Just--just when I was
so happy."

"Just when I was so happy," he said. "But that's the sort of thing they
do."

"I knew you'd be sorry for me."




XVIII


I.

She was shut up with Papa, tight, in the narrow cab that smelt of the
mews. Papa, sitting slantways, nearly filled the cab. He was quiet and
sad, almost as if he were sorry she was going.

His sadness and quietness fascinated her. He had a mysterious, wonderful,
secret life going on in him. Funny you should think of it for the first
time in the cab. Supposing you stroked his hand. Better not. He mightn't
like it.

Not forty minutes from Liverpool Street to Victoria. If only cabs didn't
smell so.


II.

The small, ugly houses streamed past, backs turned to the train, stuck
together, rushing, rushing in from the country.

Grey streets, trying to cut across the stream, getting nowhere, carried
past sideways on.

Don't look at the houses. Shut your eyes and remember.

Her father's hand on her shoulder. His face, at the carriage window,
looking for her. A girl moving back, pushing her to it. "Papa!"

Why hadn't she loved him all the time? Why hadn't she liked his beard?
His nice, brown, silky beard. His poor beard.

Mamma's face, in the hall, breaking up suddenly. Her tears in your mouth.
Her arms, crushing you. Mamma's face at the dining-room window. Tears,
pricking, cutting your eyelids. Blink them back before the girls see
them. Don't think of Mamma.

The Thames. Barking Creek goes into the Thames and the Roding goes into
Barking Creek. Yesterday, the last walk with Roddy, across Barking Flats
to the river, over the dry, sallow grass, the wind blowing in their
faces. Roddy's face, beautiful, like Mamma's, his mouth, white at the
edges. Roddy gasping in the wind, trying to laugh, his heart thumping.
Roddy was excited when he saw the tall masts of the ships. He had wanted
to be a sailor.

Dan's face, when he said good-bye; his hurt, unhappy eyes; the little
dark, furry moustache trying to come. Tibby's eyes. Dank wanted to marry
Effie. Mark was the only one who got what he wanted.

Better not think of Dank.

She looked shyly at her companions. The stout lady in brown, sitting
beside her; kind, thin mouth, pursed to look important; dull kind eyes
trying to be wise and sharp behind spectacles, between curtains of dead
hair. A grand manner, excessively polite, on the platform, to Papa--Miss
Lambert.

The three girls, all facing them. Pam Quin; flaxen pigtail; grown up
nose; polite mouth, buttoned, little flaxen and pink old lady, Pam Quin,
talking about her thirteenth birthday.

Lucy Elliott, red pig-tail, suddenly sad in her corner, innocent
white-face, grey eyes blinking to swallow her tears. Frances Elliott, hay
coloured pig-tail, very upright, sitting forward and talking fast to hide
her sister's shame.

Mamma's face--Don't think of it.

Green fields and trees rushing past now. Stop a tree and you'll change
and feel the train moving. Plato. You can't trust your senses. The
cave-dwellers didn't see the things that really moved, only the shadows
of the images of the things. Is the world in your mind or your mind in
the world? Which really moves? Perhaps the world stands still and you
move on and on like the train. If both moved together that would feel
like standing still.

Grass banks. Telegraph wires dipping and rising like sea-waves. At Dover
there would be the sea.

Mamma's face--Think. Think harder. The world was going on before your
mind started. Supposing you lived before, would that settle it? No. A
white chalk cutting flashed by. God's mind is what both go on in. That
settles it.

The train dashed into a tunnel. A long tunnel. She couldn't remember what
she was thinking of the second before they went in. Something that
settled it. Settled what? She couldn't think any more.

Dover. The girls standing up, and laughing. They said she had gone to
sleep in the train.


III.

There was no sea; only the Maison Dieu Road and the big square house in
the walled garden. Brown wire blinds half way up the schoolroom windows.
An old lady with grey hair and a kind, blunt face, like Jenny; she
unpacked your box in the large, light bedroom, folding and unfolding your
things with little gentle, tender hands. Miss Haynes. She hoped you would
be happy with them, hoped you wouldn't mind sleeping alone the first
night, thought you must be hungry and took you down to tea in the long
dining-room.

More girls, pretending not to look at you; talking politely to Miss
Lambert.

After tea they paired off, glad to see each other. She sat in the corner
of the schoolroom reading the new green Shakespeare that Roddy had given
her. Two girls glanced at her, looked at each other. "Is she doing it for
fun?" "Cheek, more likely."

Night. A strange white bed. Two empty beds, strange and white, in the
large, light room. She wondered what sort of girls would be sleeping
there to-morrow night. A big white curtain: you could draw it across the
room and shut them out.

She lay awake, thinking of her mother, crying now and then; thinking of
Roddy and Dan. Mysterious, measured sounds came through the open window.
That was the sea. She got up and looked out. The deep-walled garden lay
under the window, black and clear like a well. Calais was over there. And
Paris. Mr. Jourdain had written to say he was going to Paris. She had his
letter.

In bed she felt for the sharp edge of the envelope sticking out under the
pillow. She threw back the hot blankets. The wind flowed to her, running
cold like water over the thin sheet.

A light moved across the ceiling. Somebody had waked her. Somebody was
putting the blankets back again, pressing a large, kind hand to her
forehead. Miss Lambert.


IV.

"Mais--mais--de grГўce! Г§a ne finira jamais--jamais, s'il faut rГ©pondre Г 
tes sottises, Marie. Recommençons."

Mademoiselle, golden top-knot shining and shaking, blue eyes rolling
between black lashes.

   "De ta tige dГ©tachГ©e,
    Pauvre feuille dessechГ©e"--

DГ©tachГ©e--dessГ©chГ©e. They didn't rhyme. Their not rhyming irritated her
distress.

She hated the schoolroom: the ochreish wall-paper, the light soiled by
the brown wire gauze; the cramped classes, the faint odour of girl's
skin; girl's talk in the bedroom when you undressed.

The queer she-things had a wonderful, mysterious life you couldn't touch.

Clara, when she walked with you, smiling with her black-treacle eyes and
bad teeth, glad to be talked to. Clara in bed. You bathed her forehead
with eau-de-cologne, and she lay there, happy, glad of her headache that
made them sorry for her. Clara, waiting for you at the foot of the
stairs, looking with dog's eyes, imploring. "Will you walk with me?" "I
can't. I'm going with Lucy." She turned her wounded dog's eyes and slunk
away, beaten, humble, to walk with the little ones.

Lucy Elliott in the bathing machine, slipping from the cloak of the
towel, slender and straight; sea water gluing red weeds of hair to her
white skin. Sweet eyes looking towards you in the evening at sewing-time.

"Will you sit with me at sewing?"

"I'm sitting with Rose Godwin."

Sudden sweetness; sudden trouble; grey eyes dark and angry behind sudden
tears. She wouldn't look at you; wouldn't tell you what you had done.

Rose Godwin, strong and clever; fourteen; head of the school. Honey-white
Roman face; brown-black hair that smelt like Brazilian nuts. Rose Godwin
walking with you in the garden.

"You must behave like other people if you expect them to like you."

"I don't expect them. How do I behave?"

"It isn't exactly behaving. It's more the way you talk and look at
people. As if you saw slap through them. Or else as if you didn't see
them at all. That's worse. People don't like it."

"Anything else?"

"Yes. It was cheeky of you to tell Mademoiselle that those French verses
didn't rhyme."

"But they didn't."

"Who cares?"

"I care. I care frightfully."

"There you go. That's exactly what I mean," Rose said. "Who cares if you
care? And there's another thing. You're worrying Miss Lambert. This
school of hers has got a name for sound religious teaching. You may not
like sound religious teaching, but she's got fifteen of us to look after
besides you. If you want to be an atheist, go and be it by yourself."

"I'm not an atheist."

"Well, whatever silly thing you are. You mustn't talk about it to the
girls. It isn't fair," Rose said.

"All right. I won't."

"On your honour?"

"On my honour."


V.

A three-cornered note on her dressing-table at bed-time:

Sept. 20th, 1878. Maison Dieu Lodge.

"My dear Mary: Our talk was not satisfactory. Unless you can assure me by
to-morrow morning that you believe in the Blessed Trinity and all the
other truths of our most holy religion, I fear that, _much as we love
you_, we dare not keep you with us, for your school-fellows' sake.

"Think it over, my dear child, and let me know. Pray to God _to-night_ to
change your heart and mind and give you His Holy Spirit.

"Affectionately yours,

"Henrietta Lambert."

The Trinity. A three-cornered note.

"My dear Miss Lambert: I am very sorry; but it really isn't any good, and
if it was it couldn't be done in the time. You wouldn't like it if I told
you lies, would you? That's why I can't join in the prayers and say the
Creed and bow; in Church or anywhere. Rose made me promise not to talk
about it, and I won't.

"If you must send me away to-morrow morning, you must. But I'm glad you
love me. I was afraid you didn't.

"With love, your very affectionate

"Mary Olivier."

"P.S.--I've folded my clothes all ready for packing."

To-morrow the clothes were put back again in their drawers. She wasn't
going. Miss Lambert said something about Rose and Lucy and "kindness to
poor Clara."


VI.

Rose Godwin told her that home-sickness wore off. It didn't. It came
beating up and up, like madness, out of nothing. The French verbs, grey,
slender as little verses on the page, the French verbs swam together and
sank under the clear-floating images of home-sickness. Mamma's face,
Roddy's, Dan's face. Tall trees, the Essex fields, flat as water, falling
away behind them. Little feathery trees, flying low on the sky-line.
Outside the hallucination the soiled light shut you in.

The soiled light; odours from the warm roots of girl's hair; and Sunday.
Sunday; stale odours of churches. You wrote out the sermon you had not
listened to and had not heard. Somebody told you the text, and you amused
yourself by seeing how near you could get to what you would have heard if
you had listened. After tea, hymns; then church again. Your heart
laboured with the strain of kneeling, arms lifted up to the high pew
ledge. You breathed pew dust. Your brain swayed like a bladder, brittle,
swollen with hot gas-fumes. After supper, prayers again. Sunday was over.

On Monday, the tenth day, she ran away to Dover Harbour. She had thought
she could get to London with two weeks' pocket-money and what was left of
Uncle Victor's tip after she had paid for the eau-de-cologne; but the
ticket man said it would only take her as far as Canterbury. She had
frightened Miss Lambert and made her tremble: all for nothing, except the
sight of the Harbour. It was dreadful to see her tremble. Even the
Harbour wasn't worth it.

A miracle would have to happen.

Two weeks passed and three weeks. And on the first evening of the fourth
week the miracle happened. Rose Godwin came to her and whispered: "You're
wanted in the dining-room."

Her mother's letter lay open on the table. A tear had made a glazed
snail's track down Miss Lambert's cheek; and Mary thought that one of
them was dead--Roddy--Dan--Papa.

"My dear, my dear--don't cry. You're going home."

"Why? Why am I going?"

She could see the dull, kind eyes trying to look clever.

"Because your mother has sent for you. She wants you back again."

"Mamma? What does she want me for?"

Miss Lambert's eyes turned aside slantways. She swallowed something in
her throat, making a funny noise: qualk-qualk.

"It isn't _you_? You aren't sending me away?"

"No; we're not sending you. But we think it's best for you to go. We
can't bear to see your dear, unhappy little face going about the
passages."

"Does it mean that Mamma isn't happy without me?"

"Well--she _would_ miss her only daughter, wouldn't she?"

The miracle. The shining, lovely miracle.

"Mary Olivier is going! Mary Olivier is going!"

Actually the girls were sorry. Too sorry. The compassion in Rose Godwin's
face stirred a doubt. Doubt of the miracle.

She carried her books to the white curtained room where Miss Haynes knelt
by her trunk, packing her clothes with little gentle, tender hands.

"Miss Haynes" (suddenly), "I'm not expelled, am I?"

"Expelled? My dear child, who's talking about expulsion?"

As if she said, When miracles are worked for you, accept them.

She lay awake, thinking what she should say to her mother when she got
home. She would have to tell her that just at first she very nearly _was_
expelled. Then her mother would believe in her unbelief and not think she
was shamming.

And she would have to explain about her unbelief. And about Pantheism.


VII.

She wondered how she would set about it. It wouldn't do to start suddenly
by saying you didn't believe in Jesus or the God of the Old Testament or
Hell. That would hurt her horribly. The only decent thing would be to let
her see how beautiful Spinoza's God was and leave it to her to make the
comparison.

You would have to make it quite clear to yourself first. It was like
this. There were the five elm trees, and there was the happy white light
on the fields. God was the trees. He was the happy light and he was your
happiness. There was Catty singing in the kitchen. God was Catty.

Oh--and there was Papa and Papa's temper. God would have to be Papa too.

Spinoza couldn't have meant it that way.

He meant that though God was all Papa, Papa was not all God. He was only
a bit of him. He meant that if God was the only reality, Papa wouldn't be
quite real.

But if Papa wasn't quite real then Mamma and Mark were not quite real
either.

If Spinoza had meant that--

But perhaps he hadn't. Perhaps he meant that parts of Papa, the parts you
saw most of--his beard, for instance, and his temper--were not quite
real, but that some other part of him, the part you couldn't see, might
be real in the same way that God was. That would be Papa himself, and it
would be God too. And if God could be Papa, he would have no difficulty
at all in being Mamma and Mark.

Surely Mamma would see that, if you had to have a God, Spinoza's was by
far the nicest God, besides being the easiest to believe in. Surely it
would please her to think like that about Papa, to know that his temper
was not quite real, and that your sin, when you sinned, was not quite
real, so that not even your sin could separate you from God. All your
life Mamma had dinned into you the agony of separation from God, and the
necessity of the Atonement. She would feel much more comfortable if she
knew that there never had been any separation, and that there needn't be
any Atonement.

Of course she might not like the idea of sin being somehow inside God.
She might say it looked bad. But if it wasn't inside God, it would have
to be outside him, supporting itself and causing itself, and then where
were you? You would have to say that God was not the cause of all things,
and that would be much worse.

Surely if you put it to her like that--? But somehow she couldn't hear
herself saying all that to her mother. Supposing Mamma wouldn't listen?

And she couldn't hear herself talking about her happiness, the sudden,
secret happiness that more than anything was like God. When she thought
of it she was hot and cold by turns and she had no words for it. She
remembered the first time it had come to her, and how she had found her
mother in the drawing-room and had knelt down at her knees and kissed her
hands with the idea of drawing her into her happiness. And she remembered
her mother's face. It made her ashamed, even now, as if she had been
silly. She thought: I shall never be able to talk about it to Mamma.

Yet--perhaps--now that the miracle had happened--


VIII.

In the morning Miss Lambert took her up to London. She had a sort of idea
that the kind lady talked to her a great deal, about God and the
Christian religion. But she couldn't listen; she couldn't talk; she
couldn't think now.

For three hours, in the train, in the waiting-room at Victoria, while
Miss Lambert talked to Papa outside, in the cab, alone with Papa--Miss
Lambert must have said something nice about her, for he looked pleased,
as if he wouldn't mind if you did stroke his hand--in Mr. Parish's
wagonette, she sat happy and still, contemplating the shining, lovely
miracle.


IX.

She saw Catty open the front door and run away. Her mother was coming
slowly down the narrow hall.

She ran up the flagged path.

"Mamma!" She flung herself to the embrace.

Her mother swerved from her, staggering back and putting out her hands
between them. Aware of Mr. Parish shouldering the trunk, she turned into
the open dining-room. Mary followed her and shut the door.

Her mother sat down, helplessly. Mary saw that she was crying; she had
been crying a long time. Her soaked eyelashes were parted by her tears
and gathered into points.

"Mamma--what is it?"

"What is it? You've disgraced yourself. Everlastingly. You've disgraced
your father, and you've disgraced me. That's what it is."

"I haven't done anything of the sort, Mamma."

"You don't think it's a disgrace, then, to be expelled? For infidelity."

"But I'm not expelled."

"You are expelled. And you know it."

"No. They said I wasn't. They didn't want me to go. They told me you
wanted me back again."

"Is it likely I should want you when you hadn't been gone three weeks?"

She could hear herself gasp, see herself standing there, open-mouthed,
idiotic.

Nothing could shake her mother in her belief that she had been expelled.

"Of course, if it makes you happier to believe it," she said at last,
"do. Will you let me see Miss Lambert's letter?"

"No," her mother said. "I will not."

Suddenly she felt hard and strong, grown-up in her sad wisdom. Her mother
didn't love her. She never had loved her. Nothing she could ever do would
make her love her. Miracles didn't happen.

She thought: "I wonder why she won't let me see Miss Lambert's letter?"

She went upstairs to her room. She leaned on the sill of the open window,
looking out, drinking in the sweet air of the autumn fields. The five
elms raised golden heads to a blue sky.

Her childhood had died with a little gasp.

Catty came in to unpack her box. Catty, with wet cheeks, kissed a dead
child.




XIX


I.

In the train from Bristol to Paddington for the last time: July,
eighteen-eighty.

She would never see any of them again: Ada and Geraldine; Mabel and
Florrie and little Lena and Kate; Miss Wray with her pale face and angry
eyes; never hear her sudden, cold, delicious praise. Never see the bare,
oblong schoolroom with the brown desks, seven rows across for the lower
school, one long form along the wall for Class One where she and Ada and
Geraldine sat apart. Never look through the bay windows over the lea to
the Channel, at sunset, Lundy Island flattened out, floating, gold on
gold in the offing. Never see magenta valerian growing in hot white grey
walls.

Never hear Louie Prichard straining the little music room with Chopin's
_Fontana_ Polonaise. Never breathe in its floor-dust with the _Adagio_ of
the "Pathetic Sonata."

She was glad she had seen it through to the end when the clergymen's and
squires' daughters went and the daughters of Bristol drapers and
publicans and lodging-house keepers came.

("What do you think! Bessie Parson's brother marked all her
underclothing. In the shop!")

But they taught you quite a lot of things: Zoology, Physiology, Paley's
Evidences, British Law, Political Economy. It had been a wonderful school
when Mrs. Propart's nieces went to it. And they kept all that up when the
smash came and the butter gave out, and you ate cheap bread that tasted
of alum, and potatoes that were fibrous skeletons in a green pulp.
Oh--she had seen it through. A whole year and a half of it.

Why? Because you promised Mamma you'd stick to the Clevehead School
whatever it was like? Because they taught you German and let you learn
Greek by yourself with the old arithmetic master? (Ada Clark said it was
a mean trick to get more marks.) Because of the Beethoven and Schumann
and Chopin, and Lundy Island, and the valerian? Because nothing mattered,
not even going hungry?

She was glad she hadn't told about that, nor why she asked for the "room
to herself" that turned out to be a servants' garret on a deserted floor.
You could wake at five o'clock in the light mornings and read Plato, or
snatch twenty minutes from undressing before Miss Payne came for your
candle. The tall sycamore swayed in the moonlight, tapping on the window
pane; its shadow moved softly in the room like a ghost.


II.

She would like to see the valerian again, though. Mamma said it didn't
grow in Yorkshire.

Funny to be going back to Ilford after Roddy and Papa and Mamma had left
it. Funny to be staying at Five Elms with Uncle Victor. Nice Uncle
Victor, buying the house from Papa and making Dan live with them. That
was to keep him from drinking. Uncle Victor was hurt because Papa and
Mamma would go to Morfe when he wanted you all to live with him. But you
couldn't imagine Emilius and Victor living together or Mamma and Aunt
Lavvy.

Bristol to Paddington. This time next week it would be King's Cross to
Reyburn for Morfe.

She wondered what it would be like. Aunt Bella said it was a
dead-and-alive place. Morfe--Morfe. It did sound rather as if people died
in it. Aunt Bella was angry with Mrs. Waugh and Miss Frewin for making
Mamma go there. But Aunt Bella had never liked Mrs. Waugh and Miss
Frewin. That was because they had been Mamma's friends at school and not
Aunt Bella's.