Mary Olivier: a Life Part 33

On the fifth shelf, covered by the curtain, she found the four volumes of Sh.e.l.ley's _Poetical Works_, half-bound in marble-paper and black leather.

She had pa.s.sed them scores of times in her hunt for something to read.

Percy Bysshe Sh.e.l.ley. 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 Sh.e.l.ley in Byron's _Life and Letters_.

Something she had read and forgotten, that persisted, struggled to make itself remembered.

Sh.e.l.ley's Pantheism.

The pages of Sh.e.l.ley 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 Sh.e.l.ley, 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. Sh.e.l.ley 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 gla.s.s, 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.

"Sh.e.l.ley."

"Sh.e.l.ley? Sh.e.l.ley?" 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 Sh.e.l.ley; but he only smiled his thin, drooping smile; and presently he went away with his book.

Next morning the Sh.e.l.leys 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 Sh.e.l.leys, 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 gla.s.s. 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 pa.s.sed 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."