Mary Olivier: a Life Part 47

The Vicar of Renton. He wanted to see her.

Mamma had left her in the room with him, going out with an air of self-conscious connivance.

Mr. Spencer Rollitt. Hard and handsome. Large face, square-cut, clean-shaved, bare of any accent except its eyebrows, its mouth a thin straight line hardly visible in its sunburn. Small blue eyes standing still in the sunburn, hard and cold.

When Mr. Rollitt wanted to express heartiness he had to fall back on gesture, on the sudden flash of white teeth; he drew in his breath, sharply, between the straight, close lips, with a sound: "Fivv-vv!"

She watched him. Under his small handsome nose his mouth and chin together made one steep, straight line. This lower face, flat and naked, without lips, stretched like another forehead. At the top of the real forehead, where his hat had saved his skin, a straight band, white, like a scar. Yet Mr. Spencer Rollitt's hair curled and cl.u.s.tered out at the back of his head in perfect innocence.

He was smiling his muscular smile, while his little hard cold eyes held her in their tight stare.

"Don't you think you would like to take a cla.s.s in my Sunday School?"

"I'm afraid I wouldn't like it at all."

"Nothing to be afraid of. I should give you the infants' school."

For a long time he sat there, explaining that there was nothing to be afraid of, and that he would give her the infants' school. You felt him filling the room, crushing you back and back, forcing his will on you.

There was too much of his will, too much of his face. Her will rose up against his will and against his face, and its false, muscular smile.

"I'm sure my mother didn't say I'd like to teach in a Sunday School."

"She said she'd be very glad if I could persuade you."

"She'd say _that_. But she knows perfectly well I wouldn't really do it."

"It was not Mrs. Olivier's idea."

He got up. When he stood his eyes stared at nothing away over your head.

He wouldn't lower them to look at you.

"It was Mrs. Sutcliffe's."

"How funny of Mrs. Sutcliffe. She doesn't know me, either."

"My dear young lady, you were at school when your father and mother dined at Greffington Hall."

He was looking down at her now, and she could feel herself blushing; hot, red waves of shame, rushing up, tingling in the roots of her hair.

"Mrs. Sutcliffe," he said, "is very kind."

She saw it now. He had been at the Sutcliffes that evening. He had seen Papa. He was trying to say, "Your father was drunk at Greffington Hall.

He will never be asked there again. He will not be particularly welcome at the Vicarage. But you are very young. We do not wish you to suffer.

This is our kindness to you. Take it. You are not in a position to refuse."

"And what am I to say to Mrs. Sutcliffe?"

"Oh, anything you like that wouldn't sound too rude."

"Shall I say that you're a very independent young lady, and that she had better not ask you to join her sewing-cla.s.s? Would that sound too rude?"

"Not a bit. If you put it nicely. But you would, wouldn't you?"

He looked down at her again. His thick eyes had thawed slightly; they let out a twinkle. But he was holding his lips so tight that they had disappeared. A loud, surprising laugh forced them open.

He held out his hand with a gesture, drawing back his laugh in a tremendous "Fiv-v-v-v."

When he had gone she opened the piano and played, and played. Through the window of the room Chopin's Fontana Polonaise went out after him, joyous, triumphant and defiant, driving him before it. She exulted in her power over the Polonaise. Nothing could touch you, nothing could hurt you while you played. If only you could go on playing for ever--

Her mother came in from the garden.

"Mary," she said, "if you _will_ play, you must play gently."

"But Mamma--I can't. It goes like that."

"Then," said her mother, "don't play it. You can be heard all over the village."

"Bother the village. I don't care. I don't care if I'm heard all over everywhere!"

She went on playing.

But it was no use. She struck a wrong note. Her hands trembled and lost their grip. They stiffened, dropped from the keys. She sat and stared idiotically at the white page, at the black dots nodding on their stems, at the black bars swaying.

She had forgotten how to play Chopin's Fontana Polonaise.

XI.

Stone walls. A wild country, caught in the net of the stone walls.

Stone walls following the planes of the land, running straight along the valleys, switchbacking up and down the slopes. Humped-up, grey spines of the green mounds.

Stone walls, piled loosely, with the brute skill of earth-men, building centuries ago. They bulged, they toppled, yet they stood firm, holding the wild country in their mesh, knitting the grey villages to the grey farms, and the farms to the grey byres. Where you thought the net had ended it flung out a grey rope over the purple back of Renton, the green shoulder of Greffington.

Outside the village, the schoolhouse lane, a green trench sunk between stone walls, went up and up, turning three times. At the top of the last turn a gate.

When you had got through the gate you were free.

It led on to the wide, flat half-ring of moor that lay under Karva. The moor and the high mound of the hill were free; they had slipped from the net of the walls.

Broad sheep-drives cut through the moor. Inlets of green gra.s.s forked into purple heather. Green streamed through purple, lapped against purple, lay on purple in pools and splashes.

Burnt patches. Tongues of heather, twisted and pointed, picked clean by fire, flickering grey over black earth. Towards evening the black and grey ran together like ink and water, stilled into purple, the black purple of grapes.

If you shut your eyes you could see the flat Ess.e.x country spread in a thin film over Karva. Thinner and thinner. But you could remember what it had been like. Low, tilled fields, thin trees; sharp, queer, uncertain beauty. Sharp, queer, uncertain happiness, coming again and again, never twice to the same place in the same way. It hurt you when you remembered it.

The beauty of the hills was not like that. It stayed. It waited for you, keeping faith. Day after day, night after night, it was there.