Mary Olivier: a Life Part 90

When she came you had the old feeling of something interesting about to happen. Only you knew now that this was an illusion.

She talked to you as though, instead of being thirty-three, you were still very small and very young and ignorant of all the things that really mattered. She was vaguer and greyer, more placid than ever, and more content with G.o.d.

Impossible to believe that Papa used to bully her and that Aunt Lavvy had revolted.

"For thirty-three years, Emilius, thirty-three years"--

Sunday supper at Five Elms; on the table James Martineau's _Endeavours After the Christian Life_.

She wondered why she hadn't thought of Aunt Lavvy. Aunt Lavvy knew Dr.

Martineau. As long as you could remember she had always given a strong impression of knowing him quite well.

But when Mary had made it clear what she wanted her to ask him to do, it turned out that Aunt Lavvy didn't know Dr. Martineau at all.

And you could see she thought you presumptuous.

VI.

When old Martha brought the message for her to go to tea with Miss Kendal, Mary slunk out through the orchard into the Back Lane. At that moment the prospect of talking two hours with Miss Kendal was unendurable.

And there was no other prospect. As long as she lived in Morfe there would be nothing--apart from her real, secret life there would be nothing--to look forward to but that. If it was not Miss Kendal it would be Miss Louisa or Dorsy or old Mrs. Heron. People talked about dying of boredom who didn't know that you could really die of it.

If only you didn't keep on wanting somebody--somebody who wasn't there.

If, before it killed you, you could kill the desire to know another mind, a luminous, fiery crystal, to see it turn, shining and flashing. To talk to it, to listen to it, to love the human creature it belonged to.

She envied her youth its capacity for day-dreaming, for imagining interminable communions. Brilliant hallucinations of a mental hunger.

Better than nothing.... If this went on the breaking-point must come.

Suddenly you would go smash. Smash. Your mind would die in a delirium of hunger.

VII.

"It's a pity we can't go to his lecture," said Miss Kendal.

The train was moving out of Reyburn station. It was awful to think how nearly they had missed it. If Dr. Charles had stayed another minute at the harness-maker's.

Miss Kendal sat on the edge of the seat, very upright in her black silk mantle with the accordion-pleated chiffon frills. She had sat like that since the train began to pull, ready to get out the instant it stopped at Durlingham.

"I feel sure it's going to be all right," she said.

The white marabou feather nodded.

Her gentle mauve and sallow face was growing old, with soft curdlings and puckerings of the skin; but she still carried her head high, nodding at you with her air of gaiety, of ineffable intrigue.

"I wouldn't bring you, Mary, if I didn't feel sure."

If she had not felt sure she wouldn't have put on the grey kid gloves, the mantle and the bonnet with the white marabou feather. You don't dress like that to go shopping in Durlingham.

"You mean," Mary said, "that we shall see him."

Her heart beat calmly, stilled by the sheer incredibility of the adventure.

"Of course we shall see him. Mrs. Smythe-Caulfield will manage that. It might have been a little difficult if the Professor had been staying anywhere else. But I know Mrs. Smythe-Caulfield very well. No doubt she's arranged for you to have a long talk with him."

"Does she know what I want to see him about?"

"Well--yes--I thought it best, my dear, to tell her just what you told me, so that she might see how important it is.... There's no knowing what may come of it.... Did you bring them with you?"

"No, I didn't. If he won't look at them I should feel such an awful fool."

"Perhaps," said Miss Kendal, "it is wiser not to a.s.sume beforehand.

Nothing may come of it. Still, I can't help feeling something will....

When you're famous, Mary, I shall think of how we went into Durlingham together."

"Whatever comes of it I shall think of _you_."

The marabou feather quivered slightly.

"How long have we known each other?"

"Seventeen years."

"Is it so long?... I shall never forget the first day you came with your mother. I can see you now, Mary, sitting beside my poor father with your hand on his chair.... And that evening when you played to us, and dear Mr. Roddy was there...."

She thought: "Why can't I be kind--always? Kindness matters more than anything. Some day she'll die and she'll never have said or thought one unkind thing in all her poor, dreadful little life.... Why didn't I go to tea with her on Wednesday?"

On Wednesday her mind had revolted against its destiny of hunger. She had hated Morfe. She had felt angry with her mother for making her live in it, for expecting her to be content, for thinking that Dorsy and Miss Louisa and Miss Kendal were enough. She had been angry with Aunt Lavvy for talking about her to Miss Kendal.

Yet if it weren't for Miss Kendal she wouldn't be going into Durlingham to see Professor Lee Ramsden.

Inconceivable that she should be taken by Miss Kendal to see Professor Lee Ramsden. Yet this inconceivable thing appeared to be happening.

She tried to remember what she knew about him. He was Professor of English literature at the University of London. He had edited Anthologies and written Introductions. He had written a _History of English Literature_ from Chaucer to Tennyson and a monograph on Sh.e.l.ley.

She thought of his mind as a luminous, fiery crystal, shining.

Posters on the platform at Durlingham announced in red letters that Professor Lee Ramsden, M.A., F.R.S.L., would lecture in the Town Hall at 8 P.M. She heard Miss Kendal saying, "If it had been at three instead of eight we could have gone." She had a supreme sense of something about to happen.

Heavenly the long, steep-curved gla.s.s roof of the station, the iron arches and girders, the fanlights. Foreign and beautiful the black ca.n.a.l between the purplish rose-red walls, the white swans swaying on the black water, the red shaft of the clock-tower. It shot up high out of the Market-place, topped with the fantastically large, round, white eye of its clock.

She kept on looking up to the clock-tower. At four she would see him.

They walked about the town. They lunched and shopped. They sat in the Park. They kept on looking at the clock-tower.

At the bookseller's in the Market-place she bought a second-hand copy of Walt Whitman's _Leaves of Gra.s.s_....

A black-grey drive between bushes of s.m.u.tty laurel and arbutus. A black-grey house of big cut stones that stuck out. Gables and bow windows with sharp freestone facings that stuck out. You waited in a drawing-room stuffed with fragile mahogany and sea-green plush. Immense sea-green acanthus leaves, shaded in myrtle green, curled out from the walls. A suggestion of pictures heaved up from their places by this vigorous, thrusting growth.