“I shan’t be away forever, 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.”
Tomorrow 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.
Chapter 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.
Chapter 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.”
πότνια, πότνια νὺξ, ὑπνοδότειρα τῶν πολυπόνων βροτῶν,
ἐρεβόθεν ἴθι, μόλε, μόλε κατάπτερος
τὸν Ἀγαμεμνόνιον ἐπὶ δόμον.
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
