What had it done? What was it that they should hate it so? It had been happy and excited about them, wondering what they would be like. And quiet, looking on and listening, in the strange, green-lighted, green-dark room, crushed by the gentle, hostile voices.
Would it always have to stoop and cringe before people, hushing its own voice, hiding its own gesture?
It crouched now, stung and beaten, hiding in her body that walked beside her mother with proud feet, and small lifted head.
VII
Her mother turned at her bedroom door and signed to her to come in.
She sat down in her low chair at the head of the curtained bed. Mary sat in the window-seat.
“There’s something I want to say to you.”
“Yes, Mamma.”
Mamma was annoyed. She tap-tapped with her foot on the floor.
“Have you given up those absurd ideas of yours?”
“What absurd ideas?”
“You know what I mean. Calling yourself an unbeliever.”
“I can’t say I believe things I don’t believe.”
“Have you tried?”
“Tried?”
“Have you ever asked God to help your unbelief?”
“No. I could only do that if I didn’t believe in my unbelief.”
“You mean if you didn’t glory in it. Then it’s simply your self-will and your pride. Self-will has been your besetting sin ever since you were a little baby crying for something you couldn’t have. You kicked before you could talk.
“Goodness knows I’ve done everything I could to break you of it.”
“Yes, Mamma darling.”
She remembered. The faded green and grey curtains and the yellow birchwood furniture remembered. Mamma sat on the little chair at the foot of the big yellow bed. You knelt in her lap and played with the gold tassel while Mamma asked you to give up your will.
“I brought you up to care for God and for the truth.”
“You did. And I care so awfully for both of them that I won’t believe things about God that aren’t true.”
“And how do you know what’s true and what isn’t? You set up your little judgment against all the wise and learned people who believe as you were taught to believe. I wonder how you dare.”
“It’s the risk we’re all taking. We may every single one of us be wrong. Still, if some things are true other things can’t be. Don’t look so unhappy, Mamma.”
“How can I be anything else? When I think of you living without God in the world, and of what will happen to you when you die.”
“It’s your belief that makes you unhappy, not me.”
“That’s the cruellest thing you’ve said yet.”
“You know I’d rather die than hurt you.”
“Die, indeed! When you hurt me every minute of the day. If it had been anything but unbelief. If I even saw you humble and sorry about it. But you seem to be positively enjoying yourself.”
“I can’t help it if the things I think of make me happy. And you don’t know how nice it feels to be free.”
“Precious freedom!—to do what you like and think what you like, without caring.”
“There’s a part of me that doesn’t care and there’s a part that cares frightfully.”
The part that cared was not free. Not free. Prisoned in her mother’s bedroom with the yellow furniture that remembered. Her mother’s face that remembered. Always the same vexed, disapproving, remembering face. And her own heart, sinking at each beat, dragging remembrance. A dead child, remembering and returning.
“I can’t think where you got it from,” her mother was saying. “Unless it’s those books you’re always reading. Or was it that man?”
“What man?”
“Maurice Jourdain.”
“No. It wasn’t. What made you think of him?”
“Never you mind.”
Actually her mother was smiling and trying not to smile, as if she were thinking of something funny and improper.
“There’s one thing I must beg of you,” she said, “that whatever you choose to think, you’ll hold your tongue about it.”
“All my life? Like Aunt Lavvy?”
“There was a reason why then; and there’s a reason why now. Your father has been very unfortunate. We’re here in a new place, and the less we make ourselves conspicuous the better.”
“I see.”
She thought: “Because Papa drinks Mamma and Roddy go proud and angry; but I must stoop and hide. It isn’t fair.”
“You surely don’t want,” her mother said, “to make it harder for me than it is.”
Tears. She was beaten.
“I don’t want to make it hard for you at all.”
“Then promise me you won’t talk about religion.”
“I won’t talk about it to Mrs. Waugh.”
“Not to anybody.”
“Not to anybody who wouldn’t like it. Unless they make me. Will that do?”
“I suppose it’ll have to.”
Mamma held her face up, like a child, to be kissed.
VIII
The Sutcliffes’ house hid in the thick trees at the foot of Greffington Edge. You couldn’t see it. You could pretend it wasn’t there. You could pretend that Mr. Sutcliffe and Mrs. Sutcliffe were not there. You could pretend that nothing had happened.
There were other houses.
IX
The long house at the top of the Green was gay with rows of pink and white sun-blinds stuck out like attic roofs. The poplars in the garden played their play of falling rain.
You waited in the porch, impatient for the opening of the door.
“Mamma—what will it be like?”
Mamma smiled a naughty, pretty smile. She knew what it would be like.
There was a stuffed salmon in a long glass case in the hall. He swam, over a brown plaster river bed, glued to a milk-blue plaster stream.
You waited in the drawing-room. Drab and dying amber and the dapple of walnut wood. Chairs dressed in pallid chintz, holding out their skirts with an air of anxiety. Stuffed lovebirds on a branch under a tall glass shade. On the chimneypiece sand-white pampas grass in clear bloodred vases, and a white marble clock supporting a gilt Cupid astride over a gilt ball.
Above the Cupid, in an oval frame, the tinted crayon portrait of a young girl. A pink and blond young girl with
