She might go up to Karva Hill to look for it; but it would not be there. She couldn’t even remember what it had been like.
IV
New Year’s night. She was lying awake in her white cell.
She hated Maurice Jourdain. His wearily searching eyes made her restless. His man’s voice made her restless with its questions. “Do you know what it will be like—afterwards?” “Do you really want me?”
She didn’t want him. But she wanted Somebody. Somebody. Somebody. He had left her with this ungovernable want.
Somebody. If you lay very still and shut your eyes he would come to you. You would see him. You knew what he was like. He had Jimmy’s body and Jimmy’s face, and Mark’s ways. He had the soul of Shelley and the mind of Spinoza and Immanuel Kant.
They talked to each other. Her reverie ran first into long, fascinating conversations about Space and Time and the Thing-in-itself, and the Transcendental Ego. He could tell you whether you were right or wrong; whether Substance and the Thing-in-itself were the same thing or different.
“Die—If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek.” He wrote that. He wrote all Shelley’s poems except the bad ones. He wrote Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon. He could understand your wanting to know what the Thing-in-itself was. If by dying tomorrow, tonight, this minute, you could know what it was, you would be glad to die. Wouldn’t you?
The world was built up in Space and Time. Time and Space were forms of thought—ways of thinking. If there was thinking there would be a thinker. Supposing—supposing the Transcendental Ego was the Thing-in-itself?
That was his idea. She was content to let him have the best ones. You could keep him going for quite a long time that way before you got tired.
The nicest way of all, though, was not to be yourself, but to be him; to live his exciting, adventurous, dangerous life. Then you could raise an army and free Ireland from the English, and Armenia from the Turks. You could go away to beautiful golden cities, melting in sunshine. You could sail in the China Sea; you could get into Central Africa among savage people with queer, bloody gods. You could find out all sorts of things.
You were he, and at the same time you were yourself, going about with him. You loved him with a passionate, self-immolating love. There wasn’t room for both of you on the raft, you sat cramped up, huddled together. Not enough hard tack. While he was sleeping you slipped off. A shark got you. It had a face like Dr. Charles. The lunatic was running after him like mad, with a revolver. You ran like mad. Morfe Bridge. When he raised his arm you jerked it up and the revolver went off into the air. The fire was between his bed and the door. It curled and broke along the floor like surf. You waded through it. You picked him up and carried him out as Sister Dora carried the corpses with the smallpox. A screw loose somewhere. A tap turned on. Your mind dribbled imbecilities.
She kicked. “I won’t think. I won’t think about it any more!”
Restlessness. It ached. It gnawed, stopping a minute, beginning again, only to be appeased by reverie, by the running tap.
Restlessness. That was desire. It must be.
Desire: ἱμερος. Ἔρως. There was the chorus in the Antigone:
“Ἔρως ἀνίκατε μάχαν,
Ἔρως ὁς ἐν κτήμασι πίπτεις.”
There was Swinburne:
“… swift and subtle and blind as a flame of fire,
Before thee the laughter, behind thee the tears of desire.”
There was the song Minna Acroyd sang at the Sutcliffes’ party. “Sighing and sad for desire of the bee.” How could anybody sing such a silly song?
Through the wide open window she could smell the frost; she could hear it tingle. She put up her mouth above the bedclothes and drank down the clear, cold air. She thought with pleasure of the ice in her bath in the morning. It would break under her feet, splintering and tinkling like glass. If you kept on thinking about it you would sleep.
V
Passion Week.
Her mother was reading the Lessons for the Day. Mary waited till she had finished.
“Mamma—what was the matter with Aunt Charlotte?”
“I’m sure I don’t know. Except that she was always thinking about getting married. Whatever put Aunt Charlotte in your head?”
Her mother looked up from the Prayer Book as she closed it. Sweet and pretty; sweet and pretty; young almost, as she used to look, and tranquil.
“It’s my belief,” she said, “there wouldn’t have been anything the matter with her if your Grandmamma Olivier hadn’t spoiled her. Charlotte was as vain as a little peacock, and your Grandmamma was always petting and praising her and letting her have her own way.”
“If she’d had her own way she’d have been married, and then perhaps she wouldn’t have gone mad.”
“She might have gone madder,” said her mother. “It was a good thing for you, my dear, you didn’t get your way. I’d rather have seen you in your coffin than married to Maurice Jourdain.”
“Whoever it had been, you’d have said that.”
“Perhaps I should. I don’t want my only daughter to go away and leave me. It would be different if there were six or seven of you.”
Her mother’s complacence and tranquillity annoyed her. She hated her mother. She adored her and hated her. Mamma had married for her own pleasure, for her passion. She had brought you into the world, without asking your leave, for her own pleasure. She had brought you into the world to be unhappy. She had planned for you to do the things that she did. She cared for you only as long as you were doing them. When you left off and did other things she left off caring.
“I shall never go away and leave you,” she said.
She hated her mother and she adored her.
An hour later, when
