“Perhaps it was because you wanted something I could give you. … Tennis. … You wanted it so badly. Everything you want you want so badly.”
“And I never knew we were going to be such friends.”
“No more did I. And I don’t know now how long it’s going to last.”
“Why shouldn’t it last?”
“Because next year ‘Mark’ will have come home and you’ll have nothing to say to me.”
“Mark won’t make a scrap of difference.”
“Well—if it isn’t ‘Mark’ … You’ll grow up, Mary, and it won’t amuse you to talk to me any more. I shan’t know you. You’ll wear long skirts and long hair done in the fashion.”
“I shall always want to talk to you. I shall never do up my hair. I cut it off because I couldn’t be bothered with it. But I was sold. I thought it would curl all over my head, and it didn’t curl.”
“It curls at the tips,” Mr. Sutcliffe said. “I like it. Makes you look like a jolly boy, instead of a dreadful, unapproachable young lady. A little San Giovanni. A little San Giovanni.”
That was his trick: caressing his own words as if he liked them.
She wondered what, deep down inside him, he was really like.
“Mr. Sutcliffe—if you’d known a girl when she was only fourteen, and you liked her and you never saw her again till she was seventeen, and then you found that she’d gone and cut her hair all off, would it give you an awful shock?”
“Depends on how much I liked her.”
“If you’d liked her awfully—would it make you leave off liking her?”
“I think my friendship could stand the strain.”
“If it wasn’t just friendship? Supposing it was Mrs. Sutcliffe?”
“I shouldn’t like my wife to cut her hair off. It wouldn’t be at all becoming to her.”
“No. But when she was young?”
“Ah—when she was young—”
“Would it have made any difference?”
“No. No. It wouldn’t have made any difference at all.”
“You’d have married her just the same?”
“Just the same, Mary. Why?”
“Oh, nothing. I thought you’d be like that. I just wanted to make sure.”
He smiled to himself. He had funny, secret thoughts that you would never know.
“Well,” she said, “I didn’t beat you.”
“Form not good enough yet—quite.”
He promised her it should be perfect by the time Mark came home.
VIII
“The pale pearl-purple evening—” The words rushed together. She couldn’t tell whether they were her own or somebody else’s.
There was the queer shock of recognition that came with your own real things. It wasn’t remembering though it felt like it.
Shelley—“The pale purple even.” Not pearl-purple. Pearl-purple was what you saw. The sky to the east after sunset above Greffington Edge. Take out “pale,” and “pearl-purple evening” was your own.
The poem was coming by bits at a time. She could feel the rest throbbing behind it, an unreleased, impatient energy.
Her mother looked in at the door. “What are you doing it for, Mary?”
“Oh—for nothing.”
“Then for pity’s sake come down into the warm room and do it there. You’ll catch cold.”
She hated the warm room.
The poem would be made up of many poems. It would last a long time, through the winter and on into the spring. As long as it lasted she would be happy. She would be free from the restlessness and the endless idiotic reverie of desire.
IX
“From all blindness of heart; from pride, vainglory and hypocrisy; from envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness,
“Good Lord, deliver us.”
Mary was kneeling beside her mother in church.
“From fornication, and all other deadly sin—”
Happiness, the happiness that came from writing poems; happiness that other people couldn’t have, that you couldn’t give to them; happiness that was no good to Mamma, no good to anybody but you, secret and selfish; that was your happiness. It was deadly sin.
She felt an immense, intolerable compassion for everybody who was unhappy. A litany of compassion went on inside her: For old Dr. Kendal, sloughing and rotting in his chair; for Miss Kendal; for all women labouring of child; for old Mrs. Heron; for Dorsy Heron; for all prisoners and captives; for Miss Louisa Wright; for all that were desolate and oppressed; for Maggie’s sister, dying of cancer; and for Mamma, kneeling there, praying.
Sunday after Sunday.
And she would work in the garden every morning, digging in leaf mould and carrying the big stones for the rockery; she would go to Mrs. Sutcliffe’s sewing parties; she would sit for hours with Maggie’s sister, trying not to look as if she minded the smell of the cancer. You were no good unless you could do little things like that. You were no good unless you could keep on doing them.
She tried to keep on.
Some people kept on all day, all their lives. Still, it was not you so much as the world that was wrong. It wasn’t fair and right that Maggie’s sister should have cancer while you had nothing the matter with you. Or even that Maggie had to cook and scrub while you made poems.
Not fair and right.
X
“Mamma, what is it? Why are you in the dark?”
By the firelight she could see her mother sitting with her eyes shut, and her hands folded in her lap.
“I can’t use my eyes. I think there must be something the matter with them.”
“Your eyes? … Do they hurt?”
(You might have known—you might have known that something would happen. While you were upstairs, writing, not thinking of her. You might have known.)
“Something hurts. Just there. When I try to read. I must be going blind.”
“Are you sure it isn’t your glasses?”
“How can it be my glasses? They never hurt me before.”
But the oculist in Durlingham said it was her glasses. She wasn’t going blind. It wasn’t likely that she ever would go blind.
For a week before the new glasses came Mamma sat, patient and gentle, in her chair, with her eyes shut and her hands folded in her lap. And you read aloud to her: the Bible and The Times in the morning, and
