Then suddenly, all by itself, it shot out a cry like an arrow, a pinging, stinging, violently vibrating cry.
“I’m afraid,” Mamma said, “something’s happened to the piano.”
IV
They were turning out the cabinet drawer, when they found the bundle of letters. Mamma had marked it in her sharp, three cornered handwriting: “Correspondence, Mary.”
“Dear me,” she said, “I didn’t know I’d kept those letters.”
She slipped them from the rubber band and looked at them. You could see Uncle Victor’s on the top, then Maurice Jourdain’s. You heard the click of her tongue that dismissed those useless, unimportant things. The slim, yellowish letter at the bottom was Miss Lambert’s.
“Tt‑tt—”
“Oh, let me see that.”
She looked over her mother’s shoulder. They read together.
“We don’t want her to go. … She made us love her more in one fortnight than girls we’ve had with us for years. … Perhaps some day we may have her again.”
The poor, kind woman. The kind, dead woman. Years ago dead; her poor voice rising up, a ghostlike wail over your “unbelief.”
That was only the way she began.
“I say—I say!”
The thin voice was quivering with praise. Incredible, bewildering praise. “Remarkable.—remarkable.”—You would have thought there had never been such a remarkable child as Mary Olivier.
It came back to her. She could see Miss Lambert talking to her father on the platform at Victoria. She could see herself, excited, running up the flagged walk at Five Elms. And Mamma coming down the hall. And what happened then. The shock and all the misery that came after.
“That was the letter you wouldn’t let me read.”
“What do you mean?”
“The day I came back. I asked you to let me read it and you wouldn’t.”
“Really, Mary, you accuse me of the most awful things. I don’t believe I wouldn’t let you read it.”
“You didn’t. I remember. You didn’t want me to know—”
“Well,” her mother said, giving in suddenly, “if I didn’t, it was because I thought it would make you even more conceited than you were. I don’t suppose I was very well pleased with you at the time.”
“Still—you kept it.”
But her mother was not even going to admit that she had kept it.
She said, “I must have overlooked it. But we can burn it now.”
She carried it across the room to the fire. She didn’t want even now—even now. You saw again the old way of it, her little obstinate, triumphant smile, the look that paid you out, that said, “See how I’ve sold you.”
The violet ashen sheet clung to the furred soot of the chimney: you could still see the blenched letters.
She couldn’t really have thought it would make you conceited. That was only what she wanted to think she had thought.
“It wasn’t easy to make you pleased with me all the time. … Still, I can’t think why on earth you weren’t pleased.”
She knelt before the fire, watching the violet ashen bit of burnt-out paper, the cause, the stupid cause of it all.
Her mother had settled again, placidly, in her chair.
“Even if I was a bit conceited. … I don’t think I was, really. I only wanted to know whether I could do things. I wanted people to tell me just because I didn’t know. But even if I was, what did it matter? You must have known I loved you—desperately—all the time.”
“I didn’t know it, Mary.”
“Then you were stup—”
“Oh, say I was stupid. It’s what you think. It’s what you always have thought.”
“You were—you were, if you didn’t see it.”
“See what?”
“How I cared—I can remember—when I was a kid—the awful feeling. It used to make me ill.”
“I didn’t know that. If you did care you’d a queer way of showing it.”
“That was because I thought you didn’t.”
“Who told you I didn’t care for you?”
“I didn’t need to be told. I could see the difference.”
Her mother sat fixed in a curious stillness. She held her elbows pressed tight against her sides. Her face was hard and still. Her eyes looked away across the room.
“You were different,” she said. “You weren’t like any of the others. I was afraid of you. You used to look at me with your little bright eyes. I felt as if you knew everything I was thinking. I never knew what you’d say or do next.”
No. Her face wasn’t hard. There was something else. Something clear. Clear and beautiful.
“I suppose I—I didn’t like your being clever. It was the boys I wanted to do things. Not you.”
“Don’t—Mamma darling—don’t.”
The stiff, tight body let go its hold of itself. The eyes turned to her again.
“I was jealous of you, Mary. And I was afraid for my life you’d find it out.”
V
Eighteen ninety-eight. Eighteen ninety-nine. Nineteen hundred. Thirty-five—thirty-six—thirty-seven. Three years. Her mind kept on stretching; it held three years in one span like one year. The large rhythm of time appeased and exalted her.
In the long summers while Mamma worked in the garden she translated Euripides.
The Bacchae. You could do it after you had read Whitman. If you gave up the superstition of singing; the little tunes of rhyme. If you left off that eternal jingling and listened, you could hear what it ought to be.
Something between talking and singing. If you wrote verse that could be chanted: that could be whispered, shouted, screamed as they moved. Agave and her Maenads. Verse that would go with a throbbing beat, excited, exciting; beyond rhyme. That would be nearest to the Greek verse.
September, nineteen hundred.
Across the room she could see the pale buff-coloured magazine, on the table where, five minutes ago, Mamma had laid it down. She could see the black letters of its title and the squat column of the table of contents. The magazine with her poem in it.
And Mamma, sitting very straight, very still.
You would never know what she was thinking. She hadn’t said anything. You couldn’t
