Mary Olivier: a Life Part 102

My hat's in that wardrobe, lying on Richard's waistcoat, fast asleep.

If Tiedeman's flat's up there, that's Richard walking up and down over my head.... If it rains there'll be a row on the skylight and he won't sleep. He isn't sleeping now.

III.

It would be much nicer to walk home through Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park.

She was glad that they were going to have a quiet evening. After three evenings at the play and Richard ruining himself in hansoms and not sleeping.... After this unbelievable afternoon. All those people, those terribly important people.

It was amusing to go about with Richard and feel important yourself because you were with him. And to see Richard's ways with them, his nice way of behaving as if _he_ wasn't important in the least, as if it was you they had made all that fuss about.

To think that the little dried up schoolmasterish man was Professor Lee Ramsden, prowling about outside the group, eager and shy, waiting to be introduced to you, n.o.body taking the smallest notice of him. The woman who had brought him making soft, sentimental eyes at you through the gaps in the group, and trying to push him in a bit nearer. Then Richard asking you to be kind for one minute to the poor old thing. It hurt you to see him shy and humble and out of it.

And when you thought of his arrogance at Durlingham.

It was the women's voices that tired you so, and their nervous, snapping eyes.

The best of all was going away from them quietly with Richard into Kensington Gardens.

"Did you like it, Mary?"

"Frightfully. But not half so much as this."

IV.

She was all alone in the front room, stretched out on the flat couch in the corner facing the door.

He was still writing his letter in the inner room. When she heard him move she would slide her feet to the floor and sit up.

She wanted to lie still with her hands over her shut eyes, making the four long, delicious days begin again and go on in her head.

Richard _would_ take hansoms. You couldn't stop him. Perhaps he was afraid if you walked too far you would drop down dead. When it was all over your soul would still drive about London in a hansom for ever and ever, through blue and gold rain-sprinkled days, through poignant white evenings, through the streaming, steep, brown-purple darkness and the streaming flat, thin gold of the wet nights.

They were not going to have any more tiring parties. There wasn't enough time.

When she opened her eyes he was sitting on the chair by the foot of the couch, leaning forward, looking at her. She saw nothing but his loose, hanging hands and straining eyes.

"Oh, Richard--what time is it?" She swung her feet to the floor and sat up suddenly.

"Only nine."

"Only nine. The evening's nearly gone."

"Is that why you aren't sleeping, Richard? ... I didn't know. I didn't know I was hurting you."

"What-did-you-think? What-did-you-think? Isn't it hurting you?"

"Me? I've got used to it. I was so happy just being with you."

"So happy and so quiet that I thought you didn't care.... Well, what was I to think? If you won't marry me."

"That's because I care so frightfully. Don't let's rake that up again."

"Well, there it is."

She thought: "I've no business to come here to his rooms, turning him out, making him so wretched that he can't sleep. No business....

Unless--"

"And we've got to go on living with it," he said.

He thinks I haven't the courage ... I can't _tell_ him.

"Yes," she said, "there it is."

Why shouldn't I tell him? ... We've only ten days. As long as I'm here nothing matters but Richard ... If I keep perfectly still, still like this, if I don't say a word he'll think of it....

"Richard--would you rather I hadn't come?"

"No."

"You remember the evening I came--you got up so suddenly and left me?

What did you do that for?"

"Because if I'd stayed another minute I couldn't have left you at all."

He stood up.

"And you're only going now because you can't see that I'm not a coward."

This wouldn't last, the leaping and knocking of her heart, the eyelids s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g themselves tight, the jerking of her nerves at every sound: at the two harsh rattling screams of the curtain rings along the pole, at the light click of the switches. Only the small green-shaded lamp still burning on Richard's writing table in the inner room. She could hear him moving about, softly and secretly, in there.

He was Richard. That was Richard, moving about in there.

V.

Richard thought his flat was a safe place. But it wasn't. People creeping up the stairs every minute and standing still to listen. People would come and try the handle of the door.

"They won't, dear. n.o.body ever comes in. It has never happened. It isn't going to happen now."

Yet you couldn't help thinking that just this night it would happen.

She thought that Peters knew. He wouldn't come out of his door till you had turned the corner of the stairs.