Mary Olivier: a Life Part 44

Mary answered. "I'm rather like Dan and a good bit like Mark. But I'm most of all like myself."

Mrs. Waugh said "Oh." Her mouth went on saying it while she looked at you.

"She is not in the least like Mark," Mamma said.

They settled down, one on each side of Mamma, smiling at her with their small, faded mouths as you smile at people you love and are happy with.

You could see that Mamma was happy, too, sitting between them, safe.

Mrs. Waugh said, "I see you've got Blenkiron in again?"

"Well, he's left his ladder in the yard. I suppose that means he'll mend the kitchen chimney some time before winter."

"The Yorks.h.i.+re workmen are very independent," Mrs. Waugh said.

"They scamp their work like the rest. You'd need a resident carpenter, and a resident glazier, and a resident plumber--"

"Yes, Caroline, you would indeed."

Gentle voices saying things you had heard before in the drawing-room at Five Elms.

Miss Frewin had opened a black silk bag that hung on her arm, and taken out a minute pair of scissors and a long strip of white stuff with a st.i.tched pattern on it. She nicked out the pattern into little holes outlined by the st.i.tches. Mary watched her, fascinated by the delicate movements of the thin fingers and the slanted, drooping postures of the head.

"Do you _like_ doing it?"

"Yes."

She thought: "What a fool she must think me. As if she'd do it if she didn't like it."

The arching eyes and twitching mouth smiled at your foolishness.

Mrs. Waugh's voice went on. It came smoothly, hardly moving her small, round mouth. That was her natural voice. Then suddenly it rose, like a voice that calls to you to get up in the morning.

"Well, Mary--so you've left school. Come home to be a help to your mother."

A high, false cheerfulness, covering disapproval and reproach.

Their gentleness was cold to her and secretly inimical. They had asked her because of Mamma. They didn't really want her.

Half-past six. It was all over. They were going home across the Green.

"Mary, I wish you could learn to talk without affectation. Telling Mrs.

Waugh you 'looked like yourself'! If you could only manage to forget yourself."

Your self? Your self? Why should you forget it? You had to remember. They would kill it if you let them.

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, hus.h.i.+ng 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 G.o.d 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 ta.s.sel while Mamma asked you to give up your will.

"I brought you up to care for G.o.d and for the truth."

"You did. And I care so awfully for both of them that I won't believe things about G.o.d 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 G.o.d in the world, and of what will happen to you when you die."