Mary Olivier: a Life Part 51

His eyes widened. Innocent, vague eyes that didn't see.

Their minds fastened on Dan, to get immunity for themselves out of his unconsciousness. As long as they could keep him downstairs, in his innocence, their misery receded from them a little way.

But Mamma would not have it so. She looked at Dan. Her eyes were dull and had no more thought in them. Her mouth quivered. They knew that she was going to say something. Their thread of safety tightened. In another minute it would snap.

"Would you like to see him?" she said.

They waited for Dan to come down from the room. He would not be the same Dan. He would have seen the white sheet raised by the high mound of the body and by the stiff, upturned feet, and he would have lifted the handkerchief from the face. He would be like them, and his consciousness would put a sharper edge on theirs. He would be afraid to look at them, as they were afraid to look at each other, because of what he had seen.

VIII.

She lay beside her mother in the strange spare room.

She had got into bed straight from her undressing. On the other side of the mattress she had seen her mother's kneeling body like a dwarfed thing trailed there from the floor, and her hands propped up on the edge of the eiderdown, ivory-white against the red and yellow pattern, and her darling bird's head bowed to her finger-tips.

The wet eyelids had lifted and the drowned eyes had come to life again in a brief glance of horror. Mamma had expected her to kneel down and pray.

In bed they had turned their backs on each other, and she had the feeling that her mother shrank from her as from somebody unclean who had omitted to wash herself with prayer. She wanted to take her mother in her arms and hold her tight. But she couldn't. She couldn't.

Suddenly her throat began to jerk with a hysterical spasm. She thought: "I wish I had died instead of Papa."

She forced back the jerk of her hysteria and lay still, listening to her mother's sad, obstructed breathing and her soft, secret blowing of her nose.

Presently these sounds became a meaningless rhythm and ceased. She was a child, dreaming. She stood on the nursery staircase at Five Elms; the coffin came round the turn and crushed her against the banisters; only this time she was not afraid of it; she made herself wake because of something that would happen next. The flagstones of the pa.s.sage were hard and cold to her naked feet; that was how you could tell you were awake.

The door of the Morfe drawing-room opened into Mamma's old bedroom at Five Elms, and when she came to the foot of the bed she saw her father standing there. He looked at her with a mocking, ironic animosity, so that she knew he was alive. She thought:

"It's all right. I only dreamed he was dead. I shall tell Mamma."

When she really woke, two ent.i.ties, two different and discordant memories, came together with a shock.

Her mother was up and dressed. She leaned over her, tucking the blankets round her shoulders and saying, "Lie still and go to sleep again, there's a good girl."

Her memory cleared and settled, filtering, as the light filtered through the drawn blinds. Mamma and she had slept together because Papa was dead.

IX.

"Mary, do you know why you're crying?"

Roddy's face was fixed in a look of anger and resentment, and of anxiety as if he were afraid that at any minute he would be asked to do something that he couldn't do.

They had come down together from the locked room, and gone into the drawing-room where the yellow blinds let in the same repulsive, greyish, ochreish light.

Her tears did not fall. They covered her eyes each with a shaking lens; the chairs and tables floated up to her as if she stood in an aquarium of thick, greyish, ochreish light.

"You think it's because you care," he said. "But it's because you don't care.... You're not as bad as I am. I don't care a bit."

"Yes, you do, or you wouldn't think you didn't."

"No. None of us really cares. Except Mamma. And even she doesn't as much as she thinks she does. If we cared we'd be glad to sit in there, doing nothing, thinking about him.... That's why we keep on going upstairs to look at him, to make ourselves feel as if we cared."

She wondered. Was that really why they did it? She thought it was because they couldn't bear to leave him there, four days and four nights, alone.

She said so. But Roddy went on in his hard, flat voice, beating out his truth.

"We never did anything to make him happy."

"He _was_ happy," she said. "When Mark went. He had Mamma."

"Yes, but he must have known about us. He must have known about us all the time."

"What did he know about us?"

"That we didn't care.

"Don't you remember," he said, "the things we used to say about him?"

She remembered. She could see Dan in the nursery at Five Elms, scowling and swearing he would kill Papa. She could see Roddy, and Mark with his red tight face, laughing at him. She could see herself, a baby, kicking and screaming when he took her in his arms. For months she hadn't thought about him except to wish he wasn't there so that she could go on playing.

When he was in the fit she had been playing on the Kendals' piano, conceited and happy, not caring.

Supposing all the time, deep down, in his secret mysterious life, _he_ had cared?

"We must leave off thinking about him," Roddy said. "If we keep on thinking we shall go off our heads."

"We _are_ off our heads," she said.

Their hatred of themselves was a biting, aching madness. She hated the conceited, happy self that hadn't cared. The piano, gleaming sombrely in the hushed light, reminded her of it.

She hated the piano.

They dragged themselves back into the dining-room where Mamma and Dan sat doing nothing, hiding their faces from each other. The afternoon went on.

Utter callousness, utter weariness came over them.

Their mother kept looking at the clock. "Uncle Victor will have got to Durlingham," she said. An hour ago she had said, "Uncle Victor will have got to York." Their minds clung to Uncle Victor as they had clung, four days ago, to Dan, because of his unconsciousness.

X.

Uncle Victor had put his arm on her shoulder. He was leaning rather heavily.

He saw what she saw: the immense coffin set up on trestles at the foot of the bed; the sheeted body packed tight in the padded white lining, the hands, curling a little, smooth and stiff, the hands of a wax figure; the firm, sallowish white face; the brown stains, like iodine, about the nostrils; the pale under lip pushed out, proudly.

A cold, thick smell, like earth damped with stagnant water, came up to them, mixed with the sharp, piercing smell of the coffin. The vigilant, upright coffin-lid leaned with its sloping shoulders against the chimney-piece, ready.

In spite of his heavy hand she was aware that Uncle Victor's consciousness of these things was different from hers. He did not appear to be in the least sorry for Papa. On his face, wistful, absorbed, there was a faint, incongruous smile. He might have been watching a child playing some mysterious game.

He sighed. His eyes turned from the coffin to the coffin-lid. He stared at the black letters on the s.h.i.+ning bra.s.s plate.

Emilius Olivier.

Born November 13th, 1827.