Mary Olivier: a Life Part 64

"I get fifteen. As long as we're here you shall have your five."

He walked home with her, carrying the books. Five. Five. And when you had finished them there would be five more. It was unbelievable.

"Why are you so nice to me? Why? _Why_?"

"I think it must be because I like you, Mary."

Utterly unbelievable.

"Do--you--_really_--like me?"

"I liked you the first day I saw you. With your brother. On Greffington Edge."

"I wonder why." She wondered what he was thinking, what, deep down inside him, he was really thinking.

"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 sc.r.a.p 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 fas.h.i.+on."

"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 friends.h.i.+p could stand the strain."

"If it wasn't just friends.h.i.+p? 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.

Sh.e.l.ley--"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, vain-glory and hypocrisy; from envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness,