Mary Olivier: a Life Part 72

And to-day--there was something about Mr. Sutcliffe.

"You don't want to play?"

"After tea. When it's cooler. We'll have it in here. By ourselves." He got up and rang the bell.

The tea-table between them, and she, pouring out the tea. She was grown up. Her hair was grown up. It lay like a wreath, plaited on the top of her head.

He was smoothing out the wrinkles of one hand with the other, and smiling. "Everybody busy except you and me, Mary.... How are you getting on with Kant?"

"I've done with him. It's taken me four years. You see, either the German's hard or I'm awfully stupid."

"German hard, I should imagine. Do you _like_ Kant?"

"I like him awfully when he says exciting things about s.p.a.ce and Time. I don't like him when he goes maundering on about his old Categorical Imperative. You can because you ought--putting you off, like a clergyman."

"Kant said that, did he? That shows what an old humbug he was.... And it isn't true, Mary, it isn't true."

"If it was it wouldn't prove anything. That's what bothers me."

"What bothers me is that it isn't true. If I did what I ought I'd be the busiest man in England. I wouldn't be sitting here. If I even did what I want--Do you know what I should like to do? To farm my own land instead of letting it out to these fellows here. I don't suppose you think me clever, but I've got ideas."

"What sort of ideas?"

"Practical ideas. Ideas that can be carried out. That ought to be carried out because they can. Ideas about cattle-breeding, cattle-feeding, chemical manuring, housing, labour, wages, everything that has to do with farming."

Two years ago you talked and he listened. Now that you were grown up he talked to you and you listened. He had said it would make a difference.

That was the difference it made.

"Here I am, a landowner who can't do anything with his land. And I can't do anything for my labourers, Mary. If I keep a dry roof over their heads and a dry floor under their feet I'm supposed to have done my duty....

People will tell you that Mr. Sootcliffe's the great man of the place, but half of them look down on him because he doesn't farm his own land, and the other half kow-tow to him because he doesn't, because he's the landlord. And they all think I'm a dangerous man. They don't like ideas.

They're afraid of 'em.... I'd like to sell every acre I've got here and buy land--miles and miles of it--that hasn't been farmed before. I'd show them what farming is if you bring brains to it."

"I see. You _could_ do that."

"Could I? The land's entailed. I can't sell it away from my son. And _he_'ll never do anything with it."

"Aren't there other things you could have done?"

"I suppose I could have got the farmers out. Turned them off the land they've sweated their lives into. Or I could have sold my town house instead of letting it and bought land."

"Of course you could. Oh--why didn't you?"

"Why didn't I? Ah--now you've got me. Because I'm a lazy old humbug, Mary. All my farming's in my head when it isn't on my conscience."

"You don't really like farming: you only think you ought to. What do you really like?"

"Going away. Getting out of this confounded country into the South of France. I'm not really happy, Mary, till I'm pottering about my garden at Agaye."

She looked where he was looking. Two drawings above the chimney-piece. A chain of red hills swung out into a blue sea. The Esterel. A pink and white house on the terrace of a hill. House and hill blazing out suns.h.i.+ne.

Agaye. Agaye. Pottering about his garden at Agaye. He was happy there.

"Well, you can get away. To Agaye."

"Not as much as I should like. My wife can't stand more than six weeks of it."

"So that you aren't really happy at Agaye.... I thought I was the only person who felt like that. Miserable because I've been doing my own things instead of sewing, or reading to Mamma."

"That's the way conscience makes cowards of us all."

"If it was even _my_ conscience. But it's Mamma's. And her conscience was Grandmamma's. And Grandmamma's--"

"And mine?"

"Isn't yours a sort of landlord's conscience? Your father's?"

"No. No. It's mine all right. My youth had a conscience."

"Are you sure it wasn't put off with somebody else's?"

"Perhaps. At Oxford we were all social reformers. The collective conscience of the group, perhaps. I wasn't strong enough to rise to it.

Wasn't strong enough to resist it...."

Don't you do that, my child. Find out what you want, and when you see your chance coming, take it. Don't funk it."

"I don't see _any_ chance of getting away."

"Where do you want to get away to?"

"There. Agaye."

He leaned forward. His eyes glittered. "You'd like that?"

"I'd like it more than anything on earth."

"Then," he said, "some day you'll go there."

"No. Don't let's talk about it. I shall never go."

"I don't see why not. I don't really see why not."

She shook her head. "No. That sort of thing doesn't happen."

III.

She st.i.tched and st.i.tched, making new underclothing. It was going to happen. Summer and Christmas and the New Year had gone. In another week it would happen. She would be sitting with the Sutcliffes in the Paris-Lyons-Mediterranee express, going with them to Agaye. She had to have new underclothing. They would be two days in Paris. They would pa.s.s, in the train, through Dijon, Avignon, Toulon and Cannes, then back to Agaye. She had no idea what it would be like. Only the sounds, Agaye, rose up out of the other sounds, like a song, a slender foreign song, bright and clear, that you could sing without knowing what it meant. She would stay there with the Sutcliffes, for weeks and weeks, in the pink and white house on the terrace. Perhaps they would go on into Italy.