Mary Olivier: a Life Part 87

She lay down on her bed and listened for the strokes of the clock. She felt nothing but an immense fatigue, an appalling heaviness. Her back and arms were loaded with weights that held her body down on to the bed.

"I shall never be able to get up and tell her."

Six. Half-past. At seven she got up and went downstairs. Through the open side door she saw her mother working in the garden.

She would have to get her into the house.

"Mamma--darling."

But Mamma wouldn't come in. She was planting the last aster in the row.

She went on scooping out the hole for it, slowly and deliberately, with her trowel, and patting the earth about it with wilful hands. There was a little smudge of grey earth above the crinkles in her soft, sallow-white forehead.

"You wait," she said.

She smiled like a child pleased with itself for taking its own way.

Mary waited.

She thought: "Three hours ago I was angry with her. I was angry with her.

And Mark was dead then. And when she read his letter. He was dead yesterday."

IV.

Time was not good to you. Time was cruel. Time made you see.

Yet somehow they had gone through time. Nights of August and September when you got up before daybreak to listen at her door. Days when you did nothing. Mamma sat upright in her chair with her hands folded on her lap.

She kept her back to the window: you saw her face darkening in the dusk.

When the lamp came she raised her arm and the black shawl hung from it and hid her face. Nights of insane fear when you _had_ to open her door and look in to see whether she were alive or dead. Days when you were afraid to speak, afraid to look at each other. Nights when you couldn't sleep for wondering how Mark had died. They might have told you. They might have told you in one word. They didn't, because they couldn't; because the word was too awful. They would never say how Mark died. Mamma thought he had died of cholera.

You started at sounds, at the hiss of the flame in the grate, the fall of the ashes on the hearth, the tinkling of the front door bell.

You heard Catty slide back the bolt. People muttered on the doorstep. You saw them go back past the window, quietly, their heads turned away. They were ashamed.

You began to go out. You walked slowly, weighted more than ever by your immense, inexplicable fatigue. When you saw people coming you tried to go quicker; when you spoke to them you panted and felt absurd. A coldness came over you when you saw Mrs. Waugh and Miss Frewin with their heads on one side and their shocked, grieved faces. You smiled at them as you panted, but they wouldn't smile back. Their grief was too great. They would never get over it.

You began to watch for the Indian mail.

One day the letter came. You read blunt, jerky sentences that told you Mark had died suddenly, in the mess room, of heart failure. Captain Symonds said he thought you would want to know exactly how it happened.... "Well, we were 'c.o.c.k-fighting,' if you know what that is, after dinner. Peters is the heaviest man in our battery, and Major Olivier was carrying him on his back. We oughtn't to have let him do it.

But we didn't know there was anything wrong with his heart. He didn't know it himself. We thought he was fooling when he dropped on the floor.... Everything was done that could be done.... He couldn't have suffered.... He was happy up to the last minute of his life--shouting with laughter."

She saw the long lighted room. She saw it with yellow walls and yellow lights, with a long, white table and clear, empty wine-gla.s.ses. Men in straw-coloured bamboo armchairs turning round to look. She couldn't see their faces. She saw Mark's face. She heard Mark's voice, shouting with laughter. She saw Mark lying dead on the floor. The men stood up suddenly. Somebody without a face knelt down and bent over him.

It was as if she had never known before that Mark was dead and knew it now. She cried for the first time since his death, not because he was dead, but because he had died like that--playing.

He should have died fighting. Why couldn't he? There was the Boer War and the Khyber Pa.s.s and Chitral and the Soudan. He had missed them all. He had never had what he had wanted.

And Mamma who had cried so much had left off crying.

"The poor man couldn't have liked writing that letter, Mary. You needn't be angry with him."

"I'm not angry with him. I'm angry because Mark died like that."

"Heigh-h--" The sound in her mother's throat was like a sigh and a sob and a laugh jerking out contempt.

"You don't know what you're talking about. He's gone, Mary. If you were his mother it wouldn't matter to you how he died so long as he didn't suffer. So long as he didn't die of cholera."

"If he could have got what he wanted--"

"What's that you say?"

"If he could have got what he wanted."

"None of us ever get what we want in this world," said Mamma.

She thought: "It was her son--_her_ son she loved, not Mark's real, secret self. He's got away from her at last--altogether."

V.

She sewed.

Every day she went to the linen cupboard and gathered up all the old towels and sheets that wanted mending, and she sewed.

Her mother had a book in her lap. She noticed that if she left off sewing Mamma would take up the book and read, and when she began again she would put it down.

Her thoughts went from Mamma to Mark, from Mark to Mamma. She used to be pleased when she saw you sewing. "Nothing will ever please her now.

She'll never be happy again.... I ought to have died instead of Mark....

That's Anthony Trollope she's reading."

The long sheet kept slipping. It dragged on her arm. Her arms felt swollen, and heavy like bars of lead. She let them drop to her knees....

Little Mamma.

She picked up the sheet again.

"Why are you sewing, Mary?"

"I must do _something_."

"Why don't you take a book and read?"

"I can't read."

"Well--why don't you go out for a walk?"

"Too tired."

"You'd better go and lie down in your room."