"What are you reading, Mary?"

"The New Testament…. Extraordinary how interesting it is."

"Interesting!"

"Frightfully interesting."

"You may say what you like, Mary; you'll change your mind some day. I pray every night that you may come to Christ; and you'll find in the end you'll have to come…."

No. No. Still, he said, "The Kingdom of God is within you." If the Greek would bear it—within you.

Did they understand their Christ? Had anybody ever understood him? Their "Prince of Peace" who said he hadn't come to send peace, but a sword? The sword of the Self. He said he had come to set a man against his father and the daughter against her mother, and that because of him a man's foes should be those of his own household. "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild."

He was not meek and mild. He was only gentle with children and women and sick people. He was brave and proud and impatient and ironic. He wouldn't stay with his father and mother. He liked happy people who could amuse themselves without boring him. He liked to get away from his disciples, and from Lazarus and Martha and Mary of Bethany, and go to the rich, cosmopolitan houses and hear the tax-gatherer's talk and see the young Roman captains swaggering with their swords and making eyes at Mary of Magdala.

He was the sublimest rebel that ever lived.

He said, "The spirit blows where it wills. You hear the sound of it, but you can't tell where it comes from or where it goes to. Everybody that is born from the spirit is like that." The spirit blows where it wants to.

He said it was a good thing for them that he was going away. If he didn't the Holy Ghost wouldn't come to them; they would never have any real selves; they would never be free. They would set him up as a god outside themselves and worship Him, and forget that the Kingdom of God was within them, that God was their real self.

Their hidden self was God. It was their Saviour. Its existence was the hushed secret of the world.

Christ knew—he must have known—it was greater than he was.

It was a good thing for them that Christ died. That was how he saved them. By going away. By a proud, brave, ironic death. Not at all the sort of death you had been taught to believe in.

And because they couldn't understand a death like that, they went and made a god of him just the same.

But the Atonement was that—Christ's going away.

II.

February: grey, black-bellied clouds crawling over Greffington Edge, over Karva, swelling out: swollen bodies crawling and climbing, coming together, joining. Monstrous bodies ballooning up behind them, mounting on top of them, flattening them out, pressing them down on to the hills; going on, up and up the sky, swelling out overhead, coming together.

One cloud, grey as sink water, over all the sky, shredded here and there, stirred by slight stretchings, and spoutings of thin steam.

Then the whole mass coming down, streaming grey sink water.

She came down the twelve fields on the south slope of Karva: she could say them by heart: the field with the big gap, the field above the four firs farm, the field below the farm of the ash-tree, the bare field, the field with the thorn tree, the field with the sheep's well, the field with the wild rose bush, the steep field of long grass, the hillocky field, the haunted field with the ash grove, the field with the big barn, the last field with the gap to the road.

She thought of her thirty-four years; of the verses she had sent to the magazines and how they had come back again; of the four farms on the hill, of the four tales not written.

The wet field grasses swept, cold, round her ankles.

Mamma sat waiting in her chair, in the drawing-room, in the clear, grey, glassy dusk of the cross-lights. She waited for the fine weather to come when she would work again in the garden. She waited for you to come to her. Her forehead unknitted itself; her dove's eyes brightened; she smiled, and the rough feathers of her eyebrows lay down, appeased.

At the opening of the door she stirred in her chair. She was glad when you came.

Catty brought in the lamp. When she turned up the wick the rising flame carved Mamma's face out of the dusk. Her pretty face, delicately dinted, whitened with a powdery down; stained with faint bistres of age. Her little, high-bridged nose stood up from the softness, clear and young, firm as ivory.

The globed light showed like a ball of fire, hung out in the garden, on the black, glassy darkness, behind the pane. Catty drew down the blind and went. You heard the click of the latch falling to behind her. The evening had begun.

They took up their books. Mamma hid her face behind Anthony Trollope, Mary hers behind Thomas Hardy. Presently she would hear Mamma sigh, then yawn.

Horrible tension.

Under the edge of her book she would see Anthony Trollope lying in Mamma's lap and Mamma's fingers playing with the fringe of her shawl. She would put Thomas Hardy down and take up Anthony Trollope and read aloud till Mamma's head began bowing in a doze. Then she would take up Thomas Hardy. When Mamma waked Hardy would go down under Trollope; when she dozed he would come to the top again.

After supper Mamma would be wide awake. She would sit straight up in her chair, waiting, motionless, ready. You would pick up your book but you would have no heart in it. You knew what she wanted. She knew that you knew. You could go on trying to read if you chose; but she would still sit there, waiting. You would know what she was thinking of.

The green box in the cabinet drawer.

The green box. You began to think of it, too, hidden, hidden in the cabinet drawer. You were disturbed by the thought of the green box, of the little figures inside it, white and green. You would get up and go to the cabinet drawer.

Mamma would put out her hands on the table, ready. She smiled with shut lips, pouting, half ashamed, half delighted. You would set out the green and white chequer board, the rows of pawns. And the game of halma would begin. White figures leap-frogging over green, green over white. Your hand and your eyes playing, your brain hanging inert, remembering, forgetting.

In the pauses of the game you waited; for the clock to strike ten, for
Catty to bring in the Bible and the Prayer-book, for the evening to end.
Old verses, old unfinished verses, coming and going.

In the long pauses of the game, when Mamma sat stone-still, hypnotised by the green and white chequers, her curved hand lifted, holding her pawn, her head quivering with indecision.

In dreams He has made you wise
With the wisdom of silence and prayer….

Coming and going, between the leap-frogging of the green figures and the white.

God, Who has blinded your eyes
With the dusk of your hair….

Brown hair, sleek and thin, brown hair that wouldn't go grey.

And the evening would go on, soundless and calm, with soft, annihilating feet, with the soft, cruel feet of oblivion.

III.

One day, when she came in, she heard the sound of the piano. The knocking of loose hammers on dead wires, the light, hacking clang of chords rolling like dead drum taps: Droom—Droom, Droom-era-room.

Alone in the dusk, Mamma was playing the Hungarian March, bowing and swaying as she played.

When the door opened she started up, turning her back on the piano, frightened, like a child caught in a play it is ashamed of. The piano looked mournful and self-conscious.

Then suddenly, all by itself, it shot out a cry like an arrow, a pinging, stinging, violently vibrating cry.

"I'm afraid," Mamma said, "something's happened to the piano."

IV.

They were turning out the cabinet drawer, when they found the bundle of letters. Mamma had marked it in her sharp, three cornered hand-writing: "Correspondence, Mary."

"Dear me," she said, "I didn't know I'd kept those letters."

She slipped them from the rubber band and looked at them. You could see Uncle Victor's on the top, then Maurice Jourdain's. You heard the click of her tongue that dismissed those useless, unimportant things. The slim, yellowish letter at the bottom was Miss Lambert's.

"Tt-tt—"

"Oh, let me see that."

She looked over her mother's shoulder. They read together.

"We don't want her to go…. She made us love her more in one fortnight than girls we've had with us for years…. Perhaps some day we may have her again."

The poor, kind woman. The kind, dead woman. Years ago dead; her poor voice rising up, a ghostlike wail over your "unbelief."

That was only the way she began.

"I say—I say!"

The thin voice was quivering with praise. Incredible, bewildering praise. "Remarkable.—remarkable".—You would have thought there had never been such a remarkable child as Mary Olivier.

It came back to her. She could see Miss Lambert talking to her father on the platform at Victoria. She could see herself, excited, running up the flagged walk at Five Elms. And Mamma coming down the hall. And what happened then. The shock and all the misery that came after.

"That was the letter you wouldn't let me read."

"What do you mean?"

"The day I came back. I asked you to let me read it and you wouldn't."

"Really, Mary, you accuse me of the most awful things. I don't believe I wouldn't let you read it."

"You didn't. I remember. You didn't want me to know—"

"Well," her mother said, giving in suddenly, "if I didn't, it was because I thought it would make you even more conceited than you were. I don't suppose I was very well pleased with you at the time."

"Still—you kept it."

But her mother was not even going to admit that she had kept it.

She said, "I must have overlooked it. But we can burn it now."

She carried it across the room to the fire. She didn't want even now—even now. You saw again the old way of it, her little obstinate, triumphant smile, the look that paid you out, that said, "See how I've sold you."

The violet ashen sheet clung to the furred soot of the chimney: you could still see the blenched letters.

She couldn't really have thought it would make you conceited. That was only what she wanted to think she had thought.

"It wasn't easy to make you pleased with me all the time…. Still, I can't think why on earth you weren't pleased."

She knelt before the fire, watching the violet ashen bit of burnt-out paper, the cause, the stupid cause of it all.

Her mother had settled again, placidly, in her chair.

"Even if I was a bit conceited…. I don't think I was, really. I only wanted to know whether I could do things. I wanted people to tell me just because I didn't know. But even if I was, what did it matter? You must have known I loved you—desperately—all the time."

"I didn't know it, Mary."

"Then you were stup—"

"Oh, say I was stupid. It's what you think. It's what you always have thought."

"You were—you were, if you didn't see it."

"See what?"

"How I cared—I can remember—when I was a kid—the awful feeling. It used to make me ill."

"I didn't know that. If you did care you'd a queer way of showing it."

"That was because I thought you didn't."

"Who told you I didn't care for you?"

"I didn't need to be told. I could see the difference."

Her mother sat fixed in a curious stillness. She held her elbows pressed tight against her sides. Her face was hard and still. Her eyes looked away across the room.

"You were different," she said. "You weren't like any of the others. I was afraid of you. You used to look at me with your little bright eyes. I felt as if you knew everything I was thinking. I never knew what you'd say or do next."

No. Her face wasn't hard. There was something else. Something clear.
Clear and beautiful.

"I suppose I—I didn't like your being clever. It was the boys I wanted to do things. Not you."

"Don't—Mamma darling—don't."

The stiff, tight body let go its hold of itself. The eyes turned to her again.

"I was jealous of you, Mary. And I was afraid for my life you'd find it out."

V.

Eighteen ninety-eight. Eighteen ninety-nine. Nineteen hundred. Thirty-five—thirty-six—thirty-seven. Three years. Her mind kept on stretching; it held three years in one span like one year. The large rhythm of time appeased and exalted her.

In the long summers while Mamma worked in the garden she translated Euripides.

The Bacchae. You could do it after you had read Whitman. If you gave up the superstition of singing; the little tunes of rhyme. If you left off that eternal jingling and listened, you could hear what it ought to be.

Something between talking and singing. If you wrote verse that could be chanted: that could be whispered, shouted, screamed as they moved. Agave and her Maenads. Verse that would go with a throbbing beat, excited, exciting; beyond rhyme. That would be nearest to the Greek verse.

* * * * *

September, nineteen hundred.

Across the room she could see the pale buff-coloured magazine, on the table where, five minutes ago, Mamma had laid it down. She could see the black letters of its title and the squat column of the table of contents. The magazine with her poem in it.

And Mamma, sitting very straight, very still.

You would never know what she was thinking. She hadn't said anything. You couldn't tell whether she was glad or sorry; or whether she was afraid.

The air tingled with the thought of the magazine with your poem in it.
But you would never know what she was thinking.

VI.

A long letter from Uncle Edward. Uncle Edward was worrying Mamma.

"He never could get on with your poor father. Or your Uncle Victor. He did his best to prevent him being made trustee…. And now he comes meddling, wanting to upset all their arrangements."

"Why?"

"Just because poor Victor's business isn't doing quite so well as it did."

"Yes, but why's he bothering you about it?"

"Well, he says I ought to make another will, leaving half the boys' money to you. That would be taking it from Dan. He always had a grudge against poor Dan."

"But you mustn't do anything of the sort."

"Well—he knows your father provided for you. You're to have the Five Elms money that's in your Uncle Victor's business. You'd suppose, to hear him talk, that it wasn't safe there."

"Just tell him to mind his own business," Mary said.

"Actually," Mamma went on, "advising me not to pay back any more of
Victor's money. I shall tell him I sent the last of it yesterday."

There would be no more debts to Uncle Victor. Mark had paid back his; Mamma had paid back Roddy's, scraping and scraping, Mark and Mamma, over ten years, over twenty.

A long letter from Uncle Victor. Uncle Victor was worrying Mamma.

"Don't imagine that I shall take this money. I have invested it for you, in sound securities. Not in my own business. That, I am afraid I ought to tell you, is no longer a sound security."

"Poor Victor—"

"It almost looks," Mamma said, "as if Edward might be right."

So right that in his next letter Uncle Victor prepared you for his bankruptcy.

"It will not affect you and Mary," he wrote. "I may as well tell you now that all the Five Elms money has been reinvested, and is safe. As for myself, I can assure you that, after the appalling anxiety of the last ten years, the thought of bankruptcy is a relief. A blessed relief, Caroline."

All through September and October the long letters came from Uncle
Victor.

Then Aunt Lavvy's short letter that told you of his death.

Then the lawyer's letters.

It seemed that, after all, Uncle Victor had been mistaken. His affairs were in perfect order.

Only the Five Elms money was gone; and the money Mark and Mamma had paid back to him. He had taken it all out of his own business, and put it into the Sheba Mines and Joe's Reef, and the Golconda Company where he thought it would be safe.

The poor dear. The poor dear.

VII.

So that you knew—

Mamma might believe what Aunt Lavvy told her, that he had only gone to look out of the window and had turned giddy. Aunt Lavvy might believe that he didn't know what he was doing.

But you knew.

He had been afraid. Afraid. He wouldn't go up to the top-landing after they took Aunt Charlotte away; because he was afraid.

Then, at last, after all those years, he had gone up. When he knew he was caught in the net and couldn't get out. He had found that they had moved the linen cupboard from the window back into the night nursery. And he had bolted the staircase door on himself. He had shut himself up. And the great bare, high window was there. And the low sill. And the steep, bare wall, dropping to the lane below.

END OF BOOK FOUR