  She would never get used to the house. She couldn't think why she had been such a fool as to take it. On a seven years' lease, too; it would feel like being in prison for seven years. That was the worst of moving about for a whole year in boats and trains, and staying at hotels; it gave you an unnatural longing to settle down, in a place of your own. Your own—Undying lust of possession. If you had to have things, why a house? Why six rooms when two would have done as well and left you your freedom? After all that ecstasy of space, that succession of heavenly places with singing names: Carcassone and Vezelay; Rome and Florence and San Gimignano; Marseilles and Arles and Avignon; filling up time, stretching it out, making a long life out of one year. If you could go moving on and on while time stood still. Oh this damned house. It would be you sitting still while time tore by, as it used to tear by at Morfe before Richard came, and in the three years after he had gone, when Mamma— II.It was rather attractive, when you turned the corner and came on it suddenly, flat-roofed and small, clean white and innocent. The spring twilight gave it that look of being somewhere in Italy, the look that made you fall in love with it at first sight. As for not getting used to it, that was precisely the effect she wanted: rooms that wouldn't look like anything in the house at Morfe, things that she would always come on with a faint, exquisite surprise: the worn magentaish rug on the dark polished floor, the oak table, the gentian blue chair, the thin magenta curtains letting the light through: the things Richard had given her because in their beginning they had been meant for her. Richard knew that you were safe from unhappiness, that you had never once "gone back on it," if you could be happy with his things. He had thought, too, that if you had a house you would settle down and work. You would have to; you would have to work like blazes, after spending all the money Aunt Charlotte left you on rushing about, and half the money Aunt Lavvy left you on settling down. It was horrible this living on other people's deaths. III.Catty couldn't bear it being so different. You could see she thought you were unfaithful not to have kept the piano when Mamma had played on it. Catty's faithfulness was unsurpassable. She had wanted to marry Blenkiron, the stonemason at Morfe, but first she wouldn't because of Mamma and then she wouldn't because of Miss Mary. When you told her to go back and marry him at once she would only laugh and say, "There's your husband, and there's your children. You're my child, Miss Mary. Master Roddy was Jenny's child and you was always mine." You were only ten years younger than Catty, but like Richard she couldn't see that you were old. You would never know whether Catty knew about Richard; or whether Dorsy knew. Whatever you did they would love you, Catty because you were her child, and Dorsy because you were Mark's sister. IV.The sun had been shining for a fortnight. She could sit out all day now in the garden. It was nonsense to talk about time standing still if you kept on moving. Just now, in the garden, when the light came through the thin green silk leaves of the lime tree, for a moment, while she sat looking at the lime tree, time stood still. Catty had taken away the tea-things and was going down the four steps into the house. It happened between the opening and shutting of the door. She saw that the beauty of the tree was its real life, and that its real life was in her real self and that her real self was God. The leaves and the light had nothing to do with it; she had seen it before when the tree was a stem and bare branches on a grey sky; and that beauty too was the real life of the tree. V.If she could only dream about Mark. But if she dreamed about any of them it was always Mamma. She had left her in the house by herself and she had got out of her room to the stair-head. Or they were in London at the crossing by the Bank and Mamma was frightened. She had to get her through the thick of the traffic. The horses pushed at Mamma and you tried to hold back their noses, but she sank down and slid away from you sideways under the wheel. Or she would come into this room and find her in it. At first she would be glad to see that Mamma was still there; then she would be unhappy and afraid. She would go on to a clear thought: if Mamma was still there, then she had got back somehow to Morfe. The old life was still going on; it had never really stopped. But if that was real, then this was not real. Her secure, shining life of last year and now wasn't real; nothing could make it real; her exquisite sense of it was not real. She had only thought it had happened. Nothing had happened but what had happened before; it was happening now; it would go on and on till it frightened you, till you could not bear it. When she woke up she was glad that the dream had been nothing but a dream. But that meant that you were glad Mamma was not there. The dream showed you what you were hiding from yourself. Supposing the dead knew? Supposing Mamma knew, and Mark knew that you were glad— VI.It came to her at queer times, in queer ways. After that horrible evening at the Dining Club when the secretary woman put her as far as possible from Richard, next to the little Jew financier who smelt of wine. She couldn't even hear what Richard was saying; the little wine-lapping She tried not to hate him, not to shrink back from his puffing, wine-sour breath, to be kind to him and listen and smile and remember that his real secret self was God, and was holy; not to attend to Richard's voice breaking the beat of her heart. She had gone away before Richard could get up and come to her. She wanted to be back in her house by herself. She had pushed open the French windows of the study to breathe the air of the garden and see the tall sycamore growing deep into the thick blue night. Half the room, reflected on the long pane, was thrown out into the garden. She saw it thinning away, going off from the garden into another space, existing there with an unearthly reality of its own. She had sat down at last, too tired to go upstairs, and had found herself crying, incredibly crying; all the misery, all the fear, all the boredom of her life gathered together and discharging now. "If I could get out of it all"—Her crying stopped with a start as if somebody had come in and put a hand on her shoulder. Everything went still. She had a sense of happiness and peace suddenly there with her in the room. Not so much her own as the happiness and peace of an immense, invisible, intangible being of whose life she was thus aware. She knew, somehow through It, that there was no need to get away; she was out of it all now, this minute. There was always a point where she could get out of it and into this enduring happiness and peace. VII.They were talking to-night about Richard and his wife. They said he wasn't happy; he wasn't in love with her. He never had been; she knew it; yet she took him, and tied him to her, an old woman, older than Richard, with grey hair. Oh well—she had had to wait for him longer than he waited for me, and she's in love with him still. She's making it impossible for him to see me. Then I shan't see him. I don't want him to see me if it hurts her. I don't want her to be hurt. I wonder if she knows? They know. I can hear them talking about me when …"Mary Olivier, the woman who translated Euripides." …"Mary Olivier, the woman Nicholson discovered." …"Mary Olivier, the woman who was Nicholson's mistress." Richard's mistress—I know that's what they say, but I can't feel that they're saying it about me. It must be somebody else, some woman I never heard of. VIII.Mr. Sutcliffe is dead. He died two weeks ago at Agaye. I can see now how beautiful they were; how beautiful he was, going away like that, letting her take him away so that the sight of me shouldn't hurt her. I can see that what I thought so ugly was really beautiful, their sticking to each other through it all, his faithfulness and her forgiveness, their long life of faithfulness and forgiveness. But my short life with Richard was beautiful too; my coming to him and leaving him free. I shall never go back on that; I shall never be sorry for it. The things I'm sorry for are not caring more for Papa, being unkind to Mamma, not doing enough for her, not knowing what she was really like. I'd give anything to have been able to think about her as Mark thought, to feel about her as he felt. If only I had known what she was really like. Even now I don't know. I never shall. But going to Richard—No. If it was to be done again to-morrow I'd do it. And I don't humbug myself about it. If I made Richard happy I made myself happy too; he made me happy. Still, if I had had no happiness in it, if I'd hated it, I'd have done it for Richard all the same. IX.All this religious resignation. And the paradox of prayer: people praying one minute, "Thy will be done," then praying for things to happen or not happen, just as they please. God's will be done—as if it wouldn't be done whatever they did or didn't do. God's will was your fate. The thing was to know it and not waste your strength in the illusion of resistance. If you were part of God your will was God's will at the moment when you really willed. There was always a point when you knew it: the flash point of freedom. You couldn't mistake your flash when it came. You couldn't doubt away that certainty of freedom any more than you could doubt away the certainty of necessity and determination. From the outside they were part of the show of existence, the illusion of separation from God. From the inside they were God's will, the way things were willed. Free-will was the reality underneath the illusion of necessity. The flash point of freedom was your consciousness of God. Then praying would be willing. There would be no such thing as passive prayer. There could be no surrender…. And yet there was. Not the surrender of your will, but of all the things that entangle and confuse it; that stand between it and you, between God and you. When you lay still with your eyes shut and made the darkness come on, wave after wave, blotting out your body and the world, blotting out everything but your self and your will, that was a dying to live; a real dying, a real life. The Christians got hold of real things and turned them into something unreal, impossible to believe. The grace of God was a real thing. It was that miracle of perfect happiness, with all its queerness, its divine certainty and uncertainty. The Christians knew at least one thing about it; they could see it had nothing to do with deserving. But it had nothing to do with believing, either, or with being good and getting into heaven. It was heaven. It had to do with beauty, absolutely un-moral beauty, more than anything else. She couldn't see the way of it beyond that. It had come to her when she was a child in brilliant, clear flashes; it had come again and again in her adolescence, with more brilliant and clearer flashes; then, after leaving her for twenty-three years, it had come like this—streaming in and out of her till its ebb and flow were the rhythm of her life. Why hadn't she known that this would happen, instead of being afraid that she would "go like" Aunt Charlotte or Uncle Victor? People talked a lot about compensation, but nobody told you that after forty-five life would have this exquisite clearness and intensity. Why, since it could happen when you were young—reality breaking through, if only in flashes coming and going, going altogether and forgotten—why had you to wait so long before you could remember it and be aware of it as one continuous, shining background? She had never been aware of it before; she had only thought about and about it, about Substance, the Thing-in-itself, Reality, God. Thinking was not being aware. She made it out more and more. For twenty-three years something had come between her and reality. She could see what it was now. She had gone through life wanting things, wanting people, clinging to the thought of them, not able to keep off them and let them go. X.All her life she had gone wrong about happiness. She had attached it to certain things and certain people: Mamma and Mark, Jenny, visits to Aunt Bella, the coming of Aunt Charlotte and Aunt Lavvy and Uncle Victor, the things people would say and do which they had not said and not done: when she was older she had attached it to Maurice Jourdain and to Mark still and Mamma; to going back to Mamma after Dover; to the unknown houses in Morfe; to Maurice Jourdain's coming; then to Mark's coming, to Lindley Vickers. And in the end none of these things had brought her the happiness she had seemed to foresee in them. She knew only one thing about perfect happiness: it didn't hide; it didn't wait for you behind unknown doors. There were little happinesses, pleasures that came like that: the pleasure of feeling good when you sat with Maggie's sister; the pleasure of doing things for Mamma or Dorsy; all the pleasures that had come through the Sutcliffes. The Sutcliffes went, and yet she had been happy. They had all gone, and yet she was happy. If you looked back on any perfect happiness you saw that it had not come from the people or the things you thought it had come from, but from somewhere inside yourself. When you attached it to people and things they ceased for that moment to be themselves; the space they then seemed to inhabit was not their own space; the time of the wonderful event was not their time. They became part of the kingdom of God within you. Not Richard. He had become part of the kingdom of God without ceasing to be himself. That was because she had loved him more than herself. Loving him more than herself she had let him go. Letting go had somehow done the trick. XI.I used to think there was nothing I couldn't give up for Richard. Could I give up this? If I had to choose between losing Richard and losing this? (I suppose it would be generally considered that I had lost Richard.) If I had had to choose seven years ago, before I knew, I'd have chosen Richard; I couldn't have helped myself. But if I had to choose now—knowing what reality is—between losing Richard in the way I have lost him and losing reality, absolutely and for ever, losing, absolutely and for ever, my real self, knowing that I'd lost it?… If there's anything in it at all, losing my real self would be losing Richard, losing Richard's real self absolutely and for ever. Knowing reality is knowing that you can't lose it. That or nothing. XII.Supposing there isn't anything in it? Supposing—Supposing— Last night I began thinking about it again. I stripped my soul; I opened all the windows and let my ice-cold thoughts in on the poor thing; it stood shivering between certainty and uncertainty. I tried to doubt away this ultimate passion, and it turned my doubt into its own exquisite sting, the very thrill of the adventure. Supposing there's nothing in it, nothing at all? That's the risk you take. XIII.There isn't any risk. This time it was clear, clear as the black pattern the sycamore makes on the sky. If it never came again I should remember. THE ENDProduced by Suzanne Shell, Beth Trapaga and PG Distributed Proofreaders We are now trying to release all our eBooks one year in advance of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing. Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections, even years after the official publication date. 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