Mary Olivier: A Life quotes

The curtain of the big bed hung down beside the cot.

When old Jenny shook it the wooden rings rattled on the pole and grey men with pointed heads and squat, bulging bodies came out of the folds on to the flat green ground.

you could feel her purr throbbing under her ribs and crackling in her throat. The white rabbit pushed out his nose to you and drew it in again, quivering, and breathed his sweet breath into your mouth.

The garden flowers wouldn’t let you love them.

They stood still in their beauty, quiet, arrogant, reproachful. They put you in the wrong. When you stroked them they shook and swayed from you; when you held them tight their heads dropped, their backs broke, they shrivelled up in your hands.

Mamma took her in her lap. She lowered her head to you, holding it straight and still, ready to pounce if you said the wrong thing.

“Being good when it pleases you isn’t being good,” she said.

“It’s not what Jesus means by being good. God wants us to be good all the time, like Jesus.”

A delicious thrill of danger went through her and out at her fingers. She flung herself into space and Mark caught her. His body felt hard and strong as it received her. They did it again and again.

That was the “faith-jump.” You knew that you would be killed if Mark didn’t catch you, but you had faith that he would catch you; and he always did.

Mark and Dan were going to school at Chelmsted on the thirteenth of September, and it was the last week in August now. Mark and Mamma were always looking for each other. Mamma would come running up to the schoolroom and say, “Where’s Mark?

Mark loved Mamma; but he was not going to do what she wanted. He was going to do something that would kill her.

Papa walked in the garden in the cool of the evening, like the Lord God.

And he was always alone. When you thought of him you thought of Jehovah.

It excited you to think these things. But when you heard the “Magnificat” in church, or when you thought of Christ hanging so bravely on the cross you were sorry and you stopped thinking.

What a pity you couldn’t ever go on without having to stop.

Deep brown under the tunnel, tawny in the shallow ford, golden patches where the pebbles showed through, and the water itself, a sheet of thin crystal, running over the colours, sliding through them, running and sliding on and on.

There was nothing in the world so beautiful as water, unless it was light. But water was another sort of light.

Bertha pushed her soft sallow face into yours. Her big black eyes bulged out under her square fringe. Her wide red mouth curled and glistened. There were yellowish stains about the roots of her black hair.

It was dreadful and at the same time funny when you thought of Mr. Batty and Mr. Propart with their little round hats and their black coats and their stiff, dignified faces. And there was Uncle Edward and his whiskers. It couldn’t be true.

Yet all true things came like that, with a queer feeling, as if you remembered them.

Jenny’s wedding dress. It would be true even of Jenny. Mamma had said she would rather see her in her coffin than married to Mr. Spall. That was why.

He was what you had felt and thought him to be as soon as you could think about him at all. The God of Baruch Spinoza was the God you had wanted, the only sort of God you cared to think about.

Thinking about him⁠—after the Christian God⁠—was like coming out of a small dark room into an immense open space filled with happy light.

And yet, as far back as you could remember, there had been a regular conspiracy to keep you from knowing the truth about God. Even the Encyclopaedia man was in it. He tried to put you off Pantheism.

“Nothing,” he said. “Only—good night.”

Tomorrow no lingering and no words.

Mark’s feet quick in the passage. A door shut to, a short, crushing embrace before he turned from her to her mother.

“No. But perhaps Catty’s mother thinks she is.”

She thought: She is afraid.

“Do you suppose,” her mother said, “it’s any pleasure to me to find fault with my only daughter? If you weren’t my only daughter, perhaps I shouldn’t find fault.”

Colours were more beautiful than white radiance. But that was because of the light.

The more light there was in them the more beautiful they were; it was their real life.

One afternoon Mr. Propart called. He came into the library to borrow a book.

His shoulders and eyebrows lifted; he made a queer movement with his hands, palms outwards. He stood still in the path, turned to her, straight and tall. He looked down at her; his lips jerked; the hard, sharp smile bared narrow teeth.

“The more you do for people the less they love you,” he said.

“Your people must be very funny.”

“I suppose,” he said, “I must shut the prison door.”

They looked at each other through the bars and laughed.

“When shall I see you again?” he said.

She went upstairs to her room. She leaned on the sill of the open window, looking out, drinking in the sweet air of the autumn fields. The five elms raised golden heads to a blue sky.

Her childhood had died with a little gasp.

Catty came in to unpack her box. Catty, with wet cheeks, kissed a dead child.

Catty came in to unpack her box.

Catty, with wet cheeks, kissed a dead child.

Garthdale in front of it, Rathdale at its side, meeting in the fields below its bridge.

Morfe was beautiful. She loved it with love at first sight, faithless to Ilford.

Straight, naked houses. Grey walls of houses, enclosing the wide oblong Green. Dark grey stone roofs, close-clipped lest the wind should lift them. On the Green two grey stone pillar fountains; a few wooden benches; telegraph poles.

A streak of grey hair showed above each ear. Grey patches in his brown beard. Scarlet smears in the veined sallow of his eyes. His bursting, violent life had gone. He went stooping and shuffling. The house was too small for Papa.

He turned in it as a dog turns in his kennel, feeling for a place to stretch himself.

He said, “Where’s your mother? I want her.”

They were sitting on a ledge of stone and turf. Roddy had ceased to struggle with the hill.

“We’re all the same,” he said. “I’d give you and Dan up any day for Mark. Dan would give up you and me. Mark would give up all of us for Mamma. And Mamma would give up all of us for Mark.”

Roddy had never said anything like that before.

“Mary, I wish you could learn to talk without affectation. Telling Mrs. Waugh you ‘looked like yourself’! If you could only manage to forget yourself.”

Your self? Your self? Why should you forget it? You had to remember. They would kill it if you let them.

What had it done? What was it that they should hate it so? It had been happy and excited about them, wondering what they would be like. And quiet, looking on and listening, in the strange, green-lighted, green-dark room, crushed by the gentle, hostile voices.

What had it done? What was it that they should hate it so? It had been happy and excited about them, wondering what they would be like. And quiet, looking on and listening, in the strange, green-lighted, green-dark room, crushed by the gentle, hostile voices.

Would it always have to stoop and cringe before people, hushing its own voice, hiding its own gesture?

It crouched now, stung and beaten, hiding in her body that walked beside her mother with proud feet, and small lifted head.

He looked at you with small grey eyes blinking under weak lids and bared the shark’s tooth, smiling.

A kind, hungry shark.

“They must have starved you at your school. No? Then they made you study too hard. Kate—what d’you think Bill Acroyd’s done now? Turned this year’s heifers out along of last year’s with the ringworm. And asks me how I think they get it.

Outside the village, the schoolhouse lane, a green trench sunk between stone walls, went up and up, turning three times. At the top of the last turn a gate.

When you had got through the gate you were free.

It led on to the wide, flat half-ring of moor that lay under Karva. The moor and the high mound of the hill were free; they had slipped from the net of the walls.

But you could remember what it had been like. Low, tilled fields, thin trees; sharp, queer, uncertain beauty. Sharp, queer, uncertain happiness, coming again and again, never twice to the same place in the same way. It hurt you when you remembered it.

The beauty of the hills was not like that. It stayed. It waited for you, keeping faith.

Day after day, night after night, it was there.

They knew about Mr. James now. His mind hadn’t grown since he was five years old. He could do nothing but walk. Martha, the old servant, dressed and undressed him.

“I shall have to go,” Roddy said. “If I stay here I shall look like Mr. James. I shall walk with my arms bowed out, Catty’ll dress and undress me.”

She wondered. Was that really why they did it? She thought it was because they couldn’t bear to leave him there, four days and four nights, alone. She said so. But Roddy went on in his hard, flat voice, beating out his truth.

“We never did anything to make him happy.”

“He was happy,” she said. “When Mark went. He had Mamma.”

“We must leave off thinking about him,” Roddy said. “If we keep on thinking we shall go off our heads.”

“We are off our heads,” she said.

Their hatred of themselves was a biting, aching madness. She hated the conceited, happy self that hadn’t cared. The piano, gleaming sombrely in the hushed light, reminded her of it.

The grip on her shoulder tightened.

“He was faithful, Mary.”

He said it as if he were telling her something she couldn’t possibly have known.

“If he’s there, he’s there anyhow.”

“Until everything’s taken away there isn’t room to see that he’s there.”

When Catty came in with the lamp Aunt Lavvy went out quickly.

There had been two Maurice Jourdains, the one who said, “I’ll understand. I’ll never lose my temper”; the one with the crystal mind, shining and flashing, the mind like a big room filled from end to end with light. But he had never existed.

Maurice Jourdain was only a name. A name for intellectual beauty.

You could love that. Love was “the cle‑eansing fi-yer!” There was the love of the body and the love of the soul. Perhaps she had loved Maurice Jourdain with her soul and not with her body. No.

“I shall never go away and leave you,” she said.

She hated her mother and she adored her.

An hour later, when she found her in the garden kneeling by the violet bed, weeding it, she knelt down beside her, and weeded too.

She went to bed, happy, thinking of the tiger and the mutiny. When Catty called her in the morning she jumped out of bed, quickly, to begin another happy day. Everything was going to be interesting, to be exciting.

At any minute anything might happen, now that Mark had come home.

She was tired of waiting on the flagstones, swinging her stick. She called through the house for him to come. She looked through the rooms, and found him in the study with Mamma.

That’s her real self. I adore it. Selves are sacred. You ought to adore them. Anybody’s self. Catty’s. … I used to wonder what the sin against the Holy Ghost was. They told you nobody knew what it was. I know. It’s that.

Not adoring the self in people. Hating it. Trying to crush it.

”

“Why do you say she’s the sanest?”

“Because she knew what she wanted.”

“Yes. She knew what she wanted. She spent her whole life trying to get it. She went straight for that one thing. Didn’t care a hang what anybody thought of her.”

And in the end you were cheated. You would never know the only thing worth knowing. Reality. For all you knew there was no Reality, no God, no freedom, no immortality. Only doing your duty. “You can because you ought.”

Kant, when you got to the bottom of him, was no more exciting than Mamma.

“Du kannst, weil du sollst.”

“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.

”

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.”

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.

“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.”

As long as she lived in Morfe there would be nothing—apart from her real, secret life there would be nothing—to look forward to but that. If it was not Miss Kendal it would be Miss Louisa or Dorsy or old Mrs. Heron.

People talked about dying of boredom who didn’t know that you could really die of it.

If only you didn’t keep on wanting somebody—somebody who wasn’t there. If, before it killed you, you could kill the desire to know another mind, a luminous, fiery crystal, to see it turn, shining and flashing.

… 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

And Mr. Spencer Rollitt. He was proud because Richard Nicholson had asked him about a secretary and he had recommended you.

Funny that people could go on disapproving of you for twenty years, and then suddenly approve because of Richard Nicholson.

And Mamma. Mamma thought you wonderful and important, too.

“Oh, but you don’t know how kind.”

“Kind? Good Lord, yes. There are millions of kind people in the world. It’s possible to be kind and at the same time not entirely brainless.”

“He wouldn’t mind that. He wouldn’t think she was brainless—”

Dorsy Heron’s otter brown hair was striped with grey; her nose stood up sharp and bleak in her red, withering face; her sharp, tender mouth drooped at the corners. She was forty-nine.

It was cruel, cruel, cruel; it hurt you to see them.

Rather than own it was cruel they went about pulling faces and pretending they were happy. Their gestures had become exaggerated, tricks that they would never grow out of, that gave them the illusion of their youth.

But she had been horribly old at nineteen. She could remember what it had felt like, the desperate, middle-aged sadness, the middle-aged certainty that nothing interesting would ever happen.

She had got hold of life at the wrong end.

And all the time her youth had been waiting for her at the other end, at the turn of the unknown road, at thirty-nine. All through the autumn and winter Richard Nicholson had kept on writing.

“I know,” he said. “My uncle would let you do anything you liked if you were young enough. He ought to have had children of his own. They’d have kept him out of mischief.”

“I can’t think,” she said to the surrounding hills, “why people get into mischief, or why they go and kill themselves. When they can ride bicycles instead.”

Mamma was sitting upright and averted, with an air of self-conscious effacement, holding the thin white book before her like a fan.

“If that’s what comes of your publishing I’d rather your books were sunk to the bottom of the sea. I’d rather see you in your coffin.”

“I am in my coffin.”

“I wish I were in mine,” her mother said.