Poems made of the white dust, of the wind in the green corn, of the five
trees--they would be the most beautiful poems in the world.
Sometimes the images of these things would begin to move before her with
persistence, as if they were going to make a pattern; she could hear a
thin cling-clang, a moving white pattern of sound that, when she tried to
catch it, broke up and flowed away. The image pattern and the sound
pattern belonged to each other, but when she tried to bring them together
they fell apart.
That came of reading too much Byron.
How was it that patterns of sound had power to haunt and excite you? Like
the "potnia, potnia nux" that she found in the discarded Longfellow,
stuck before his "Voices of the Night."
Potnia, potnia nux, hypnodoteira ton polyponon broton, erebothen ithi,
mole, mole katapteros ton Agamemnonion epi domon.
She wished she knew Greek; the patterns the sounds made were so hard and
still.
And there were bits of patterns, snapt off, throbbing wounds of sound
that couldn't heal. Lines out of Mark's Homer.
Mark's Greek books had been taken from her five years ago, when Rodney
went to Chelmsted. And they had come back with Rodney this Easter. They
stood on the shelf in Mark's bedroom, above his writing-table.
One day she found her mother there, dusting and arranging the books.
Besides the little shabby Oxford Homers there were an Aeschylus, a
Sophocles, two volumes of Aristophanes, clean and new, three volumes of
Euripides and a Greek Testament. On the table a well-preserved Greek
Anthology, bound in green, with the owner's name, J.C. Ponsonby, stamped
on it in gilt letters. She remembered Jimmy giving it to Mark.
She took the _Iliad_ from its place and turned over the torn, discoloured
pages.
Her mother looked up, annoyed and uneasy, like a child disturbed in the
possession of its toys.
"Mark's books are to be kept where Mark put them," she said.
"But, Mamma, I want them."
Never in her life had she wanted anything so much as those books.
"When will you learn not to want what isn't yours?"
"Mark doesn't want them, or he'd have taken them. He'd give them me if he
was here."
"He isn't here. I won't have them touched till he comes back."
"But, Mamma darling, I may be dead. I've had to wait five years as it
is."
"Wait? What for, I should like to know?"
"To learn Greek, of course."
Her mother's face shivered with repugnance. It was incredible that
anybody should hate a poor dead language so.
"Just because Mark learnt Greek, you think _you_ must try. I thought
you'd grown out of all that tiresome affectation. It was funny when you
were a little thing, but it isn't funny now."
Her mother sat down to show how tired she was of it.
"It's just silly vanity."
Mary's heart made a queer and startling movement, as if it turned over
and dashed itself against her ribs. There was a sudden swelling and
aching in her throat. Her head swam slightly. The room, Mark's room, with
Mark's white bed in one corner and Dan's white bed in the other, had
changed; it looked like a room she had never been in before. She had
never seen that mahogany washstand and the greyish blue flowers on the
jug and basin. The person sitting on the yellow-painted bedroom chair was
a stranger who wore, unaccountably, a brown dress and a gold watch-chain
with a gold tassel that she remembered. She had an odd feeling that this
person had no right to wear her mother's dress and her chain.
The flash of queerness was accompanied by a sense of irreparable
disaster. Everything had changed; she heard herself speaking, speaking
steadily, with the voice of a changed and unfamiliar person.
"Mark doesn't think it's vanity. You only think it is because you want
to."
The mind of this unfamiliar self had a remorseless lucidity that seemed
to her more shocking than anything she could imagine. It went on as if
urged by some supreme necessity. "You're afraid. Afraid."
It seemed to her that her mother really was afraid.
"Afraid? And what of?" her mother said.
The flash went out, leaving her mind dark suddenly and defeated.
"I don't know what _of_. I only know you're afraid."
"That's an awful thing for any child to say to any mother. Just because I
won't let you have your own way in everything. Until your will is
resigned to God's will I may well be afraid."
"How do you know God doesn't want me to know Greek? He may want it as
much as I do."
"And if you did know it, what good would it do you?"
She stood staring at her mother, not answering. She knew the sound
patterns were beautiful, and that was all she knew. Beauty. Beauty could
be hurt and frightened away from you. If she talked about it now she
would expose it to outrage. Though she knew that she must appear to her
mother to be stubborn and stupid, even sinful, she put her stubbornness,
her stupidity, her sinfulness, between it and her mother to defend it.
"I can't tell you," she said.
"No. I don't suppose you can."
Her mother followed up the advantage given her. "You just go about
dreaming and mooning as if there was nothing else in the wide world for
you to do. I can't think what's come over you. You used to be content to
sit still and sew by the hour together. You were more help to me when you
were ten than you are now. The other day when I asked you to darn a hole
in your own stocking you looked as if I'd told you to go to your funeral.
"It's time you began to take an interest in looking after the house.
There's enough to keep you busy most of your time if you only did the
half of it."
"Is that what you want me to be, Mamma? A servant, like Catty?"
"Poor Catty. If you were more like Catty," her mother said, "you'd be
happier than you are now, I can tell you. Catty is never disagreeable or
disobedient or discontented."
"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."
Her new self answered again, implacable in its lucidity. "You mean, if
you'd had a girl you could do what you liked with you'd have let me
alone? You'd have let me alone if you could have done what you liked with
Mark?"
She noticed, as if it had a separate and significant existence, her
mother's hand lying on the green cover of the Greek Anthology.
"If you were like Mark--if you were only like him!"
"If I only were!"
"Mark never hurt me. Mark never gave me a minute's trouble in his life."
"He went into the Army."
"He had a perfect right to go into the Army."
Silence. "Minky--you'll be kind to little Mamma." A hard, light sound;
the vexed fingers tap-tapping on the book. Her mother rose suddenly,
pushing the book from her.
"There--take Mark's books. Take everything. Go your own way. You always
have done; you always will. Some day you'll be sorry for it."
She was sorry for it now, miserable, utterly beaten. Her new self seemed
to her a devil that possessed her. She hated it. She hated the books. She
hated everything that separated her and made her different from her
mother and from Mark.
Her mother went past her to the door.
"Mamma--I didn't mean it--Mamma--"
Before she could reach the door it shut between them.