Her mother turned at her bedroom door and signed to her to come in.
She sat down in her low chair at the head of the curtained bed. Mary sat
in the window-seat.
"There's something I want to say to you."
"Yes, Mamma."
Mamma was annoyed. She tap-tapped with her foot on the floor.
"Have you given up those absurd ideas of yours?"
"What absurd ideas?"
"You know what I mean. Calling yourself an unbeliever."
"I _can't_ say I believe things I don't believe."
"Have you tried?"
"Tried?"
"Have you ever asked God to help your unbelief?"
"No. I could only do that if I didn't believe in my unbelief."
"You mean if you didn't glory in it. Then it's simply your self-will and
your pride. Self-will has been your besetting sin ever since you were a
little baby crying for something you couldn't have. You kicked before you
could talk.
"Goodness knows I've done everything I could to break you of it."
"Yes, Mamma darling."
She remembered. The faded green and grey curtains and the yellow
birchwood furniture remembered. Mamma sat on the little chair at the foot
of the big yellow bed. You knelt in her lap and played with the gold
tassel while Mamma asked you to give up your will.
"I brought you up to care for God and for the truth."
"You did. And I care so awfully for both of them that I won't believe
things about God that aren't true."
"And how do you know what's true and what isn't? You set up your little
judgment against all the wise and learned people who believe as you were
taught to believe. I wonder how you dare."
"It's the risk we're all taking. We may every single one of us be wrong.
Still, if some things are true other things can't be. Don't look so
unhappy, Mamma."
"How can I be anything else? When I think of you living without God in
the world, and of what will happen to you when you die."
"It's your belief that makes you unhappy, not me."
"That's the cruellest thing you've said yet."
"You know I'd rather die than hurt you."
"Die, indeed! When you hurt me every minute of the day. If it had been
anything but unbelief. If I even saw you humble and sorry about it. But
you seem to be positively enjoying yourself."
"I can't help it if the things I think of make me happy. And you don't
know how nice it feels to be free."
"Precious freedom!--to do what you like and think what you like, without
caring."
"There's a part of me that doesn't care and there's a part that cares
frightfully."
The part that cared was not free. Not free. Prisoned in her mother's
bedroom with the yellow furniture that remembered. Her mother's face that
remembered. Always the same vexed, disapproving, remembering face. And
her own heart, sinking at each beat, dragging remembrance. A dead child,
remembering and returning.
"I can't think where you got it from," her mother was saying. "Unless
it's those books you're always reading. Or was it that man?"
"What man?"
"Maurice Jourdain."
"No. It wasn't. What made you think of him?"
"Never you mind."
Actually her mother was smiling and trying not to smile, as if she were
thinking of something funny and improper.
"There's one thing I must beg of you," she said, "that whatever you
choose to think, you'll hold your tongue about it."
"All my life? Like Aunt Lavvy?"
"There was a reason why then; and there's a reason why now. Your father
has been very unfortunate. We're here in a new place, and the less we
make ourselves conspicuous the better."
"I see."
She thought: "Because Papa drinks Mamma and Roddy go proud and angry; but
I must stoop and hide. It isn't fair."
"You surely don't want," her mother said, "to make it harder for me than
it is."
Tears. She was beaten.
"I don't want to make it hard for you at all."
"Then promise me you won't talk about religion."
"I won't talk about it to Mrs. Waugh."
"Not to anybody."
"Not to anybody who wouldn't like it. Unless they make me. Will that do?"
"I suppose it'll have to."
Mamma held her face up, like a child, to be kissed.