Lindley Vickers had gone. Nothing was left of him but Mamma's silence and
Dan's, and Nannie's flush as she slunk by and her obscene smirk of
satisfaction.
Then Nannie forgot him. As if nothing had happened she hung about Horn's
yard and the Back Lane, waiting for young Horn. She smiled her trusting
smile again. As long as you lived in Morfe you would remember.
Mary didn't blame her mother and Dan for their awful attitude. She
couldn't blink the fact that she had begun to care for a man who was no
better than young Horn, who had shown her that he didn't care for her by
going to Nannie. If he could go to Nannie he was no better than young
Horn.
She thought of Lindley's communion with Nannie as a part of him,
essential, enduring. Beside it, her own communion with him was not quite
real. She remembered his singing; she remembered playing to him and
sitting beside him on the bracken as you remember things that have
happened to you a long time ago (if they had really happened). She
remembered phrases broken from their context (if they had ever had a
context): "Das man vom liebsten was man hat...." "If you don't know I
can't tell you--Dear." ... "And when--when--Then you won't think, you'll
_know_."
She said to herself, "I must have been mad. It couldn't have happened. I
must have made it up."
But, if you made up things like that you _were_ mad. It was what Aunt
Charlotte had done. She had lived all her life in a dream of loving and
being loved, a dream that began with clergymen and ended with the
piano-tuner and the man who did the clocks. Mamma and Dan knew it. Uncle
Victor knew it and he had been afraid. Maurice Jourdain knew it and he
had been afraid. Perhaps Lindley Vickers knew it, too.
There must be something in heredity. She thought: "If there is I'd rather
face it. It's cowardly not to."
Lindley Vickers had told her what to read. Herbert Spencer she knew.
Haeckel and Ribot were in the London Library Catalogue at Greffington
Hall. And Maudsley: she had seen the name somewhere. It was perhaps lucky
that Mr. Sutcliffe had gone abroad early this year; for he had begun to
follow her through Balzac and Flaubert and Maupassant, since when he had
sometimes interfered with her selection.
The books came down in two days: Herbert Spencer's _First Principles_,
the _Principles of Biology_, the _Principles of Psychology_; Haeckel's
_History of Evolution_; Maudsley's _Body and Mind, Physiology and
Pathology of Mind, Responsibility in Mental Disease_; and Ribot's
_Heredity_. Your instinct told you to read them in that order,
controlling personal curiosity.
For the first time in her life she understood what Spinoza meant by "the
intellectual love of God." She saw how all things work together for good
to those who, in Spinoza's sense, love God. If it hadn't been for Aunt
Charlotte and Lindley Vickers she might have died without knowing
anything about the exquisite movements and connections of the live world.
She had spent most of her time in the passionate pursuit of things under
the form of eternity, regardless of their actual behaviour in time. She
had kept on for fifteen years trying to find out the reality--if there
was any reality--that hid behind appearances, piggishly obtuse to the
interest of appearances themselves. She had cared for nothing in them but
their beauty, and its exciting play on her emotions. When life brought
ugly things before her she faced them with a show of courage, but
inwardly she was sick with fear.
For the first time she saw the ugliest facts take on enchantment, a
secret and terrible enchantment. Dr. Mitchell's ape-faced idiot; Dr.
Browne's girl with the goose-face and goose-neck, billing her shoulders
like a bird.
There was something in Heredity. But the sheer interest of it made you
forget about Papa and Mamma and Aunt Charlotte; it kept you from thinking
about yourself. You could see why Ribot was so excited about his laws of
Heredity: "They it is that are real...." "To know a fact thoroughly is to
know the quality and quantity of the laws that compose it ... facts are
but appearances, laws the reality."
There was Darwin's Origin of Species. According to Darwin, it didn't seem
likely that anything so useless as insanity could be inherited at all;
according to Maudsley and Ribot, it seemed even less likely that sanity
could survive. To be sure, after many generations, insanity was stamped
out; but not before it had run its course through imbecility to idiocy,
infecting more generations as it went.
Maudsley was solemn and exalted in his desire that there should be no
mistake about it. "There is a destiny made for a man by his ancestors,
and no one can elude, were he able to attempt it, the tyranny of his
organisation."
You had been wrong all the time. You had thought of your family, Papa and
Mamma, perhaps Grandpapa and Grandmamma, as powerful, but independent and
separate entities, in themselves sacred and inviolable, working against
you from the outside: either with open or secret and inscrutable
hostility, hindering, thwarting, crushing you down. But always from the
outside. You had thought of yourself as a somewhat less powerful, but
still independent and separate entity, a sacred, inviolable self,
struggling against them for completer freedom and detachment. Crushed
down, but always getting up and going on again; fighting a more and more
successful battle for your own; beating them in the end. But it was not
so. There were no independent, separate entities, no sacred, inviolable
selves. They were one immense organism and you were part of it; you were
nothing that they had not been before you. It was no good struggling. You
were caught in the net; you couldn't get out.
And so were they. Mamma and Papa were no more independent and separate
than you were. Dan had gone like Papa, but Papa had gone like Grandpapa
and Grandmamma Olivier. Nobody ever said anything about Grandpapa
Olivier; so perhaps there had been something queer about him. Anyhow,
Papa couldn't help drinking any more than Mamma could help being sweet
and gentle; they hadn't had a choice or a chance.
How senseless you had been with your old angers and resentments. Now that
you understood, you could never feel anger or resentment any more. As
long as you lived you could never feel anything but love for them and
compassion. Mamma, Papa and Aunt Charlotte, Dan and Roddy, they were
caught in the net. They couldn't get out.
Dan and Roddy--But Mark had got out. Why not you?
They were not all alike. Papa and Uncle Victor were different; and Aunt
Charlotte and Aunt Lavvy. Papa had married and handed it on; he hadn't
cared. Uncle Victor hadn't married; he had cared too much; he had been
afraid.
And Maurice Jourdain and Lindley Vickers had been afraid; everybody who
knew about Aunt Charlotte would be afraid, and if they didn't know you
would have to tell them, supposing--
You would be like Aunt Lavvy. You would live in Morfe with Mamma for years
and years as Aunt Lavvy had lived with Grandmamma. First you would be
like Dorsy Heron; then like Louisa Wright; then like Aunt Lavvy.
No; when you were forty-five you would go like Aunt Charlotte.