Olivia (14 page)

“I don’t know what I’m saying,” she went on dully. “I’ve got a headache. Good-bye.”

I remained silent—rooted to the ground—uncomprehending—bewildered.

“Good-bye,” she repeated angrily. I believe she stamped her foot. “Can’t you understand? Good-bye.”

I was dismissed. This was the end. But before I reached the door, she called again: “Olivia!”

Ah, she has relented! Ah, now I shall be gathered to her heart, and, impatient as the wind, I turned to fly towards her—but she was still behind the table. Her attitude, her voice, her look, stern, hard and proud, put a still more impassable barrier between us.

“I had forgotten,” she said, “that I must give you a parting present—a book, I think—but I don’t know where it is——” She fingered vaguely some volumes that lay before her.

“Take this instead,” she said and handed me across the table her long ivory paper cutter. “And now send me the next girl.”

Those were the last words I ever heard her speak: “And now send me the next girl.”

I took the paper cutter—a gift, I thought bitterly, that lessens no distance between us, that she can give me without any fear of our fingers touching. I left the room in a turmoil of resentment—hatred almost. This, then, was the end. No, no, it was impossible. Unbearable and therefore impossible. And yet I knew all the time that it was not only possible but that it must be borne. It was movement I wanted—to fling the crushing thought from my mind as a wild colt shakes off the intolerable, galling burden of a saddle. I rushed upstairs. I tore open the window and flung the paper cutter out into the garden as far as I had strength to hurl. I seized a cloak and
bérêt
(all the time I was moving, I needn’t be thinking) and ran downstairs. Out of the house, out of the grounds, across the road, into the forest, I ran. Mad thoughts pursued me—I fled from them as from relentless all-powerful enemies; mad dreams called to me—I ran towards them as to some miraculous saviour. I should meet her. She would step out from behind that tree—no, from behind the next—I should be in her arms once more—once more. We should be reconciled. I should understand at last. I could bear to say good-bye to her for ever, if only before the end, one moment of communion might be granted me. It would be. It must be. I ran till I was exhausted and breathless, knowing that when I stopped running that relentless enemy would be upon me, grinding me, torturing
me. At last I could run no longer. I flung myself on the ground and buried my face in a heap of moss. No, no, that would never do, I must get up, I must walk. And now, I was as impatient to get back to the house as I had been to leave it. Perhaps something would have happened in the interval—perhaps—perhaps——

But when I got back everything was unchanged. No one had noticed my absence. I walked past the library—the door was open—it was empty—up again to my little room. The time had come. There was no more help for it. I must face it out.

I sat on my bed and tried to compose myself. And still, do what I would, hope came to interfere with my thoughts, my resolves. How hard it is to kill hope. Time after time, one thinks one has trodden it down, stamped it to death. Time after time, like a noxious insect, it begins to stir again, it shivers back again into a faint tremulous life. Once more it worms its way into one’s heart, to instil its poison, to gnaw away the solid hard foundations of life and leave in their place the hollow phantom of illusion.

“She will come to see me tonight,” I thought. “I mustn’t despair yet. Tonight! Tonight!” But how was I to get through the time till then? And if she didn’t come —what then? What then?

I began tossing my things into my trunk, taking them out again and tossing them back. I was doing this, when Signorina came into my room.

“I’ve brought you a cup of tea,” she said.

“Thank you, I don’t want it,” I answered, my head still in my trunk.

“Mlle Julie has gone to Paris——”

Hope! Hope!

“——she’s not coming back tonight. She’s spending the weekend with the R——s. You’d better drink your tea.”

And she left the room.

Ha! That was better. The noxious creature was dead now. It would undermine me no longer. I was free at last from its insidious burrowings. I could be calm now and brace myself to endure.

I went to the window and looked out. I should never see that sky, those trees, that road again. The road along which I used to hear her carriage driving back at night. Good-bye! Good-bye!

I knelt down by my bed and burst into tears.

T
hroughout the journey home and during many weeks, months, and perhaps years, I pondered the episodes I have just related. I lived them over again, sometimes with ecstasy, sometimes with anguish. But more often I tried to think what had been the meaning of her attitude to me. As for those obscure words, spoken in our last interview, as I was standing silent before her, though now they seem to me to cast a curious illumination over the whole story, I barely remembered them. They were incomprehensible, and it was not of them I thought but of all the rest.

She had seemed to be fond of me. At moments I had dared to think she had loved me. Why had she treated me so at the end? Had I offended her? Had she changed? That was more probable. She had remembered that the only person she had ever loved was the dead woman on the bed. She hated me for having dared intrude into that privacy, for having thrust upon her a love she resented.
But yet, I thought, why, why? Had I not been humble? Had I ever asked or wanted more than kindness? Had I ever dreamt that more was possible from her to me? Sometimes an uneasy conscience murmured “yes.” She knew, she guessed perhaps the secret fluttering of my senses. Had she been disgusted? I put that dreadful thought away and began afresh. It was a scene she had dreaded. If I had gone into hysterics of tears, she might have broken down and wept too. But was I in the habit of having hysterics? It was unjust to think it. My tears were usually silent. And in any case, I thought angrily, she had no right to treat me with such cruelty, just to spare herself the inconvenience of my tears. She should have put up with them. Did she not owe me that at least? Perhaps, after all, she had left me with that last cruel memory out of some idea that it was for my good. Perhaps she had thought she would cure me in that way, that so I should suffer less. Oh, how mistaken! How dreadfully mistaken! She had not realized, she could not conceive the depth of the wound she had given me, how it had cut into the very quick of my life, how it had maimed me for ever. And such a little effort on her part, so small an exercise of her imagination, would have saved me, would have helped me to get through these dreary months and years. But why should she make an effort, even the smallest, for my sake? She didn’t care. She didn’t care. Her thoughts were elsewhere—with the past—with the future.
I was nothing to her. Nothing. So, I consumed my heart with love and resentment, my eyes with hot, slow tears.

One day, I suddenly heard her voice as if she were speaking to me. A sentence came back to me I had forgotten. The voice said, earnestly, solemnly:

“Believe, Olivia, believe, I don’t want to harm you.”

There descended on me then a sudden and almost magic calm. Grace touched me mysteriously. The stifling, blinding clouds rolled away from my heart, from my eyes, I was able to breathe, to see once more. I was saved.

That night, I wrote her a letter. I told her that I had hated her, that that had been the worst of my pain, but that now I was reconciled to her, to life. I loved her again with all that was best in me. I was going to be happy; I was going to work, to live. I was going to try again.

I wrote by the same post to Signorina and begged for news.

Signorina had written to me once or twice. She had told me of their arrival in a big Canadian town, and of their settling into a small house. Mlle Julie had refused to start another school. They had enough to live on and were able to occupy themselves sufficiently. Signorina gave Italian lessons. Mlle Julie was busy with translations. Short, dry letters. Signorina was no writer.

Need I say, however, that the letter I longed for in answer to mine, the letter I hoped for, was to be from Mlle Julie. I dreamt of it. I wrote it in my head. It was to
be tender and helpful. But it never came. It was only Signorina who wrote. I give her letter:

 

Olivia mia,

You ask for news. There isn’t much to give you. There has been no particular change since last I wrote. Mlle Julie is well, but she still has fits of weeping. She had one the other day, and I knew it was because she had had a letter from you. I found the pieces in the wastepaper basket. Yesterday she said to me, “Tell Olivia not to write again.” That was all.

As for me, I am happy. But you needn’t mind. She doesn’t care for me really, and when she comes to die, she will turn me out of her room and not allow me to come near her. I know that. In the meantime, I brush her hair and go on my knees before her and cut her nails. That is enough for me. It wouldn’t be for you. Your share has been something more. But you have had to pay for it.

Addio.

 

Thank God that when that letter came, I was able to think of her and no longer of myself.

 

It was four years later that I got my last letter from Signorina.

Olivia mia,

Mlle Julie died last night of pneumonia. She wasn’t ill long. She was able to give me some few directions of what to do in case of her death and told me how to dispose of some of her belongings. She said I was to send you her ivory paper cutter.

She has left me enough to live on. My mother and sister are coming to join me.

Addio.

 

The ivory paper cutter is lying on my desk as I write this. It has her name engraved on it: JULIE.

DOROTHY STRACHEY (1865-1960) was the sister of novelist Lytton Strachey and a prominent member of the Bloomsbury Group. She was André Gide’s main English translator. Olivia, originally published under a pseudonym, is her only novel.

 

REGINA MARLER is the author of
Bloomsbury Pie: The Making of the Bloomsbury Boom and the editor of Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell and Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America On to Sex.
She lives in San Francisco.

Copyright © Itzy
Foreword copyright © 2006 by Regina Marler.

eISBN : 978-1-573-44847-5

 

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

 

First published by The Hogarth Press in 1949.

 

This edition published in the United States by Cleis Press Inc.,
P.O. Box 14697, San Francisco, California 94114.