Olivia (8 page)

Mlle Cara was always being asked whether she
hadn’t a headache, always being told she looked tired, always being urged to lie down. Mlle Julie’s library was jealously guarded from intrusion. She must not be disturbed at her work. Her visits to Paris were facilitated and encouraged. The breath of outside air was what gave the school its
cachet
, said Frau Riesener; it would be absurd to let them be interfered with by less important duties, which could be as well discharged by a subordinate—by herself, in fact.

And so, from being a prop on which both the friends leaned, each on her different side, she turned gradually into a barrier between them.

“And then,”said Signorina, “her methods changed.” As Mlle Julie was often away or often absorbed in her particular tasks, Frau Riesener established her hold more and more completely on Mlle Cara—a hold, which from being enveloping turned dominating, while Mlle Cara became more attached, more clinging, more subservient. She gradually sank—she was actually encouraged to sink —into invalidism. Every ailment was made the most of, every healthy reaction nipped in the bud, and the campaign of insinuation was begun. She was artfully led to believe that Mlle Julie didn’t understand her case, that, so strong herself, she was unsympathetic, indifferent to the sufferings of others, that she cared only for her own amusement and neglected her friend and her school. Often, Signorina said, she had heard conversations like the following:

“Come into the garden, Cara.”

“Do you think you’d better, Mlle Cara?” Frau Riesener would say. “It’s very wet underfoot.”

“Would you like me to read to you tonight, Cara?”

“Oh, Mlle Julie, Mlle Cara has had such a tiring day. I’m afraid it might make her head worse.”

“Won’t you come to the R——’s tomorrow, Cara? They’ve asked us to lunch.”

“Oh Julie, you know I can’t. It’s far too exhausting. And really, if Minnie R——had wanted me, I think she might have written to
me
. Don’t you think so too, Frau Riesener?”

When was the motive of jealousy introduced? When did it become all-important? Obviously, as Mlle Cara was more and more withdrawn from her friend’s companionship, the latter’s vitality sought other outlets. Signorina herself crept gradually, unobtrusively into her affections. Frau Riesener had been glad enough at first to make use of her.

“I was so small,” repeated Signorina, “that nobody noticed me—except Mlle Julie. She recognized me from the first day. She knew at once what I was capable of. Oh, how good she was to me, Olivia mia! When she found me first, we were starving in Paris, my mother, my sister, and I. She took infinite pains to help us—provided hospitals, doctors, nurses, for my mother; established my sister as an Italian teacher in half a dozen wealthy families; and made
me
come to help her here. And so I do,”
Signorina added, “and so I will till the end of life.

“For that matter,” she went on, “why should Mlle Cara be more jealous of me than Mlle Julie of Frau Riesener?” In any case, the breach had widened, deepened. No smallest incident now but was distorted into a grievance. Complaints had become reproaches, reproaches were turning into taunts.

“How long can it last? What will be the end? And I assure you, Olivia, Mlle Julie bears it all with extraordinary patience. I have never known her return an angry answer. She does all she can to soothe and pacify; she gives her the most devoted attention—when she is allowed to. She does everything, everything except——”

“Except?”

“Except give up her friends. Give up those who love her—those she loves. ‘What should I have left,’ she said to me once, ‘if I were to let you go?’ And she told me that Mlle Cara and Frau Riesener were making a concerted attempt to get rid of me. ‘Will it be too painful for you, I wonder,
mon enfant,
to stay on, with them against you?’ she asked me once. But there was no need for me to answer. And then everything got worse when Laura came. And if Laura hadn’t been a saint—a sublime, unconscious saint—I don’t know what would have happened. But I believe Laura, without the smallest hypocrisy, was devoted too to Mlle Cara. I think Mlle Cara was able to believe that she had her affection and that Mlle Julie only cared for her because of her intelligence. This
time, however, Laura understood. She was right to cut her visit short, though it won’t do much good—for now—” a pause, a sombre pause—“for now, there’s you.”

Let me think of those words later, I said to myself, there’s too much in them—too much joy and terror. I must brush them aside for the moment. I must keep them, bury them, like a dog his bone, till I can return to them alone.

“But what is Frau Riesener’s object?” I asked. “Why does she want to separate them? Is it just pure love of mischief-making?”

“I believe,” said Signorina slowly and reflectively, “I believe it was so at first, or love of power rather than of mischief. But now I think what she really wants is to drive Mlle Julie away and step into her shoes.”

Something incomprehensible it was that Signorina had said: that Mlle Julie had only cared for Laura’s intelligence. But hadn’t I seen with my own eyes their affection manifested in fifty different ways, the obvious ease and happiness of their relationship? But Mlle Cara had not been jealous of Laura, neither was I jealous of her. “But now there’s you,” Signorina had said. So there was something different about me. Was it simply that I wasn’t a sublime, unconscious saint? That I wasn’t generous enough to be fond of Mlle Cara. Something perhaps different from that lay at the back of her remark. Nobody could say that Mlle Julie cared for my intellect. Oh, my intellect couldn’t compare with Laura’s. I had
none of her gifts, I was totally unable to carry on a conversation with Mlle Julie on a footing of equality. Then why should Mlle Cara mind about me? Why should Signorina have said so sombrely, “And now there’s you?” So they must think she cares for me more than for Laura. Insensate thought. No, no, not more. But she cares a little. And differently. Just as I cared for her differently. And now I understood that it was that difference I wanted.

But Laura had been a saint. It was because of that that the breach between the two friends had not become a catastrophe. But I—I was not a saint. How could I be one? And so perhaps it was I who was going to bring that catastrophe about. I couldn’t help it. If it depended on altering the feelings in my heart, I was no more capable of doing that than of plucking the heart out of my breast—and I didn’t want to. On the contrary. A strange exaltation filled me. Oh no, I wasn’t a saint.

Why had Signorina told me all this story? Because I wanted to hear it so? Wasn’t it as a warning too? A warning then, given in vain, for there was nothing I could alter, nothing I would try to alter.

And then my thoughts went back to that past when they had both been young, both beautiful, both happy. Like a wedded couple, I thought. And when couples who have loved part, what a tragedy is that. What disillusionment, what self-reproach, what regrets were eating my beloved’s heart out. It was that that had hollowed her cheek, that had made the sensitive curve of her lips so
sad, so bitter. And I could do nothing for her. Yet oh, I sighed, how willingly I would die to make her happy.

It was not long after this talk with Signorina, and a day or two after Laura had left, that I gathered up my courage and went by myself to the library at the usual hour. I stood for a minute or two outside the door before turning the handle. When I was alone, I always stood so before the door which was shut between her and me. It seemed an almost superhuman effort to open it. It wasn’t exactly fear that stopped me. No, but a kind of religious awe. The next step was too grave, too portentous to be taken without preparation—the step which was to abolish absence. All one’s fortitude, all one’s powers, must be summoned and concentrated to enable one to endure that overwhelming change. She is behind that door. The door will open and I shall be in her presence.

“Is that you, Olivia? Come in.”

“May I?”

“Yes. I was feeling lonely without Laura. I’m glad you’ve come. But I’m busy. You needn’t go though. Take a book and read. The Sainte-Beuves are over there. You’d better take a
Lundi
.”

“May I take a poet?”

“Yes, certainly. What do you want?”

“The Vigny you were reading yesterday.”

“Yes. There it is.”

I took the little red volume and sat down on the floor.

How happy I was!

I could see her sitting at her table. I could see her beautiful, serious profile, when I raised my eyes from my book, and when I dropped them I could still feel she was there.

I re-read the
Moïse
.

Greatness and loneliness. “
Puissant et solitaire
.” To live above the crowd in loneliness. To be condemned to loneliness by the greatness of one’s qualities. To be condemned to live apart, however much one wanted the contact of warm human companionship. To be the Lord’s anointed. Strange and dreadful fate! I forgot where I was as I thought of it. At last I raised my head and saw her eyes fixed upon me. Without knowing what I was doing, without reflection, as if moved by some independent spring of whose existence I was unaware, and whose violence I was totally unable to resist, I suddenly found myself kneeling before her, kissing her hands, crying out over and over again, “I love you!”—sobbing “I love you!”

Can I remember what she said, what she did? No. Nothing. I can only remember myself kneeling beside her—the feel of her woollen dress on my cheeks, the feel of her hands, the softness and warmth of her hands under my lips, the hardness of her rings. I don’t know how I left the room. The rest of the day I lived in a kind of maze, dreaming of those hands, of those kisses.

I
t was at this time that a change came over me. That delicious sensation of gladness, of lightness, of springing vitality, that consciousness of youth and strength and ardour, that feeling that some divine power had suddenly granted me an undreamt-of felicity and made me free of boundless kingdoms and untold wealth, faded as mysteriously as it had come and was succeeded by a very different state. Now I was all moroseness and gloom—heavy-hearted, leaden-footed. I could take no interest in my lessons; it was impossible to think of them. When, on Thursdays and Sundays, I sat with the other girls in our study where we were supposed to be writing our
devoirs,
I could not work. I sat for hours, my arms folded on the table in front of me, my head resting on them, plunged in a kind of coma.

“What on earth are you doing, Olivia?” a friend would ask. “Are you asleep?”

“Oh, leave me alone,” I would cry impatiently. “I’m thinking.”

But I wasn’t thinking. I was sometimes dreaming—the foolish dreams of adolescence: of how I should save her life at the cost of my own by some heroic deed, of how she would kiss me on my death bed, of how I should kneel at hers and what her dying word would be, of how I should become famous by writing poems which no one would know were inspired by her, of how one day she would guess it, and so on and so on.

At other times I wasn’t even dreaming, but just a mass of physical sensations which bewildered me, which made me feel positively sick. My heart beat violently, my breath came fast and unevenly, with the expectation of some extraordinary event which was going to happen the very next minute. At the opening of every door, at the sound of the most casual footstep, my solar plexus shot the wildest stabs through every portion of my body, and the next minute, when nothing had happened, I collapsed, a pricked bladder, into flat and dreary quiescence. Sometimes I was possessed by longing, but I didn’t know for what—for some vague blessing, some unimaginable satisfaction, which seemed to be tantalizingly near but which, all the same, I knew was unattainable—a blessing, which, if I could only grasp it, would quench my thirst, still my pulses, give me an Elysian peace. At other times, it was the power of expression that seemed maddeningly denied me. If only I could express myself—in words, in music, anyhow. I imagined myself a prima donna or a great actress. Oh, heavenly relief. Oh, an outlet for all
this ferment which was boiling within me. Perilous stuff. If I could only get rid of it—shout it to the world—declaim it away.

Then there was a more passive, a more languorous state, when I seemed to myself dissolving, when I let myself go, as I phrased it to myself, when I felt as though I were floating luxuriously down a warm, gentle river, every muscle relaxed, every portion of me open to receive each softest caress of air and water, down, down, towards some unknown, delicious sea. My indefinite desire was like some pervading, unlocalized ache of my whole being. If I could only know, thought I, where it lies, what it is. In my heart? In my brain? In my body? But no, all I felt was that I desired something. Sometimes I thought it was to be loved in return. But that seemed to me so entirely impossible that it was really and truly unimaginable. I could not imagine
how
she could love me.
Like
me, be fond of me, as a child, as a pupil, yes, of course. But that had nothing to do with what I felt. And so I made myself another dream. It was a man I loved as I loved her, and then he would take me in his arms . . . and kiss me . . . I should feel his lips on my cheeks, on my eyelids, on my No, no, no, that way lay madness. All this was different-hopeless. Hopeless. A dreadful word, but with a kind of tonic in it. I would hug it to my heart. Yes, hopeless. It was that that gave my passion dignity, that made it worthy of respect. No other love, no love of man and woman could ever be as disinterested
as mine. It was I alone who loved—it was I alone whose love was an impossible fantasy.