Olivia (13 page)

I tried to remember the end of the verse that had been ringing in my head:

What came after that?

Cold! Cold! I was dreadfully cold. I was shivering. I thought of my bed and blankets. What was I doing here? Why didn’t I go back to them? What use was I here? None. None whatever. But no; some violent compulsion forbade me to go. I must watch out the night with her. I would stay here till dawn broke, however cold, however perishing I felt. I must not abandon her. A strange feeling that my staying was of vital importance had taken hold of me. I must stay. I must stay. The cold crept up me, from feet to legs; arms, shoulders, were cold, icy. I rubbed myself, but it was no good. I couldn’t think any more. I was possessed of only two sensations—this cold and the desperate, blind determination to stay. I wouldn’t even get up. No, though I was numb and stiff, if I got up, if I moved, I should be tempted; I should desert my post; I should fail. I would not fail. The time went by slowly, very slowly. But I could not see my watch. There was no light.

Suddenly I heard a sound. It was quite close to me. It was at my ear. It was the rattle of the door handle, and before I had time to realize what was happening,
the door opened and Mlle Julie stood there, a candle in her hand. She almost stumbled over me.

“What is that?” she cried. “Who is it?”

She stooped her face to look at me. It was strangely lighted by the candle.

“Olivia!” she said. “What are you doing there? Get up! Speak!”

I tried to, but I couldn’t. I was too numb to move. My teeth were chattering so that I couldn’t speak.

She helped me up, put her arm round me—for I needed her support—and cried, “Heavens! How cold you are! You must come and get warmed. Come.”

She drew me into the room. There, on the bed, was the figure. I shivered still more when I saw it.

“Don’t be afraid, my dear. Look. There’s nothing terrible in the sight.” And now she led me to the bed and held my hand as I looked. No, it was not terrible—a sweet face, calm and gentle. But the colour! I had always heard them speak of the waxen, the ivory pallor of death. But this face, I thought, was yellow. A horrible nausea seized me and, “I’m going to be sick,” I cried desperately.

In an instant, Mlle Julie’s arm was round me again. She supported me, dragged me through the dressing room into the next room and put me in an armchair beside a fire. As quick as lightning, there was a basin in front of me and I was indeed being violently sick. She was very swift and sure in her movements. An eiderdown quilt
was tucked round my knees, shawls wrapped round my shoulders in a moment; the basin was removed as soon as possible; eau de Cologne dabbed on my dank, cold forehead; there was a kettle of boiling water on the hearth and a hot-water bottle put to my feet, and a hot grog with a stiff spoonful of brandy in it to my lips; then she knelt down beside me, chafed my frozen hands, chafed even my feet, murmuring to herself as she did so, “Poor child! Poor child!” This went on as it seemed to me for a long time, and for a long time my teeth continued to chatter, but at last a delicious warmth crept over me, drowsiness weighted my eyelids, and, hardly knowing where I was, except that I was in comfort, my head sank on to her shoulder and I slept.

When I woke up it was dawn. I raised my head from the pillow on which it was resting and looked about me. I was in her room. I had never been in it before. This was where she slept. There was her bed. It had not been slept in, and if it was disordered, it was because the blankets and eiderdown had been taken from it to wrap round me, and the pillow to put under my head. She herself, dressed in a long woollen wrapper, was standing at the window, her back towards me. Slowly the memory of the night before came back to me and the memory of Mlle Cara’s figure lying next door. Mlle Julie heard me stirring and turned round. She smiled.

“Better, Olivia? Yes, you’re quite rosy this morning. You must go back to your room now.”

I was beginning to collect myself, when I saw there was something she wanted to say to me. She seemed to be making a great effort. I saw her wet her lips once or twice as if they were too dry for her to be able to speak. Then, in a curious, colourless voice, she said:

“Perhaps you’ll like to hear that I think you saved my life last night. When I stumbled over you in the passage, I was going to the medicine chest. There are three doses left in the bottle. Mlle Baietto was careful to see that the cupboard was locked and to take away the key herself. I expect she’s sleeping with it under her pillow. She didn’t know I had a duplicate.”

I had thrown aside my blankets and ran to kneel before her.

“And now?” I asked.

“Now?” she answered. “No, you needn’t be afraid now. I saw last night that one can’t kill oneself without killing too many other things besides. I’ve done enough harm in my life already.”

She bent her head near to mine, but she did not touch me:

“Believe, Olivia, believe,” she said earnestly, solemnly, “I don’t want to harm you.”

Kneeling before her, I took her hand religiously in mine and kissed it, with nothing now in my heart but the very purity of pity.

As I was leaving the room, she called after me:

“You’re to stay in bed all day today. We must make sure you haven’t caught bronchitis. Take my shawl with you.”

I did as she told me, went to my room and to my bed, stiff, aching in every limb, but scandalously, intolerably happy.

I
stayed in bed all that day and did not catch pneumonia, bronchitis, or even a cold in my head. I think it was because I was too happy. Signorina, busy as she was, visited me often, looking at me, I thought, curiously, and perhaps enviously.

It was settled, she told me, that the school should break up for the holidays at once (only a fortnight was wanting to the end of the term). With girls who came from so many different countries, and often had long journeys to make, difficult and complicated arrangements had to be made for accompanying them and insuring they should be met, so that it was impossible to get rid of them before the funeral. That was to be on the next day—Thursday. Frau Riesener was seeing to it and helping with the
lettres de faire part,
of which there were hundreds to be sent, without counting the more intimate letters to friends. Mlle Julie herself wrote only three or four.

“And is the day on which the English girls are to go home settled?”

“Yes,” she answered gently. “Saturday. Saturday morning. Miss Smith is to take you.”

“Oh, Signorina,” I said, “need she still go to Canada? What is she meaning to do? Can’t she stop on here now?”

“I don’t know. She has said nothing about it so far. We must wait for the will.”

“The will?” I gasped.

“Yes,” said Signorina. “All the deeds of separation had been signed some days ago. The house and contents were made absolutely over to Mlle Cara, in consideration of an annuity to be paid to Mlle Julie—far too low a one, but there it is. So now it remains to be seen whether Mlle Cara had made a will and in that case to whom she has left her property. I expect Frau Riesener has taken pretty good care of that.”

My flimsy, shining fabric fell shattered to the ground. I knew now what was coming. It was not a foreboding, but a certainty.

On Thursday, the day of the funeral, the girls and governesses were sent out for a long walk and picnic. They had to be got out of the way. A dismal picnic it was, but a lull, a parenthesis, between past and future anguish. The sun was shining; the air was mild; the forest was beginning to put on its mist of green, and the earliest flowers were pushing up their heads through last
year’s decayed leaves as on the day of my first walk in it so many ages ago. Edith, Gertrude, and I walked and talked together in low, subdued voices; I was half-absent from the conversation, but yet I was glad to be with my friends.

I knew what was awaiting me when I got in, and yet when the blow fell, it was as though I had been unprepared for it. As soon as Signorina was able to speak to me alone, she told me that the will had been found and read, and that Mlle Cara had left all her property absolutely to Frau Riesener, who was only subjected to the condition of the annuity.

“That day they went out in the carriage, it was to go to the
notaire
’s and sign the will—just two days before the accident. So now,” she added, “that woman has got what she wanted. She is triumphant, sole mistress of the school, freed from the persons she detested—and even,” she added sardonically, “from the one she loved.”

Queer fragments of thought came into my mind, like bits of a jigsaw puzzle, which, when I had time, I might perhaps piece together, but now I brushed them away:

“And the Canada plan, does it still hold good?”

“I think so,” she said. “But Mlle Julie seems to be in a kind of torpor still. She won’t talk to me about anything.”

And yet I felt that Signorina was triumphant too. She too was left in sole possession of the field. “In Canada,”
she was singing to herself, or so I guessed, “in Canada, I shall be alone with her, her only friend, her only help, her only servant.”

The next day was Friday, and we English girls were told to pack. We were to leave by an early train the following morning. In the afternoon, Mlle Julie would say good-bye to us. We, of her class, were assembled in the little study and were summoned one by one to the library, where she was waiting for us. Two or three of the girls came back weeping. Each was holding a book—her parting present. “She was so kind,” they sobbed. “She looked so sad, so desolate, in her big armchair.”

I had made up my mind that I should be called last. I dreamt that in any case it wouldn’t be the final farewell. She would come once more to my room tonight, tonight.

Four of the girls had gone to their interview. There were two more to go and then it would be my turn. I counted them. I calculated the minutes. I looked at the clock. I listened to its ticking—the slow unrelenting footfall of time.

But when the fourth girl came back, she said, “Olivia, you’re to go next.”

I have known what it is to wait in a surgeon’s waiting room. I have imagined what it is to enter his consulting room in expectation of a sentence of death. Some of those feelings, I think, were mine—that swimming giddiness of body and soul, that shooting pain, that supreme
summoning of resolution and fortitude. I had not seen her since the night of our vigil. She had kept strictly to her room.

I did not dare pause outside the door this time, lest my faltering limbs should fail me. I knew that once I was in the room strength would come. I went in.

She was not in her armchair, sitting at the big centre table, as I expected. I had had a vision of myself once more running towards her, laying my head on her lap, kissing her hands.

No; she was standing in the bow window, behind a smaller writing table, where Signorina used to sit and do her accounts. In her hand, she held her long ivory paper cutter.
Barricaded
flashed into my mind. She has barricaded and armed herself against me—I felt myself turn to steel.

“There’s to be no scene, if you please, Olivia,” she said coldly.

“I don’t want to make a scene,” I answered as coldly.

There was a long pause. She stood with her back towards me, looking out of the window. Then she began in a changed voice, as if she were talking to herself:

“It has been a struggle all my life—but I have always been victorious—I was proud of my victory.” And then her voice changed, broke, deepened, softened, became a murmur: “I wonder now whether defeat wouldn’t have been better for us all—as well as sweeter.” Another long pause. She turned now and looked at me, and smiled.
“You, Olivia, will never be victorious, but if you are defeated——” how she looked at me—“when you are defeated——” She looked at me in a way that made my heart stand still and the blood rush to my face, to my forehead, till I seemed to be wrapped in flame. Then she suddenly broke off and brushed her hand across her eyes, as if brushing away an importunate vision. When I saw them again, they were extinguished and lifeless.