Free Olivia by Dorothy Strachey Page A

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.
    And yet she sometimes showered me with marvellous kindnesses. Often when she was reading aloud to me in the library, she would drop her hand into mine and let me hold it. Once when I had a cold, she visited me in my room, petted me, brought me delicacies from the table, told me stories that made me laugh, left me cheerful and contented. It was during my convalescence from that little indisposition that she put her head into my room one evening and said:
    “I’m going out to dinner in Paris, but I’ll look in on you when I get back and see how you are and say good night to you.” Her good night was gay and tender and the next day I was well.
    A fortnight