Vol. 37 No. 2 1970 - page 272

272
FILIPPA ROLF
at the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and the slights and
contumely, as if they had never occurred to her before, until the
new moment, fighting bitterness and her insights with utmost bravery
in
order to help and do her duty, a word she would never have
used, proud and interested
in
poetry,
new and old, and the
arts,
such was M.B.
A heavy-featured, grey
mask
of cast lead (her face when dying),
on the one hand, and on the other, me. I don't know more about
them, at present. I never knew either of them well. Mother saw to it
that it was mostly by hearsay, what little I happened to learn about .
them. At
this
point, they may be seen as constituting a kind of
couple. The dying one recovered. One doesn't want to believe, though,
that
this
was as easy and as automatic a process for her as the bully
(one's past preceding this writing) knows one willing to think her
agony to have been. In these cases one thinks oneself much more
callous than she. The bully took revenge . . . (unfinished sentence).
(Deprived me of physical reality.)
I realized that I was at first irritated out of proportion and then •
grateful
in
an almost tearful way (what caused my tears giving way
to my tears themselves causing a new effect) whenever my cousin
sighed and from the bedroom, presumably letting a book fall out
of
her hand finished, let fall also an audible: "So far, so good" or "That
was that," or suggesting that dinner be made might say: "You have
cabbage. Why don't you make a stew instead that would save you
all those pots," or finally, in a finality I resented: "We won't eat
until
six will we? It
is
four o'clock now," or used the telephone for
ef·
ficient messages.
But simultaneously I was very proud to walk around with her
everywhere, showing her everything that would suddenly resolve–
unanimously - to become real at last under her quick glance, her
generous, appreciative and vivacious senses. She wore an amusing
green hat like a little chimney, a ditto smart suit and yellow blouse
last seen
In The Ravine;
her colors made it
easy,
I thought, to visual·
I
ize one of the characters in this novel by Chekhov.
She left and the reaction came a few days later, as so often
in
connection with something surprising and beautiful- surprising and
beautiful to the point where I thought myself pleased to be on
my
own again and felt it like an explosion: first the idea of liberty, then
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