Olivia by Strachey Dorothy

Author:Strachey, Dorothy [Strachey, Dorothy]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Itzy, Classics, Kickass.to, Gay
ISBN: 9781573448475
Publisher: Cleis Press
Published: 1948-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

8

It 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

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