When Miriam got out of the train into the darkness she knew that there were woods all about her. The moist air was rich with the smell of trees—wet bark and branches—moss and lichen, damp dead leaves. She stood on the dark platform snuffing the rich air. It was the end of her journey. Anything that might follow would be unreal compared to that moment. Little bulbs of yellow light further up the platform told her where she must turn to find the things she must go to meet. “How lovely the air is here.” ... The phrase repeated itself again and again, going with her up the platform towards the group of lights. It was all she could summon to meet the new situation. It satisfied her; it made her happy. It
was enough; but no one would think it was enough.
But the house was two miles off. She was safe for the present. Throughout the journey from London the two-mile drive from the station had stood between her and the house. The journey was a long solitary adventure; endless; shielded from thoughts of the new life ahead and leaving the past winter in the Gunnersbury villa far away; vanquished, almost forgotten. She could only recall the hours she had spent shivering apathetically over small fires; a moment when she had brought a flush of tears to her mother’s eyes by suddenly telling her she was maddeningly unreasonable, and another moment alone with her father when she had stood in the middle of the hearth-rug with her hands behind her and ordered him to abstain from argument with her in the presence of her mother—“because it gives her pain when I have to show you that I am at least as right as you are”—and he had stood cowed and silent.... Then the moment of accepting the new post, the last days of fear and isolation and helplessness in hard winter weather and the setting off in the main line train that had carried her away from everything—into
the spring. Sitting in the shabbily upholstered unexpectedly warm and comfortable main line train she had seen through the mild muggy air bare woods on the horizon, warm and tawny, and on the near copses a ruddy purpling bloom. Surprise had kept her thoughtless and rapt. Spring—a sudden pang of tender green seen in suburban roadways in April ... one day in the Easter holidays, bringing back the forgotten summer and showing you the whole picture of summer and autumn in one moment ... but evidently there was another spring, much more real and wonderful that she had not known—not a clear green thing, surprising and somehow disappointing you, giving you one moment and then rushing your thoughts on through vistas of leafage, but tawny and purple gleamings through soft mist, promising ... a vision of spring in dim rich faint colours, with the noisy real rushing spring still to come ... a thing you could look at and forget; go back into winter, and see again and again, something to remember when the green spring came, and to think of in the autumn ... spring; coming; perhaps spring was coming all the year round.... She looked back, wondering. This was not the first time that she
had been in the country in March. Two years ago, when she had first gone out into the world it had been March ... the night journey from Barnes to London, and on down to Harwich, the crossing in a snowstorm, the afternoon journey across Holland—grey sky, flat bright green fields, long rows of skeleton poplars. But it was dark before they reached the wooded German country—the spring must have been there, in the darkness. And now coming to Newlands she had seen it. The awful blind cold effort of coming to Newlands had brought a new month of spring; there for always.... And this was the actual breath of it; here, going through her in the darkness.... Someone was at her side, murmuring her name, a footman. She moved with him towards a near patch of light which they reached without going through the station building, and in a moment the door of a little brougham closed upon her with a soft thud. She sat in the softly lit interior, holding her umbrella and her undelivered railway ticket in careful fingers. The footman and a porter were hoisting her Saratoga trunk. Their movements sounded muffled and far-off. The brougham bowled away through the darkness softly. The lights of
the station flickered by and disappeared. The brougham windows were black. No sound but the faint rumble of the wheels along the smooth road. Miriam relaxed and sat back, smiling. For a moment she was conscious of nothing but the soft-toned, softly lit interior, the softness at her back, the warmth under her feet and her happy smile; then she felt a sudden strength; the smile coming straight up so unexpectedly from some deep where it had been waiting, was new and strong and exhilarating. It would not allow itself to dimple; it carried her forward, tiding her over the passage into new experience and held her back, at the same time; it lifted her and held her suspended over the new circumstances in rapid contemplation. She pressed back more steadily into the elastic softness and sat with bent head, eagerly watching her thoughts ... this is me; this is right; I’m used to dainty broughams; I can take everything for granted.... I must take everything absolutely for granted.... The moments passed, carrying her rapidly on. There was a life ahead that was going to enrich and change her as she had been enriched and changed by Hanover, but much more swiftly and intimately. She was changed
already. Poverty and discomfort had been shut out of her life when the brougham door closed upon her. For as long as she could endure and achieve any sort of dealing with the new situation, they had gone, the worry and pain of them could not touch her. Things that rose warm and laughing and expanding within her now, that had risen to the beauty and music and happiness of Germany and been crushed because she was the despised pupil teacher, that had dried up and seemed to die in the English boarding school, were going to be met and satisfied ... she looked down at the hands clasped on her knees, the same hands and knees that had ached with cold through long winter days in the basement schoolroom ... chilblains ... the everlasting unforgettable aching of her sore throat ... things that had made her face yellow and stiff or flushed with fever ... gone away for ever. Her old self had gone, her governess self. It had really gone weeks ago, got up and left her in that moment when she had read Mrs. Corrie’s letter in Bennett’s villa in the middle of a bleak February afternoon. A voice had seemed to come from the large handwriting scrawling across the faint blue page under the thick neat
small address in raised gilt. The same voice, begging her to come for a few weeks and try seemed to resound gently in the brougham. She had not accepted the situation; she had accepted something in Mrs. Corrie’s imagined voice coming to her confidently from the big wealthy house.
The brougham passed a lamp and swerved in through a gate, bowling along over softly crunching gravel. She pressed reluctantly against the cushioned back. The drive had been too short.... Bennett’s friends had given the Corries wrong ideas about her. They wanted a governess. She was not a governess. There were governesses ... the kind of person they wanted. It was a mistake; another mistake ... the brougham made a beautiful dull humming, going along a tree-lined tunnel.... What did the Corries want of her, arriving in their brougham? What did they expect her to do?...
As the footman opened the door of the brougham, a door far back in the dim porch was flung back, letting out a flood of light, and the swift figure of a parlourmaid who seized Miriam’s
Gladstone bag and the silver-mounted Banbury Park umbrella and led the way across the porch into the soft golden blaze. The Saratoga trunk had gone away with the brougham, and in a moment the door was closed and Miriam was standing, frightened and alone, in a fire-lit, lamp-lit, thickly carpeted enclosure within sound of a thin chalky voice saying “Ello, ello.” It seemed to come from above her. “Ello—ello—ello—ello,” it said busily, hurrying about somewhere above as she gazed about the terrifying hall. It was somehow like the box office of a large theatre, only much better; the lamplight, there seemed to be several lamps shaded with low-hanging old gold silk, and the rosy light from the huge clear fire in a deep grate fell upon a thick pale greeny yellow carpet, the little settees with their huge cushions, and the strange-looking pictures set low on dull gold walls. In two directions the hall went dimly away towards low archways screened by silently hanging bead curtains. “Ello—ello—ello—ello,” said the voice coming quickly downstairs. Half raising her eyes Miriam saw a pale turquoise blue silk dress, long and slender with deep frills of black chiffon round the short sleeves and a large frill draping
the low-cut bodice, a head and face, sheeny bronze and dead white, coming across the hall.
“Ow-de-do; so glad you’ve come,” said the voice, and two thin fingers and a small thin crushed handkerchief were pressed against her half-raised hand.
“Are you famished? Deadly awful journey! I’m glad you’re tall. Wiggerson’ll take up your things. You must be starvin’. Don’t change. There’s only me. Don’t be long. I shall tell them to put on the soup.”
Gently propelled towards the staircase Miriam went mechanically up the wide shallow stairs towards the parlourmaid waiting at the top. Behind her she heard the swift fuffle of Mrs. Corrie’s dress, the swish of a bead curtain and the thin tuneless voice inaccurately humming in some large near room, “Jack’s the boy for work; Jack’s the boy for play.” She followed the maid across the landing, walking swiftly, as Mrs. Corrie had done—the same greeny carpet, but white walls up here and again strange pictures hung low, on a level with your eyes, strange soft tones ... crayons? ... pastels?—what was the word—she was going to live with them, she would be able to look at them—and everything
up here, in the soft pink light. There were large lamps with rose-pink shades. The maid held back a pink silk curtain hanging across an alcove, and Miriam went through to the open door of her room. “Harris will bring up your trunk later, miss—if you like to leave your keys with me,” said the maid behind her. “Oh yes,” said Miriam carelessly, going on into the room. “Oh, I don’t know where they are. Oh, it doesn’t matter, I’ll manage.”
“Very good, miss,” said Wiggerson politely, and came forward to close the bedroom door.
Miriam flung off her outer things and faced herself in the mirror in her plain black hopsack dress with the apple green velveteen pipings about the tight bodice and the square box sleeves which filled the square mirror from side to side as she stood. “This dress is a nightmare in this room,” she thought, puffing up her hair under her fringe-net with a hat-pin. “Never mind, I mustn’t think about it,” she added hurriedly, disconcerted for a moment by the frightened look in her eyes. The distant soft flat silvery swell of a little gong sent her hurrying to the mound of soft bath towel in the wide pale blue wash-hand basin. She found a bulging
copper hot-water jug, brilliantly polished, with a wicker-covered handle. The water hissed gently into the wide shallow basin, sending up a great cloud of comforting steam. Dare’s soap ... extraordinary. People like this being taken in by advertisements ... awful stuff, full of free soda, any transparent soap is bad for the skin, must be, in the nature of things ... makes your skin feel tight. Perhaps they only use it for their hands.... Advertisement will do anything, Pater said.... Perhaps in houses like this—plonk, it certainly made a lovely hard ring falling into the basin—where everything was warm and clean and fragrant even Dare’s soap could not hurt you. The room behind her seemed to encourage the idea. But surely it couldn’t be her room. It was a spare room. They had put her into it for her month on trial. Could it possibly be hers, just her room, if she stayed ... the strange, beautiful, beautiful long wide hang of the faintly patterny faintly blue curtains covering the whole of the window space; the firelight on them as she came into the room with Wiggerson, the table with a blotter, there had been a table by the door with a blotter, as Wiggerson spoke. She looked round, there
it was ... the blue covered bed, the frilled pillows, high silky-looking bed curtains with some sort of little pattern on them, the huge clear fire, the big wicker chair.
Miriam laughed over her strange hot wine-clear wine-flavoured soup ... two things about soup besides taking it from the side of your spoon, which everybody knows—you eat soup, and you tilt your plate away, not towards you (chum along, chum along and eat your nice hot soup).... Her secure, shy, contented laugh was all right as a response to Mrs. Corrie, sitting at the head of the long table, a tall graceful bird, thin broad shoulders, with the broad black frill slipping from them, rather broad thin oval white face, wiry auburn Princess of Wales fringe coming down into a peak with hollow beaten-in temples each side of it, auburn coils shining as she moved her head and the chalky lisping voice that said little things and laughed at them and went on without waiting for answers. But to herself the laugh meant much more than liking Mrs. Corrie and holding her up and begging her to go on. It meant the large dark room, the dark
invisible picture, the big pieces of strange dark furniture in gloomy corners, the huge screen near the door where the parlourmaid came in and out; the table like an island under the dome of the low-hanging rose-shaded lamp, the table-centre thickly embroidered with beetles’ wings, the little dishes stuck about, sweets, curiously crusted brown almonds, sheeny grey-green olives; the misty beaded glass of the finger bowls—Venetian glass from that shop in Regent Street—the four various wine glasses at each right hand, one on a high thin stem, curved and fluted like a shallow tulip, filled with hock; and floating in the warmth amongst all these things the strange, exciting, dry sweet fragrance coming from the mass of mimosa, a forest of little powdery blossoms, little stiff grey—the arms of railway signals at junctions—Japanese looking leaves—standing as if it were growing, in a shallow bowl under the rose-shaded lamp.
“Mélie’s coming on Friday.”
The parlourmaid set before Miriam a small shapely fish, with scales like mother-of-pearl and pink fins, lying in a curl of paper. “Red mullet,” she exclaimed to herself; “how on earth do I know that it’s red mullet? And those are olives,
of course.” Mrs. Corrie was humming to herself about Mélie as the fork in her thin little fingers plucked fitfully at the papered fish. “Do you know planchette?” she asked, in a faint singsong, turning with a little bold pounce to the salt-cellar close at Miriam’s left hand. “Oh-h-h” said Miriam intelligently.... “Planchette ... Planchette ... Cloches de Corneville. Planquette. Is planchette a part of all this?... Planchette, a French dressmaker, perhaps.” She turned fully round to Mrs. Corrie and waited, smiling sympathetically. “It’s deadly uncanny,” Mrs. Corrie went on, “I can tell you. Deadly.” Her delicate voice stopped fearfully and she glanced at Miriam with a laugh. “I don’t believe I know what it is,” said Miriam, sniffing in the scent of the mimosa and savouring the delicate flavour of the fish. These things would go on after planchette was disposed of, she thought, and took a sip of hock.
“It’s deadly. I hope Mélie’ll bring one. She’s a fairy; real Devonshire fairy. She’ll make it work. We’ll have such fun.”
“What is it?” said Miriam a little uneasily.... A fairy and a planchette and fun—silly laughter, some tiresome sort of game; a hoax.
“I tell you all about it, all, all ...” intoned Mrs. Corrie provisionally, whilst the maid handed the tiny ready-cut saddle of lamb. “Spinnich? Ah, nicey spinnich; you can leave us that, Stokes.... Oh, you must have Burgundy—spin-spin and Burgundy; awful good; a thimble-full, half a glass; that’s right.”
The clear dry hock had leapt to Miriam’s brain and opened her eyes, the Burgundy spread through her limbs, a warm silky tide. The green flavour of the spinach, tasting of earth, and yet as smooth as cream intoxicated her. Surely nothing could so delicately build up your strength as these small stubby slices of meat so tender that it seemed to crumble under your teeth.... “It’s an awful thing. It whirls about and writes with a pencil. Writes. All sorts of things,” said Mrs. Corrie, with a little frightened laugh. “Really. No nonsense. Names. Anythin’. Whatever you’re thinkin’ about. It’s uncanny, I can tell you.”
“It sounds most extraordinary,” said Miriam, with a firm touch of scepticism.
“You wait. Oh—you wait,” sang Mrs. Corrie in a whisper. “I shall find out, I shall find out, if you’re not careful, I shall find out his name.”
Miriam blushed violently. “Ah-ha,” beamed Mrs. Corrie in a soft high monotone. “I shall find out. We’ll have such fun.”
“Do you believe in it?” said Miriam, half irritably.
“You wait—you wait—you wait, young lady. Mélie’ll be here on Friday day.”
The rich caramel, the nuts and dessert, Mrs. Corrie’s approval of her refusal of port wine with her nuts, the curious, half-drowsy chill which fell upon the table, darkening and sharpening everything in the room as the broken brown nutshells increased upon their trellis-edged plates were under the spell of the strange woman. Mrs. Corrie kept on talking about her; Mélie—born in Devonshire, seeing fairies, having second sight, being seen one day staring into space by a sportsman, a fisherman, a sort of poet, who married her and brought her to London. Did Mrs. Corrie really believe that she knew everything? “I believe she’s a changeling,” laughed Mrs. Corrie at last—“oh, it’s cold. Chum-long, let’s go.”
“We can’t go into my little room,” said Mrs. Corrie, turning to Miriam with a little excited catch in her voice, as the bead curtain rattled gently into place behind them. “It’s bein’ re-done.” Just ahead of them, beyond a mystery of palms to right and left, a door opened upon warm brilliance. Miriam heard the busy tranquil flickering of a fire. “I see,” she said eagerly. “Why does she explain?” she wondered, as they passed into the large clear room. How light it was, fairyland, light and fragrant and very warm. The light was high; creamy bulbs, high up, and creamy colour everywhere, cream and gold stripes, stripy chairs of every shape, some of them with twisted gilt legs, Curious oval pictures in soft half-tones, women in hats, strange groups, all tilted forward like mirrors.
“Ooogh—barracky, ain’t it? I hate empty droin’-rooms,” said Mrs. Corrie, sweeping swiftly about, pushing up great striped easy chairs towards the fire. Miriam stood in a dream, watching the little pale hands in the clear light, dead white fingers, rings, twinkling green and sea blue, and the thin cruel flash of tiny diamonds
... harpy hands ... dreadful and clever ... one of the hands came upon her own and compelled her to drop into a large cushioned chair.
“Like him black?” came the gay voice. Coffee cups tinkled on a little low table near Mrs. Corrie’s chair. “I’m glad you’re tall. Kummel?”
“She doesn’t know German pronunciation,” thought Miriam complacently.
“I suppose I am,” she said, accepting a transparent little cup and refusing the liqueur. Those strange eyes were blue with dark rings round the iris and there were fine deep wrinkles about the mouth and chin. She looked so picturesque sitting there, like something by an “old master,” but worn and tired. Why was she so happy—if she thought so many things were deadly awful....
“How’s Gabbie Anstruther?”
“Oh—you see—I don’t know Mrs. Anstruther. They are patients of my future brother-in-law. It was all arranged by letter.”
“About your comin’ here, you mean. I say—you’ll never get engaged, will you? Promise?”
Miriam got up out of her deep chair and stood with her elbow on the low mantel staring into
the fire. She heard phrases from Mrs. Anstruther’s letter to Bennett as if they were being spoken by a tiresome grave voice. “She doats upon her children. What she really wants is someone to control her; read Shakespeare to her and get her into the air.” Mrs. Corrie did not want Shakespeare. That was quite clear. And it was quite clear that she wanted a plain dull woman she could count on; always there, in a black dress. She doated. Someone else, working for her, in her pay, would look after the children and do the hard work.
“The kiddies were ’riffickly ’cited. Wanted to stay up. I hope you’re strict, very strict, eh?”
“I believe I’m supposed to understand discipline,” said Miriam stiffly, gazing with weary eyes at the bars of the grate.
“We were in an awful fix before we heard about you. Poor old Bunnikin breakin’ down. She adored them—they’re angels. But she hadn’t the tiniest bit of a hold over them. Used to cry when they were naughty. You know. Poor old kiddies. Want them to be awfully clever. Work like a house afire. I know you’re clever. P’raps you won’t stay with my little heathens. Do try and stay. I can see you’ve
got just what they want. Strong-minded, eh? I’m an imbecile. So was poor old Bunnikin. D’you like kiddies?”
“Oh, I’m very fond of children,” said Miriam despairingly. She stared at the familiar bars. They were the bars of the old breakfast-room grate at home, and the schoolroom bars at Banbury Park. There they were again hard and black in the hard black grate in the midst of all this light and warmth and fragrance. Nothing had really changed. Black and hard. Someone’s grate. She was alone again. Mrs. Corrie would soon find out. “I think children are so interesting,” she said conversationally, struck by a feeling of originality in the remark. Perhaps children were interesting. Perhaps she would manage to find the children interesting. She glanced round at Mrs. Corrie. Her squarish white face was worn. Her eyes and neck looked as though all the life and youth had been washed away from them by some long sorrow. Her smile was startling ... absolute confidence and admiration ... like mother. But she would find out if one were not really interested.
That night Miriam roamed about her room from one to another of the faintly patterned blue hangings. Again and again she faced each one of them. For long she contemplated the drapery of the window space, the strange forest-like confusion made in the faint pattern of tiny leaves and flowers by the many soft folds, and turned from it for a distant view of the draperies of the bed and the French wardrobe. Sitting down by the fire at last she had them all in her mind’s eye. She was going to be with them all night. If she stayed with them long enough she would wake one day with red bronze hair and a pale face and thin white hands. And by that time life would be all strange draperies and strange inspiring food and mocking laughing people who floated about hiding a great secret and servants who were in the plot, admiring and serving it and despising as much as anybody the vulgar things outside.
Her black dress mocked at these thoughts and she looked about for her luggage. Finding the Saratoga trunk behind the draperies of the French wardrobe she extracted her striped
flannelette dressing-gown and presently sat down again with loosened hair. Entrenched in her familiar old dressing-gown, she felt more completely the power of her surroundings. Whatever should happen in this strange house she had sat for one evening in possession of this room. It was added for ever to the other things. And this one evening was more real than all the fifteen months at Banbury Park. It was so far away from everything, trams and people and noise—it was in the centre of beautiful exciting life; perfectly still and secure. Creeping to the window she held back the silk-corded rim of a curtain—a deep window-seat, a row of oblong lattices with leaded diamond panes. One of the windows was hasped a few inches open. No sound came in ... soft moist air and the smell of trees. Nothing but woods all round, everywhere.
The next morning a housemaid tapped at Miriam’s door half an hour after she had called her to say that her breakfast was laid in the schoolroom. Going out on to the landing she discovered the room by a curious rank odour coming towards her through a half-opened door.
Pushing open the door she found a large clear room, barely furnished, carpeted with linoleum and cold in the morning light pouring through an undraped window. In the grate smoked a half-ignited fire and one corner of the hearth-rug caught by a foot lay turned back. Across one end of the baize-covered table a cloth was laid, and on it stood a small crowded tray: a little teapot, no cosy, some rather thick slices of bread and butter, a small dish of marmalade, a small plate and cup and saucer piled together, and a larger plate on which lay an unfamiliar fish, dark brown, curiously dried and twisted and giving out a strong salt smoky odour. Miriam sat uncomfortably on the edge of a cane chair getting through her bread and butter and tea and one mouthful of the strong dry fish, feeling, with the door still standing wide, like a traveller snatching a hasty meal at a buffet. She tried to collect her thoughts on education. Little querulous excited sounds came to her from across the wide landing. Presently there came the swift flountering of a print dress across the landing and Wiggerson, long and willowy and capless with a cold red nose and large red hands, her thin small head looking very young with its
revealed bunch of untidy hair, appeared in the schoolroom doorway with an unconscious smile hesitating on her pale lips and in her pale blue eyes. “It isn’t very comfortable for you,” she said in a hurried voice. “I say, my word”; she went to the chilly grate and bent down for the poker. Miriam glanced at the solicitous droop of her long figure. “Stokes hasn’t half laid it,” went on Wiggerson; “if I were you I should have breakfast in my room. They all do, except Mr. Corrie when he’s at home. The other young lady was daily; she didn’t stop. I should, if I were you,” she finished, getting lightly to her feet. She stood between the door and the fireplace, half turned away, and gazing into space with her pale strong eyes, every line in her long pure unconscious figure waiting for Miriam’s response.
“Do you like me, Wiggerson?” said Miriam within, “you’ll have toothache and neuralgia with that thin head. You’re devoted to your relations. You’ve got a tiresome sickly old mother. You’ll never know you’re a servant....” “I think perhaps I will,” she drawled, clearing her throat.
“All right,” said Wiggerson, with a lit face. “I’ll tell them.”
As Miriam sat having tea with the children in the dining-room the brougham drove up to the door. “There’s someone arriving,” she said, hoping to distract the attention of the children from her fumblings with the teapot and the hot water jug. They had certainly never met anyone who did not know how to pour out tea. But they were taken in by her bored tone.
“It’s only Joey,” said Sybil, frowning tranquilly, her lively penetrating brown eyes fixed on the table just ahead of the small plate nearly covered by a mass of raspberry jam from which she ate with a teaspoon in the intervals of taking small bites from a thin piece of bread and butter held conveniently near her mouth as she sat with one elbow on the table. “She’s always here.” She looked across the table and met the soft brown eyes of the boy. They had been wandering absently about her square pale face and her short straggling red hair as she answered Miriam.
“Jenooshalet,” he said, lisping over the s and smiling meditatively.
“Jenoash,” responded Sybil, and they both laughed drunkenly.
“What I’m finking,” said the boy, putting a teaspoonful of jam into his teacup and speaking with a stammering difficulty that drew deep lines in his thin face; “what’s worrying me is she’ll have Rollo after tea instead of us.... Vat’s what I’m finking.”
“D’you like bays?” said Sybil, throwing a fleeting glance in the direction of Miriam.
“Yes, I do, I think,” said Miriam at random, patting her hair and wondering if the children had been to Weymouth.
“Oh, Boy.” Sybil flung her arms tightly round her thin body and sat grinning at her brother. Her old blue and white striped overall, her sparse hair and the ugly large gap between her two large front teeth seemed to set her apart from her surroundings. For a moment it seemed to Miriam that the large quiet room looking through two high windows on to a stretch of tree-shaded lawn, the cheerful little spread of delicate white china at one end of the long table, the preserves and cakes, the cress sandwiches and
thin bread and butter were all there for her appreciation alone, the children somehow profane and accidental, having no right to be there. But they had been in these surroundings, the girl for twelve the boy for eight years. They had never known anything else. For years life had been for them just what it was to-day—breakfast in bed, chirping at their mother from the dressing-rooms where they slept, and scolding at Stokes as she waited on their toilet; jocularly and impatiently learning lessons from little text-books for an hour or so in the morning, spending their afternoons cantering about the commons and along the sandy roadways with the groom; driving with their mother or walking with the governess and every day coming in at the end of the afternoon to this cosy, dainty grown-up tea, with their strange untroubled brooding faces. They would grow up and be exactly like their parents. They did not know anything about their fate. It was a kind of prison. Perhaps they knew. Perhaps that was what they were always brooding over. No, they did not mind. Their musings were tranquil. They were waiting. They had silent conversations all the time. To be with them after being
so long with the straining, determined, secretly ambitious children at Banbury Park was a great relief ... the way they moved their heads and used their hands ... the boy’s hands were wonderful, the palest fine brown silk, quick eloquent little claws, promising understanding and support. Fine little hands and steady gentle brown eyes.
“Bays.”
“Bright bays.”
“Roans.”
“Strawberry roans.”
“Chestnuts.”
“Chestnut bays.”
The children sat facing each other, each with clasped hands, and eyes lit with dreams. Miriam listened. Bay, then, must be that curious liver colour that was neither brown nor chestnut.
“Our ponies are bay,” said Sybil quickly, with flushed face. “Boy’s and mine, the brougham and victoria horses are chestnut bays and we’ve got two dogs, a whippet bitch, she’s in the stables now, and a Great Dane; I’m going to have a Willoughby pug pup on my birthday.”
Mrs. Corrie was standing in the hall when the little tea-party came out of the dining-room. She raised her head and stood shaped in the well-cut lines of her long brown and fawn check coat and skirt against the bead curtain that led to the drawing-room, looking across at them. The boy tottered blindly across the hall with arms outstretched. “Oh, Rollo, Rollo,” he said brokenly, as he reached her, pressing his hands up against her grey suède waistcoat and his face into her skirt, “are we going to h—ave you?”
Mrs. Corrie began singing in a thin laughing voice, taking the boy by the wrists.
“No, no,” he said sharply, “let me hold you a minute.” But Mrs. Corrie danced, forcing his steps as he pressed against her. Up and down the hall they capered while Sybil pranced round them whirling her skirts and clapping her hands. Miriam sank into a settee. The cold March sunlight streaming in through the thinly curtained windows painted the sharply bobbing figures in faint shadows on the wall opposite her.
When the dancers were breathless the little party strayed into the drawing-room. Presently they were gathered at the piano. Mrs. Corrie sat on a striped ottoman and peering closely picked out the airs of songs that made Miriam stare in amazement. They all sang. Slowly and stumblingly with many gasps of annoyance from Mrs. Corrie and the children violently assaulting each other whenever either of them got ahead of the halting accompaniment, they sang through all the songs in an album with a brightly decorated paper cover. But in their performance there was no tune, no rhythm, and the words spoken out slowly and separately were intolerable to her. One song they sang three times. Its chorus
Stiboo—stibee,
Sti-ibbety-oo
Sti-ibbety-boo,
Stibee,
which Sybil could sing without the piano with an extraordinary flourishing rapidity, pirouetting as she sang, they attacked again and again, slowly and waveringly, fitting the syllables note by note into the printed line of disconnected
jerkily tailed quavers.... They thought this was music. Encouraged at last by the fervour of the halting performance Miriam found herself seated at the piano attacking the score. They went through the songs from the beginning, three thin blissful wavering tremulous voices, with a careful perfect monotony of emphasis, uninfluenced by any variation of accent or inflection introduced by Miriam into the accompaniment. Looking round as they reached the end she saw flushed rapt faces with happy eyes gleaming through the gathering twilight. They smiled at her as they sang. When they had finished they lit the piano candles and sang “Stiboo” once more.
“Sti-boo, stibee, sti-ibbety-oo, sti-ibbety boo, stibee,” sang Miriam, getting into the large square bodice of her silkette evening dress. Its great oblong box-like elbow sleeves more than filled the mirror as she stood. They were stiffened with stout muslin, and stood squarely out from shoulder to elbow, so that the little band of silk edged with a piping of salmon pink velveteen which held them round the arm just
above the elbow could only be seen when she raised her arms. The piping was repeated round the square neck of her bodice, cutting in front across the bust just below the collar bone and at the back just above her shoulder blades. She sang the little refrain at intervals until her toilet was completed by the pinning of a small salmon pink velvet bow against the left side of the hard mass of her coiled hair and went humming downstairs into the hall. The soles of her new patent leather shoes felt pleasantly smooth against the thick carpet. She went across the hall to prop a foot against the fender and take one more reassuring look at the little disc of steel beads adorning her toe. “Stiboo——”
“Won’t you come in here?” said a soft staccato bass voice, a woman’s voice, but deep and rounded like the voice of a deep-chested watch-dog barking single soft notes after a furious outbreak.
Miriam looked round. Wiggerson was lighting the big lamp in the dining-room, peering up under the rose-coloured shade. “In here,” repeated the deep voice, smiling, and Miriam’s eyes discovered that the small door set back between the dining-room and the window on
the left side of the hall door was open, showing part of a curious soft brown room; a solid brown leather covered secretaire, with a revolving chair between its pillars of drawers, set back in the bow of a small window, a little bronze lamp with a plain buff-coloured shade standing near a pile of large volumes on the secretaire, a piece of wall covered with a dark silky-looking brown paper shining in the glow of an invisible fire. She went forward across the hall into the room with a polite pleased hesitating smile. There was a faint rich exciting odour in the warm little room ... cigars ... leather ... a sort of deep freedom. The rest of the house seemed suddenly far away. Coloured drawings of houses on the little brown walls, two enormous deep low leather arm-chairs drawn up on either side of an enormous fire, a littered mantelshelf. “I saw you froo the crack,” said a lady, fitted deeply into one of the large chairs. She held out a small hand when Miriam was near enough to take it and said softly and lazily, “You’re the new guvnis, aren’t you? I’m Joey Banks.”
“Yes, I came yesterday,” said Miriam serenely.
Sinking into the second arm-chair she crossed her knees and beamed into the fire. What
perfect security.... She turned to Mr. Corrie, unknown and mysteriously away somewhere in London to thank him for setting her here, protected from the whole world in the deeps of his study chair—all the worry and the noise and the fussing people shut away. If suddenly he came in she would not thank him, but he would know. He would be sitting in the other arm-chair, and she would say, “What do you think about everything?” Not so much to hear what he thought, but because some of his thoughts would be her thoughts. Thought was the same in everybody who thought at all. She would sit back and rest and hear an understanding voice. He might be heavy and fat. But a leading Q.C. must have thoughts ... and he had been thin once ... and there were those books ... and he would read newspapers; perhaps too many newspapers. He would know almost at once that she thought he read too many newspapers. She would have to conceal that to hear the voice going on and leaving her undisturbed.
Of course people like this wore evening dress every day. You could only rest and think and
talk and be happy without collars and sleeves—with the cool beaded leather against one’s neck and arms in the firelight....
She gazed familiarly into her companion’s eyes taking in her soft crimson silk evening dress with its wide folded belt of black velvet and the little knots of black about the square sleeves, as the eyes smiled long and easily into hers ... the smile of one of the girls at the Putney school, the same dark fringed caressing smiling eyes set in delicately bulging pale brown cheeks, the same little frizz of dark hair. She felt for the name, but could only recall the sense of the girl as she had sat, glints of fear and hard watchfulness in the beautiful eyes, trying to copy her neighbour’s exercise. This girl’s dull hair was fluffed cloudily, and there was no uneasiness in the eyes. Probably she too had been a duffer at school and had had to crib things. But she had left all that behind and her smile was—perfect.
“You look like an Oriental princess,” said Miriam, gazing.
Joey flushed and smiled more deeply, but without making the smallest movement.
“Do I, weally?”
“Exactly,” said Miriam, keeping her own pose
with difficulty. She knew she had flung up her head and spoken emphatically. But the girl was such a wonderful effect—she wanted her to be able to see herself ... she was not quite of the same class as the Corries, or different, somehow. Miriam gazed on. Raising the large black cushion a little, turning her head and pressing her cheek into it, her eyes still on Miriam’s, Joey laughed a short contralto gurgle, bringing the sharp dimples and making her cheeks bulge slightly on either side of the chin.
“I brought it in from Rollo’s room,” she said. “I like bein’ in here. Rollo never comes in; but she always has a fire in here when she’s got people stoppin’. You can pop in here whenever you like when Felix isn’t at home. It’s jolly. I like it.”
Miriam looked into the fire and thought. Joey, too, liked talking to Mr. Corrie in his room when he was not there. He must be one of those charming sort of men, rather weak, who went on liking people. Joey was evidently an old friend of the family and still liked him. She evidently liked even to mention his name. He couldn’t be really anything much ... or perhaps Joey didn’t really know him at all. Joey did not live there. She came and went.
“Of course you haven’t seen Felix yet, have you?”
“No.”
Joey straightened her head on her pillow.
“It’s not the least use me tryin’ to describe him to you,” she breathed in broken tones.
Miriam struggled uneasily with her thoughts ... a leading Q.C.—about forty.... “Oh, do try,” she said, a little fearfully ... how vulgar ... just like a housemaid ... no; Wiggerson would never have said such a thing, nor asked at all. It was treachery to Mr. Corrie. If Joey said anything more about him she would never be able to speak to him freely.
“He’s divine,” said Joey, smiling into the fire.
How nice of Joey to be so free with her and want her to like him too ... the gong. They both rose and peered into the little strip of mirror in the small overmantel ... divine might mean anything ... divine ... oh, quite too utterly too-too ... greenery-yellery—Grosvenor-gallery—foot-in-the-grave young man.
The next day the ground was powdered with snow. Large snowflakes were hurrying through the air driving to and fro on a harsh wind. The wind snored round the house like a flame and bellowed in the chimneys. An opened window let in the cold air and the smell of the snow. No sound came from the woods. The singing of the birds and the faint sound of the woods had gone.
But when Miriam left her room to go across to the schoolroom and wait for the children she found the spring in the house. The landing was bright with the light streaming through many open doors. Rooms were being prepared. On a large tray on the landing table lay a mass of spring flowers and little flowered bowls of many shapes and sizes filled with fresh water. Stokes and Wiggerson were fluttering in and out of the rooms carrying frilled bed-linen, lace-edged towels and flowered bed-spreads.
People with money could make the spring come as soon as the days lengthened. Clear bright rooms, bright clean paint, soft coloured hangings, spring flowers in the bright light on landings. The warmth from stoves and fires seemed as if it came from the sun. Its glow changed suddenly to the glow of sunlight. It drew the scent of the flowers into the air. And with the new scent of the new flowers something was moving and leaping and dancing in the air. Outside the wintry weather might go on and on as though the spring would never come.
In a dull cheap villa there might be a bunch of violets in a bowl on a whatnot. Snuffing very close you could feel the tide of spring wash through your brain. But only in the corner where the violets were. In cold rooms upstairs you could remember the violets and the spring; but the spring did not get into the house.
There was an extraordinary noise going on downstairs. Standing inside the schoolroom door Miriam listened. Joey’s contralto laugh coming up in gusts, the sound of dancing feet, the children shouting names, Mrs. Corrie repeating them in her laughing wavering chalky voice. Joey; certainly Joey was not dancing about.
She was probably sitting on the sofa watching them, and thinking. Fancy their being so excited about people coming. Just like any ordinary people. She went into the schoolroom saying over the names to herself. “Mélie to-day ... Dad and Mr. Staple-Craven to-morrow ... the Bean-pole for Sunday” ... someone they knew very well. It might be either a tall man or a tall woman.... They made the house spring-like because people were coming. Would the people notice that the house was spring-like? Would they realise? People did not seem to realise anything. They would patronise the flowers ... they ought to feel wild with joy; join hands and dance round the flowers.
At lunch time the door at the far end of the dining-room stood open showing the shrouded length of a billiard-table, and beyond it at the far end in the gloom a squat oak chimney-piece littered with pipes and other small objects. The light, even from the overcast sky, came in so brilliantly that the holland cover looked almost white. There must be several windows; perhaps three. What a room to have, just for a billiard-room. A quiet, mannish room, waiting until it was wanted, the pockets of the table bulging
excitingly under the cover, the green glass supports under the squat round stoutly spindling legs, a bit of a huge armchair showing near the fireplace, the end of a sofa, the green shaded lamps low over the table, the dark untidy mantelpiece, tobacco, books, talks, billiards. In there too the spring flowers stood ready on the table. They would be put somewhere on the wide dark mantel, probably on a corner out of the way. “We used to play table billiards at home,” said Miriam at random, longing to know what part the billiard-room played in the week-end.
“Billy-billy,” said Mrs. Corrie, “oh, we’ll have some fun. We’ll all play.”
“It was such a bore stretching the webbing,” said Miriam critically, avoiding Sybil’s eager eyes.
“It must have been—but how awfully jolly to have billiards. I simply adaw billiards,” said Joey fervently.
“Such a fearful business getting them absolutely taut,” pursued Miriam, feeling how much the cream caramel was enhanced by the sight of the length, beyond the length of the dining-room, of that bright long heavy room. She imagined it lit and people walking about amongst the
curious lights and shadows with cues—and cigarettes; quiet intent faces. Englishmen. Did the English invent billiards?
“Poor old Joey. Wish you weren’t going to the dentist. You won’t be here when Mélie comes.”
“Don’t mind the dentist a scrap. I’m looking forward to it. I shall see Mélie to-night.”
She doesn’t like her, thought Miriam; people being together is awful; like the creaking of furniture.
Mélie arrived an hour before dinner time. Miriam heard Mrs. Corrie taking her into the room next to her own with laughter and many phrases. A panting, determined voice, like a voice out of a play, the thick, smooth, rather common voice of a fair-haired middle-aged lady in a play kept saying, “The pores, my dear. I must open my pores after the journey. I’m choked with it.”
Presently Mélie’s door closed and Mrs. Corrie tapped and put her head inside Miriam’s door. “She’s goin’ to have a steam bath on her floor, got an injarubber tent on the floor and a
spirit lamp. She’s gettin’ inside it. Isn’t she an old cure!”
“She’s thinking more about her food than anything they’re saying; she doesn’t really care about them a bit,” thought Miriam at dinner, gazing again and again across at Mrs. Staple-Craven’s fat little shape seated opposite herself in a tightly fitting pale blue silk dress whose sleeves had tiny puffs instead of the fashionable large square sleeves. Watching her cross unconscious face, round and blue-eyed and all pure “milk and roses,” her large yellow head with a tiny twist of hair standing up like the handle of a jug, exactly on the top of the crown, her fat white hands with thick soft curly fingers and bright pink nails, the strange blue stare that went from thing to thing on the table, hearing her thick smooth heedless voice, with its irrelevant assertions and statements, Miriam wondered how she had come to be Mrs. Staple-Craven. She was no more Mrs. Staple-Craven than she was sitting at Mrs. Corrie’s table. She was not really there. She was just getting through, and neither Mrs. Corrie nor Joey really knew this. At the same time she was too stout and gluttonous to be still really a fairy in Devonshire. Where
was she? What did she think? She went on and on because she was afraid someone might ask her that.
Although Joey had been to have her hair dyed and had not been to the dentist at all she was not pretending nearly so much. She was a little ashamed. Why had she said she was going to the dentist and come back with sheeny bronzy hair, ashamed? She had been worrying about her looks. Perhaps she was more than twenty-one. Nan Babington said no one need mind being twenty-one if they were engaged, but if not it was a frantic age to be. Joey was a poor worried thing, just like any other girl.
When they were safely ensconced round the drawing-room fire Mrs. Staple-Craven sat very upright in her chair with her plump little hands on either arm and her eyes fixed on the blaze. Joey pleading toothache had said good night and gone away with her coffee. There was a moment’s silence.
“You’d never think I’d been fairly banged to death by the spirits last night,” said Mrs. Staple-Craven in a thick flat reproachful narrative
tone. It sounds like a housekeeper giving an order to a servant she knows won’t obey her, thought Miriam, swishing more comfortably into her chair. If Mrs. Craven would talk there would be no need to do anything.
“Ah-ha,” said Mrs. Craven, still looking at the fire, “something’s pleasing Miss Henderson.”
“Is she rejoicin’? Tell us about the spirits, Mélie. I’m deadly keen. Deadly. She mustn’t be too delighted. I’ve told her she’s not to get engaged.”
“Engaged?” enquired Mrs. Craven, of the fire.
“She’s promised,” said Mrs. Corrie, turning off the lights until only one heavily shaded lamp was left, throwing a rosy glow over Mélie’s compact form.
“She won’t, if she’s not under the star, to be sure.”
“Oh, she mustn’t think about stars. Why should she marry?”
Miriam looked a little anxiously from one to the other.
“You’ve shocked her, Julia,” said Mrs. Staple-Craven. “Never mind at all, my dear. You’ll marry if you’re under the star.”
“Star, star, beautiful star, a handsome one with twenty thousand a year,” sang Mrs. Corrie.
“I don’t think a man has any right to be handsome,” said Miriam desperately—she must manage to keep the topic going. These women were so terrible—they filled her with fear. She must make them take back what they had said.
“A handsome man’s much handsomer than a pretty woman,” said Mrs. Craven.
“It’s cash, cash, cash—that’s what it is,” chanted Mrs. Corrie softly.
“Oh, do you?” said Miriam. “I think a handsome man’s generally so weak.”
Mrs. Craven stared into the fire.
“You take the one who’s got the ooftish, my friend,” said Mrs. Corrie.
“But you say I’m not to marry.”
“You shall marry when my poor little old kiddies are grown up. We’ll find you a very nice one with plenty of money.”
“Then you don’t think marriage is a failure,” said Miriam, with immense relief.
Mrs. Corrie leaned towards her with laughter in her clear light eyes. It seemed to fill the room. “Have some more coffy-drink?”
“No, thanks,” said Miriam, shivering.
“Sing us something—she sings, Mélie—German songs. Isn’t she no end clever?”
“Does she?” said Mrs. Craven. “Yes. She’s got a singing chin. Sing us a pretty song, my dear.”
As she fluttered the leaves of her Schumann album she saw Mrs. Craven sit back with closed eyes, and Mrs. Corrie still sitting forward in her chair with her hands clasped on her knees gazing with a sad white face into the flames.
“Ich grolle nicht, und wenn das Herz auch bricht,” sang Miriam, and thought of Germany. Her listeners did not trouble her. They would not understand. No English person would quite understand—the need, that the Germans understood so well—the need to admit the beauty of things ... the need of the strange expression of music, making the beautiful things more beautiful and of words when they were together in the beauty of the poems. Music and poetry told everything—whether you understood the music or the words—they put you in the mood that made things shine—then heart-break or darkness did not matter. Things go on shining in the end; German landscapes and German sunshine and German towns were full of this
knowledge. In England there was something besides—something hard.
“’Menjous, ain’t it?” said Mrs. Corrie, as she rose from the piano.
“If we lived aright we should all be singing,” said Mrs. Craven, “it’s natural.”
“You look a duck.”
Miriam stood still at the top of the stairs and looked down into the hall. Mrs. Staple-Craven was standing under the largest lamp near the fireplace looking up at a tall man in a long ulster. Grizzled hair and a long face with a long pointed grizzled beard—she was staring up at him with her eyes “like saucers” and her face pink, white, gold, “like a full moon”—how awful for him ... he’d come down from town probably in a smoking carriage, talking, and there she was and he had to say something.
“I’ve just had my bath,” said Mrs. Craven, without altering the angle of her gaze.
“You look a duck,” said the tall man fussily, half turning away.
Standing with his back to the couple, opening letters at the hall table was a little man in a neat
little overcoat with a silk hat tilted back on his head. His figure had a curious crooked jaunty appearance, the shoulders a little crooked and the little legs slightly bent. “It’s Mr. Corrie,” mused Miriam, moving backwards as he turned and went swiftly out banging the front door behind him. “He looks like a jockey”; she got herself back into her room until the hall should be clear. “He’s gone down to the stables.” She listened to the quick jerky little footsteps crunching along the gravel outside her window.
Soon after the quick little steps sounded on the stairs and the children shouted from their rooms. A door was opened and shut and for five minutes there was a babel of voices. Then the steps came out again and went away down the passage leading off the landing to the bathroom and a little spare room at the further end. They passed the bathroom and the door of the little room was opened and shut and locked. Everything was silent in the house, but from the room next to hers came the sounds of Mr. Craven plunging quickly about and blowing and clearing his throat. She had not heard him come up.
When at last she came downstairs she found the whole party standing talking in the hall.
The second gong was drowning the terrible voices, leaving nothing but gesticulating figures. Presently Mr. Staple-Craven was standing before her with Mrs. Corrie, and her hand was powerfully wrung and released with a fussy emphatic handshake cancelling the first impression. Mr. Craven made some remark in a high voice, lost by Miriam as Mr. Corrie came across to her from talking to Joey under a lamp and took her hand. “Let me introduce your host,” he said, keeping her hand and placing it on his arm as he turned towards the dining-room, “and take you in to dinner.”
Miriam went across the hall past the servants waiting on either side of the dining-room door and down the long room with her hand on the soft coat sleeve of a neat little dinner jacket and her footsteps led by the firm, disconnected, jumpy footsteps of the little figure at her side. There was a vague crowd of people coming along behind. “Come on, everybody,” Mrs. Corrie had pealed delicately, and Mrs. Craven had said in a thick smooth explanatory voice, “Of course she’s the greatest stranger.”
The table was set with replicas of the little groups of Venetian wine and finger glasses and
fine silver and cutlery that had accompanied Miriam’s first sense of dining and when she found herself seated at Mr. Corrie’s left hand opposite Mrs. Craven, with Joey away on her left, facing Mr. Craven and Mrs. Corrie now far away from her at the door end of the table, it seemed as if these things had been got together only for the use of the men. Why were women there? Why did men and women dine together? She would have liked to sit there and watch and listen, but not to dine—not to be seen dining by Mr. Corrie. It was extraordinary, this muddle of men and women with nothing in common. The men must hate it. She knew he did not have such thoughts. All the decanters stood in a little group between him and the great bowl of flaring purple and crimson anemones that stood in the centre of the table, and the way in which he said when her soup came, “Have some Moselle,” and filled her glass, compelled her to feel welcome to share the ritual of the feast. She sat with bent head wrapped and protected, hearing nothing as the voices sounded about the table but the clear sweet narrow rather drawling tones of Mr. Corrie’s voice. She could hear it talking to men, on racecourses, talking in clubs,
laughing richly, rather drunkenly, at improper stories in club smoking-rooms; dining, talking and lunching, dining, talking, talking every day and sitting there now, wonderfully, giving her security. She knew with perfect certainty that nothing painful or disagreeable or embarrassing could come near her in his presence. But he knew nothing about her; much less than Wiggerson knew.
Joey felt the same, of course. But Joey was laughing and talking in her deep voice and making eyes. No, it was not the same. Joey was not happy.
These people sitting at his table were supposed to be friends. But they knew nothing about him. He made little quiet mocking jokes and laughed and kept things going. The Staple-Cravens knew nothing at all about him. Mrs. Staple-Craven did not care for anybody. She looked about and always spoke as if she were answering an accusation that nobody had made—a dressmaker persuading you to have something and talking on and on in fat tones to prevent your asking the price.... Mr. Craven only cared for himself. He was weak and pompous and fussy with a silly
elaborate chivalrous manner. There was a stillness round the table. Miriam felt that it centred in her and was somehow her fault. Never mind. She had successfully got through whitebait and a quail. She would write home about the quails and whitebait and the guests and say nothing about her own silence—“Mr. Staple-Craven is a poet ...”
“Give Mélie some more drink, Percy,” said Mrs. Corrie. “It’s all wrong you two sittin’ together.”
“She likes to sit near me, don’t you, my duck?” said Mr. Craven, looking about for the wine and bowing to and fro from his hips.
“You’ve been away so long,” murmured Mr. Corrie. “What sort of a place is Balone to stay in?”
“Oh, nothing of a place in itself, nothing of a place. Why do you call it Balone?”
“Isn’t that right? That’s right enough. Come.”
Miriam waited eagerly, her eyes on Mr. Craven’s pink face with the grizzled hair above and below it. How perfectly awful he must look in his nightshirt, she thought, and flushed violently. “Balloyne,” he was saying carefully,
showing his red lips and two rows of unnaturally even teeth.... “Oh, Lord, they mean Bologne.” Both men were talking together. “Balloyne is perfectly correct; the correct pronunciation,” said Mr. Craven in a loud testy voice, with loose lips. Mrs. Craven gazed up ... like a distressed fish ... into his flushed face. Mrs. Corrie was throwing out her little wavering broken laughs. Keeping his angry voice Mr. Craven went on. Miriam sat eagerly up and glanced at Mr. Corrie. He was sitting with his lips drawn down and his eyebrows raised ... his law-court face.... Suddenly his face relaxed and the dark boyish brown head with the clear thoughtful brow and the gentle kind eyes turned towards her. “Let’s ask Miss Henderson. She shall be umpire.”
Miriam carefully enunciated the word. The blood sang in her ears as everyone looked her way. The furniture and all the room mimicked her. What did it matter, after all, the right pronunciation? It did matter; not that Balone was wrong, but the awfulness of being able to miss the right sound if you had once heard it
spoken. There was some awful meaning in the way English people missed the right sound; all the names in India, all the Eastern words. How could an English traveller hear hahreem, and speak it hairum, Aswan and say Ass-ou-ann? It made them miss other things and think wrongly about them. “That’s more like it,” she heard Mr. Corrie say. There was sheeny braiding round the edges of his curious little coat. “Got you there, Craven, got you there,” he was saying somewhere in his mind ... his mind went on by itself repeating things wearily. His small austere face shone a little with dining; the corners of his thin lips slackened. “I can read all your thoughts. None of you can disturb my enjoyment of this excellent dinner; none of you can enhance it” ... but he was not quite conscious of his thoughts. Why did not the others read them? Perhaps they did. Perhaps they were too much occupied to notice what people were thinking. Perhaps in society people always were. The Staple-Cravens did not notice. But they were neither of them quite sure of themselves. Mrs. Corrie was busy all the time dancing and singing somewhere alone, wistfully. Joey kept throwing her smile at Mr. Corrie—lounging
a little, easily, over the table and saying in her mind, “I understand you, the others don’t, I do,” and he smiled at her, broadened the smile that had settled faintly all over his face, now and again in her direction. But she did not understand him. “Divine,” perhaps he was, or could be. But Joey did not know him. She only knew that he had a life of his own and no one else at the table had quite completely. She did not know that with all his worldly happiness and success and self-control he was miserable and lost and needing consolation ... but neither did he. Perhaps he never would; would not find it out because he had so many thoughts and was always talking. So he thought he liked Joey. Because she smiled and responded. “Jabez Balfour,” he was saying slowly, savouring the words and smiling through his raised wineglass with half closed eyes. That was for Mr. Staple-Craven; there was some exciting secret in it. Presently they would be two men over their wine and nuts. Mr. Staple-Craven took this remark for himself at once, scorning the women with a thick polite insolence. His lips shot out. “Ah,” he said busily, “Jabez Balfour, Jabez Balfour; ah,” he swung from side to side from his waist. “Let me see, Jabez....”
“The Liberator scheme,” said Mr. Corrie interestedly with a bright young eye. “They’ve got ’im this time; fairly got ’im on the hop.”
Jabez Balfour; what a beautiful name. He could not have done anything wrong. There was a soft glare of anger in Mr. Corrie’s eyes; as if he were accusing Mr. Staple-Craven of some crime, or everybody. Perhaps one would hear something about crime; crime. That’s crime—somebody taking down a book and saying triumphantly, “that’s crime,” and people talking excitedly about it, in the warm, at dinners ... like that moment at Richmond Park, the ragged man with panting mouth, running ... the quiet grass, the scattered deer, the kindly trees, the gentlemen with triumphant faces, running after him; enough, enough, he had suffered enough ... his poor face, their dreadful faces. He knew more than they did. Crime could not be allowed. People murdering you in your sleep. But criminals knew that—the running man knew. He was running away from himself. He knew he had spoiled the grass and the trees and the deer. To have stopped him and hidden him and let him get over it. His poor face.... The awful moment of standing up trying to say or do
something, feeling so weak, trembling at the knees, the man’s figure pelting along in the distance, the two gentlemen passing, their white waistcoats, homes, wives, bathrooms, stuffiness, indigestion....
“It comes perfectly into line with Biblical records, my dear Corrie: a single couple, two cells originating the whole creation.”
“I’m maintaining that’s not the Darwinian idea at all. It was not a single couple, but several different ones.”
“We’re not descended from monkeys at all. It’s not natural,” said Mrs. Craven loudly, across the irritated voices of the men. Their faces were red. They filled the room with inaccurate phrases pausing politely between each and keeping up a show of being guest and host. How nice of them. But this was how cultured people with incomes talked about Darwin.
“The great thing Darwin did,” said Miriam abruptly, “was to point out the power of environment in evolving the different species—selecting.”
“That’s it, that’s it!” sang Mrs. Corrie.
“Let’s all select ourselves into the droin’-room.” “Now I’ve offended the men and the women too,” thought Miriam.
Mr. Staple-Craven joined the ladies almost at once. He came in leaving the door open behind him and took a chair in the centre of the fireside circle and sat giving little gasps and sighs of satisfaction, spreading his hands and making little remarks about the colours of the fire, and the shape of the coffee cups. There he was and he would have to be entertained, although he had nothing at all to say and was puzzling about himself and life all the time behind his involuntary movements and polite smiles and gestures. Perhaps he was uneasy because he knew there was someone saying all the time, “You’re a silly pompous old man and you think yourself much cleverer than you are.” But it was not altogether that; he was always uneasy, even when he was alone, unless he was rapidly preparing to go and be with people who did not know what he was. If he had been alone with the other three women he would have forgotten for a while and half-liked, half-despised them for their affability.
“The great man’s always at work, always at work,” he said suddenly, in a desperate sort of way. They were like some sort of needlework guild sitting round, just people, in the end; it made the surroundings seem quite ordinary. The room fell to pieces; one could imagine it being turned out, or all the things being sold up and dispersed.
“All work and no play,” scolded Mrs. Craven, “makes Jack....”
Miriam heard the swish of the bead curtain at the end of the short passage.
“Heah he is,” smiled Joey.
“A miracle,” breathed Mrs. Craven, glancing round the circle. Evidently he did not usually come in.
Mr. Corrie came quietly into the room with empty hands; in the clear light he looked older than he had done in the dining-room, fuller in the face; grey threads showed in his hair. Everyone turned towards him. He looked at no one. His loose little smile had gone. The straight chair into which he dropped with a dreamy careless preoccupied air was set a little back from the fireside circle. No one moved.
“Absorbed the evidence, m’lud?” squeaked Mr. Craven.
“Ah-m,” growled his host, clearing his throat.
Why can’t they let him alone, Miriam asked herself, and leave him to me, added her mind swiftly. She sat glaring into the fire; the room had resumed its strange magic.
“Do you think it is wrong to teach children things you don’t believe yourself?...” said Miriam, and her thoughts rushed on. “You’re an unbeliever and I’m an unbeliever and both of us despise the thoughts and opinions of ‘people’; you’re a successful wealthy man and can amuse yourself and forget; I must teach and presently die, teach till I die. It doesn’t matter. I can be happy for a while teaching your children, but you know, knowing me a little what a task that must be; you know I know nothing and that I know that nobody knows anything; comfort me....”
She seemed to traverse a great loop of time waiting for the answer to her hurried question. Mr. Corrie had come into the drawing-room dressed for dinner and sat down near her with a
half-smile as she closed the book she was reading and laid it on her knee and looked up with sentences from “A Human Document” ringing through her, and by the time her question was out she knew it was unnecessary. But she had flung it out and it had reached him and he had read the rush of thoughts that followed it. She might as well have been silent; better. She had missed some sort of opportunity. What would have happened if she had been quite silent? His answer was swift, but in the interval they had said all they would ever have to say to each other. “Not in the least,” he said, with a gentle decisiveness.
She flashed thanks at him and sighed her relief. He did not mind about religion. But how far did he understand? She had made him think she was earnest about the teaching children something. He would be very serious about their being “decently turned out.” She was utterly incapable of turning them out for the lives they would have to lead. She envied and pitied and despised those lives. Envied the ease and despised the ignorance, the awful cruel struggle of society that they were growing up for—no joy, a career and sport for the boy, clubs, the
weary dyspeptic life of the blasé man, and for the girl lonely cold hard bitter everlasting “social” life. She envied the ease. Mr. Corrie must know she envied the ease. Did he know that she tried to hide her incapacity in order to go on sharing the beauty and ease?
“It is so difficult,” she pursued helplessly, and saw him wonder why she went on with the subject and try to read the title of her book. She did not mean to tell him that. That would lead them away; just nowhere. If only she could tell him everything and get him to understand. But that would mean admitting that she was letting the children’s education slide; and he was sitting there, confidently, so beautifully dressed for dinner, paying her forty pounds a year not to let the children’s education slide.... “It’s an opportunity; he’s come in here, and sat down to talk to me. I ought to tell him; I’m cheating.” But he had looked for the title of her book, and would have talked, about anything, if she could have talked. He had a little air of deference, quiet kind indulgent deference. His neat little shoulders, bent as he sat turned towards her, were kind. “I’m too young,” she cried in her mind. If only she could say aloud,
“I’m too young—I can’t do it,” and leave everything to him.
Or leave the children out altogether and talk to him, man to man, about the book. She could not do that. Everything she said would hurt her, poisoned by the hidden sore of her incapability to do anything for his children. He ought to send them to school. But they would not go to a school where anything real was taught. Science, strange things about India and Ireland, the ?sthetic movement, Ruskin; making things beautiful. How far away all that seemed, that sacred life of her old school—forgotten. The thought of it was like a breath in the room. Did he know of these things? That sort of school would take the children away, out of this kind of society life. Make them think—for themselves. He did not think or approve of thought. Even the hard Banbury Park people would be nearer to him than any of those things.... That was the world. Nearly everyone seemed to be in it. He was whimsically trying to read the title of her book with the little half-smile he shared with the boy.
People came in and they both rose. It was over. She sank back miserably into the offering
of the moment, retiring into a lamp-lit corner with her book, enclosing herself in its promise.
She sat long that night over her fire dipping into the strange book, reading passages here and there; feeling them come nearer to her than anything she had read before. She knew at once that she did not want to read the book through; that it was what people called a tragedy, that the author had deliberately made it a tragedy; something black and twisted and painful, painful came to her out of every page; but seriously to read it right through and be excited about the tragic story seemed silly and pitiful. The thought of Mrs. Corrie and Joey doing this annoyed her and impatiently she wanted to tell them that there was nothing in it, nothing in the things the author wanted to make them believe; that was fraud, humbug ... they missed everything. They could not see through it, they read through to the happy ending or the sad ending and took it all seriously.
She struggled in thought to discover why it was she felt that these people did not read books and that she herself did. She felt that she could
look at the end, and read here and there a little and know; know something, something they did not know. People thought it was silly, almost wrong to look at the end of a book. But if it spoilt a book, there was something wrong about the book. If it was finished and the interest gone when you know who married who, what was the good of reading at all? It was a sort of trick, a sell. Like a puzzle that was no more fun when you had found it out. There was something more in books than that ... even Rosa Nouchette Carey and Mrs. Hungerford, something that came to you out of the book, any bit of it, a page, even a sentence—and the “stronger” the author was the more came. That was why Ouida put those others in the shade, not, not, not because her books were improper. It was her, herself somehow. Then you read books to find the author! That was it. That was the difference ... that was how one was different from most people.... Dear Eve; I have just discovered that I don’t read books for the story, but as a psychological study of the author ... she must write that to Eve at once; to-morrow. It was rather awful and strange. It meant never being able to agree with people about books,
never liking them for the same reasons as other people.... But it was true and exciting. It meant ... things coming to you out of books, people, not the people in the books, but knowing, absolutely, everything about the author. She clung to the volume in her hand with a sense of wealth. Its very binding, the feeling of it, the sight of the slender serried edges of the closed leaves came to her as having a sacredness ... and the world was full of books.... It did not matter that people went about talking about nice books, interesting books, sad books, “stories”—they would never be that to her. They were people. More real than actual people. They came nearer. In life everything was so scrappy and mixed up. In a book the author was there in every word.
Why did this strange book come so near, nearer than any others, so that you felt the writing, felt the sentences as if you were writing them yourself? He was a sad pained man, all wrong; bothered and tragic about things, believing in sad black horror. Then why did he come so near? Perhaps because life was sad. Perhaps life was really sad. No; it was somehow the writing, the clearness. That was the thing.
He himself must be all right, if he was so clear. Then it was dangerous, dangerous to people like Mrs. Corrie and Joey who would attend only to what he said, and not to him ... sadness or gladness, saying things were sad or glad did not matter; there was something behind all the time, something inside people. That was why it was impossible to pretend to sympathise with people. You don’t have to sympathise with authors; you just get at them, neither happy nor sad; like talking, more than talking. Then that was why the people who wrote moral stories were so awful. They were standing behind the pages preaching at you with smarmy voices.... Bunyan?... No.... He preached to himself too ... crying out his sins.... He did not get between you and himself and point at a moral. An author must show himself. Anyhow, he can’t help showing himself. A moral writer only sees the mote in his brother’s eye. And you see him seeing it.
A long letter to Eve.... Eve would think that she was showing off. But she would be excited and interested too, and would think about it a little. If only she could make Eve see what a book was ... a dance by the author, a song, a prayer, an important sermon, a message. Books were not stories printed on paper, they were people; the real people; ... “I prefer books to people” ... “I know now why I prefer books to people.”
“... I do wish you’d tell me more about your extraordinary days. You must have extraordinary days. I do. Perhaps everyone has. Only they don’t seem to know it!”
... This morning, the green common lying under the sun, still and wide and silent; with a little breeze puffing over it; the intense fresh green near the open door of the little Catholic church; the sandy pathway running up into the common, hummocky and twisting and winding, its sand particles glinting in the sun, always there, going on, whoever died or whatever happened,
winding amongst happy greenery, in and out amongst the fresh smell of the common. Inside the chapel the incense streaming softly up, the seven little red lamps hanging in the cloud of incense about the altar; the moving of the thick forest of embroidery on the cope of the priest. Funny when he bobbed, but when he just moved quietly, taking a necessary step, all the colour of the forest on his cope moving against the still high wide colours of the chancel. If only anyone could express how perfect life was at those moments; everyone must know, everyone who was looking must know that life was perfectly happy. That is why people went to church; for those moments with the light on all those things in the chancel. It meant something.... Priests and nuns knew it all the time; even when they were unhappy; that was why they could kiss dying people and lepers; they saw something else, all the time. Nothing common or unclean. That was why Christ had blazing eyes. Christianity: the sanctification of bread and wine, and lepers and death; the body; the resurrection of the body. Even if there was some confusion and squabbling about Christ there must be something in it if the things that showed were so beautiful.
Hard cold vows, of chastity and poverty. That did it. Emptiness, in face of—an unspeakable glory. If one could not, was too weak or proud, “Verily they have their reward.” Everyone got something somehow ... in hell; thou art there also ... that shows there is no eternal punishment. Earth is hell, with everyone going to heaven.
What was the worldly life? The gay bright shimmering lunch, the many guests, the glitter of the table, mayonnaise red and green and yellow, delicate bright wines; strolling in the woods in the afternoon.... Tea, everyone telling anecdotes of the afternoon’s walk as if it were a sort of competition, great bursts of laughter and abrupt silences and then another story, the moments of laughter were something like those moments in church; whilst there was nothing but laughter in the room everybody was perfectly happy and good; everybody forgot everything and ran back somewhere; to the beginning, to the time when they were first looking at things, without troubling about anything. But when the laughter ceased everyone ran away and the rest of their day together showed in a flash, an awful tunnel that would be filled with the echo of the separate footsteps unless more laughter could
be made, to hide the sad helpless sounds. Dinners were like all the noise and laughter of tea-time grown steadier, a pillow fight with harder whacks and more time for the strokes, no bitterness, just buffeting and shouts, and everyone laughing the same laugh as if they were all in some high secret. They were in some high secret; the great secret of the worldly life; and if you prevented yourself from thinking and laughed, they seemed to take you in. That was the way to live the worldly life. To talk absurdly and laugh; to be lost in laughter. Why had Mrs. Corrie seemed so vexed? Why had she said suddenly and quietly in the billiard-room that it seemed rummy to go to Mass and play billiards in the evening? “Be goody if you are.” It had spoiled the day. Mrs. Corrie would like her to be goody. But then it was she who had pushed her down the steps in the afternoon and called after the actor to take care of her in the woods.
There was something too sad about the worldliness and too difficult about goodness.
Perhaps one had not gone far enough with worldliness....
“Take each fair mask for what it shows itself,
Nor strive to look beneath it.”
That was what she had done drifting about in the wood with the actor listening to his pleasant voice. It was an excursion into pure worldliness. He had never thought for a moment in his life of the world as anything than what it appeared to be. He had no suspicion that anyone ever did. He had accepted her as one of the house-party and talked, on and on busily, about his American tour and his hope of a London engagement, getting emphatic about his chance, the chanciness of everything. And she had drifted along, delighting in the pleasant voice sounding through the wood, seeing the wood clear and steady through the pleasant tone, not caring about chance or chanciness but ready to pretend she was interested in them so that the voice might go on; pretending to be interested when he stopped. That was feminine worldliness, pretending to be interested so that pleasant things might go on. Masculine worldliness was refusing to be interested so that it might go on doing things. Feminine worldliness then meant perpetual hard work and cheating and pretence at the door of a hidden garden, a lovely hidden garden. Masculine worldliness meant never being really there; always talking about things
that had happened or making plans for things that might happen. There was nothing that could happen that was not in some way the same as anything else. Nobody was ever quite there, realising.
During her second week of giving the children their morning’s lessons Miriam saw finally that it was impossible and would always be impossible to make their two hours of application anything but an irrelevant interval in their lives. They came into the schoolroom with languid reluctance, dreamily indolent from breakfast in bed, fragrant from warm baths. They made no resistance. She sat with the appointed tasks clearly in mind, holding on to the certainty that they were to be done as the only means of getting through the morning. The excitement of taking up everything afresh with her was over and beyond occasional moments of brightness when she tried to impress a fact or lift them over a difficulty with a jest and they would exchange their glance of secret delight, their curious conspirators’ glance of some great certainty shared, they went through their tasks with well-bred preoccupation, sighing deeply
now and again and sometimes groaning, with clenched hands pressed between their knees. Their accustomed life of events was close round them, in the garden just beyond the undraped window, on the mat outside the schoolroom door, where at any moment a footstep crossing the landing might fall softly and pause, when their heads would go up in tense listening. “Rollo!” they would say, waiting for the turning of the handle, holding themselves in for the subdued shoutings they would utter when Mrs. Corrie appeared standing in the doorway with a finger on her lips. “Happy?” she would breathe; “working like nigger boys?” Unless Miriam looked gravely detached she would glide in blushing, and passionately caress them. When this happened, sighs and groanings filled the time that remained. Their nearest approach to open rebellion included a tacit appeal to her as a fellow-sufferer to throw up the stupid game. It was quite clear that they did not blame her for their sufferings and they were so much prepared to do the decent thing that her experiment of reading to them regularly at some convenient half-hour each day from a book of adventures or fairy tale, not only reconciled them to endure the morning’s
ordeal, but filled them with a gratitude that astonished her and the beginnings of a personal regard for her that shook her heart. During the readings they would lose their air of well-bred detachment and would come near. They would be relaxed and silent; the girl with bent head and brooding defiant curiously smiling and frowning face, the boy gazing at the reader, rapturous. She would sometimes feel against each arm the pressure of a head.
She had felt instinctively and at once that she could not use their lesson hours as opportunities for talking at large on general ideas as she had done with the children in the Banbury Park school. Those children, the children of tradesmen most of them, could be allowed to take up the beginnings of ideas; “ideals,” the sense of modern reforms, they could be allowed to discuss anything from any point of view and take up attitudes and have opinions. The opportunity for discussion and for encouraging a definite attitude towards life was much greater in this quiet room with only the two children; but it would have been mean, Miriam felt, to take advantage of this opportunity; to be anything but strictly neutral and wary of generalisations.
It would have been so easy. Probably a really “conscientious” woman would have done it, have “influenced” them, given the girl a bias in the direction of some life of devotion, hospital nursing or slum missionary work, and have filled the boy with ideas as to the essential superiority of “Radicals.” Their minds were so soft and untouched.... It ended in a conspiracy, they all sat masquerading, and finished their morning exhausted and relieved. The children knew the lessons tortured her and made her ill at ease, and they were puzzled without disapproving. Through it all she felt their gratitude to her for not being “simple,” like Bunnikin.
There was to be another week-end. Again there would be the sense of being a visitor amongst other visitors; visitor was not the word; there was a French word which described the thing, “convive,” “les convives” ... people sitting easily about a table with flushed faces ... someone standing drunkenly up with eyes blazing with friendliness and a raised wineglass ... women and wine, the roses of Heliogabalus; but he was a Greek and dreadful in some way,
convives were Latin, Roman; fountains, water flowing over marble, white-robed strong-faced people reclining on marble couches, feasting ... taking each fair mask for what it shows itself; that was what this kind of wealthy English people did, perhaps what all wealthy people did ... the maimed, the halt, the blind, compel them to come in ... but that was after the others had refused. The thing that made you feel jolliest and strongest was to forget the maimed, to be a fair mask, to keep everything else out and be a little circle of people knowing that everything was kept out. Suppose a skeleton walked in? Offer it a glass of wine. People have no right to be skeletons, or if they are to make a fuss about it. These people would be all the brighter if they happened to have neuralgia; some strong pain or emotion made you able to do things. Taking each fair mask was a fine grown-up game. Perhaps it could be kept up to the end? Perhaps that was the meaning of the man playing cards on his death-bed. Defying God. That was what Satan did. He was brave; defying a tyrant ... “nothing to do but curse God and die.” Who said that? there was something silly about it; giving in, not real defiance. It
didn’t settle anything; if the new ideas were true; the thing went on. The love of God was like the love of a mother; always forgiving you, ready to die for you, always waiting for you to be good. Why? It was mean. The things one wanted one could not have if one were just tame and good.... It is morbid to think about being good; better the fair mask—anything. But it did not make people happy. These people were not happy. They were not real.
Spring; everywhere, inside and outside the house. The spring outside had a meaning here. It came in through the windows without obstruction and passed into everything. At home it had sent one nearly mad with joy and anticipation and passed and left you looking for it for the rest of the year; in Germany it had brought music and wild joy—the secret had passed from eye to eye; all the girls had known it. At Wordsworth House it had stood far away, like a picture in a dream, something that could be seen from windows, and found for a moment in the park, but powerless to get into the house. Here it came in; you could not forget it for a
moment; and it was a background for something more wonderful than itself; something that made it wonderful; something there were no words for; voices, movements from room to room, strange food, the soft chink of Venetian glass, amber wine, the light drowned in wine, through the window a sharp gleam on things that reflected, day and night, into everything, even into one’s thoughts. Why was the spring suddenly so real? Why was it that you could stand as it were in a shaft of it all the time, feeling in your breathing, hearing in your voice the sound of the spring, the blood in your fingertips seeming like the roses that they would touch soon in the garden?
How ignorant the man was who said, “each fair mask for what it shows itself.” Life is not a mask, it is fair; the gold in one’s hair is real.
Friday brought an atmosphere of expectation. Mr. Kronen, an old friend of the Corries, was coming down, with a new Mrs. Kronen.
By the early afternoon the house was full of fragrance; coming downstairs dressed for an errand in the little town two miles away, Miriam
saw the hall all pink and saffron with azaleas. Coming across the hall she found a scent in the air that did not come from the azaleas, a sweet familiar syrupy distillation ... the blaze of childhood’s garden was round her again, bright magic flowers in the sunlight, magic flowers, still there, nearer to her than ever in this happy house; she could almost hear the humming of the bees, and flung back the bead curtain with unseeing eyes half expecting some doorway to open on the remembered garden; the scent was overpowering ... the drawing-room was cool and silent with closed windows and drawn blinds; bowls of roses stood in every available place; she tiptoed about in the room gathering their scent.
As she opened the hall door Mrs. Corrie’s voice startled her from the dining-room.
Going into the dining-room she found her with a flushed face and excited eyes and the children dancing round her. “Another tin! One more tin!” they exclaimed, plucking at Miriam. From the billiard-room came the smell of fresh varnish. Wiggerson was on her knees near the door.
“She’s done some stupid thing,” thought Miriam, looking at Mrs. Corrie’s excited, unconscious
face with sudden anxiety; “some womanish overdoing it, wanting to do too much and spoiling everything.” She felt as if she were representing Mr. Corrie.
“Will it be dry in time?” she asked, half angrily, scarcely knowing what she said and in the midst of Mrs. Corrie’s apologetic petition that she would bring a tin of oak stain back with her.
“Lordy, don’t you think so?” whispered Mrs. Corrie, only half dismayed.
Miriam had not patience to follow her as she went to survey the floor ruefully chanting, “Oh, Wiggerson, Wiggerson.”
“Anyhow I’m sure it oughtn’t to have any more on as late as when I come back,” she scolded boldly. How annoyed Mr. Corrie would be....
As she was going down the quiet road past the high oak garden palings of the nearest house she heard the bumping and scrabbling of a heavy body against the palings and a dog leapt into the road almost at her feet, making the dust fly. It was an Irish terrier. It smiled and barked a little, waiting, looking up into her face and up
and down the road. “It thought it knew me,” she pondered; “it mistook me for someone else.” She patted its head and went forward thinking of the joyful scrabbling, its headlong determination. The dog jerked back its head with a wide smile, tore down the road and came back leaping and smiling. Something disappeared from the vista of the roadway as the dog rushed along it nosing after scents, looking round now and again, and now and again rushing back to greet her. It brought back the sense of the house and the strange gay life she had just left to go on her errand to the little unknown town. It wore a smart collar; it belonged to that life. People in it were never alone; when they went out there was always a dog with them. “It thinks I’m one of them.” But it liked the wild; when they came out on to the common it rushed up a sandy pathway and disappeared amongst the gorse bushes. For a while Miriam hoped it would come back and kept looking about for it; then she gave it up and went ahead with the commons drifting slowly by on either side; she wished that the action of walking were not so jerky, that the expanses on either side might pass more smoothly and easily by: “that’s why people
drive,” she thought; “you can only really see the country when you are not moving yourself.” Standing still for a moment she looked across the open stretch to her left and smiled at it and went on again, walking more quickly; the soft beauty that had retreated to the horizon when the dog was with her was spreading back again across the whole expanse and coming towards her; she hurried on singing softly at random, “Scorn such a foe ... though I could fell thee at a blow, though I-i, cou-uld fe-ell thee-ee a-at a-a blow” ... people walking and thinking and fussing, people driving somewhere in victorias were always coming along the road, to them it was a sort of suburb, quite ordinary, the bit near home. But it was big enough to be full of waves and waves of something real, something cool and true and unchanging. Had anybody seen it, did the people who lived there know it? Did anybody know this strange thing? She almost ran; my “commons,” she said. “I know how beautiful you are; if only I knew whether you know that I know. I know, I know,” she said, “I shan’t forget you.” “True, true till death; bear it, oh wind, on thy lightning breath.”
The sun was very warm; before she reached the end of the long road the sandy pathways were beginning to glare. There was the river and the little bridge and the first shop just beyond it, where her purchase was to be made. Its wood-work was very bright white; it had a seaside look. She stood still on the slight ascent of the bridge mopping her face and preparing to represent Mrs. Corrie in the shop. Scrambling up the shallow bank from the common came the yellow dog. “Oh, hooray—you duck,” she breathed, patting the warm stubbly head and listening to his breathless snortings. A piano-organ broke into loud music in the little street. It was not a mysterious little town, there was nothing of the village about it. The white framed windows held things you would see in a Regent Street confectioner’s; it was a special shop for the kind of people who lived here. Miriam felt for her three and six and asked for her pound of coffee creams with a bored air, wishing she knew the dog’s name so that she could claim him familiarly. She contented herself with telling him to lie down in an angry whisper repeatedly, as the
creams were being weighed. He stood panting and gazing at her wagging his stump. “’Ullo, Bushy,” said the shopwoman languidly; the dog faced round panting more loudly. “There you are, Bush,” she said, as the scales balanced, and flung the dog a chocolate wafer which he caught with a snap. Miriam gazed vaguely at the unfamiliar spectacle, angrily feeling that the shopwoman was observing her. “You’re not going to take him through the town?” said the shopwoman severely.
“Oh, no,” said Miriam nervously.
“He’s the worst fighter in the parish; they never bring him into the town unless it’s the groom sometimes.”
“Thank you,” said Miriam, taking her bag of coffee creams. “Dogs are a nuisance, aren’t they?” she added, in an emphatically sympathetic tone, getting away through the swing door almost hating the yellow body that squeezed through at her side and stood eagerly facing towards the market-place waiting for her movements.
She hurried up over the bridge calling to the dog without looking round, listening fearfully
for sounds of conflict with a brown collie she had caught sight of standing with head high and ears pricked, twenty yards down the street. The piano-organ jingled angrily. The dog came thoughtfully trotting over the bridge and ambled off across the common—safe. He might have been killed, or killed another dog; how cruel dogs were, without knowing better. She looked to the common asking consolation for her beating heart. The bag of creams was safe and heavy in her hand, the dog had gone, the little town was behind, it had hurt her; it was spoiled; she would never like it. It had done nothing but remind her that she was a helpless dingy little governess. She toiled along, feeling dreadfully tired; the sounds of her boot soles on the firm, sand-powdered road mocked her, telling her she must go on. If she could be quite sure of finding a kind woman, not a hard-featured woman with black and grey hair, like the shopwoman, but kind, knowing and understanding everything, in a large print apron with her sleeves rolled up to the elbows, living in a large cottage with a family, who would look at her and smile a quiet short certain smile, as if she had been waiting for her, and take her in and let her help and stay there
for ever, she would put down the bag of coffee creams on the edge of the common and go straight across it to her; but there would not be a woman like that here; all that the women round here would think about her would be to wonder which of the families she belonged to. If a victoria came along and in it a delicate, lonely old gentleman who had a large empty house with deep quiet rooms and a large sunny garden with high walls and wanted someone to be about there singing and happy till he died she would go. He would drive away with her and shut her up in the quiet beautiful house, protecting her and keeping people off, and she would sing all day in the garden and the house and play to him and read sometimes aloud, and he would forget he was old and ill, and they would share the great secret, dying of happiness. Die of happiness. People ought to be able to die of happiness if they were able to admit how happy they were. If they admitted it aloud they would pass straight out of their bodies, alive; unhappiness was the same as death, not suffering; but letting suffering make you unhappy—curse God and die, curse life, that was letting life beat you; letting God beat you. God did not want
that. No one admitted it. No one seemed to know anything about it. People just went on fussing.
The violent beating of her heart died down. The sun was behind her; the commons glowed. She must have been looking at them for some time because she could close her eyes and see exactly how they looked, all alive in steady colour, gleaming and fresh. The thumping and trilling of the distant piano-organ offered itself equally to everybody. It knew the secret and twirled and swept all the fussing away into a tune. Quietly the clock of the church in the little town struck four. She would be late for tea. The children would have tea with Mrs. Corrie. Wiggerson would make a fresh pot for her when she got in. There would be a little tray in her quiet room, a cup and saucer, the little sprigged silk tea-cosy, the “Human Document.” It would be the beginning of the week-end. It would link her up again with the early afternoon, the rose-filled drawing-room, the excited dining-room, the smell of varnish from the billiard-room floor.
Mrs. Corrie and the children were dancing in a lingering patch of sunlight at the far end of the lawn as Miriam came up the drive with her chocolates. They waved and shouted to her, trumpeting questions through their hands. She held up the bag. “Go and have tea, you poor soul,” sang Mrs. Corrie. How excited they were. In the flower-filled hall Stokes, muttering excitedly to herself, was lighting the fire. The crackling of wood came from the dining-room.
Wiggerson was swishing about in the dining-room clearing away tea.
Sitting in her low basket chair with her dismantled tea-tray at her side and a picture in her mind of the new Mrs. Kronen coming down from London in the train in bright new clothes and a dust-cloak, Miriam was startled by hearing frightened footsteps rush across the landing and a frightened voice calling for Wiggerson.
“Something’s happened,” she told herself angrily, “it always does when everybody’s so excited—‘tel qui rit vendredi dimanche pleurera.’”
Opening the door she found the landing empty and quiet, the setting sun streamed across its coloured spaces, the flowers blazed as if they were standing in a garden.... Joey always went for walks if she were feeling thick and fat, she always went for a long walk; in coats with skirts to match; a costume; never a jacket with a different skirt ... the long cool passage leading away to the invisible door of Mr. Corrie’s room was full of wreathing smoke. Wiggerson rushed across the landing along the passage, followed by Mrs. Corrie, with her head up and her handkerchief to her nose and all her figure tense and angular and strong. Both had passed silently; but there were shriekings on the stairs and the children came at Miriam with cries and screams. “Rollo’ll be killed”; “Go to her”; “Go and save vem”; the children shrieked and leaped up and down in front of her. The boy’s white features worked as if they must dislocate; his eyes were black with terror; he wrung his hands. Sybil’s face, scarlet and shapeless and streaming with tears, blazed wrath at Miriam through her green eyes. “Be quiet,” Miriam said in loud tones. “I shall do nothing till you are quiet.” With a shriek the girl lashed
at her with the dog-whip. “Save vem, save vem,” shrieked the boy, twisting his arms in the air. “Will you both be quiet instantly?” shouted Miriam, as the blood rose to her head, catching and holding the boy. Both children howled and choked; Sybil flung herself forward howling, and Miriam felt her teeth in her wrist. The smoke came pouring out of the little hidden room, coiling itself against the air of the passage like some fascinating silent inevitable grimace. Wiggerson’s figure flying through it stirred it strangely, but it closed behind her and billowed horribly out towards Mrs. Corrie standing just clear of its advance with her handkerchief pressed to her face, quiet, not calling to Wiggerson, waiting where she had disappeared. Miriam could not move. Sybil’s body hung fastened to her own with entwining limbs ... “a fight in the jungle,” a tiger flung fixed like a leech against the breast of a screaming elephant ... the boy had the whip and was slashing at her legs through her thin dress and uttering piercing shrieks.
“Stokes is an idjut,” said Mrs. Corrie, going gaily downstairs with the two exhausted white-faced
children followed by Wiggerson flitting along with bloodshot blinking eyes.
Stokes, sullenly brooding, lighting Mr. Corrie’s fire without putting back the register. What was it that made Stokes sullen and brooding so that the accident had happened and the smoke had come? Stokes had seen something, someone, like the fearful oncoming curving stare of the smoke. Mrs. Corrie and Wiggerson did not brood like that. They laughed and wept and snatched things out of danger. They had thin faces. Mrs. Corrie was alone, like an aspen shaking its leaves in windless air. She knew she was alone. Wiggerson ... Wiggerson was...? Making her toilet in the spring sunset Miriam saw all that time Wiggerson’s tall body hurtling about in her small pantry, quickly selecting and packing things on a tray—her eyes glancing swiftly downwards as her foot caught, the swift bending of her body, the rip, rip as she tore the braiding from her skirt, her intent face as she threw it from her and swept sinuously upright, her undisturbed hands once more at their swift work.
What a strange photograph ... a woman in Grecian drapery seated on a stonework chair with a small harp on her knees, one hand limply tweaking the strings of her harp; her head thrown back, her eyes, hard and bright, staring up into the sky, “Inspiration” printed in ink on the white margin under the photograph. It was an Englishwoman, a large stiff square body, a coil of carefully crimped hair and a curled fringe, pretending. There were people who would say, “What a pretty photograph,” and mean it ... the draperies and the attitude. How easy it was to take people in, just by acting. Not the real people. There were real people. Where were they? That horrid thing could get itself on to Mrs. Corrie’s drawing-room table and sit there unbroken. All women were inspired in a way. It was true enough. But it was a secret. Men ought not to be told. They must find it out for themselves. To dress up and try to make it something to attract somebody. She was not a woman, she was a woman ... oh, curse it all. But men liked actresses. They liked being fooled.
Miriam looked closely at the photograph with
hatred in her eyes. Why not the stone steps and the chair and the sense of sunlight; sunlit air? That would be enough. “You get in the way of the air, you thing,” she muttered, and the woman’s helpless unconscious sandalled feet reproached her. Voices were shouting to each other on the upper landing. It was Mrs. Kronen’s photograph, of course. Miriam moved quickly away, ashamed of having stared. But it was too late; she had done a horrid thing again. She saw, as if it were in the room with her, the affair of the taking of the photograph, a cross face coming down from its pose to argue with the photographer, and then flung upwards again, waiting. And she had put or let someone put it, in a frame, at once on a strange drawing-room table. Perhaps her husband had put it there. But if he valued it he would hide and shelter it.... When we meet, she will know I have stared at her photograph.
Mrs. Kronen came suddenly in with Mrs. Corrie, talking in a rich deep thick voice that moved, with large intervals, up and down a long scale and yet produced a curious effect of toneless flatness, just as if she were speaking a narrow nasal Cockney. There was a Cockney sound somewhere
in her voice. She began at once loudly praising everything in the room, hardly pausing when Miriam was introduced to her, and giving no sign of having seen her. If I were alone with her, thought Miriam, I should want to say “’Ullo, ’ow’s yourself?” and grin. It would be the only thing one could genuinely do. Mrs. Corrie almost giggled at the end of each of Mrs. Kronen’s exclamations, but she was very gay and animated and so was Mr. Corrie when he came in with Mr. Kronen. They all went in to dinner talking and laughing loudly. And they went on laughing and joking and talking loudly against each other through dinner.
Mr. and Mrs. Corrie looked thin and small and very young. Once or twice they laughed at the same moment and glanced at each other. Mr. Corrie’s face was flushed. Mr. and Mrs. Kronen looked like brother and sister—only that she said South Africa as if it were a phrase in a tragic recitative from an oratorio and he as if it were something he had behind him that gave him a sort of advantage over everyone. It seemed to be all he had. They had both been in South
Africa, travelling in bullock waggons blinded by the fierce light and choked with sand. It seemed to linger in the curious brickish look of their complexions and the hard yellow of their hair. The talk about South Africa lasted all dinnertime. It seemed to interest Mr. Corrie. His eyes gleamed strangely as he talked about I.D.B.’s. Everybody at the table said, “Illicit dahmond bah” at least once with a little thrill of the face. Why was it illicit to buy diamonds?—strange people out there in the glare buying gleaming stones from miners and this curious feeling about it all round the table, everybody with hot glinting excited eyes—and somebody, some man, a business man who had handed round diamonds like chocolates to his friends in his box at the opera, a Stock Exchange man in a frock-coat throwing himself into the sea somewhere between England and South Africa—ah, what a pity, worried to death, with an excited head. He wanted diamonds. And when Mr. Corrie handed Mrs. Kronen a dish of fruit and said, “A banana? A bite of a barnato?” they all laughed, so comfortably. Something illicit seemed to creep into the very pictures and flow over the walls. The poor man’s body falling desperately
into the sea. He could not endure his own excited eyes.
Early on Monday morning Miriam heard Mrs. Kronen singing in the bathroom. She tried not to listen and listened. The bold sound had come in through her open door when Stokes brought her breakfast tray. With it had come the smell of a downstairs breakfast, coffee, a curious fresh, sustaining odour of coffee and freshly frying rashers. There was coffee on her own tray this morning and a letter addressed to her in a bold unknown hand. She sipped her coffee at once and put the overwhelming letter aside on her blue coverlet. It was an overweight, something thrown in on the surface of the tide on which she had awakened in the soft fresh harmonies of rose and blue of her curtained room. It could wait. It had come out of the world for her; but she felt independent of it. It did not disturb her. Its overwhelming quality was in the fact that she had called it to her out of the world. It was as if she had herself addressed the large bold envelope. She left it. Her sipped coffee steered her into the tide of the downstairs life. There was breakfast downstairs, steaming coffee and
entrée dishes for Mr. Corrie and the Kronens, and they were all going off by the early train.
“C’est si bon,” sang Mrs. Kronen in a deep baritone, as Miriam drank her coffee; “de con-fon-dre en un, deu-eux bai-sers.” She sang it out through the quiet upstairs rooms, she met with it the bustle of preparation downstairs. It was a world she lived in that made her able to carry off these things without being disturbed by them, a rosy secret world in which she lived secure. A richness at the heart of things. She was there. She possessed it with her large strong brick-red and rose-white frame and her strong yellow hair. Did she, really? At any rate she wanted to suggest that she did—that that secret richness was the heart of things. She flung out boldly that it was and that she was there, but a sort of soft horrible slurring flatness in her voice suggested evil, as if a sort of restless acceptance of something evil was the price of her carelessness. Perhaps that was how things were. Perhaps that was part of taking each fair mask for what it shows itself. She made everyone else seem cloudy and shrivelled and dim. Miriam took up the stupendous envelope and held its solid weight in her hand as Mrs. Kronen sang on. “All right,”
she said, and smiled at it, feeling daring and strong. Its arrival would have been quite different if Mrs. Kronen had not been there; this curious powerful independent morning in the rose-blue room would not have happened in the same way without Mrs. Kronen.... Live, don’t worry.... I’ve always been worrying and bothering. I’m going to be like Mrs. Kronen; but quite different, because she hasn’t the least idea how beautiful things really are. She doesn’t know that everyone is living a beautiful strange life that has never been lived before. If she did she would not be ashamed of herself. Miriam gave a great sigh and smiled.
Her breakfast was a feast. Sitting back under the softly tinted canopy with the soft folds of the bed curtains hanging near on either side she stared at the bright light pouring in through the lattices. Her room was a great square of happy light ... happy, happy. She gathered up all the sadness she had ever known and flung it from her. All the dark things of the past flashed with a strange beauty as she flung them out. The light had been there all the time; but she had
known it only at moments. Now she knew what she wanted. Bright mornings, beautiful bright rooms, a wilderness of beauty all round her all the time—at any cost. Any life that had not these things she would refuse.... Roses in her blood and gold in her hair ... it was something belonging to them, something that made them gleam. It was her right; even if they gleamed only for her. They gleamed, she knew it. Youth, the glory of youth. So strong. She had got herself into this beautiful life, found her way to it; she would stay in it for ever, work in it, make money and when she was old, have soft, pink curtains and fragrant things to remind her, as long as she could lift her hand. No more ugliness, no more schools or mean little houses. Luxuries, beautiful gleaming things ... a secret happy life.
She smiled securely, with her eyes, the strange happy smile that had come in the brougham....
How strong Mrs. Kronen was.... How huge and strong she had looked standing in the hall while Mr. Corrie said cruel laughing little things about the billiard-room floor.... “She’ll
paint Madonna lilies on the table next.” ... Mrs. Kronen saying nothing, smiling more and more without moving her face, growing bigger and stronger and taller as Mr. Corrie grumbled and Mr. Kronen fidgeted, cross and disappointed by the hall fire and then suddenly lifting her head and singing, a great flourish of clear strong notes filling the hall and pealing up through the house as she swept into the drawing-room.
Singing song after song to her own loud accompaniment, great emphatic sweeps of song, so that everyone came and sat about in the room listening and waiting, the men staring at the back of her head as she sat at the piano. Waiting, for music—they did not know they were waiting for music, waiting for her to stop getting between them and the music. They admired her, her magnificent singing and waited, unsatisfied, in the sweetness of the lamp-lit flower-filled room that her music did not touch. She sang on and on and they all grew smaller and smaller in the great sea of sound, more and more hopelessly waiting.
And Mrs. Corrie had sat deep in her large chair, dead and drowned. Dead because of something she had never known. Dead in ignorance and living bravely on—her sweet thin voice rising above the gloom where she lay hid—a gloom where there were no thoughts. Nearly all women were like that, living in a gloom where there were no thoughts. If anyone could persuade her that she was alive she would do nothing but rush about and dance and sing ... how irritating that would be ... making men smile and trot about and look silly ... no room for ideas; except in smoking-rooms—and—laboratories.... She was a good woman; a God woman; the sweetness of her bones and her thin sweet voice of tears and laughter were of God. Everyone knew that and worshipped her. Men’s ideas were devilish; clever and mean.... Was God a woman? Was God really irritating? No one could endure God really.... Men could not.... Women were of God in some way. That is what men could never forgive; the superiority of women.... “Perhaps I can’t stand women because I’m a sort of horrid man.”
Mrs. Kronen was a sort of man too. She was not perplexed. But she was a woman too—because she was not mean and petty and fussy as men are ... sitting tall and square at the piano with the square tall form of her husband standing ready to turn the pages—her strong baritone voice rolling out, “Ai-me-moi ... car ton charme-est étrange ... et-je-t’ai-me.”
Recalling the song as she sat back in the alcove of her bed motionless, keeping the brightness of her room at its first intensity, Miriam remembered that it had brought her a moment when the flower-filled drawing-room had seemed to be lit, from within herself, a sudden light that had kept her very still and made the bowls of roses blaze with deepening colours. In her mind she had seen garden beyond garden of roses, sunlit, brighter and brighter and had made a rapturous prayer. She remembered the words ... God.... I’m not afraid of you. Look at the gardens ... and something had smiled through the lit gardens exultantly, and Mrs. Kronen’s voice had raged through the room like a storm, “Ai-me-moi!...” and Mr. Corrie’s eyes were strange
and hard with shadows.... He knew, in some strange way men knew there were gardens everywhere, not always visible. Women did not seem to know....
The letter on her tray was a sort of response to her prayer.
It was quite a long letter—signed with a large “Bob” set crosswise. It began by asking her advice about a wedding present for Harriett and ended with the suggestion that she should meet him and help him to make a suitable selection. It was written from the British Chess Club, to her, because Bob Greville wanted to see her. Harriett’s wedding present was only an excuse. She flung the envelope and the two sheets of notepaper, spread loose, on her blue coverlet and smiled into her cup as she finished her coffee. Old Bob did not know that he had clad her in armour. He wanted to meet her alone. They two people were to meet and talk, without any reason, because they wanted to. But what could she have to say to anyone who thought that Mrs. Caudle’s Curtain Lectures, even a nice edition bound in calf, or How to be Happy though Married, suitable for a wedding present for Harriett, or for anybody? Still, they might
write to each other. It was right that letters, secret letters, should be brought into her blue room in the morning with her breakfast. She dropped out of bed smiling and sniffed at the roses she had worn the day before, standing in a glass on her washstand, freshened, half faded, half fresh, intoxicating as she bent over them. She dressed, without drawing back her curtains, in the soft rose-blue light, singing Mrs. Kronen’s song in an undertone.
At eleven o’clock Mrs. Corrie swept into the schoolroom. Miriam looked easily up at her from the dreamy thicket where she and the children had spent their hour, united and content, speaking in undertones, getting easily through books that had seemed tiresome and indifferent the day before. She had felt the play of her mind on theirs and their steady adult response. They had joined as conspirators in this mad contemptible business of mastering the trick of the text-book, each dreaming the while his own dream.
“You darlings,” cried Mrs. Corrie, “how sweet you all look!” They raised drunken eyes and beamed drowsily at her. “Give them a
holiday,” said Mrs. Corrie, raising her hands over the table like a conductor about to start an orchestra. “Give them a holiday—a picnic—and come and buy hats!”
In a moment the room was in an uproar of capering figures. “Hats! A new hat for Rollo! Heaps of cash! I’ve got heaps of cash!”
Miriam blinked from her thicket. This was anarchy; she felt herself sliding. But they were so old. All so old and experienced. She so young, by so far the youngest of the four.
Mrs. Corrie sat back in the victoria, her face alight under the cream lace veil she had twisted round her soft winter hat, and talked in quiet clipped phrases: soft shouts. They were driving swiftly through the fresh warmth of the April midday.
They were off for the afternoon. The commons gleamed a prelude. Miriam saw that Mrs. Corrie did not notice them nor think of sweeping back across them later on through the afternoon air and seeing them move and gleam in the afternoon light. She did not think of the bright shops, the strangely dyed artificial flowers with
their curious fascinating smell interwoven with the strange warm smell of velvet and chenille and straw.... Miriam had once bought a hat in a shop in Kensington. As long as it lasted it had kept for her whenever she looked at its softly dyed curiously plaited straw something of the exciting fascination of the shop, the curious faint flat odours of millinery, the peculiar dim warm smell of silks and velvets—silk, China and Japan, silkworms weaving shining threads in the dark. Even when it had become associated with outings and events and shabby with exposure it remained each time she took it afresh from its box of wrappings, a mysterious sacred thing; and the soft blending of its colours, the coiled restraint of its shape, the texture of its snuggled trimmings were a support, refreshing her thoughts. She had never known anyone who went regularly to good hatshops; the sense of them as a part of life was linked only with Mrs. Kronen—Mrs. Kronen’s little close toque made of delicately shaded velvet violets and lined with satin, her silky peacock blue straw shining with rich filmy tones, its mass of dull shot blue-green ribbon and the soft rose pink of its velvet roses. These hats had excited Mrs. Corrie; the hats and the
sand-coloured silk dust cloak explained her cheque and her sudden happiness. But they only made her want to buy hats. The going and the shops were nothing to her. She talked about the Kronens as they drove, speaking as though she wanted Miriam to hear without answering. “She knows Mrs. Kronen fascinates me,” thought Miriam.
“Ain’t they a pair, lordy ... him divorced and her divorced and then marryin’ each other. Ain’t it scandalous, eh?”
People like the Corries disapproved of people like the Kronens, but had them to stay with them and were excited about their clothes. Miriam returned to listen to the singing of her body; it would sing until they got to the station. As she listened she held firmly clasped the letter she had addressed to the British Chess Club to say she would be nowhere near London until the weddings. “She doesn’t care a rap about him—not a teeny rap ... she’s a wise lady ... dollars—that’s the thing,” whispered Mrs. Corrie gaily. What does she want me to say? thought Miriam. What would she say if I pretended to agree?
Should she tell her about the weddings?
Perhaps not. It would be time enough, she reflected rapidly, when she had to ask permission to go home for them. Mrs. Corrie had not asked her a single question about things at home, and if she were to say, “We used to live in a big house and my father lost nearly all his money and we live now in a tiny villa and two of my sisters are to be married,” it would break into this strange easy new life. It would break the charm and not bring her any nearer to Mrs. Corrie. And Mrs. Corrie would not really understand about the home troubles. Mrs. Corrie had always been lonely and sad, inside. She had been an orphan, but brought up by a wealthy uncle and always living in wealth and now she seemed to think about nothing but the children and the house and the garden—hating theatres and dances and never going to them or paying visits or seeing the wonder of anything. She would only say, “Don’t you marry yourself off, young lady, marriage is a fraud. You wait for a wealthy one.” Whatever one said to her, whatever joy one showed her would lead to that.
But the two weddings hovered about the commons. They were a great possession. Nothing to worry about in them. Gerald and
Bennett who had managed everything since the smash would manage them. Sarah and Harriet would be married from the little villa and would be Mrs. Brodie and Mrs. Ducayne just like anybody else. So safe. And she herself, free, getting interesting letters, going up to town with Mrs. Corrie, no worry, spring hats and the commons and garden waiting for them. She was sure she did not want to see the commons overburdened by the idea of her own wedding. Two was enough for the present. Of course, some day—someone, somewhere, wonderful and different from everyone else. Cash—no, not business and cigars and offices ... the city, horrible bloated men with shapeless figures, horrible chemists’ shops advertising pick-me-ups ... a cottage—a cottage. Why did people laugh at love in a cottage? The outsides of cottages were the best part, everyone said. They were dark inside; but why not? A lamp; and outside the garden and the light.
“She’s had all kinds of operations,” mused Mrs. Corrie.
“Really?”
“Deadly awful. In nursing homes. She’ll never have any kiddies.”
Were there cold shadows on everything, everywhere?
She turned a pleading face to Mrs. Corrie. They were driving into the station yard.
“It’s true, true, true,” laughed Mrs. Corrie. “She doesn’t care, she doesn’t want any. They’re all like that, that sort.”
Miriam mused intensely. She felt Mrs. Kronen ought to be there to answer. She had some secret Mrs. Corrie did not possess. Mrs. Corrie looked suddenly small and mild and funny. Why did she think it dreadful that Mrs. Kronen should have no children? There was nothing wonderful in having children. It was better to sing. She was perfectly sure that she herself did not want children.... “Superior women don’t marry,” she said, “sir she said, sir she said, su, per, i, or women”—but that meant blue stockings.
“I don’t want a silly hat,” said Mrs. Corrie, as their hansom drew up in bright sunlight outside a milliner’s at the southern end of Regent Street. “Let’s buy a real lovely teapot or a Bartolozzi or somethin’. What fun to go home with somethin’ real nice. Eh? A real real
beauty Dresden teapot,” she chanted, floating into the dimness of the shop where large hats standing on long straight stands flared softly like blossoms in the twilight.
She swept about in her flowing lace-trimmed twine-coloured overcoat on the green velvet carpet, or stood ruthlessly trying on a hat, pressing its wire frame to fit her head, crushing her fingers into tucked tulle, talking and trying, and discarding until the collection was exhausted. Miriam sat angry and admiring, wondering at the subdued helplessness of the satin-clad assistant, sorry for the discarded hats lying carelessly about, their glory dimmed. All the hats, whatever their shape or colour seemed to her to decorate the bronze head and the twine-coloured coat. The little toques gave slenderness and willowy height, and the large flowered ribboned hats, the moment a veil draped the boniness of the face made, Miriam felt, an entrancing picturesqueness. With each hat Mrs. Corrie addressed the large mirror calling herself a freak, a sketch, a nightmare, a real real fogey.
The process seemed endless and Miriam sat at last scourging herself with angry questions. “Why doesn’t she decide,” she found herself repeating almost aloud, her hot tired eyes turning for relief to the soft guipure-edged tussore curtain screening the lower part of the window, “what kind of hat she really wants and then look at the few most like it and perhaps have one altered?...” “It’s so awfully silly not to have a plan. She’ll go on simply for ever.” But the soft curtain running so evenly along its smooth clean brass rod was restful, and plan or no plan the trouble would presently come to an end and there would be no discomforts to face when it was over—no vulgar bun shops, no struggling on to a penny ’bus with your ride perhaps spoiled by a dreadful neighbour, but Regent Street in the bright sun, a hansom, a smart obliging driver with a buttonhole, skimming along to tea somewhere, the first-class journey home, the carriage at the station, the green commons.
“Perhaps,” said the assistant at last in a cheerful suggestive furious voice, flinging aside with just Mrs. Corrie’s cheerful abandon, a large
cream lace hat with a soft fresh mass of tiny banksia roses under its left brim, “Perhaps moddom will allow me to make her a shape and trim it to her own design.”
Mrs. Corrie stood arrested in the middle of the green velvet floor. Wearily Miriam faced the possibility of the development of this fresh opportunity for going on for ever.
“Wouldn’t that be lovely?” said Mrs. Corrie, turning to her enthusiastically.
“Yes,” said Miriam eagerly. Both women were facing her and she felt that anything would be better than their united contemplation of her brown stuff dress with its square sleeves and her brown straw hat with black ribbon and its yellow paper buttercups.
“Can’t be did though,” said Mrs. Corrie in a cold level voice, turning swiftly back to the hats massed in a confused heap on the mahogany slab. Standing over them and tweaking at one and another as she spoke she made a quiet little speech, indicating that such and such might do for the garden and such others for driving, some dozen altogether she finally ordered to be sent at once to an address in Brook Street where she would make her final selection whilst the messenger
waited. “Have you got the address all right?” she wound up; “so kind of you.” “Come along, you poor thing you look worn out,” she cried to Miriam, without looking at her as she swept from the shop. She waved her sunshade at a passing hansom and as it drew sharply up with an exciting clatter near the curb she grasped Miriam’s arm, “Shall we try Perrin’s? It’s only three doors up.” Miriam glanced along and caught a glimpse of another hat shop. “Do you really want to?” she suggested reluctantly. “No! No! not a bit old spoil sport. Chum yong, jump in,” laughed Mrs. Corrie.
“Oh, if you really want to,” began Miriam, but Mrs. Corrie, singing out the address to the driver was putting her into the cab and showing her how to make an easy passage for the one who gets last into a hansom by slipping into the near corner. Her appreciation of this little man?uvre helped her over her contrition and she responded with gay insincerity to Mrs. Corrie’s assurance of the fun they would have over the hats at Mrs. Kronen’s.... Tea at Mrs. Kronen’s then. How strange and alarming ... but she felt too tired to sustain a tête-à-tête at a smart tea shop. “After tea we’ll drop into a china shop and get
somethin’ real nice,” said Mrs. Corrie excitedly, as they bowled up Regent Street.
They found Mrs. Kronen in a mauve and white drawing-room, reclining on a mauve and white striped settee in a pale mauve tea gown. On a large low table a frail mauve tea service stood ready, and Mrs. Kronen rose tall to welcome them dropping on to the mauve carpet a little volume bound in pale green velvet. On a second low table were strawberries in a shallow wide bowl, a squat jug brimming with cream, dark wedding cake hiding a pewter plate, a silken bag unloosed, showing marvellous large various sweetmeats heavy against its silk lining. As Mrs. Kronen slurred her fingers across Miriam’s hand she ordered the manservant who had dipped and gathered up the green velvet volume to ask for the tea-cakes.
Then this was “Society.” To come so easily up from the Corries’ beautiful home, via the West End hat shop to this wonderful West End flat and eat strawberries in April.... If only the home people could see. Her fatigue vanished.
Secure from Mrs. Kronen’s notice she sat in a mauve and white striped chair and contemplated her surroundings.
While they were waiting for the tea-cakes, Mrs. Kronen trailed about the mauve floor reciting her impressions of the weather. “So lovely,” she intoned in her curious half-Cockney. “I almost—went—out. But I haven’t. I—haven’t—stirred. It is lovely inside on this sort of spring day—the light.”
She paused and swept about. There is something about her, thought Miriam. It’s true, the light inside on a clear spring day.... I never thought of that. It is somehow spring in here in the middle of London in some real way. Her blood leaped and sang as it had done driving across the commons; but even more sweetly and keenly. It wouldn’t be, in a dingy room, even in the country.... It’s an essence—something you feel in the right surroundings.... What chances these people have. They get the most out of everything. Get everything in advance and over and over again. They can go into the country any minute as well as have clear light rooms. Nothing is ever grubby. And London there, all round; London ... London
was a soft, sea-like sound; a sound shutting in the spring. The spring gleamed and thrilled through everything in the pure bright room.... She hoped Mrs. Kronen would say no more about the light. Light, light, light. As the manservant brewed the tea and the silver teapot shone in the light as he moved it—silver and strange black splashes of light—caught and moving in the room. Drawing off her gloves she felt as if she could touch the flowing light.... Flowing in out of the dawn, moving and flowing and brooding and changing all day, in rooms. Mrs. Kronen was back on her settee sitting upright in her mauve gown, all strong soft curves. “That play of Wilde’s ...” she said. Miriam shook at the name. “You ought not to miss it. He—has—such—genius.” Wilde ... Wilde ... a play in the spring—someone named Wilde. Wild spring. That was genius. There was something in the name.... “Never go to the theatre; never, never, never,” Mrs. Corrie was saying, “too much of a bore.” Genius ... genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains. Capacity. A silly definition; like a proverb—made up by somebody who wanted to explain.... Wylde, Wilde.... Spring.... Genius.
The little feast was over and Mrs. Kronen was puffing at a cigarette when the hats were announced. As the fine incense reached her Miriam regretted that she had not confessed to being a smoker. The suggestion of tobacco brought the charm of the afternoon to its height. When the magic of the scented cloud drew her eyes to Mrs. Kronen’s face it was almost intolerable in its keenness. She gazed wondering whether Mrs. Kronen felt so nearly wild with happiness as she did herself.... Life what are you—what is life? she almost said aloud. The face was uplifted as it had been in the photograph, but with all the colour, the firm bows of gold hair, the colour in the face and strong white pillar of neck, the eyes closed instead of staring upwards and the rather full mouth flattened and drooping with its weight into a sort of tragic shapeliness—like some martyr ... that picture by Rossetti, Beata Beatrix, thought Miriam ... perfect reality. She liked Mrs. Kronen for smoking like that. She was not doing it for show. She would have smoked in the same way if she had been alone. She probably wished she was, as Mrs. Corrie did
not smoke. How she must have hated missing her smokes at Newlands, unless she had smoked in her room.
“It’s—a—mis-take,” said Mrs. Kronen incredulously, in response to the man’s announcement of the arrival of the hats. She waved her cigarette “imperiously,” thought Miriam, “how she enjoys showing off” ... to and fro in time with her words. Mrs. Corrie rose laughing and explaining and apologising. Waving her cigarette about once more Mrs. Kronen ordered the hats to be brought in and her maid to be summoned, but retained her expression of vexed incredulity. She’s simply longing for us to be off now, thought Miriam, and changed her opinion a few moments later when Mrs. Kronen, assuming on the settee the reclining position in which they had found her when they came in, disposed one by one of the hats as Mrs. Corrie and the maid freed them from their boxes and wrappings, with a little flourish of the cigarette and a few slow words.... “Im-poss-i-ble; not-in-key-with-your-lines; slightly too ingénue,” etc.: to three or four she gave a grudging approval, whereupon Mrs. Corrie who was laughing and pouncing from box to box would
stand upright and pace holding the favoured hat rakishly on her head. The selection was soon made and Miriam, whose weariness had returned with the millinery, was sent off to instruct the messenger that three hats had been selected and a bill might be sent to Brook Street in the morning.
As she was treating with the messenger in the little mauve and white hall, Mrs. Corrie came out and tapped her on the shoulder. Turning, Miriam found her smiling and mysterious. “We’re going by the 5.30,” she whispered. “Would you like to go for a walk for half an hour and come back here?”
“Rather!” said Miriam heartily, with a break in her voice and feeling utterly crushed. The beautiful clear room. She loved it and belonged to it. She was turned out. “All right,” smiled Mrs. Corrie encouragingly and disappeared. Under the eyes of the messenger and the servants who were coming out of the boudoir laden with hat boxes, she got herself out through the door.
The West End street ... grey buildings rising on either side, feeling away into the approaching distance—angles sharp against the sky ... softened angles of buildings against other buildings ... high moulded angles soft as crumb, with deep undershadows ... creepers fraying from balconies ... strips of window blossoms across the buildings, scarlet, yellow, high up; a confusion of lavender and white pouching out along a dipping sill ... a wash of green creeper up a white painted house front ... patches of shadow and bright light.... Sounds of visible near things streaked and scored with broken light as they moved, led off into untraced distant sounds ... chiming together.
Wide golden streaming Regent Street was quite near. Some near narrow street would lead into it.
Flags of pavement flowing along—smooth clean grey squares and oblongs, faintly polished, shaping and drawing away—sliding into each other.... I am part of the dense smooth clean paving stone ... sunlit; gleaming under dark winter rain; shining under warm sunlit rain, sending up a fresh stony smell ... always there ... dark and light ... dawn, stealing....
Life streamed up from the close dense stone. With every footstep she felt she could fly.
The little dignified high-built cut-through street, with its sudden walled-in church, swept round and opened into brightness and a clamour of central sounds ringing harshly up into the sky.
The pavement of heaven.
To walk along the radiant pavement of sunlit Regent Street forever.
She sped along looking at nothing. Shops passed by, bright endless caverns screened with glass ... the bright teeth of a grand piano running along the edge of its darkness, a cataract of light pouring down its raised lid; forests of hats; dresses, shining against darkness, bright headless crumpling stalks; sly, silky, ominous furs; metals, cold and clanging, brandishing the light; close prickling fire of jewels ... strange people who bought these things, touched and bought them.
She pulled up sharply in front of a window. The pavement round it was clear, allowing her to stand rooted where she had been walking, in the middle of the pavement, in the midst of the tide flowing from the clear window, a soft fresh tide of sunlit colours ... clear green glass shelves laden with shapes of fluted glass, glinting transparencies of mauve and amber and green, rose-pearl and milky blue, welded to a flowing tide, freshening and flowing through her blood, a sea rising and falling with her breathing.
The edge had gone from the keenness of the light. The street was a happy, sunny, simple street—small. She was vast. She could gather up the buildings in her arms and push them away, clearing the sky ... a strange darkling and she would sleep. She felt drowsy, a drowsiness in her brain and limbs and great strength, and hunger.
A clock told her she had been away from Brook Street ten minutes. Twenty minutes to spare. What should she do with her strength? Talk to someone or write ... Bob; where was Bob? Somewhere in the West End. She would write from the West End a note to him in the West End.
There were no cheap shops in Regent Street. She looked about. Across the way a little side street showing a small newspaper shop offered help.
Thoroughly frightened she hurried with clenched hands down the little mean street ready to give up her scheme at the first sight of an unfriendly eye. “We went through those awful
side streets off the West End; I was terrified; I didn’t know where he was driving us,” Mrs. Poole had said about a cabman driving to the theatre ... and her face as she sat in her thick pink dress by the dining-room fire had been cunning and mean and full of terror. A small shop appeared close at hand, there were newspaper posters propped outside it and its window was full of fly-blown pipes, toilet requisites, stationery and odd-looking books. “Letters may be left here,” said a dirty square of cardboard in the corner of the window. “That’s all right,” thought Miriam, “it’s a sort of agency.” She plunged into the gloomy interior. “Yes!” shouted a tall stout man with a red coarse face coming forward, as if she had asked something that had made him angry. “I want some notepaper, just a little, the smallest quantity you have and an envelope,” said Miriam, quivering and panic-stricken in the hostile atmosphere. The man turned and whisked a small packet off a shelf, throwing it down on the counter before her. “One penny!” bellowed the man as she took it up. “Oh, thank you,” murmured Miriam ingratiatingly putting down twopence. “Do you sell pencils?” The man’s great
fingers seemed an endless time wrenching a small metal-sheathed pencil from its card. The street outside would have closed in and swallowed her up forever if she did not quickly get away.
“Dear Mr. Greville,” she wrote in a clear bold hand.... He won’t expect me to have that kind of handwriting, like his own, but stronger. He’ll admire it on the page and then hear a man’s voice, Pater’s voice talking behind it and not like it. Me. He’d be a little afraid of it. She felt her hard self standing there as she wrote, and shifted her feet a little, raising one heel from the ground, trying to feminise her attitude; but her hat was hard against her forehead, her clothes would not flow.... “Just imagine that I am in town—I could have helped you with your shopping if I had known I was coming....” The first page was half filled. She glanced at her neighbours, a woman on one side and a man on the other, both bending over telegram forms in a careless preoccupied way—wealthy, with expensive clothes with West End lines.... Regent Street was Salviati’s. It was Liberty’s and a music shop and the shop with the chickens.
But most of all it was Salviati’s. She feared the officials behind the long grating could see by the expression of her shoulders that she was a scrubby person who was breaking the rules by using one of the little compartments with its generosity of ink and pen and blotting paper, for letter writing. Someone was standing impatiently just behind her, waiting for her place. “Telle est la vie,” she concluded with a flourish, “yours sincerely,” and addressed the envelope in almost illegible scrawls. Guiltily she bought a stamp and dropped the letter with a darkening sense of guilt into the box. It fell with a little muffled plop that resounded through her as she hurried away towards Brook Street. She walked quickly, to make everything surrounding her move more quickly. London revelled and clamoured softly all round her; she strode her swiftest heightening its clamorous joy. The West End people, their clothes, their carriages and hansoms, their clean bright spring-filled houses, their restaurants and the theatres waiting for them this evening, their easy way with each other, the mysterious something behind their faces, was hers. She, too, now had a mysterious secret face—a West End life of her own....