The next morning there was a letter from Bob containing a page of description of his dull afternoon at his club within half a mile of her. “Let me know, my dear girl,” it went on, “whenever you escape from your gaolers, and do not suffer the thought of old Bob’s making himself responsible for all the telegrams you may send to cloud your joyous young independence.”
Miriam recoiled from the thought of a dull bored man looking to her for enlivenment of the moving coloured wonder of London and felt that Mr. and Mrs. Corrie were anything but gaolers. She was not sorry that she had missed the opportunity of seeing him. “Meanwhile write and tell me your thoughts,” was the only sentence that had appealed to her in the letter; but she was sure she could not whole-heartedly offer her thoughts as entertainment to a man who spent his time feeling dull in a club. He’s ...
blasé, that’s it, she reflected. Perhaps it would be better not to write again. He’s not my sort a bit, she pondered with a sudden dim sense of his view of her as a dear girl. But she knew she wanted to retain him to decorate her breakfast tray with letters.
The following day Mrs. Corrie decided that she did not want to keep the hats. She would spend the money intended for them on sketching lessons. An artist should come once a week and teach them all to paint from Nature. This decision excited Miriam deeply, putting everything else out of her mind. It promised the satisfaction of a desire she had cherished with bitter hopelessness ever since her schooldays when every Friday had brought the necessity of choking down her longing to join the little crowd of girls who took “extras” and filed carelessly in to spend a magic afternoon amongst easels and casts in the large room. The old longing came leaping back higher than it had ever done before, making a curious eager smouldering in her chest—as Mrs. Corrie talked. An old sketch-book was brought out and Mrs.
Corrie spent the morning making drawings of the heads of the children as they sat at lessons. The book was almost full of drawings of the children’s heads. Besides the heads there were rough sketches of people Miriam did not know. The first half-dozen pages were covered with small outlines, hands, feet, eyes, thumbs; a few lines suggesting a body. These pages seemed full of life. But the sketches of the children and the unknown people, sitting posed, in profile, looking up, looking down, full face, quarter face, three-quarters, depressed her. Learning to draw did not seem worth while if this was the result. The early pages haunted her memory as she sat over the children’s lessons. Feet, strange things stepping out, going through the world, running, dancing; the silent feet of people sitting in chairs pondering affairs of state. Eyes, looking at everything; looking at the astonishingness of everything.
“That’s the half-crown Mrs. Corrie gave me for the cabman, and the shilling for my tea,” said Miriam, handing the coins to her companion as they bowled over Waterloo Bridge. Seagulls were rising and dipping about the rim of the
bridge and the sunlight lay upon the water and shimmered and flashed along the forms of the seagulls as they hovered and wheeled in the clear air. Miriam glanced at them through the little side window of the hansom with a remote keen part of her consciousness ... light flashing from the moving wing of a seagull, the blue water, the brilliant sky, the bite of sun-scorched air upon her cheek, the sound about her like the sound of the sea.... As she turned back to the shaded enclosure of the hansom these things shrivelled and vanished and left her dumb, helplessly poised between two worlds. This shabby part of London and the seaside bridge could make no terms with the man at her side, his soft grey suit, his soft grey felt hat, the graceful crook of his crossed knees, his gleaming spats, the glitter of the light upon patent leather shoes. He was gazing out ahead, with the look with which he had looked across Australia in his gold-digging days, weary until he got back to the West End, not talking because the cab made such a noise crossing the bridge. It was stupid of her to peer out of her window and get away to her own world like that. Nothing that we can ever say to each other can possibly interest us,
she reflected. Why am I here? Her coins reassured her.
“Don’t think about pence, dear girl,” he said, in a voice that quavered a little against the noise of the cab, “when you’re with old Bob.” Without looking at her he gently closed her hand over the money.
“All right,” she shouted, “we’ll see, later on!”
The cab swept round into a street and the noise abated.
“When we’ve dropped those famous hats and rung the bell and run away we’ll go on to Bumpus’s and choose our book,” he said, as if asserting themselves and their errand against the confusion through which they were driving.
“Mrs. Caudle’s Curtain Lectures,” thought Miriam, glancing with loathing at the pointed corner of the collar that stuck out across the three firm little folds under the clean-shaven chin.... How funny I am. I suppose I shall get through the afternoon somehow. We shall go to the bookshop and then have tea and then it will be time to go back.
“The cabman is to take the hats into the shop and leave them. Isn’t it extraordinary?”
Bob laughed with a little fling of his head.
“The vagaries of the Fair, dear girl,” he said presently, in a soft blurred tone.
That’s one of his phrases, thought Miriam—that’s old-fashioned politeness; courtliness. Behind it he’s got some sort of mannish thought ... “the unaccountability of women” ... who can understand a woman—she doesn’t even understand herself—thought he’d given up trying to make out. He’s gone through life and got his own impressions; all utterly wrong ... talking about them with an air of wisdom to young men like Gerald ... my dear boy, a woman never knows her own mind. How utterly detestable mannishness is; so mighty and strong and comforting when you have been mewed up with women all your life, and then suddenly, in a second, far away, utterly imbecile and aggravating with a superior self-satisfied smile because a woman says one thing one minute and another the next. Men ought to be horsewhipped, all the grown men, all who have ever had that self-satisfied smile, all, all, horsewhipped until they apologise on their knees.
They sat in a curious oak settee, like a high-backed church pew. The waitress had cleared away the tea things and brought cigarettes, large flat Turkish cigarettes. Responding to her companion’s elaborate apologetic petition for permission to smoke it did not occur to Miriam to confess that she herself occasionally smoked. She forgot the fact in the completeness of her contentment. On the square oak table in front of them was a bowl of garden anemones, mauve and scarlet with black centres, flaring richly in the soft light coming through the green-tinted diamond panes of a little low square deep-silled window. On either side of the window short red curtains were drawn back and hung in straight, close folds ... scarlet geraniums ... against the creamy plaster wall. Bowls of flowers stood on other tables placed without crowding or confusion about the room and there was another green window with red curtains near a far-off corner. There were no other customers for the greater part of their time and when the waitress was not in the room it was still; a softly shaded stillness. Bob’s low blurred voice had gone on
and on undisturbingly, no questions about her life or her plans, just jokes, about the tea-service and everything they had had, making her laugh. Whenever she laughed, he laughed delightedly. All the time her eyes had wandered from the brilliant anemones across to the soft green window with its scarlet curtains.
When May came life lay round Miriam without a flaw. She seemed to have reached the summit of a hill up which she had been climbing ever since she came to Newlands. The weeks had been green lanes of experience, fresh and scented and balmy and free from lurking fears. Now the landscape lay open before her eyes, clear from horizon to horizon, sunlit and flawless, past and future. The present, within her hands, brought her, whenever she paused to consider it, to the tips of her toes, as if its pressure lifted her. She would push it off, smiling—turning and shutting herself away from it, with laughter and closed eyes, she found herself deeper in the airy flood and drawing breath swam forward.
The old troubles, the things she had known from the beginning, the general shadow that lay over the family life and closed punctually in
whenever the sun began to shine, her own personal thoughts, the impossibility of living with people, poverty, disease, death in a dark corner, had moved and changed, melted and flowed away.
The family shadow had shrunk long ago, back in the winter months they had spent in Bennett’s little bachelor villa, to a small black cloud of disgrace hanging over her father. At the time of its appearance, when the extent of his embarrassment was exactly known, she had sunk for a while under the conviction that the rest of her life must be spent in a vain attempt to pay off his debts. Her mind revolved round the problem hopelessly.... Even if she went on the stage she could not make enough to pay off one of his creditors. Most women who went on the stage, Gerald had said, made practically nothing, and the successful ones had to spend enormous sums in bribery whilst they were making their way—even the orchestra expected to be flattered and bribed. She would have to go on being a resident governess, keeping ten pounds a year for dress and paying over the rest of her salary. Her bitter rebellion against this prospect was reinforced by the creditors’ refusal to make her father a bankrupt. The refusal brought her a picture of the creditors,
men “on the Stock Exchange,” sitting in a circle, in frock-coats, talking over her father’s affairs. She winced, her blood came scorching against her skin. She confronted them, “Stop!” she shouted, “stop talking—you smug ugly men! You shall be paid. Stop! Go away....” But Gerald had said, “They like the old boy ... it won’t hurt them ... they’re all made of money.” They liked him. They would be kind. What right had they to be “kind”? They would be kind to her too. They would smile at her plan of restitution and put it on one side. And yet secretly she knew that each one of them would like to be paid and was vexed and angry at losing money just as she was angry at having to sacrifice her life to them. She would not sacrifice her life, but if ever she found herself wealthy she would find out their names and pay them secretly. Probably that would be never.
Disgrace closed round her, stifling. “It’s us—we’re doomed,” she thought, feeling the stigma of her family in her flesh. “If I go on after this, holding up my head, I shall be a liar and a cheat. It will show in my face and in my walk, always.” She bowed her head. “I want to live,” murmured
something. “I want to live, even if I slink through life. I will. I don’t care inside. I shall always have myself to be with.”
Something that was not touched, that sang far away down inside the gloom, that cared nothing for the creditors and could get away down and down into the twilight far away from the everlasting accusations of humanity.... The disgrace sat only in the muscles of her face, in her muscles, the stuff of her that had defied and fought and been laughed at and beaten. It would not get deeper. Deeper down was something cool and fresh—endless—an endless garden. In happiness it came up and made everything in the world into a garden. Sorrow blotted it over, but it was always there, waiting and looking on. It had looked on in Germany and had loved the music and the words and the happiness of the German girls and at Banbury Park, giving her no peace until she got away.
And now it had come to the surface and was with her all the time. Away in the distance filling in the horizon was the home life. Beyond the horizon, gone away for ever into some outer
darkness were her old ideas of trouble, disease and death. Once they had been always quite near at hand, always ready to strike, laying cold hands on everything. They would return, but they would be changed. No need to fear them any more. She had seen them change. And when at last they came back, when there was nothing else left in front of her they would still be changing. “Get along, old ghosts,” she said, and they seemed friendly and smiling. Her father and mother, whose failure and death she had foreseen as a child with sudden bitter tears, were going on now step by step towards these ghostly things in the small bright lamplit villa in Gunnersbury. She had watched them there during the winter months before she came to Newlands. They had some secret together and did not feel the darkness. Their eyes were careless and bright. Startled, she had heard them laugh together as they talked in their room. Often their eyes were preoccupied, as if they were looking at a picture. She had laughed aloud at the thought whenever there had been any excuse, and they had always looked at her when she laughed her loud laugh. Had they understood? Did they know that it was themselves
laughing in her? Families ought to laugh together whenever there was any excuse. She felt that her own grown-up laughter was the end of all the dreadful years. And three weeks ahead were the two weddings. The letters from home gleamed with descriptions of the increasing store of presents and new-made clothing. Miriam felt that they were her own; she would see them all at the last best moment when they were complete. She would have all that and all her pride in the outgoing lives of Sarah and Harriett that were like two sunlit streams. And meanwhile here within her hands was Newlands. Three weeks of days and nights of untroubled beauty. Interminable.
The roses were in bud. Every day she managed to visit them at least once, running out alone into the garden at twilight and coming back rich with the sense of the twilit green garden and the increasing stripes of colour between the tight shining green sheaths.
There had been no more talk of painting lessons. The idea had died in Mrs. Corrie’s mind
the day after it had been born and a strange interest, something dreadful that was happening in London had taken its place. It seemed to absorb her completely and to spread a strange curious excitement throughout the house. She sent a servant every afternoon up to the station for an evening newspaper. The pink papers disappeared, but she was perpetually making allusions to their strange secret in a way that told Miriam she wanted to impart it and that irritated without really arousing her interest. She felt that anything that was being fussed over in pink evening papers was probably really nothing at all. She could not believe that anything that had such a strange effect on Mrs. Corrie could really interest her. But she longed to know exactly what the mysterious thing was. If it was simply a divorce case Mrs. Corrie would have told her about it, dropping out the whole story abstractedly in one of her little shocked sentences and immediately going on to speak of something else. She did not want to hear anything more about divorce; all her interested curiosity in divorced people had been dispersed by her contact with the Kronens. They had both been divorced and their lives were broken and muddly and they
were not sure of themselves. Mrs. Kronen was strong and alone. But she was alone and would always be. If it were a murder everybody would talk about it openly. It must be something worse than a murder or a divorce. She felt she must know, must make Mrs. Corrie tell her and knew at the same time that she did not want to be distracted from the pure solid glory of the weeks by sharing a horrible secret. The thing kept Mrs. Corrie occupied and interested and left her free to live undisturbed. It was a barrier between them. And yet ... something that a human being had done that was worse than a murder or a divorce.
“Is it a divorce?” she said suddenly and insincerely one afternoon coming upon Mrs. Corrie scanning the newly arrived newspaper in the garden.
“Lordy no,” laughed Mrs. Corrie self-consciously, scrumpling the paper under her arm.
“What is it?” said Miriam, shaking and flushing. “Don’t tell me, don’t tell me,” cried her mind, “don’t mention it, you don’t know yourself what it is. Nobody knows what anything is.”
“I couldn’t tell you!” cried Mrs. Corrie.
“Why not?” laughed Miriam.
“It’s too awful,” giggled Mrs. Corrie.
“Oh, you must tell me now you’ve begun.”
“It’s the most awful thing there is. It’s like the Bible,” said Mrs. Corrie, and fled into the house.
Little cities burning and flaring in a great plain until everything was consumed. Everything beginning again—clean. Would London be visited by destruction? Humanity was as bad now as in Bible days. It made one feel cold and sick. In the midst of the beauty and happiness of England—awful things, the worst things there were. What awful faces those people must have. It would be dreadful to see them.
At the week-end the house seemed full of little groups of conspirators, talking in corners, full of secret glee ... someone describing a room, drawn curtains and candlelight at midday ... wonderful ... and laughing. Why did they laugh? A candle-lit room in the midst of bright day ... wonderful, like a shrine.
The low-toned talk went on, in Mr. Corrie’s
little study behind the half-closed door, in corners of the hall. Names were mentioned—the name of the man who wrote the plays, Mrs. Kronen’s “genius.” Miriam could only recall when she was alone that it was a woodland springtime name. It comforted her to think that this name was concerned in the horrible mystery. Her sympathies veered vaguely out towards the patch of disgrace in London and her interest died down.
The general preoccupation and excitement seemed to destroy her link with the household. As soon as the children’s tea was over she felt herself free. A strange tall woman came to stay in the house, trailing about in long jewelled dresses with a slight limp; Miss Tower, Mrs. Corrie called her Jin. But the name did not belong to her. Miriam could not think of any name that would belong to her ... talking to Mrs. Corrie at lunch with amused eyes and expressionless, small fine features of some illness that was going to kill her in eight or ten years, of her friends, talking about her men friends as if they were boys to be cried over. “Why don’t you marry him?” Mrs. Corrie would say of one
or another. How happy the man would be, thought Miriam, gazing into the strange eyes and daring her to marry anyone and alter the eyes. Miss Tower spoke to her now and again as if she had known her all her life. One day after lunch she suddenly said, “You ought to smile more often—you’ve got pretty teeth; but you forget about them. Don’t forget about them”; and one evening she came into her room just as she was beginning to undress and stood by the fire and said, “Your evening dresses are all wrong. You should have them cut higher, above the collar-bone—or much lower—don’t forget. Don’t forget, you could be charming.”
Mrs. Corrie came in herself the next evening and gave Miriam a full-length cabinet photograph of herself, suddenly. Afterwards she heard her saying to Kate on the landing, “Let the poor thing rest when she can,” and they both went into Kate’s room.
Every day as soon as the children’s tea was over she fled to her room. The memory of Mrs. Corrie’s little sketch-book had haunted her for days. She had bought a block and brushes, a small box of paints and a book on painting in
water colours. For days she painted, secure in the feeling of Mrs. Corrie and Kate occupied with each other. She filled sheet after sheet with swift efforts to recall Brighton skies—sunset, the red mass of the sun, the profile of the cliffs, the sky clear or full of heavy cloud, the darkness of the afternoon sea streaked by a path of gold, bird-specks, above the cliffs, above the sea. The painting was thick and confused, the objects blurred and ran into each other, the image of each recalled object came close before her eyes, shaking her with its sharp reality, her heart and hand shook as she contemplated it, and her body thrilled as she swept her brushes about. She found herself breathing heavily and deeply, sure each time of registering what she saw, sweeping rapidly on until the filled paper confronted her, a confused mass of shapeless images, leaving her angry and cold. Each day what she had done the day before thrilled her afresh and drove her on, and the time she spent in contemplation and hope became the heart of the days as April wore on.
On the last day of Jin Tower’s visit, Miriam came in from the garden upon Mrs. Corrie sitting in the hall with her guest. Jin was going and was sorry that she was going. But Miriam saw that her gladness was as great as her sorrow. It always would be. Whatever happened to her. Mrs. Corrie was sitting at her side bent from the waist with her arms stretched out and hands clasped beyond her knees. Miriam was amazed to see how much Mrs. Corrie had been talking, and that she was treating Jin’s departure as if it were a small crisis. There was a touch of soft heat and fussiness in the air. Mrs. Corrie’s features were discomposed. They both glanced at her as she came across the hall and she smiled, awkwardly and half paused. Her mind was turned towards her vision of a great cliff in profile against a still sky with a deep sea brimming to its feet in a placid afterglow; the garden with its lawn and trees, its bushiness and its buttons of bright rosebuds had seemed small and troubled and talkative in comparison. In her slight pause she offered them her vision, but knew as she went on upstairs that her attitude had said, “I am the
paid governess. You must not talk to me as you would to each other; I am an inferior and can never be an intimate.” She was glad that Jin had left off coming to her room. She did not want intimacy with anyone if it meant that strained fussiness in the hall. Meeting Mrs. Corrie later on the landing she asked with a sudden sense of inspiration whether she might have her meal in her room, adding in an insincere effort at explanation that she wanted to do some reading up for the children. Mrs. Corrie agreed with an alacrity that gave her a vision of possible freedom ahead and a shock of apprehension. Perhaps she had not succeeded even so far as she thought in living the Newlands social life. She spent the evening writing to Eve, asking her if she remembered sea scenes at Weymouth and Brighton, pushing on and on weighed down by a sense of the urgency of finding out whether to Eve the registration and the recalling of her impressions was a thing that she must either do or lose hold of some essential thing ... she felt that Eve would somehow admire her own stormy emphasis but would not really understand how much it meant to her. She remembered Eve’s comparison of the country round the Greens’
house to Leader landscapes—pictures, and how delightful it had seemed to her that she had such things all round her to look at. But her thoughts of the great brow and downward sweep of cliff and the sea coming up to it was not a picture, it was a thing; her cheeks flared as she searched for a word—it was an experience, perhaps the most important thing in life—far in away from any “glad mask,” a thing belonging to that strange inner life and independent of everybody. Perhaps it was a betrayal, a sort of fat noisy gossiping to speak of it even to Eve. “You’ll think I’m mad,” she concluded, “but I’m not.”
When the letter was finished the Newlands life seemed very remote. She was alone in a strange, luxurious room that did not belong to her, lit by a hard electric light that had been put there by some hardworking mechanic to whom the house was just a house with electric fittings. She felt a touch of the half-numb half-feverish stupor that had been her daily mood at Banbury Park. She would go on teaching the Corrie children, but her evenings in future would be divided between unsuccessful efforts to put down her flaming or peaceful sunset scenes and to explain their importance to Eve.
But the next evening when Mr. Corrie came down for the week-end with a party of guests, Mrs. Corrie appeared with swift suddenness in Miriam’s room and glanced at her morning dress.
“I say, missy, you’ll have to hurry up.”
“Oh, I didn’t dress ... the house is full of strangers.”
“No, it isn’t; there’s Mélie and Tom ... Tommy and Mélie.”
“Yes, but I know there are crowds.”
She did not want to meet the Cravens again, and the strangers would turn out to be some sort of people saying certain sorts of things over and over again, and if she went down she would not be able to get away as soon as she knew all about them. She would be fixed; obliged to listen. When anyone spoke to her, grimacing as the patronised governess or saying what she thought and being hated for it.
“Crowds,” she repeated, as Mrs. Corrie placed a large lump in the centre of the blaze.
They had her here, in this beautiful room and looked after her comfort as if she were a guest.
“Nonsensy-nonsense. You must come down and see the fun.” Miriam glanced at her empty table. In the drawer hidden underneath the table-cover were her block and paints. Presently she could, if she held firm, be alone, in a grey space inside this alien room, cold and lonely and with the beginning of something ... dark painful beginning of something that could not come if people were there.... Downstairs, warmth and revelry.
“You must come down and see the fun,” said Mrs. Corrie, getting up from the fire and trailing across the room with bent head. “A nun—a nun in amber satin,” thought Miriam, surveying her back.
“Want you to come down,” said Mrs. Corrie plaintively from the door. Cold air came in from the landing; the warmth of the room stirred to a strange vitality, the light glowed clearer within its ruby globe. The silvery clatter of entrée dishes came up from the hall.
“All right,” said Miriam, turning exultantly to the chest of drawers.
“A victory over myself or some sort of treachery?” ... The long drawer which held her evening things seemed full of wonders. She dragged out a little home-made smocked blouse of pale blue nun’s veiling that had seemed too dowdy for Newlands and put it on over her morning skirt. It shone upon her. Rapidly washing her hands, away from the glamour of the looking-glass, she mentally took stock of her hair, untouched since the morning, the amateur blouse, its crude clear blue hard against the harsh black skirt. Back again at the dressing-table as she dried her hands she found the miracle renewed. The figure that confronted her in the mirror was wrapped in some strange harmonising radiance. She looked at it for a moment as she would have looked at an unknown picture, in tranquil disinterested contemplation. The sound of the gong came softly into the room, bringing her no apprehensive contraction of nerves. She wove its lingering note into the imagined tinkling of an old melody from a wooden musical box. Opening the door before turning out her gas she found a small bunch of hothouse lilies of
the valley lying on the writing-table.... Mrs. Corrie—“you must come.”
Tucking them into her belt she went slowly downstairs, confused by a picture coming between her and her surroundings like a filmy lantern slide, of Portland Bill lying on a smooth sea in a clear afterglow....
“Quite a madonna,” said Mrs. Staple-Craven querulously. She sat low in her chair, her round gold head on its short stalk standing firmly up from billowy frills of green silk ... “a fat water-lily,” mused Miriam, and went wandering through the great steamy glass-houses at Kew, while the names that had been murmured during the introductions echoed irrelevantly in her brain.
“She must wear her host’s colours sometimes,” said Mr. Corrie quickly and gently.
Miriam glanced her surprise and smiled shyly in response to his shy smile. It was as if the faint radiance that she felt all round her had been outlined by a flashing blade. Mrs. Craven might go on resenting it; she could not touch it again. It steadied and concentrated; flowing from some inexhaustible
inner centre, it did not get beyond the circle outlined by the flashing blade, but flowed back on her and out again and back until it seemed as if it must lift her to her feet. Her eyes caught the clear brow and smooth innocently sleeked dark hair of a man at the other end of the table—under the fine level brows was a loudly talking, busily eating face—all the noise of the world, and the brooding grieving unconscious brow above it. Everyone was talking. She glanced. The women showed no foreheads; but their faces were not noisy; they were like the brows of the men, except Mrs. Craven’s. Her silent face was mouthing and complaining aloud all the time.
“Old Felix has secured himself the best partner,” Miriam heard someone mutter as she made her fluke, a resounding little cannon and pocket in one stroke. Wandering after her ball she fought against the suggesting voice. It had come from one of the men moving about in the gloom surrounding the radiance cast by the green-shaded lamps upon the long green table. Faces moving in the upper darkness were indistinguishable.
The white patch of Mrs. Corrie’s face gleamed from the settee as she sat bent forward with her hands clasped in front of her knees. Beyond her, sitting back under the shadow of the mantelpiece and the marking board was Mrs. Craven, a faint mass of soft green and mealy white. All the other forms were standing or moving in the gloom; standing watchful and silent, the gleaming stems of their cues held in rest, shifting and moving and strolling with uncolliding ordered movements and little murmurs of commentary after the little drama—the sudden snap of the stroke breaking the stillness, the faint thundering roll of the single ball, the click of the concussion, the gentle angular explosion of pieces into a new relation and the breaking of the varying triangle as a ball rolled to its hidden destination held by all the eyes in the room until its rumbling pilgrimage ended out of sight in a soft thud. It was pure joy to Miriam to wander round the table after her ball, sheltered in the gloom, through an endless “grand chain” of undifferentiated figures that passed and repassed without awkwardness or the need for forced exchange; held together and separated by the ceremony of the game. Comments came
after each stroke, words and sentences sped and smoothed and polished by the gloom like the easy talking of friends in a deep twilight; but between each stroke were vast intervals of untroubled silent intercourse. The competition of the men, the sense of the desire to win, that rose and strained in the room could not spoil this communion. After a stroke, pondering the balls while the room and the radiance and the darkness moved and flowed and the dim figures settled to a fresh miracle of grouping, it was joy to lean along the board to her ball, keeping punctual appointment with her partner whose jaunty little figure would appear in supporting opposition under the bright light, drawing at his cigarette with a puckering half-smile, awaiting her suggestion and ready with counsel. Doing her best to measure angles and regulate the force of her blow she struck careless little lifting strokes that made her feel as if she danced, and managed three more cannons and a pocket before her little break came to an end.
“It must be jolly to smoke in the in-between times,” said Miriam, standing about at a loss during a long break by one of her opponents.
“Yes, you ought to learn to smoke,” responded Mr. Corrie judicially. The quiet smile—the serene offer of companionship, the whole room troubled with the sense of the two parties, the men with whom she was linked in the joyous forward going strife of the game and the women on the sofa, suddenly grown monstrous in their opposition of clothes and kindliness and the fuss of distracting personal insincerities of voice and speech attempting to judge and condemn the roomful of quiet players, shouting aloud to her that she was a fool to be drawn in to talking to men seriously on their own level, a fool to parade about as if she really enjoyed their silly game. “I hate women and they’ve got to know it,” she retorted with all her strength, hitting blindly out towards the sofa, feeling all the contrivances of toilet and coiffure fall in meaningless horrible detail under her blows.
“I do smoke,” she said, leaving her partner’s side and going boldly to the sofa corner. “Ragbags, bundles of pretence,” she thought, as she confronted the women. They glanced up with cunning eyes. They looked small and cringing. She rushed on, sweeping them aside.... Who
had made them so small and cheated, and for all their smiles so angry? What was it they wanted? What was it women wanted that always made them so angry?
“Would you mind if I smoked?” she asked in a clear gay tone, cutting herself from Mrs. Corrie with a wrench as she faced her glittering frightened eyes.
“Of course not, my dear lady—I don’t mind, if you don’t,” she said, tweaking affectionately at Miriam’s skirt. “Ain’t she a gay dog, Mélie, ain’t she a gay dog!”
“It’s a pleasure to see you smoke,” murmured Mr. Corrie fervently, “you’re the first woman I’ve seen smoke con amore.”
Contemplating the little screwed-up appreciative smile on the features of her partner, bunched to the lighting of his own cigarette, Miriam discharged a double stream of smoke violently through her nostrils—breaking out at last a public defiance of the freemasonry of women. “I suppose I’m a new woman—I’ve said I am now, anyhow,” she reflected, wondering in the background of her determination how she would
reconcile the r?le with her work as a children’s governess. “I’m not in their crowd, anyhow; I despise their silly secret,” she pursued, feeling out ahead towards some lonely solution of her difficulty that seemed to come shapelessly towards her, but surely—the happy weariness of conquest gave her a sense of some unknown strength in her.
For the rest of the evening the group in the sofa-corner presented her a frontage of fawning and flattery.
Coming down with the children to lunch the next day, Miriam found the room dark and chill in the bright midday. It was as if it were empty. But if it had been empty it would have been beautiful in the still light and tranquil. There was a dark cruel tide in the room, she sought in vain for a foothold. A loud busy voice was talking from Mr. Corrie’s place at the head of the table. Mr. Staple-Craven, busy with cold words to hide the truth. He paused as the nursery trio came in and settled at the table and then shouted softly and suddenly at Mrs. Corrie, “What’s Corrie having?”
“Biscuits,” chirped Mrs. Corrie eagerly, “biscuits
and sally in the study.” She sat forward, gathering herself to disperse the gloom. But Mrs. Craven’s deep voice drowned her unspoken gaieties ... ah—he’s not gone away, thought Miriam rapidly, he’s in the house....
“Best thing for biliousness,” gonged Mrs. Craven, and Mr. Craven busily resumed.
“It’s only the fisherman who knows anything, anything whatever about the silver stream. Necessarily. Necessarily. It is the—the concentration, the—the absorption of the passion that enables him to see. Er, the fisherman, the poet-tantamount; exchangeable terms. Fishing is, indeed one might say——”
The men of the party were devouring their food with the air of people just about to separate to fulfil urgent engagements. They bent and gobbled busily and cast smouldering glances about the table, as if with their eyes they would suggest important mysteries brooding above their animated muzzles.
Miriam’s stricken eyes sought their foreheads for relief. Smooth brows and neatly brushed hair above; but the smooth motionless brows were ramparts of hate; pure murderous hate. That’s men, she said, with a sudden flash of certainty,
that’s men as they are, when they are opposed, when they are real. All the rest is pretence. Her thoughts flashed forward to a final clear issue of opposition, with a husband. Just a cold blank hating forehead and neatly brushed hair above it. If a man doesn’t understand or doesn’t agree he’s just a blank bony conceitedly thinking, absolutely condemning forehead, a face below, going on eating—and going off somewhere. Men are all hard angry bones; always thinking something, only one thing at a time and unless that is agreed to, they murder. My husband shan’t kill me.... I’ll shatter his conceited brow—make him see ... two sides to every question ... a million sides ... no questions, only sides ... always changing. Men argue, think they prove things; their foreheads recover—cool and calm. Damn them all—all men.
“Fee ought to be out here,” said Mrs. Corrie, moving her basket chair to face away from the sun.
The garden blazed in the fresh warm air. But there was no happiness in it. Everything was lost and astray. The house-party had dispersed
and disappeared. Mrs. Corrie sat and strolled about the garden, joyless, as if weighed down by some immovable oppression. If Mr. Corrie were to come out, and sit there too it would be worse. It was curious to think that the garden was his at all. He would come feebly out, looking ill and they would all sit, uneasy and afraid. But Mrs. Corrie wanted him to come out, knew he ought to be there. It was she who had thought of it. It was intolerable to think of his coming. Yet he had been “crazy mad” about her for five years. Five years and then this. Whose fault was it? His or hers? Or was marriage always like that? Perhaps that was why she and Mrs. Craven had laughed when they were asked whether marriage was a failure. Mrs. Craven had no children. Nothing to think about but stars and spirits and her food and baths and little silk dresses and Mr. Craven treated her as if she were a child he had got tired of petting. She did not even go fishing with him. She was lying down in her room and tea would be taken up to her. At least she thought of herself and seemed to enjoy life. But she was getting fatter and fatter. Mrs. Corrie did not want anything for herself, except for the fun of getting things. She cared
only for the children and when they grew up they would have nothing to talk to her about. Sybil would have thoughts behind her ugly strong face. She would tell them to no one. The boy would adore her, until his wife whom he would adore came between them. So there was nothing for women in marriage and children. Because they had no thoughts. Their husbands grew to hate them because they had no thoughts. But if a woman had thoughts a man would not be “silly” about her for five years. And Mrs. Corrie had her garden. She would always have that, when he was not there.
“If you were to go and ask him,” said Mrs. Corrie, brushing out her dress with her hands, “he’d come out.”
“Me!” said Miriam in amazement.
“Yes, go on, my dear, you see; he’ll come.”
“But perhaps he doesn’t want to,” said Miriam, suddenly feeling that she was playing a familiar part in a novel and wanting to feel quite sure she was reading her r?le aright.
“You go and try,” laughed Mrs. Corrie gently. “Make him come out.”
“I’ll tell him you wish him to come,” said
Miriam gravely, getting to her feet. “All right,” she thought, “if I have more influence over him than you it’s not my fault, not anybody’s fault, but how horrid you must feel.”
Miriam’s trembling fingers gave a frightened fumbling tap at the study door. “Come in,” said Mr. Corrie officially, and coughed a loose, wheezy cough. He was sitting by the fire in one of the huge armchairs and didn’t look up as she entered. She stood with the door half closed behind her, fighting against her fear and the cold heavy impression of his dull grey dressing-gown and the grey rug over his knees.
“It’s so lovely in the garden,” she said, fervently fixing her eyes on the small white face, a little puffy under its grizzled hair. He looked stiffly in her direction.
“The sun is so warm,” she went on hurriedly. “Mrs. Corrie thought——” she stopped. Of course the man was too ill to be worried. For, an eternity she stood, waiting. Mr. Corrie coughed his little cough and turned again to the fire. If only she could sit down in the other chair, saying nothing and just be there. He looked so
unspeakably desolate. He hated being there, not able to play or work.
“I hate being ill,” she said at last, “it always seems such waste of time.” She knew she had borrowed that from someone and that it would only increase the man’s impatience. “I always have to act and play parts,” she thought angrily—and called impatiently to her everyday vision of him to dispel the obstructive figure in the armchair.
“Umph,” said Mr. Corrie judicially.
“You could have a chair,” she ventured, “and just sit quietly.”
“No thanks, I’m not coming out.” He turned a kind face in her direction without meeting her eyes.
“You have such a nice room,” said Miriam vaguely, getting to the door.
“Do you like it?” It was his everyday voice, and Miriam stopped at the door without turning.
“It’s so absolutely your own,” she said.
Mr. Corrie laughed. “That’s a strange definition of charm.”
“I didn’t say charming. I said your own.”
Mr. Corrie laughed out. “Because it’s mine it’s nice, but it is, for the same reason, not charming.”
“You’re tying me up into something I haven’t said. There’s a fallacy in what you have just said, somewhere.”
“You’ll never be tied up in anything, mademoiselle—you’ll tie other people up. But there was no fallacy.”
“No verbal fallacy,” said Miriam eagerly, “a fallacy of intention, deliberate misreading.”
“No wonder you think the sun would do me good.”
“How do you mean?”
“I’m such a miscreant.”
“Oh no, you’re not,” said Miriam comfortingly, turning round. “I don’t want you to come out”—she advanced boldly and stirred the fire. “I always like to be alone when I’m ill.”
“That’s better,” said Mr. Corrie.
“Good-bye,” breathed Miriam, getting rapidly to the door ... poor wretched man ... wanting quiet kindness.
“Thank you; good-bye,” said Mr. Corrie gently.
“Then you’d say, Corrie,” said Mr. Staple-Craven, as they all sat down to dinner on Sunday, evening ... now comes flattery, thought
Miriam calmly—nothing mattered, the curtains were back, the light not yet gone from the garden and birds were fluting and chirruping out there on the lawn where she had played tennis all the afternoon—at home there was the same light in the little garden and Sarah and Harriett were there in happiness, she would see them soon and meantime, the wonder, the fresh rosebuds, this year’s, under the clear soft lamplight.
“You’d say that no one was to blame for the accident.”
“The cause of the accident was undoubtedly the signalman’s sudden attack of illness.”
Pause. “It sounds,” thought Miriam, “as if he were reading from the Book of Judgment. It isn’t true either. Perhaps a judgment can never be true.” She pondered to the singing of her blood.
“In other words,” said one of the younger men, in a narrow nasal sneering clever voice, “it was a purely accidental accident.”
“Purely,” gurgled Mr. Corrie, in a low, pleased tone.
“They think they’re really beginning,” mused Miriam, rousing herself.
“A genuine accident within the meaning of the act,” blared Mr. Craven.
“An actident,” murmured Mr. Corrie.
“In that case,” said another man, “I mean since the man was discovered ill, not drunk, by a doctor in his box, all the elaborate legal proceedings would appear to be rather—superfluous.”
“Not at all, not at all,” said Mr. Corrie testily.
Miriam listened gladly to the anger in his voice, watching the faint movement of the window curtains and waiting for the justification of the law.
“The thing must be subject to a detailed inquiry before the man can be cleared.”
“He might have felt ill before he took up his duties—you’d hardly get him to admit that.”
“Lawyers can get people to admit anything,” said Mr. Craven cheerfully, and broke the silence that followed his sally by a hooting monotonous recitative which he delivered, swaying right and left from his hips, “that is to say—they by beneficently pursuing unexpected—quite unexpected bypaths—suddenly confront—their—their examinees—with the truth—the Truth.”
“It’s quite a good point to suggest that the
chap felt ill earlier in the day—that’s one of the things you’d have to find out. You’d have, at any rate, to know all the circumstances of the seizure.”
“Indigestible food,” said Miriam, “or badly cooked food.”
“Ah,” said Mr. Corrie, his face clearing, “that’s an excellent refinement.”
“In that case the cause of the accident would be the cook.”
Mr. Corrie laughed delightedly.
“I don’t say that because I’m interested, but because I wanted to take sides with him,” thought Miriam, “the others know that and resent it and now I’m interested.”
“Perhaps,” she said, feeling anxiously about the incriminated cook, “the real cause then would be a fault in her upbringing, I mean he may have lately married a young woman whose mother had not taught her cooking.”
“Oh, you can’t go back further than the cook,” said Mr. Corrie finally.
“But the cause,” she persisted, in a low, anxious voice, “is the sum total of all the circumstances.”
“No, no,” said Mr. Corrie impenetrably, with
a hard face—“you can’t take the thing back into the mists of the past.”
He dropped her and took up a lead coming from a man at the other end of the table.
“Oh,” thought Miriam coldly, appraising him with a glance, the slightly hollow temples, the small skull, a little flattened, the lack of height in the straight forehead, why had she not noticed that before?—the general stinginess of the head balancing the soft keen eyes and whimsical mouth—“that’s you; you won’t, you can’t look at anything from the point of view of life as a whole”—she shivered and drew away from the whole spectacle and pageant of Newlands’ life. It all had this behind it, a man, able to do and decide things who looked about like a ferret for small clever things, causes, immediate near causes that appeared to explain, and explained nothing and had nothing to do with anything. Her hot brain whirled back—signalmen, in bad little houses with bad cooking—tinned foods—they’re a link—they bring all sorts of things into their signal boxes. They ought to bring the fewest possible dangerous things. Something ought to be done.
Lawyers were quite happy, pleased with themselves
if they made some one person guilty—put their finger on him. “Can’t go back into the mists of the past ... you didn’t understand, you’re not capable of understanding any real movements of thought. I always knew it. You think—in propositions. Can’t go back. Of course you can go back, and round and up and everywhere. Things as a whole ... you understand nothing. We’ve done. That’s you. Mr. Corrie—a leading Q.C. Heavens.”
In that moment Miriam felt that she left Newlands for ever. She glanced at Mrs. Corrie and Mrs. Craven—bright beautiful coloured birds, fading slowly year by year in the stifling atmosphere, the hard brutal laughing complacent atmosphere of men’s minds ... men’s minds, staring at things, ignorantly, knowing “everything” in an irritating way and yet ignorant.
Coming home at ten o’clock in the morning, Miriam found the little villa standing quiet and empty in the sunshine. The sound of her coming down the empty tree-lined roadway had brought no face to either of the open windows. She stood on the short fresh grass in the small front garden looking up at the empty quiet windows. During her absence the dark winter villa had changed. It had become home. The little red brick fa?ade glowed as she looked up at it. It belonged to her family. All through the spring weather they had been living behind the small bright house-front. It was they who had set those windows open and left them standing open to the spring air. They had gone out, of course; all of them; to be busy about the weddings. But inside was a place for her; things ready; a bed prepared where she would lie to-night in the darkness. The sun would come up to-morrow and be again on this green
grass. She could come out on the grass in the morning.
The sounds of her knocking and ringing echoed through the house with a summery resonance. All the inside doors were standing open. Footsteps came and the door opened upon Mary. She had forgotten Mary and stood looking at her. Mary stood in her lilac print dress and little mob cap, filling the doorway in the full sunlight. She had shone through all the years in the grey basement kitchens at Barnes. Miriam had never before seen her face to face in the sunlight, her tawny red Somersetshire hair; the tawny freckles on the soft rose of her face; the red in her shy warm eyes. They both stood gazing. The strong sweet curve of Mary’s bony chin moved her thoughtful mouth. “How nice you do look, Miss Mirry.” Miriam took her by the arm and trundled her into the house. They moved into the little dining-room filled with a blaze of sunlight and smelling of leather and tobacco and fresh brown paper and string and into the dim small drawing-room at the back. The tiny greenhouse plastered on its hindmost wall was full of growing things. Mary dropped
phrases, offering Miriam her share of the things that had happened while she had been away. She listened deferentially, her heart rising high. After all these years she and Mary were confessing their love to each other.
She went down the road with a bale of art muslin over her shoulder and carrying a small bronze table-lamp with a pink silk shade. The bright bunchy green heads of the little lopped acacia trees bobbed against their background of red brick villa as she walked ... little moving green lampshades for Harriett’s life; they were like Harriett; like her delicate laughter and absurdity. The sounds of the footsteps of passers-by made her rejoice more keenly in her burdens. She felt herself a procession of sacred emblems, in the sunshine. The sunshine streamed about her from an immense height of blue sky. The sky had never been so high as it was above Harriett’s green acacias. It had gone soaring up to-day for them all; their sky.
That eldest Wheeler girl, going off to India, to marry a divorced man. Julia seemed to think
it did not matter if she were happy. How could she be happy?... Coming home from the “Second Mrs. Tanqueray” Bennett had asked Sarah if she would have married a man with a past ... it was not only that his studies had kept him straight. It was himself ... and Gerald too. It was ... there were two kinds of men. You could tell them at a glance. Life was clean and fresh for Sarah and Harriett.... There were two kinds of people. Most of the people who were going about ought to be shut up, somehow, in prison.
Eve came into the little room with her arms full of Japanese anemones. Behind her came a tall man with red-brown hair, a stout fresh face and beautifully cut clothes. Miriam bowed him a greeting without waiting for introduction and went on arranging her festoons of art muslin about the white wooden mantelpiece. He was carrying a trayful of little fluted green glasses each half filled with water. He came into the room on a holiday—a little interval in his man’s life—delighted to be arranging the tray of glasses; half contemptuous and very happy.
Pleased and surprised at himself and ready for miracles. He was not married—but he was a marrying man—a ladies’ man—a man of the world—something like Bob Greville—with the same sort of attitude towards women.... “The vagaries of the Fair” ... a special manner for women and a clubby life of his own, with men. Women meant sex to him, the reproduction of the species my dear chap, and his comforts and a little music on Sunday afternoon. He loved his mother, that was certain, Miriam felt, from something in his voice, and respected all mothers; the sort of man who would “look after” a woman properly, but would never know anything about her. And there was something in himself that he knew nothing about. Some woman would live with him in loneliness, maddened, waiting for that something to speak. Secretly he would be half contemptuous, half afraid of her and would keep on always with that mocking, obsequious, patronising manner. Horrible—and so easy to deceive, and yet cruel to deceive. Hit him ... hit him awake. He put down the tray of glasses near the heap of anemones that Eve had flung on the table and enquired whether they were to put one bloom in each
glass.... He had a secret, indulgent life of his own. Did he imagine that no one knew?... Eve giggled and tittered ... this new giggling way of Eve’s ... perhaps it was the way the Greens treated young men; arch and silly, like the girls at the tennis club. He must see through it. He was not in the least like the tennis club young men, most of whom needed to be giggled at before they could be anything but just sneery and silly.
But it was fascinating, like something in a novel come true; the latest tableau in all the wedding tableaux; their own. Bennett and Gerald had swept the lonely Henderson family into this. One was going to be a sister-in-law for certain, to-morrow.... Held up by this dignity Miriam concentrated on her folds and loops, adjusting and pinning with her back to the room, listening to the sparring and giggling, the sounds of the tinkling glasses—the scissors snipping and dropping with a rattle on to the table, the soft flurring of shifted blossoms. The moment was coming. The man was being impudently patronising to Eve, but really talking at her, trying to make her turn round. She
did not want him. There was something ... some quality in men that this kind of man did not possess ... something she knew ... who? It was somewhere, but not in him. Still, his being there gave an edge to her freedom and happiness. She owed him some kind of truth ... some blow or shock. Holding her last festoon in place she consulted some jumbled memory and found a phrase: “Will you people leave off squabbling and just see if this is all right before I nail it up?” She spoke in a cool even tone that filled the room. It startled her, making her feel sad, small and guilty. Still with her back to the room she waited during the moment of silence that followed her words. “It’s simply lovely, Mirry,” said Eve. Had she been more vulgar than Eve? She knew her decoration was all right and did not want an opinion. She wanted to crush the man’s behaviour, trample on it and fling it out of the room. Eve was sweeter and more lovable than she. Mother said it was natural and right to laugh and joke with young men. No ... no ... no....
She glanced, asking Eve to hold the corner while she went for the hammer and nails. Eve came eagerly forward. The man was standing
upright and motionless by the table, looking quietly at her as she stood back for Eve to substitute a supporting hand. “Er—let me do that,” he said gravely—“or go for the hammer.” He was at the door: “Oh—thanks,” said Miriam, in a hard tone; “you will find it in the kitchen.”
Eve remained holding the muslin with downcast face and conscious lips. Seizing a vase of anemones Miriam put it on the marble, bunching up the muslin to hide the vase.
“This is their smoking-room,” she said, her voice praying for tolerance. Eve beamed sadly and gladly. “Yes—isn’t it jolly?” Joining hands they waltzed about the room. Eve did not really mind; she fought, but there was something in her that did not mind.
Through the French windows of the new drawing-room Miriam saw a group of figures moving towards the end of the garden. In a moment they would have reached the low brick wall at the end of the garden. They might stand talking there with their heads outlined against the green painted trellis-work that ran along the
top of the wall or they might walk back towards the house and see her at the window.
She hid herself from view. The room closed round her. She could not sit down on one of the new chairs. The room was too full. Things were speaking to her. Their challenge had sent her to the window when she came into the room. It had made her feel like a trespasser. Now she was caught. She stood breathing in curious odours; faint odours of new wood and fresh upholstery, and the strange strong subdued emanation coming from the black grand piano, a mingling of the smell of aromatic wood with the hard raw bitter tang of metal and the muffled woolly pungency of new felting.
The whole of the floor space up to the edge of the skirting was filled by a soft thick rich carpet of clear green with a border and centre-piece of large soft fresh pink full-blown roses. Standing about on it were a set of little delicate shiny black chairs, with seats covered with silken stripings of pink and green, two great padded easy-chairs, deep cushioned and low-seated, and three little polished black tables of different shapes. A black overmantel with shelves and side brackets, holding fluted white bowls framed a
long strip of deeply bevelled mirror. The wooden mantelpiece was draped at the sides like the high French windows with soft straight hanging green silk curtains. At the windows long creamy net curtains hung, pulled in narrow straight folds just within the silk ones.
The walls swept up dimly striped with rose and green, the green misty and changeful, glossy or dull as you moved. And on the widest spaced wall dreadful presences ... two long narrow dark-framed pictures, safe and far-off and dreamy in shop windows, but now, shut in here, suddenly full of sad heavy dreadful meaning. A girl, listening to the words she had waited for, not seeing the youth who is gazing at her, not even thinking of him, but seeing suddenly everything opening far far away, and leaving him, going on alone, to things he will never see, joining the lonely women of the past, feeling her old self still there, wanting everyone to know that she was still there, and cut off, for ever. There was something ahead; but she could not take him with her. He would see it now and again, in her face, but would never understand. And the other picture; the girl grown into a woman; just married, her face veiled forever, her eyes closed;
sinking into the tide, his strong frame near her the only reality; blindly trying to get back to him across the tide of separation.
Their child will come—throwing even the support of him off and away, making her monstrous ... and then born into life between them, forever, “drawing them together,” showing they were separate; between them, forever. There was no getting away from that.
The strange strong crude odours breathing quietly out from the open lid of the new piano seemed to support them, to make them more mockingly inexorable.
The smell of the piano would go on being there while inexorable things happened.
Voices were sounding in the garden....
Hanging on either side of the mantelpiece were two more pictures—square green garden scenes.... There was relief in the deeps of the gardens and in under the huge spreading trees that nearly filled the sky. There were tiresome people fussing in the foreground ... Marcus Stone people—having scenes—not noticing the garden; getting in the way of the garden. But the garden was
there, blazing, filled with some particular time of day, always being filled with different times of day.
There would be in-between times for Harriett—her own times. Times when she would be at peace in this room near the garden. Away from the kitchen and strange-eyed servants, and from the stern brown and yellow pig-skin dining-room. In here she would have fragrant little teas; and talk as if none of those other things existed. There were figures standing at the French window.
She opened the window upon Harriett and Gerald. Standing a little aloof from them was a man. As Harriett spoke to her Miriam met his strange eyes wide and dark, unseeing; no, glaring at things that did not interest him ... desperate, playing a part. His thin squarish frame hung loosely, whipped and beaten, within his dark clothes.
His eyes passed expressionlessly from her face to Harriett.
A great gust of laughter sounded from the open kitchen window away to the left, screened by a trellis over which the lavish trailings of a
creeper made a bright green curtain. It was Bennett’s voice. He had just accomplished something or other.
“Ullo,” said Harriett. The strange man was holding his lower lip in with his teeth, as if in horror or pain.... They stood in a row on the gravel.
“Let me introduce Mr. Grove,” said Harriett, with a shy movement of her head and shoulders, keeping her hands clasped. Her face was all broken up. She could either laugh or cry. But there was something, a sort of light, chiselling it, holding everything back.
Miriam bowed. “What’s Bennett doing?” she said hurriedly.
“The last time I saw him he was standing on the kitchen table fighting with the gas bracket,” said Gerald.
The sallow man drew in his breath sharply and stood aside, staring down the garden. Miriam glanced at him, wondering. He was not criticising Gerald. It was something else.
“I say, Mirry, what did you do to old Tremayne this morning?” went on Gerald.
“What do you mean?” said Miriam interested. This was the novel going on....
She must read it through even at this strange moment ... this moment was the right setting to read through Gerald that little exciting far-away finished thing of the morning, to know that it had been right. She felt decked. Gerald stood confronting her and spoke low, fingering the anemones in her belt. The others were talking. Harriett in high short laughing sentences, the man gasping and moaning his replies, making jerky movements. He was not considering his words, but looking for the right, appropriate things to say. Miriam rejoiced over him as she smiled encouragingly at Gerald.
“Well, my dear, he wanted to know—who you were; and he swears he’s going to be engaged to you before the year is out.”
“What abominable cheek,” said Miriam, flushing with delight. Then she had taken the right line. How easy. This was how things happened.
“No, my dear, he didn’t mean to be cheeky.”
“I call it the most abominable cheek.”
“No you don’t”; Gerald was looking at her with fatherly solicitude. “That’s what he said anyhow—and he meant it. Ask Harry.”
“Frivolous young man.”
“Well, he’s an awful flirt, I warn you; but
he’s struck this time—all of a heap ... came and raved about you the minute he’d seen you, and when he heard you were Harry’s sister that’s what he said.”
“I’m sure I’m awfully obliged to his majesty.”
Gerald laughed and turned, looking for Harriett and moving to her. Miriam caught at a vision of the well-appointed man, a year ... a home full of fresh new things, no more need to make money; a stylish contented devoted sort of man, who knew nothing about one. It would be a fraud, unfair to him ... so easy to pretend to admire him ... well, there it was ... an offer of freedom ... that was admirable, in almost any man, the power to lift one out into freedom. He wanted to lift her out—her, not any other woman. It was rather wonderful, and appealing. She hung over his moment of certainty in pride and triumph. But there was something wrong somewhere; though she felt that someone had placed a jewel in her hair. Gerald had drawn Harriett through the doorway into the drawing-room. The sunlight followed them. They looked solid and powerful. The strange terrors of the room were challenged by their sunlit figures.
Moving to the side of Gerald’s strange friend Miriam said something about the garden in a determined manner. He drew a sawing breath without answering. They walked down the short garden. It moved about them in an intensity of afternoon colour. He did not know it was there; there was something between him and the little coloured garden. He walked with bent head, his head dipping from his shoulders with a little bob at each step. Miriam wanted to make him feel the garden moving round them; either she must do that or ask him why he was suffering. He walked responsively, as if they were talking. He was feeling some sort of reprieve ... perhaps the afternoon had bored him. They had turned and were walking back towards the house. If they reached it without speaking, they would not have courage to go down the garden again. She could not relinquish the strange painful comradeship so soon. They must go on expressing their relief at being together; anything she might say would destroy that. She wanted to take him by the arm and groan ... on Harriett’s wedding-eve, and when she was feeling so happy and triumphant....
“Have you known Gerald long?” she said, as they reached the house. He turned sharply to face the garden again.
“Oh, for a very great number of years,” he said quickly, “a—very—great—number.” His voice was the voice of the ritualistic curate at All Saints. He sighed impatiently. What was it he was waiting for her to say? Nothing perhaps. This busy walking was a way of finishing his visit without having to try to talk to anybody.
“How different people are,” she said airily.
“I’m very different,” he said, with his rasping, indrawn breath. A darkness coming from him enfolded her.
“Are you?” she said insincerely. Her eyes consulted the flowered border. She saw it as he saw it, just a flowered border, meaningless.
“You cannot possibly imagine what I am.”
Her mind leapt out to the moving garden, recapturing it scornfully. He is conceited about his difficulties and differences. He doesn’t think about mine. But he couldn’t talk like this unless he knew I were different. He knows it, but is not thinking about me.
“Don’t you think people are all alike, really?” she said impatiently.
“Our common humanity,” he said bitingly.
She had lost a thread. They were divided. She felt stiffly about for a conventional phrase.
“I expect that most men are the average manly man with the average manly faults.” She had read that somewhere. It was sly and wrong, written by somebody who wanted to flatter.
“It is wonderful, wonderful that you should say that to me.” He stared at the grass with angry eyes. His mouth smiled. His teeth were large and even. They seemed to smile by themselves. The dark, flexible lips curled about them in an unwilling grimace.
“He’s in some horrible pit,” thought Miriam, shrinking from the sight of the desolate garden.
“What are you going to do in life?” she said suddenly.
During the long silent interval she had felt a growing longing to hurt him in some way.
“If I had my will—if—I had my will—I should escape from the world.”
“What would you do?”
“I should join a brotherhood.”
“Oh....”
“That is the life I should choose.”
“Do you see how unfair everything is?”
“Um?”
“If a woman joins an order she must confess to a man.”
“Yes,” he said indifferently.... “I can’t carry out my wish, I can’t carry out my dearest wish.”
“You have a dearest wish; that is a good deal.”
She ought to ask him why not and what he was going to do. But what did it matter? He was going unwillingly along some dreary path. There was some weak helplessness about him. He would always have a grievance and be sorry for himself ... self-pity. She remained silent.
“I’m training for the Bar,” he murmured, staring away across the neighbouring gardens.
“Why—in Heaven’s name?”
“I have no choice.”
“But it’s absurd. You are almost a priest.”
“The Bar. That is my bourne.”
“Lawyers are the most ignorant, awful people.”
“I cannot claim superiority.” He laughed bitterly.
“But you can; you are. You can never be a lawyer.”
“It is necessary to do one’s duty. Occupation does not matter.”
“There you are; you’re a Jesuit already,” said Miriam angrily, seeing the figure at her side shrouded in a habit, wrapped in tranquillity, pacing along a cloister, lost to her. But if he stayed in the world and became a lawyer he would be equally lost to her.
“I have been ... mad,” he muttered; “a madman ... nothing but the cloister can give me peace—nothing but the cloister.”
“I don’t know. It seems like running away.”
“Running towards, running towards——”
Can’t you be at peace now, in this garden? ran her thoughts. I don’t condemn you for anything. Why can’t we stop worrying at things and be at peace? If I were beautiful I could make you be at peace—perhaps. But it would be a trick. Only real religion can help you. I can’t do anything. You are religious. I must keep still and quiet....
If some cleansing fire could come and consume them both ... flaring into the garden and consuming them both, together. Neither of them were wanted in the world. No one would ever want either of them. Then why could they
not want each other? He did not wish it. Salvation. He wanted salvation—for himself.
“My people must be considered first,” he said speculatively.
“They want you to be a barrister. That’s the last reason in the world that would affect me.”
He glanced at her with far-off speculative eyes, his upper lip drawn terribly back from his teeth.
“He is thinking I am a hard unfeminine ill-bred woman.”
“I do it as an atonement.”
The word rang in the garden ... the low tone of a bell. Her thoughts leaned towards the strength at her side.
“Oh, that’s grand,” she said hastily, and fluted quickly on, wondering where the inspiration had come from: “Luther said it’s much more difficult to live in the world than in a cell.”
“I am glad I have met you, glad I have met you,” he said, in a clear light tone.
She felt she knew the quality of the family voice, the way he had spoken as a lad, before his troubles came, his own voice easy and sincere. The flowers shone firm and steady on their stalks.
She laughed and rushed on into cheerful words,
but his harsh voice drowned hers. “You have put my life in a nutshell.”
“How uncomfortable for you,” she giggled excitedly.
He laughed with a dip of the head obsequiously. There was a catch of mirth in his tone.
Miriam laughed and laughed, laughing out fully in relief. He turned towards her a young lit face, protesting and insisting. She wanted to wash it, with soap, to clear away a faint greasiness and do something with the lank, despairing hair.
“You have come at the right instant, and shown me wisdom. You are wonderful.”
She recoiled. She did not really want to help him. She wanted to attract his attention to her. She had done it and he did not know it. Horrible. They were both caught in something. She had wanted to be caught, together with this agonising priestliness. But it was a trick. Perhaps they hated each other now.
“It is jolly to talk about things,” she said, as the blood surged into her face.
He was grave again and did not answer.
“People don’t talk about things nearly enough,” she pursued.
“I saw Miriam through the window, deep in conversation with a most interesting young man.”
“Have those people written about the bouquets?” said Miriam irritably.... Then mother had moved about the new house and was looking through those drawing-room windows this afternoon. She had looked about the house with someone else, saying all the wrong things, admiring things in the wrong way, impressed in the wrong way, having no thoughts, and no one with her to tell her what to think....
She flashed a passionate glance towards the clear weak flexible voice, half seeing the flushed face ... you’re not upset about the weddings—“Miriam’s scandalous goings-on the whole day long,” said somebody ... because you’ve got me. You don’t know me. You wouldn’t like me if you did. You don’t know him. He doesn’t know you. But I know you, that’s the difference....
“I’ve just thought something out,” she said aloud, her voice drowned by two or three voices and the sound of things being served and handed about the supper-table. They were trying to
draw her—still talking about the young men and her “goings-on.” They did not know how far away she was and how secure she felt. She laughed towards her mother and smiled at her until she made her blush. Ah, she thought proudly, it’s I who am your husband. Why have I not been with you all your life?... all the times you were alone; I knew them all. No one else knows them.
“I say,” she insisted, “what about the bouquets?”
Mrs. Henderson raised her eyebrows helplessly and smiled, disclaiming.
“Hasn’t anybody done anything?” roared Miriam.
Mary came in with a dish of fruit. Everyone went on so placidly.... She thought of the perfect set of her white silk bridesmaid’s dress, its freshness, its clear apple green pipings, the little green leaves and fresh pink cluster roses on the white chip hat. If the shower bouquets did not come it would be simply ghastly. And everybody went on chattering.
She leaned anxiously across the table to Harriett.
“Oo—what’s up?” asked Harriett.
Conversation had dropped. Miriam sat up to fling out her grievances.
“Well—just this. I’m told Gerald said the people would send a line to say it was all right, and they haven’t written, and so far as I can make out nothing’s been done.”
“Bouquets would appear to be one of the essentials of the ceremony,” hooted Mr. Henderson.
“Well, of course,” retorted Miriam savagely, “if you have a dress wedding at all. That’s the point.”
“Quite so, my dear, quite so. I was unaware that you were depending on a message.”
“I’m not anxious. It’s simply silly, that’s all.”
“It’ll be all right,” suggested Harriett, looking into space. “They’d have written.”
“Well, it’s your old bouquet principally.”
“Me. With a bouquet. Hoo——”
“Peace I give unto you, My peace I give unto you. Not as the world giveth, give I unto you——”
Christ said that. But peace came from God—the peace of God that passeth all understanding.
How could Christ give that? He put Himself between God and man. Why could not people get at God direct? He was somewhere.
The steam was disappearing out of the window; the row of objects ranged along the far side of the bath grew clear. Miriam looked at them, seeking escape from the problem—the upright hand-glass, the brush bag propped against it, the small bottle of Jockey Club, the little pink box of French face powder ... perhaps one day she would learn to use powder without looking like a pierrot ... how nice to have a thick white skin that never changed and took powder like a soft bloom....
But as long as the powder box were there it would be impossible to reach that state of peace and freedom that Thomas à Kempis meant. “To Miriam, from her friend, Harriett A. Perne.” Had Miss Haddie found anything of it? No—she was horribly afraid of God and turned to Christ as a sort of protecting lover to be flattered and to lean upon....
There were so many exquisite and wise things in the book; the language was so beautiful. But somehow there was a whining going all through it ... fretfulness. Anger too—“I had rather
feel compunction than know the definition thereof.” Why not both? He was talking at someone in that sentence.
The Kingdom of Heaven is within you. But even Christ went about sad, trying to get people to do some sort of trick that He said was necessary before they could find God—something to do with Himself. There was something wrong about that.
If one were perfectly still, the sense of God was there.
Supposing everyone could be got to stay perfectly still, until they died ... like that woman in the book who was dying so happily of starvation ... and then the friend came fussing in with soup....
Things were astounding enough; enough to make you die of astonishment, if you did nothing at all. Being alive. If one could realise that clearly enough, one would die.
Everything everyone did was just a distraction from astonishment.
It could only be done in a convent.... It cost money to get into a convent, except as a servant. If you were a servant you could not stay day and night in your cell—watching the
light and darkness until you died.... Perhaps in women’s convents they would not let you anyhow.
Why did men always have more freedom?... His head had a listening look. His eyes were waiting desperately, seeing nothing of the things in the world ... he wanted to stay still until the voice of things grew so clear and near that one could give a great cry and fall dead ... a long long cry.... Your hot heart, all of you, pouring out, getting free. Perhaps that happened to people when they were happy. They cried out to each other and were free—lost in another person. Whoso would save his soul ... but then they grew strange and apart.... Marriage was a sort of inferior condition ... an imitation of something else.... Ho-o-zan-na-in-the-Hi...i...est ... the top note rang up and stayed right up, in the rafters of the church.
“Did you ever notice how white the insides of your wrists are?”
Why did Bob seem so serious?... What a bother, what a bother.
It is a good thing to be plain ... “the tragedy of beauty; woman’s greatest curse.”
... Andromeda on a rock with her hair blowing over her face....
She was afraid to look at the monster coming out of the sea. If she had looked at it, it would not have dared to come near her. Because Perseus looked and rescued her, she would have to be grateful to him all her life and smile and be Mrs. Perseus. One day they would quarrel and he would never think her beautiful again....
Adam had not faced the devil. He was stupid first, and afterwards a coward and a cad ... “the divine curiosity of Eve....” Some person had said that.... Perhaps men would turn round one day and see, what they were like. Eve had not been unkind to the devil; only Adam and God. All the men in the world, and their God, ought to apologise to women....
To hold back and keep free ... and real. Impossible to be real unless you were quite free.... Two married in one family was enough. Eve would marry, too.
But money.
The chair-bed creaked as she knelt up and turned out the gas. “I love you” ... just a quiet manly voice ... perhaps one would forget everything, all the horrors and mysteries ...
because there would be somewhere then always to be, to rest, and feel sure. If only ... just to sit hand in hand ... watching snowflakes ... to sit in the lamplight, quite quiet.
Pictures came in the darkness ... lamplit rooms, gardens, a presence, understanding.
Voices were sounding in the next room. Something being argued. A voice level and reassuring; going up now and again into a hateful amused falsetto. Miriam refused to listen. She had never been so near before. Of course they talked in their room. They had talked all their lives; an endless conversation; he laying down the law ... no end to it ... the movement of his beard as he spoke, the red lips shining through the fair moustache ... splash baths and no soap; soap is not a cleansing agent ... he had a ruddy skin ... healthy.
A tearful, uncertain voice....
“Don’t mother ... don’t, don’t ... he can’t understand.... Come to me! Come in here.... Well, well!...” A loud clear tone moving near the door, “Leave it all to nature, my dear....”
They’re talking about Sally and Harriett.... He is amused ... like when he says “the marriage service begins with ‘dearly beloved’ and ends with ‘amazement.’ ...”
She turned about, straining away from the wall and burying her head in her pillow. Something seemed to shriek within her, throwing him off, destroying, flinging him away. Never again anything but contempt....
She lay weak and shivering in the uncomfortable little bed. Her heart was thudding in her throat and in her hands ... beloved ... beloved ... a voice, singing—
“So ear-ly in the mor-ning,
My beloved—my beloved.”
Silence, darkness and silence.
Waking in the darkness, she heard the fluttering of leafage in the garden and lay still and cool listening and smiling. That went on ... flutter, flutter, in the breeze. It was enough ... and things happened, as well, in the far far off things called “days.”
A fearful clamour—bright sunlight; something sticking sideways through the partly opened door—a tin trumpet. It disappeared with a flash as she leapt out of bed. The idea of Harriett being up first!
Harriett stood on the landing in petticoat and embroidered camisole, her hair neatly pinned, her face glowing and fresh.
“Gerrup,” she said at once.
“You up. You oughtn’t to be. I’m going to get your breakfast. You mustn’t dress yourself....”
“Rot! You hurry up, old silly, breakfast’s nearly ready.”
She ran upstairs tootling her trumpet. “Hurry up,” she said, from the top of the stairs, with a friendly grin.
Miriam shouted convivially and retired into her crowded sunlit bathroom, turning on both bath taps so that she might sing aloud. Harriett had made the day strong ... silver bright and clean and clear. Harriett was like a clear blade. She splashed into the cold water gasping and singing. Two o’clock—ages yet before the
weddings. There was a smell of bacon frying. They would all have breakfast together. She could smile at Harriett. They had grown up together and could admit it, because Harriett was going away. But not for ages. She flew through her toilet; the little garden was blazing. It was a fine hot day.
Bennett and Gerald had turned strained pale faces to meet the brides as they came up the aisle. Now, Bennett’s broad white forehead seemed to give out a radiance. It had been fearful to stand behind Harriett through the service listening to the bland hollow voice of the vicar and the four unfamiliar low voices responding, and taking the long glove smooth and warm from Harriett’s hand, her rustling heavy-scented bouquet. At the sight of Bennett’s grave radiant face the fear deepened and changed. Marriage was a reality ... fearful, searching reality; it changed people’s expressions. Hard behind came Gerald and Harriett; Gerald’s long face still pale, his loosely knit figure carried along by her tense little frame as she walked, a little firm straight figure of satin, her veil thrown back from her little snub
face, her face held firmly; steady and old with its solid babyish curves and its brave stricken eyes: old and stricken; that was how Sarah had looked too. No radiance on the faces of Sarah and Harriett.
The Wedding March was pealing out from the chancel, a great tide of sound blaring down through the church and echoing back from the west window, near the door where they would all go out, in a moment, out into the world. On they went; how swift it all was.... Sarah and Harriett, rescued from poverty and fear ... mother’s wedding on a May morning long ago ... in the little village church ... to walk out of church into the open country; in the morning; a bride. There were no brides in London.
Now to fall in behind Eve and Mr. Tremayne. Mr. Grove walked clumsily. His arm brushed against the shower bouquet.
The upturned faces of the pink carnations were fresh and sweet; for nothing. To-morrow they would be dead. Harriett’s bouquet, dead too ... a wonderful dead bouquet that meant life. “Where are you, my friend, my own friend?”
A wedding seemed to make everybody happy. The people moving in Harriett’s new rooms were happy. Old people were new and young. They laughed.... The sad dark man, following with his tray of glasses as she went from guest to guest with Harriett’s champagne cup had laughed again and again....
The voices of the grey-clad bridegrooms rang about the rooms full of quiet relieved laughter. The outlines of their well-cut grey clothes were softly pencilled with a radiance of marriage. Round about Sarah and Eve was a great radiance. Light streamed from their satin dresses. But they were untouched. Silent and untouched and far away. What should these strange men ever know of them; coming and going?
She found herself standing elbow to elbow with Harriett. Warm currents came to her from Harriett’s body; she moved her elbow against Harriett’s to draw her attention. Harriett turned a scorched cheek and a dilated unseeing eye. Their hands dropped and met. Miriam
felt the quivering of firm, strong fingers and the warm metal of rings. She grasped the matronly hand with the whole strength of her own. Harriett must remember ... all this wedding was nothing.... She was Harriett ... not the Mrs. Ducayne Bob Greville had just been talking to about Curtain Lectures and the Rascality of the Genus Homo ... she must remember all the years of being together, years of nights side by side ... night turning to day for both of them, at the same moment. She gave her hand a little shake. Harriett made a little skipping movement and grinned her own ironic grin. It was all right. They were quite alone and irreverent; they two; the festive crowd was playing a game for their amusement. They laughed without a sound as they had so often done in church. The air that encircled them was the air of their childhood.
Gerald’s voice sounded near. It made no break in their union though Harriett welcomed it, clearing her throat with a businesslike cough.
“Time you changed, Mrs. La Reine,” said Gerald, in a frightened friendly voice.
“Oh, lor, is it?” ... that kindliness was
only in Harriett’s voice when she had hurt someone.
... The edge of Gerald’s voice, kind to everyone, would always be broken when he spoke to Harriett. She would always be this young absurd Harriett to him, always. He would go on fastening her boots for her tenderly, and go happily about his hobbies. She would never hear him call her “my dear.” That old-fashioned mock-polite insolence of men ... paterfamilias.
The four of them were together in a room again, fastening and hooking and adjusting; standing about before mirrors. We’ve all grown up together ... we can admit it now ... we’re admitting it. Everything clear, back to the beginning; happy and good. The room was still with the hush of its fresh draperies, hemming them in. Beautiful immortal forms moved in the room, reaping ... voices, steady and secure, said nothing but the necessary things, borne down with wealth, all the wealth there was ... all the laughter and certainty. Immortality. Nothing could die. They saw and knew everything. Each tone was a confession and a
song of truth. They need never meet and speak again. They had known. The voices of Sarah and Harriett would go on ... marked with fresh things.... Her own and Eve’s would remain, separate, to grow broken and false and unrecognisable in the awful struggle for money. No matter. The low secure untroubled tone of a woman’s voice. There was nothing like it on earth.... If you had once heard it ... in your own voice, and the voice of another woman responding ... everything was there.
Was there anyone who fully realised how amazing it was ... a human tone. Perhaps everyone did, really, most people without knowing it. A few knew. Perhaps that was what kept life going.
In a few minutes they would go. They avoided each other’s eyes. Miriam began to be afraid Eve would say something cheerful, or sing a snatch of song, desecrating the singing that was there, the deep eternal singing in each casual tone.
Gerald’s whistle came up from the front garden.
Miriam opened the door. Bennett’s voice came from the hall, calling for Sarah.
“Your skirt sets simply perfectly, Sally.” ... Sarah was at the door in her neat soft dark blue travelling dress, and a soft blue straw hat with striped ribbon bands and bows, hurrying forward, her gold hair shining under her hat; seeing nothing but the open door downstairs and Bennett waiting.
The garden and pathway was thronged with bright-coloured guests. Miriam found herself standing with Gerald on the curb, waiting for Harriett to finish her farewells. He crushed her arm against his side. “Good Lord, Mirry, ain’t I glad it’s all over.”
Sarah was stepping into the shelter of the first of the two waiting carriages. Her face was clear with relief. Bennett followed, dressed like her in dark blue. On the step he spoke abruptly, something about a small portmanteau. Sarah’s voice sounded from inside. Miriam had never heard her speak with such cool unconcern. Perhaps she had never known Sarah. Sarah was herself now, for the first time free and unconcerned.
What freedom. Cool and unconcerned. The door shut with a bang. They had forgotten everyone. They were going to forget to wave. Everyone had watched them. But they did not think of that. They saw green Devonshire ahead and their little house waiting in the Upper Richmond Road with work for them both, work they could both do well, with all their might when they came back. Someone shouted. Rice was being showered. People were running down the road showering rice. The road and pathway were bright with happy marriage, all the world linked in happy marriages.
The second carriage swept round the bend of the road with a yellow silk slipper swinging in the rear. Miriam struggled for breath through tears. Gerald and Harriett had taken the old life away with them in their carriage. Harriett had taken it, and gone. But she knew. She would bring it back with her. They would come back. Harriett would never forget. Nothing could change or frighten her. She would come back the same, in her new dresses, laughing.
A fat voice ... Mrs. Bywater ... “proud
of your gails, Mrs. Henderson” ... fat flattering voice. The brightness had gone from the houses and the roadway ... unreal people were moving about with absurd things on their heads. Bridesmaids in cold white dresses, moving in pounces, as people spoke to them ... the Hendon girls.... What bad complexions Harriett’s school friends had. Why were they all dark? Why did Harriett like them? Who was Harriett? Why did she have dark, sallow friends? Oh ... this dark face, near and familiar ... saying something—eyes looking at nothing; haunted eyes looking at nothing, very dear and familiar ... relief ... the sky seems to lift again; kind harmless bitter features, coming near and speaking.
“I am obliged to go——” rasping voice, curious sawing breath....
“Oh yes....” Perhaps there will be a thunderstorm or something—something will happen.
“We shall meet again.”
“Yes—oh, yes.”
There was no reason to feel nervous, at any rate for a night or two. Burglars who wanted the presents would take some time to find out that there was only one young lady in the house and a little servant sleeping in a top room. It was all right. No need to put the dinner-bell on the dressing-table. Next week the middle-aged servant would have arrived. Would she mind being alone with the presents and the little maid? The only way to feel quite secure at night would be to marry ... how awful ... either you marry and are never alone or you risk being alone and afraid ... to marry for safety ... perhaps some women did. No wonder ... and not to turn into a silly scared nervous old maid ... how tiresome, one thing or the other ... no choice.
She laid her head on the pillow. Thank Heaven I’m here and not at home ... out of it.... “I’ll come round, first thing, to cut up the cake”—that would be jolly too. But here ... with all these new things, magical and easy, secure with Gerald and Harriett, chosen to embark on their new life with them.... “You
chuck your job, my dear, and stay with us for a bit.” They would like it. That was so jolly. Absurd free days with Harriett; tea in the garden, theatres; people coming, Mr. Tremayne and Mr. Grove....
But there was something, some thought sweeping round all these things, something else, sweeping round outside the weddings and the joy of being at home, making all these things extra, like things thrown in, jolly and perfect and surprising, but thrown in with something else that was her own, something hovering around and above, in and out the whole day keeping her apart. This morning the weddings had seemed the end of everything. They were over, Harriett’s and Sarah’s lives going forward and her own share in them, and home still there too, three things instead of one, easily hers. And yet they did not concern her. It would be a sham to pretend they did, with this other thing haunting—to go on from thing to thing, living with people and for them as if there were nothing else, as people seemed to do, one thing happening after another all the time. Sham.
Harriett and Sarah had rushed out into life. They had changed everything. Things did not
seem to matter now that they had achieved all that. Harriett would take the first shock of life for her. Curiosities could come to an end. It did not seem to matter. That was all at peace, through Harriett. Life had come into the family, leaving her free....
Was she free? That strange, dark priestliness. If he called to her, if he really called.... But he called in a dark dreadful way ... and yet mysteriously linked to something in her. She could not give the help he needed. She would fail. Over their lives would shine, far away, visible to both of them the radiance of heaven. They both wanted to be good; redemption from sin. They both believed these things. But he was weak, weak ... and she not strong enough to help. And there was that other thing beckoning far from this suburban life and quite as far from him, away, up in London, down at Newlands, a brightness....
She looked through the darkness at the harmony of soft tones and draperies at distant Newlands ... etchings; the strange effect of etchings ... there were no etchings in the suburbs ... curious, close, strong lines that rested you and had a meaning and expression even though you
did not understand the subject. There were so many things to take you away from people. In the suburbs people were everything, and there was nothing in them. They did not understand anything; but going on. They were helpless and without thoughts; amongst their furniture. They did not even have busts of Beethoven. At Newlands people might be dead, the women in bright hard deaths or deaths of cold, cruel deceitfulness, the men tiny insects of selfishness, but there were things that made up for everything full and satisfying.
And Salviati’s window....
She must hold on to these things. Life without them would be impossible.
It was—Style ... or something. Le style c’est l’homme. That meant something. It was the same with clothes.... Suburban people could be fashionable, never stylish. And manners.... They were fussily kind and nice to each other; as if life were pitiful ... life ... pitiful. They all pitied, and despised each other.
The night was vast with all the other things. No need to sleep. To lie happy and strong in
the sense of them was better than sleep. In a few hours the little suburban day would come ... everything gleaming with the light of the big things beyond. One could go through it in a drowse of strength, full of laughter ... laughter to the brim, all one’s limbs strong and heavy with laughter.
Bob Greville had gone jingling down the road in a hansom—grey holland blinds and a pink rosebud in the driver’s buttonhole. Why had he come? Going in and out of the weddings a pale grey white-spatted guest, talking to everyone ... a preoccupied piece of the West End. Large club windows looking out on sunlit Piccadilly; a glimpse of the haze of the Green Park. Weddings must be laughable to him with his “Mrs. Caudle’s Curtain Lectures” ideas. His wife was dead. She had been fearfully ill suddenly on their wedding tour ... at “Lawzanne.” That was the wrong way to pronounce Lausanne. And that wrong way of pronouncing was somehow part of his way of thinking about her. He seemed to remember nothing but her getting ill and spoke with a sort of laughing, contemptuous fear. Men.
But in some way he was connected with
that strange thing outside the everyday things.
How stupid of Eve to be vexed because she was told there was no need to scrawl the addresses of the little cake boxes right across the labels. Impossible now to ask her to come and play song accompaniments. Besides, she was tired. Eve was tired because she did not really know how glorious life was. In her life with the Greens in Wiltshire there was nothing besides the Greens but the beautiful landscape. And the landscape seen from the Greens’ windows must look commercial, in the end. Eve was evidently beginning to tire of it. And they had worked so hard all the morning cutting up the cake. Eve did not know that towards the end of the morning she had thought of singing after lunch ... feeling so strong and wanting to make a noise. Bohm’s songs. It was better really to sing to one’s own accompaniment; only there was no one to listen....
“Und wenn i dann mal wie-ie-d-er komm.”
a German girl, her face strahlend mit Freude—radiant with joy ... but strahlend was more
than radiant ... streaming—like sunlight—shafts of sunlight. German women were not self-conscious. They were full of joy and sorrow. Perhaps happier than any other women. Their mountains and woods and villages and towns were beautiful with joy. They did not care what men thought or said. They were happy in their beautiful country in their own way. Germany ... all washed with poetry and music and song. “Freue dich des Lebens.” Freue ... Freue dich ... the words were like the rush of wings ... the flutter of a fresh skirt round happy hurrying feet.
“What a melancholy ditty, chick.”
Miriam laughed and dropped into the accompaniment of Schubert’s “Ave Maria.” “Listen, mother ... there was a monk who sang this so beautifully in a church that he had to be stopped.” She played through the “Ave Maria” and looked round. Mrs. Henderson was sitting stiffly in a stiff straight chair with her hands twisted in her lap. “Oh bother,” thought Miriam, “she’s feeling hysterical ... and it’s my turn this time. What on earth shall I do?” The word had come up through the years. Sarah had seen
“attacks of hysteria....” Was she going to have one now ... laugh and cry and say dreadful things and then be utterly exhausted? Good Lord, how fearful. And what was the good? She “couldn’t help it.” That was why you had to be firm with hysterical people. But there was no need, now. Everything was better. Two of them married; the boys ready to look after everything. It was simply irritating ... and the sun just coming round into the green of the conservatory....
She sat impatient, feeling young and strong and solid with joy on the piano stool. Couldn’t mother see her, sitting there in a sort of blaze of happy strength? She swung impatiently round to the keyboard and glanced at the open album. There was silence in the room. Her heart beat anxiously ... some German printer had printed those notes ... in pain and illness perhaps—but pain and illness in Germany, not in this dreadful little room where despair was shut in.... “Comus,” “The Seven Ages of Man,” “The Arctic Regions,” beautiful bindings on the little old inlaid table, things belonging to those sunny beginnings and ending with that awful agonised figure sitting there silent. She
cleared her throat and stretched a hand out over the notes of a chord without striking it. Something was gaining on her. Something awful and horrible.
“Play something cheerful, chickie,” said her mother, in a dreadful deep trembling voice. Suddenly Miriam knew, in horror, that the voice wanted to scream, to bellow. Bellow ... that huge, tall woman striding about on the common at Worthing ... bellowing ... mad—madness. She summoned, desperately, something in herself, and played a thing she disliked, wondering why she chose it. Her hands played carefully, holding to the rhythm, carefully avoiding pressure and emphasis. Nothing could happen as long as she could keep on playing like that. It made the music seem like a third person in the room. It was a new way of playing. She would try it again when she was alone. It made the piece wonderful ... traceries of tone shaping themselves one after another, intertwining, and stopping against the air ... tendrils on a sunlit wall.... She had a clear conviction of manhood ... that strange hard feeling that was always twining between her and the things people wanted her to do and to be. Manhood
with something behind it that understood. This time it was welcome. It served. She asserted it, sadly feeling it mould the lines of her face.
The end of the piece was swift and tuneful and stormy, the only part she had cared for hitherto. For a moment she was tempted to dash into it ... her hands were so able and strong, so near to mastery of the piano after that curious careful playing. But it would be cruel. She passed on to the final chords—broad and even and simple. They suggested quiet music going on, playing itself in the room. Getting up beaming and shy and embarrassed she did not dare to look at the waiting figure, and looked busily into the dark interiors of the bowls and vases along the mantelpiece.... There was something in the waiting figure that did not want to scream. Something exactly like herself.... At the bottom of one of the deep bowls was a curling-pin. She giggled, catching her breath.
Mrs. Henderson glanced up at her and looked away, looking about the room. That’s naughty, thought Miriam. She’s not trying; she’s being naughty and tiresome. Perhaps she’s angry with
me, and thinks I mean she must just go on enduring.
“I can’t correct a misprint with a curling-pin.”
Mother believed in the misprint.... Talk on about misprints ... why was it necessary to be insincere if one wanted to make anything happen? But anything was better than saying, What is the matter? That would be just as insincere, and impudent too.
“These cheap things are always so badly printed.”
“Oh!” ... Mother’s polite tone, trying to be interested. That was all she’d had for years. All she’d ever had, from him. Miriam sat down conversationally, in a long chair. She felt a numb sleepiness coming over her, and stretched all her muscles lazily, to their full limit ... mother, just mother in the room, perfect ease and security ... and relaxed with a long yawn, feeling serenely awake. The little figure ceased to be horrible.
“My life has been so useless,” said Mrs. Henderson suddenly.
Here it was ... a jolt ... an awful physical shock, jarring her body.... She braced herself and spoke quickly and blindly ... a
network of feeling vibrated all over to and fro, painfully.
“It only seems so to you,” she said, in a voice muffled by the beating of her heart. Anything might happen—she had no power.... Mother—almost killed by things she could not control, having done her duty all her life ... doing thing after thing had not satisfied her ... being happy and brave had not satisfied her. There was something she had always wanted, for herself ... even mother....
Mrs. Henderson shuddered and sighed. Her pose relaxed a little.
“I might have done something for the poor.”
“Oh, yes? What things?” She had lived in a nightmare of ways and means, helpless....
“I might have made clothes, sometimes....”
“That worries you, so that you can hardly bear it.”
“Yes.”
“It needn’t. I don’t mean the poor need not be helped. But you needn’t have that feeling.”
“You understand it?”
“I feel it this moment, as you feel it.”
“Well?”
“You needn’t.”
Miriam held back her thoughts. Nothing mattered but to sit there holding back thought and feeling and argument, if only she could without getting angry.... There was something here, something decisive. This was what she had been born for, if only she could hold on. She felt very old. No more happiness ... the little house they sat in was a mockery, a fiendish contrivance to hide agony. There was nothing in these little houses in themselves, just indifference hiding miseries.
She sat forward conversationally. A rain of tears was coming down her companion’s cheeks. To hold on ... hold on ... not to think or feel glad or sorry ... it would be impudent to feel anything ... to hold on if the tears went on for an hour ... treating them as if they were part of a conversation.
“You understand me?”
“Of course.”
“You are the only one.”
The relieved voice ... steady, as she had known it correcting her in her babyhood.
“I should be better if I could be more with you ...” oh Lord ... impossible.
“You must be with me as much as you like.”
That was the thing. That was what must be done somehow.
“Mother! would you mind if I smoked a cigarette?”
It was suddenly possible, the unheard-of unconfessed ... suddenly easy and possible.
“My dearest child!” Mrs. Henderson’s flushed face crimsoned unresistingly. She was shocked and ashamed and half delighted. Miriam gazed boldly, admiring and adoring. She felt she had embarked on her first real flirtation and blessed the impulse that had that morning transferred cigarettes and matches from her handbag to her hanging pocket as a protection against suburban influence and a foretaste of her appointment with Bob. She lit a cigarette with downcast lids and a wicked smile, throwing a triumphant possessive glance at her mother as it drew. The cigarette was divine. It was divine to smoke like this, countenanced and beloved—scandalous and beloved.
Miriam ran all the way to the station. The gardens on either side of Gipsy Lane were full of flowering shrubs massed up against laburnum and
May trees in flower ... fresh clean colours, pink and lilac and yellow and everywhere new bright fresh green ... May. She flung herself into an empty carriage of the three o’clock Vauxhall and Waterloo train, her eyes filled with the maze of garden freshness and was carried off along the edge of the common, streaming blazing green in the full sunlight, dotted with gorse. Bob would not have to wait at Waterloo.... Further down the line, towards Kew, was the mile of orchards, close on either side of the line, thick with bloom.... Walls and houses began to appear. She took her eyes from the window and the gardens and the common and the imagined orchards passed before her eyes in the dusty enclosure. As she gazed they seemed to pass through her, the freshness of the blossoms backed by fresh greenery was a feeling, cool and fresh in her blood. The growing intensity of this feeling stirred her to movement and consciousness of the dust-filmed carriage, the smell of dust. Still again, the sight of the spring flowing from her eyes, into them, out through them, breathing with her breath, the feeling of spring in the soft beating from head to foot of her blood, was all there was anywhere out to
the limits of space. The dusty carriage was a speck in the great fresh tide, and the vision of Eve drifting in the carriage, in the corner, opposite, with pale frightened face, saying the things she had said just now, was no longer terrifying, though each thing she said came clearly, a separate digging blow.
... “Dr. Ryman is giving her bromide ... she can’t sleep without it.” Sleeplessness, insomnia ... she can’t see the spring ... why not; and forget about herself.
“It’s nerves. He says we must behave as if there was nothing wrong with her. There is nothing wrong but nerves.”
That fevered frame, the burning hands and burning eyes looking at everything in the wrong way, the brain seeking about, thinking first this and then that ... nerves; and fat Dr. Ryman giving bromide ... awful little bottles of bromide coming to the house wrapped up in white paper. And everyone satisfied. “She’s in Dr. Ryman’s hands. Dr. Ryman is treating her.” Mrs. Poole said Dr. Ryman was a very able man. What did she mean? How did she know? Suburban faces; satisfied. “In the doctor’s hands.” A large square house, a square garden,
high walls, a delicate wife always being ill, always going to that place in Germany—how did he know, going about in a brougham—and he had gout ... how did he know more than anyone else? ... bottles of bromide, visits, bills, and mother going patiently on, trusting and feeling unhelped. Going on. People went ... mad. If she could not sleep she would go ... mad.... And everyone behaving as if nothing were wrong.
And the vicar! Praying in the dining-room. Sarah had heard.... The vicar, kneeling on the Turkey carpet ... praying. Couldn’t God see her, on the carpet, praying and trying? And the vicar went away. And things were the same and that night she would not sleep, just the same. Of course not. Nothing was changed. It was all going on for her in some hot wrong, shut-up way. Bromide and prayers.
And she blamed herself. If only she would not blame herself. “He’s one in a thousand ... if only I could be as calm and cool as he is.” Why not be calm and cool? She had gone too far ... “the end of my tether” ... mother, a clever
phrase like that, where had she got it? It was true. Her suffering had taught her to find that awful phrase. She feared her room, “loathed” it. She, always gently scolding exaggeration, used and meant that violent word.
Money. That was why nothing had been done. “The doctor” had to be afforded as she was so ill, but nothing had been done. Borrow from the boys to take her away. “A bright place and a cool breeze.” She dreamed of things—far-away impossible things. Had she told the others she wanted them? They must be told. To-morrow she should know she was going away. Nothing else in life mattered. Someone must pay, anyone. Newlands must go. To-morrow and every day till they went away she should come round to Harriett’s new house. Something for her to do every day.
The little bonneted figure ... happy, shocked, smiling. To go about with her, telling her everything, dreadful things. The two of them going about and talking and not talking, and going about.
Miriam moved uneasily to the mantelpiece. An unlit fire was laid neatly in the grate. A ray of sunlight struck the black bars of the grate; false uneasy sunlight. Two strange round-bowled long-necked vases stood on the mantelpiece amongst the litter of Bob’s belongings. Dull blue and green enamellings moving on a dark almost black background ... strange fine little threads of gold.... She peered at them.
“My dear girl, do you like my vases?” Bob came and stood at her side.
“Yes—they’re funny and queer. I like them.”
“They’re clawzonny—Japanese clawzonny.” He took one of them up and tapped it with his nail. It gave out a curious dull metallic ring. Miriam passed her finger over the enamelled surface. It was softly smooth and with no chill about it; as if the enamel were alive. She marvelled at the workmanship, wondering how the gold wires were introduced. They gleamed, veining over the curves of the vase.
Her uneasiness had gone. While they were looking at the vases it did not seem to matter that she had consented, defying the whole world,
to come and see Bob’s bachelor chambers. She did not like them and wanted to be gone. The curious dingy dustiness oppressed her, and there was an emptiness. Fancy having breakfast in a room like this. Who looked after a man’s washing when he lived alone? There must be some dreadful sort of charwoman who came, and Bob had to speak kindly to her in his weary old voice and go on day after day being here. But the vases stood there alive and beautiful and he liked them. She turned to see his liking in his face. As she turned his arm came round her shoulders and the angle of his shoulder softly touched her head. Behind her head there was a point of perfect rest; comfort, perfect. Australia; a young man in shirt-sleeves, toiling and dreaming. Was that there still in his face?
“Are you happy, dear girl? Do you like being with old Bob in his den?”
He came nearer and spoke with a soft husky whisper.
“Let me go,” said Miriam wearily, longing to rest, longing for the stairs they had come up and the open street in the sunshine and freedom.
She moved away and gathered up her gloves and scarf.
Miriam sat with her mother near the bandstand. They faced the length of the esplanade with the row of houses that held their lodging to their right and the sea away to the left. She had found that it was better to sit facing a moving vista; forms passing by too near to be looked at and people moving in the distance too far away to suggest anything. The bandstand had filled. The town-clock struck eleven. Presently the band would begin to play. Any minute now. It had begun. The introduction to its dreamiest waltz was murmuring in a conversational undertone. The stare of the esplanade rippled and broke. The idling visitors became vivid blottings. The house-rows stood out in lines and angles. The short solemn symphony was over. Full and soft and ripe the euphonium began the beat of the waltz. It beat gently within the wooden kiosk. The fluted melody went out across the sea. The sparkling
ripples rocked gently against the melody. A rousing theme would have been more welcome to the suffering at her side. She waited for the loud gay jerky tripping of the second movement. When it crashed brassily out the scene grew vivid. The air seemed to move; freshness of air and sea coming from the busy noise of the kiosk. The restless fingers ceased straying and plucking. The suffering had shifted. The night was over. When the waltz was over they would be able to talk a little. There would be something ... a goat-chaise; a pug with a solemn injured face. Until the waltz came to an end she turned towards the sea, wandering out over the gleaming ripples, hearing their soft sound, snuffing freshness, seeing the water just below her eyes, transparent green and blue and mauve, salt-filmed.
The big old woman’s voice grated on about Poole’s Miriorama. She had been a seven-mile walk before lunch and meant to go to Poole’s Miriorama. She knew everything there was in it and went to it every summer and for long walks and washed lace in her room and borrowed an iron from Miss Meldrum. No one listened and
her deep voice drowned all the sounds at the table. She only stopped at the beginning of a mouthful or to clear her throat with a long harsh grating sound. She did not know that there was nothing wonderful about Poole’s Miriorama or about walking every morning to the end of the parade and back. She did not know that there were wonderful things. She was like her father ... she was mad. Miss Meldrum listened and answered without attending. The other people sat politely round the table and passed things with a great deal of stiff politeness. One or two of them talked suddenly, with raised voices. The others exclaimed. They were all in agreement ... “a young woman with a baritone voice” ... a frog, white, keeping alive in coal for hundreds of years ... my cousin has crossed the Atlantic six times.... Nothing of any kind would ever stop them. They would never wait to know they were alive. They were mad. They would die mad. Of diseases with names. Even Miss Meldrum did not quite know. When she talked she was as mad as they were. When she was alone in her room and not thinking about ways and means she read books of devotion and cried. If she had had a home and a family she would have
urged her sons and daughters to get on and beat other people.... But she knew mother was different. All of them knew it in some way. They spoke to her now and again with deference, their faces flickering with beauty. They knew she was beautiful. Sunny and sweet and good, sitting there in her faded dress, her face shining with exhaustion.
They walked down the length of the pier through the stiff breeze arm in arm. The pavilion was gaslit, ready for the entertainment.
“Would you rather stay outside this afternoon?”
“No. Perhaps the entertainment may cheer me.”
There was a pink paper with their tickets—“The South Coast Entertainment Company” ... that was better than the usual concert. The inside of the pavilion was like the lunch, table ... the same people. But there was a yellow curtain across the platform. Mother could look at that. It was quite near them. It would take off the effect of the audience of people she envied. The cool sound of the waves flumping and washing against the pier came in
through the open doors with a hollow echo. They were settled and safe for the afternoon. For two hours there would be nothing but the things behind the curtain. Then there would be tea. Mother had felt the yellow curtain. She was holding the pink programme at a distance trying to read it. Miriam glanced. The sight of the cheap black printing on the thin pink paper threatened the spell of the yellow curtain. She must manage to avoid reading it. She crossed her knees and stared at the curtain, yawning and scolding with an affected manliness about the forgotten spectacles. They squabbled and laughed. The flump-wash of the waves had a cheerful sunlit sound. Mrs. Henderson made a brisk little movement of settling herself to attend. The doors were being closed. The sound of the waves was muffled. They were beating and washing outside in the sunlight. The gaslit interior was a pier pavilion. It was like the inside of a bathing-machine, gloomy, cool, sodden with sea-damp, a happy caravan. Outside was the blaze of the open day, pale and blinding. When they went out into it it would be a bright unlimited jewel, getting brighter and brighter, all its colours fresher and deeper until it turned to clear deep
live opal and softened down and down to darkness dotted with little pinlike jewellings of light along the esplanade; the dark luminous waves washing against the black beach until dawn.... The curtain was drawing away from a spring scene ... the fresh green of trees feathered up into a blue sky. There were boughs of apple-blossom. Bright green grass sprouted along the edge of a pathway. A woman floundered in from the side in a pink silk evening dress. She stood in the centre of the scene preparing to sing, rearing her gold-wigged head and smiling at the audience. Perhaps the players were not ready. It was a solo. She would get through it and then the play would begin. She smiled promisingly. She had bright large teeth and the kind of mouth that would say chahld for child. The orchestra played a few bars. She took a deep breath. “Bring back—the yahs—that are—dead!”—she screamed violently.
She was followed by two men in shabby tennis flannels with little hard glazed tarpaulin hats who asked each other riddles. Their jerky broken voices fell into cold space and echoed about the shabby pavilion. The scattered audience sat silent and still, listening for the voices ... cabmen wrangling in a gutter. The green scene stared
stiffly—harsh cardboard, thin harsh paint. The imagined scene moving and flowing in front of it was going on somewhere out in the world. The muffled waves sounded near and clear. The sunlight was dancing on them. When the men had scrambled away and the applause had died down, the sound of the waves brought dancing gliding figures across the stage, waving balancing arms and unconscious feet gliding and dreaming. A man was standing in the middle of the platform with a roll of music—bald-headed and grave and important. The orchestra played the overture to “The Harbour Bar.” But whilst he unrolled his music and cleared his throat his angry voice filled the pavilion: “it’s all your own fault ... you get talking and gossiping and filling yer head with a lot of nonsense ... now you needn’t begin it all over again twisting and turning everything I say.” And no sound in the room but the sound of eating. His singing was pompous anger, appetite. Shame shone from his rim of hair. He was ashamed, but did not know that he showed it.
They could always walk home along the smooth grey warm esplanade to tea in an easy silence.
The light blossoming from the horizon behind them was enough. Everything ahead dreamed in it, at peace. Visitors were streaming homewards along the parade lit like flowers. Along the edge of the tide the town children were paddling and shouting. After tea they would come out into the sheltering twilight at peace, and stroll up and down until it was time to go to the flying performance of The Pawnbroker’s Daughter.
They were late for tea and had it by themselves at a table in the window of the little smoking-room looking out on the garden. Miss Meldrum called cheerily down through the house to tell them when they came in. They went into the little unknown room and the cook brought up a small silver tea-pot and a bright cosy. Outside was the stretch of lawn where the group had been taken in the morning a year ago. It had been a seaside town lawn, shabby and brown, with the town behind it; unnoticed because the fresh open sea and sky were waiting on the other side of the house ... seaside town gardens were not gardens ... the small squares of greenery were helpless against the bright sea
... and even against shabby rooms, when the sun came into the rooms off the sea ... sea-rooms.... The little smoking-room was screened by the shade of a tree against whose solid trunk half of the French window was thrown back.
When the cook shut the door of the little room the house disappeared. The front rooms bathed in bright light and hot with the afternoon heat, the wide afterglow along the front, the vast open lid of the sky, were in another world.... Miriam pushed back the other half of the window and they sat down in a green twilight on the edge of the garden. If others had been there Mrs. Henderson would have remarked on the pleasantness of the situation and tried to respond to it and been dreadfully downcast at her failure and brave. Miriam held her breath as they settled themselves. No remark came. The secret was safe. When she lifted the cosy the little tea-pot shone silver-white in the strange light. A thick grey screen of sky must be there, above the trees, for the garden was an intensity of deep brilliance, deep bright green and calceolarias and geraniums and lobelias, shining in a brilliant gloom. It was not a seaside garden ... it was a garden ... all gardens. They took
their meal quietly and slowly, speaking in low tones. The silent motionless brilliance was a guest at their feast. The meal-time, so terrible in the hopelessness of home, such an effort in the mocking glare of the boarding-house was a great adventure. Mrs. Henderson ate almost half as much as Miriam, serenely. Miriam felt that a new world might be opening.
“The storm has cleared the air wonderfully.”
“Yes; isn’t it a blessing.”
“Perhaps I shan’t want the beef-tea to-night.” Miriam hung up her dress in the cupboard, listening to the serene tone. The dreadful candle was flickering in the night-filled room, but mother was quietly making a supreme effort.
“I don’t expect you will”; she said casually from the cupboard, “it’s ready if you should want it. But you won’t want it.”
“It is jolly and fresh,” she said a moment later from the window, holding back the blind. Perhaps in a few days it would be the real jolly seaside and she would be young again, staying there alone with mother, just ridiculous and
absurd and frantically happy, mother getting better and better, turning into the fat happy little thing she ought to be, and they would get to know people and mother would have to look after her and love her high spirits and admire and scold her and be shocked as she used to be. They might even bathe. It would be heavenly to be really at the seaside with just mother. They would be idiotic.
Mrs. Henderson lay very still as Miriam painted the acid above the unseen nerve centres and composed herself afterwards quietly without speaking. The air was fresh in the room. The fumes of the acid did not seem so dreadful to-night.
The Pawnbroker’s daughter was with them in the room, cheering them. The gay young man had found out somehow through her that “goodness and truth” were the heart of his life. She had not told him. It was he who had found it out. He had found the words and she did not want him to say them. But it was a new life for them both, a new life for him and happiness for her even if he did not come back, if she could forget the words.
Putting out the candle at her bedside suddenly
and quietly with the match-box to avoid the dreadful puff that would tell her mother of night, Miriam lay down. The extinguished light splintered in the darkness before her eyes. The room seemed suddenly hot. Her limbs ached, her nerves blazed with fatigue. She had never felt this kind of tiredness before. She lay still in the darkness with open eyes. Mrs. Henderson was breathing quietly as if in a heavy sleep. She was not asleep but she was trying to sleep. Miriam lay watching the pawnbroker’s daughter in the little room at the back of the shop, in the shop, back again in the little room, coming and going. There was a shining on her face and on her hair. Miriam watched until she fell asleep.
She dreamed she was in the small music-room in the old Putney school, hovering invisible. Lilla was practising alone at the piano. Sounds of the girls playing rounders came up from the garden. Lilla was sitting in her brown merino dress, her black curls shut down like a little cowl over her head and neck. Her bent profile was stern and manly, her eyes and her bare white forehead manly and unconscious. Her lissome brown
hands played steadily and vigorously. Miriam listened incredulous at the certainty with which she played out her sadness and her belief. It shocked her that Lilla should know so deeply and express her lonely knowledge so ardently. Her gold-flecked brown eyes that commonly laughed at everything, except the problem of free-will, and refused questions, had as much sorrow and certainty as she had herself. She and Lilla were one person, the same person. Deep down in everyone was sorrow and certainty. A faint resentment filled her. She turned away to go down into the garden. The scene slid into the large music-room. It was full of seated forms. Lilla was at the piano, her foot on the low pedal, her hands raised for a crashing chord. They came down, collapsing faintly on a blur of wrong notes. Miriam rejoiced in her heart. What a fiend I am ... what a fiend, she murmured, her heart hammering condemnation. Someone was sighing harshly; to be heard; in the darkness; not far off; fully conscious she glanced at the blind. It was dark. The moon was not round. It was about midnight. Her face and eyes felt thick with sleep. The air was rich with sleep. Her body was heavy with a richness of
sleep and fatigue. In a moment she could be gone again.... “Shall I get the beef-tea, mother?” ... she heard herself say in a thin wideawake voice. “Oh no my dear,” sounded another voice patiently. Rearing her numb consciousness against a delicious tide of oncoming sleep she threw off the bed-clothes and stumbled to the floor. “You can’t go on like this night after night, my dear.” “Yes I can,” said Miriam in a tremulous faint tone. The sleepless even voice reverberated again in the unbroken sleeplessness of the room. “It’s no use ... I am cumbering the ground.” The words struck sending a heat of anger and resentment through Miriam’s shivering form. She spoke sharply, groping for the matches.
Hurrying across the cold stone floor of the kitchen she lit the gas from her candle. Beetles ran away into corners, crackling sickeningly under the fender. A mouse darted along the dresser. She braced herself to the sight of the familiar saucepan, Miss Meldrum’s good beef-tea brown against the white enamel—helpless ... waiting for the beef-tea to get hot
she ate a biscuit. There was help somewhere. All those people sleeping quietly upstairs. If she asked them to they would be surprised and kind. They would suggest rousing her and getting her to make efforts. They would speak in rallying voices, like Dr. Ryman and Mrs. Skrine. For a day or two it would be better and then much worse and she would have to go away. Where? It would be the same everywhere. There was no one in the world who could help. There was something ... if she could leave off worrying. But that had been Pater’s advice all his life and it had not helped. It was something more than leaving off ... it was something real. It was not affection and sympathy. Eve gave them; so easily, but they were not big enough. They did not come near enough. There was something, crafty and worldly about them. They made a sort of prison. There was something true and real somewhere. Mother knew it. She had learned how useless even the good kind people were and was alone, battling to get at something. If only she could get at it and rest in it. It was there, everywhere. It was here in the kitchen, in the steam rising from the hot beef-tea. A moon-ray came through the barred window as she turned
down the gas. It was clear in the eye of the moon-ray; a real thing.
Some instinct led away from the New Testament. It seemed impossible to-night. Without consulting her listener Miriam read a psalm. Mrs. Henderson put down her cup and asked her to read it again. She read and fluttered pages quietly to tell the listener that in a moment there would be some more. Mrs. Henderson waited saying nothing. She always sighed regretfully over the gospels and Saint Paul, though she asked for them and seemed to think she ought to read them. They were so dreadful; the gospels full of social incidents and reproachfulness. They seemed to reproach everyone and to hint at a secret that no one possessed ... the epistles did nothing but nag and threaten and probe. St. Paul rhapsodised sometimes ... but in a superior way ... patronising; as if no one but himself knew anything....
“How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of those who bring” she read evenly and slowly. Mrs. Henderson sighed quietly.... “That’s Isaiah mother.... Isaiah is a beautiful name.” ... She read on. Something had shifted. There was something in the room....
If she could go droning on and on in an even tone it would be there more and more. She read on till the words flowed together and her droning voice was thick with sleep. The town clock struck two. A quiet voice from the other bed brought the reading to an end. Sleep was in the room now. She felt sure of it. She lay down leaving the candle alight and holding her eyes open. As long as the candle was alight the substance of her reading remained. When it was out there would be the challenge of silence again in the darkness ... perhaps not; perhaps it would still be there when the little hot point of light had gone. There was a soft sound somewhere ... the sea. The tide was up, washing softly. That would do. The sound of it would be clearer when the light was out ... drowsy, lazy, just moving, washing the edge of the beach ... cool, fresh. Leaning over she dabbed the candle noiselessly and sank back asleep before her head reached the pillow.
In the room yellow with daylight a voice was muttering rapidly, rapid words and chuckling laughter and stillness. Miriam grasped the
bedclothes and lay rigid. Something in her fled out and away, refusing. But from end to end of the world there was no help against this. It was a truth; triumphing over everything. “I know,” said a high clear voice. “I know ... I don’t deceive myself” ... rapid low muttering and laughter.... It was a conversation. Somewhere within it was the answer. Nowhere else in the world. Forcing herself to be still she accepted the sounds, pitting herself against the sense of destruction. The sound of violent lurching brought her panic. There was something there that would strike. Hardly knowing what she did she pretended to wake with a long loud yawn. Her body shivered, bathed in perspiration. “What a lovely morning” she said dreamily, “what a perfect morning.” Not daring to sit up she reached for her watch. Five o’clock. Three more hours before the day began. The other bed was still. “It’s going to be a magnificent day” she murmured pretending to stretch and yawn again. A sigh reached her. The stillness went on and she lay for an hour tense and listening. Something must be done to-day. Someone else must know.... At the end of an hour a descending darkness took her
suddenly. She woke from it to the sound of violent language, furniture being roughly moved, a swift angry splashing of water ... something breaking out, breaking through the confinements of this little furniture-filled room ... the best gentlest thing she knew in the world openly despairing at last.
The old hom?opathist at the other end of the town talked quietly on ... the afternoon light shone on his long white hair ... the principle of health, God-given health, governing life. To be well one must trust in it absolutely. One must practise trusting in God every day.... The patient grew calm, quietly listening and accepting everything he said, agreeing again and again. Miriam sat wondering impatiently why they could not stay. Here in this quiet place with this quiet old man, the only place in the world where anyone had seemed partly to understand, mother might get better. He could help. He knew what the world was like and that nobody understood. He must know that he ought to keep her. But he did not seem to want to do anything but advise them and send them away. She hated him, his serene white-haired pink-faced old age. He
told them he was seventy-nine and had never taken a dose in his life. Leaving his patient to sip a glass of water into which he had measured drops of tincture he took Miriam to look at the greenhouse behind his consulting room. As soon as they were alone he told her speaking quickly and without benevolence and in the voice of a younger man that she must summon help, a trained attendant. There ought to be someone for night and day. He seemed to know exactly the way in which she had been taxed and spoke of her youth. It is very wrong for you to be alone with her he added gravely.
Vaguely, burning with shame at the confession she explained that it could not be afforded. He listened attentively and repeated that it was absolutely necessary. She felt angrily for words to explain the uselessness of attendants. She was sure he must know this and wanted to demand that he should help, then and there at once, with his quiet house and his knowledge. Her eye covered him. He was only a pious old man with artificial teeth making him speak with a sort of sibilant woolliness. Perhaps he too knew that in the end even this would fail. He made her promise to write for help and refused
a fee. She hesitated helplessly, feeling the burden settle. He indicated that he had said his say and they went back.
On the way home they talked of the old man. “He is right; but it is too late” said Mrs. Henderson with clear quiet bitterness, “God has deserted me.” They walked on, tiny figures in a world of huge grey-stone houses. “He will not let me sleep. He does not want me to sleep.... He does not care.”
A thought touched Miriam, touched and flashed. She grasped at it to hold and speak it, but it passed off into the world of grey houses. Her cheeks felt hollow, her feet heavy. She summoned her strength, but her body seemed outside her, empty, pacing forward in a world full of perfect unanswering silence.
The bony old woman held Miriam clasped closely in her arms. “You must never, as long as you live, blame yourself my gurl.” She went away. Miriam had not heard her come in. The pressure of her arms and her huge body came from far away. Miriam clasped her hands together. She could not feel them. Perhaps
she had dreamed that the old woman had come in and said that. Everything was dream; the world. I shall not have any life. I can never have any life; all my days. There were cold tears running into her mouth. They had no salt. Cold water. They stopped. Moving her body with slow difficulty against the unsupporting air she looked slowly about. It was so difficult to move. Everything was airy and transparent. Her heavy hot light impalpable body was the only solid thing in the world, weighing tons; and like a lifeless feather. There was a tray of plates of fish and fruit on the table. She looked at it, heaving with sickness and looking at it. I am hungry. Sitting down near it she tried to pull the tray. It would not move. I must eat the food. Go on eating food, till the end of my life. Plates of food like these plates of food.... I am in eternity ... where their worm dieth not and their fire is not quenched.
The End