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Title: The Trap
       Pilgrimage, Volume 8

Author: Dorothy M. Richardson

Release Date: February 17, 2021 [eBook #64585]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

Produced by: Mary Glenn Krause, Jens Sadowski, and the online Distributed
             Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net.

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TRAP ***

                                THE TRAP

                         VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES

                        POINTED ROOFS
                        BACKWATER
                        HONEYCOMB
                        THE TUNNEL
                        INTERIM
                        DEADLOCK
                        REVOLVING LIGHTS
                        THE TRAP
                        OBERLAND (to follow shortly)




                                THE TRAP


                                   BY
                         DOROTHY M. RICHARDSON
                               AUTHOR OF
                 “THE TUNNEL,” “REVOLVING LIGHTS,” ETC.


                               DUCKWORTH
                       3 HENRIETTA STREET, LONDON


                        First published . . 1925
                         (All rights reserved)


                      Printed in Great Britain at
       The Mayflower Press, Plymouth. William Brendon & Son, Ltd.


                                   TO
                                BRYHER.




                                THE TRAP




                               CHAPTER I


                                   1

A short by-street paved from side to side. Narrow house-fronts and the
endmost houses, hiding the passage that curved round into the further
street, high enough to keep out of sight the neighbouring cubes of model
dwellings and to leave, as principal feature in the upper air, the spire
of St. Pancras Church. An old little street. A scrap of old London
standing apart, between the Bloomsbury squares and the maze of streets
towards the City. The light gleaming from its rain-washed flagstones
gave it a provincial air and a freshness unknown to the main streets,
between whose buildings lay modern roadways dulled by mud or harsh with
grimy dust.

Whenever during all her London years Miriam had passed the spot where it
opened into the thoroughfare, the little by-way had drawn her eyes;
always stating its sequestered charm. Entering it now for the first time
she had a sense of arriving nowhere.

She found her number to the right, just beyond the opening, on a
blistered door, whose knocker, a blurred, weather-worn iron face, gazed
sadly downwards. Next the door, within a small window screened from the
interior by a frayed serge curtain, were ranged small blocks of stone
and marble, polished columns, scraps of moulding; and in the centre upon
an oblong mount an alabaster finger. A lady’s forefinger, fastidiously
posed—the nail, smooth joints and softly curving flesh most delicately
carved. Its white cleanliness seemed to rebuke the dust that lay thick
upon the other objects and made their welcome quiet and impersonal. It
was personal, emotional. Arrogant, calling the eye from the surrounding
dusty peace.

Dust lay even upon the large grey cat compactly curled amongst the sharp
angles and looking forth with a green eye, glass-clear and startlingly
bright in contrast to the dried socket from which its fellow should have
shone.

She raised the heavy knocker and tapped. The sounds echoed down the
empty court and left a stillness into which flowed her own tremulous
stillness. Down the street a black cat came towards her, serene and
unnoticing, keeping aloof along the centre of the way.

Yet she was an inhabitant of Flaxman’s Court. Up there, on the upper
floors of the house that remained so quiet before her claim were rooms
as quiet, her own. Soon she would daily be slipping out into this small
brightness, daily coming back to it, turning from strident thoroughfares
to enter its sudden peace.

She knocked again, more loudly. If Miss Holland were not there, she was
shut out. But certainly the door would open. She knew, so careless was
her spirit, that she was not shut out. In a moment there came the sound
of boots upon uncarpeted stairs. The door opened; but not upon Miss
Holland. There before her was the dark passage that skirted the little
shop and led to the staircase, the way up to the quiet, eager, empty
rooms, obstructed.

Since he stood aside, welcoming, and greeted her by name, the man could
be none other than the landlord. An unconsidered item, appearing at the
outset. Not only postponing joy, but enhancing it; for if this meeting
were its price, how good must be what lay ahead.

She hoped that during the swift moment of confronting once more this
long-forgotten way of being, that she had shown no sign of antipathy.
She could not be sure, for in that moment she had been back again in
bitter conflict. The shape was a duplicate. The same tall, grey-clad
form, neither thin nor solid, the same pale eyes, arrogant and
embarrassed, the florid skin, the drooping fair moustache half-hiding
the fleshy red lips through which had come the voice familiar and
shunned from beyond memory.

She went forward followed by the voice into an air dense with shut-in
odours dried brown by stale pipe-smoke. It was as if the door just
closed behind her were never set open, and any egress there might be at
the back, closely sealed. And here, at the centre of a fog of smells of
which the air of the passage was but the fringe, someone was living.

The voice behind her on the stairs rang clear through the murk; a
refined voice, musical; they always had good voices.

“I’ve had three buckets of boiling water over the floors, and I’m going
to have three more.”

Yet another price to pay. This time not intermittent but permanent. How
long did scrubbing last?

Though the air cleared as they mounted the stairs, it had now a new
smell, meeting and mingling with the thinned odours coming up from
below, the smell of long-lying London dust. A staircase window, fast
shut, showed a grimy sky. On the first floor were two rooms standing
open, their doorways close together at right angles. The window of the
large front room gave a blurred view of the house-fronts over the way.
The back room was a small square, with a square window. The sky here was
fly-blown, but less dim than from the staircase window, and there were
trees, black-stemmed, bearing many-shaped masses of drying leaves. A
short flight led up to the second floor. Here were the rooms, two; open
doors at right angles as on the floor below. Windows wide, smells
banished; clear clean height of air. It was the height of the rooms that
made these narrow four-story houses look tall.

“Oh, they’re _nice_ rooms,” she said.

“They’re nice old houses, they’ve been _good_ houses,” he panted
plaintively. “I live next door, with my mother. Come _upstairs_, Miss
Henderson. I’m at work up _there_.”

He went on up the narrow flight leading to the attic. When his long form
had disappeared, Miriam turned into the large room; a large oblong, its
end wall, opposite the broad high window, broken by a door communicating
with the back room. Going through it, she found the smaller room dark.
There was a pale wash on the walls of the other room, but here a dark
old paper absorbed the light without reflection. And the ceiling, of
course, would be dark with grime. The ceiling seemed to have looked down
at her long ago. Long she had stood, with life gathered richly about
her, in the empty window-lit space where she now asked whether really
she had seen up there while she welcomed this superfluous second room,
the thing that lay reflected in her mind, growing dim, changing to a
feeling, a part of the warm sense of life all about her.

“Won’t you come up, Miss Henderson? I’m at work up _here_.”

She had forgotten the man and the third room. At this moment, in order
not to go up, she would have sacrificed the possession of the third
room. On her way out she glanced at the ceiling. It _was_ painted.
Floating draped figures, garlanded, in dull crimsons, faded rose and
blue and gold, dim with grime, set within a moulding shaped to fill the
angles of the square and filmed to a yellowish brown.

“This is a nice room.”

The man, a good deal altered by a large white apron, was standing behind
his buckets.

“My name’s Sheffield. I _told_ Miss Holland. Perhaps she didn’t tell
you?”

The room stated itself, competing with the voice. It was high and airy,
its ceiling sloping on all four sides; in the front to a deep lattice,
having a wide shelf underneath.

“She’s a very nice lady. Nice _quiet_ lady. There’s not so many about
nowadays.”

It was all coming back; the attitude towards life that had so tormented
her when she listened unaided by thought. She knew now that it was
blasphemy. It is blasphemy, she could say, if this man were equally
armed, blasphemy to imagine that each next generation is plunging into
an abyss.

“People don’t keep themselves to themselves like they did. There’s too
much running about. Don’t you think so, Miss Henderson?”

She was looking out upon the rain-washed parapet a yard away from the
window. ‘Nice to have a parrypidge in case of fire; plenty of roofs and
chimley-pots to walk on.’

“Yes,” she said hastily. “People run about because they wonder who they
are.”

“That’s it. Don’t know where they are. That’s the position of the L.C.C.
Money to spend and must find something to spend it on. Public money.
Pitched away. Not a hayputh o’ good out of it.”

The sudden presence in the room of the L.C.C. made him harmless.

“Officials are strange people. Being officials makes people strange.”
She stood seeking something that had passed wordlessly through her mind
while she snatched this borrowed thought. Something she ought to say,
hidden because she was being insincere. It remained hidden, and she
passed towards the door, his inferior, having nothing to offer half so
good as his own mistaken convictions.

“You going _down_, Miss Henderson?”

She was at the top of the winding stair before she spoke the
leave-taking that left the room empty, as it would be this afternoon.

Very gently she went down her stairs. In this clear upper light, angles
and surfaces declared themselves intimately. The thing she loved was
there. Light falling upon the shapes of things, reflected back, moving
through the day, a steadfast friend, silent and understanding. She had
loved it wherever she was, even in the midst of miseries; and always it
had belonged to others. This time it was her own. The breath she held
facing it was a cool stream, bringing strength; joy. Nothing could be
better than this. None of the events, none of the passions of life,
better than this sense of light quietly falling.


                                   2

Coming back in the afternoon, she found Miss Holland installed, her half
of the larger room fully furnished.

From a low camp-bed with a limply frilled Madras muslin cover, her eyes
passed to a wicker washstand-table, decked with a strip of the same
muslin and set with chilly, pimpled white crockery. At its side was a
dulled old Windsor chair, and underneath it a battered zinc footbath
propped against the wall. Above a small shabby chest of drawers a tiny
square of mirror hung by a nail to the strip of wall next the window. No
colour anywhere but in the limp muslin, washed almost colourless.

But over the whole of the floor, gleaming, without blemish, was the new
linoleum. And soon the dividing curtain would hang between her and Miss
Holland’s cheerless things. A length of cord hung ready, suspended in a
deep loop from the top of the window frame to a hook in the wall above
the connecting door, and on the floor beneath the window lay a pile of
material.

She cried out at the sight of it, bringing Miss Holland in from the next
room.

“Yes,” she said disdainfully, “that is the curtain.”

Though in the course of two meetings Miriam had grown used to Miss
Holland’s way of speaking, it was still fruitful of wonder. She wondered
now, hearing it unchanged by the informality of the occasion, how it had
first come into being. At Wimpole Street it was a familiar tone, common
to upper middle-class dowdies of the better sort. Perhaps Henry James
used it? In men, it was apt to be fluty; a contraction of the range of
the voice to two or three fluty notes. In women it was almost only one
note, a little curved, breaking at some point of its passage into
distress; solicitous.

She had already discovered the exact amount of constriction of the
throat necessary to its production, and felt it draw the muscles of her
nose and mouth into an expression of faintly humorous contempt. Heard
now, as it were in its dressing-gown, it gave a clue to the mode of
being that would automatically produce it; a disdain of life’s external
processes, of everything but high ends, any kind of high end, from the
honour of England to the dignity of the speaker, that everything in life
must be moulded to serve.

Once accepted, it would ban any kind of passionate feeling, even
passionate chirpiness. Even mirth would not be allowed to reach beyond a
faint amusement. On the whole, so far, she had decided against it,
decided that it might even be possible to become a sort of châtelaine
without the constricted voice.

But on this occasion the voice showed itself in a new light. Subtly
attractive. For behind Miss Holland’s tone was a smile that beamed the
more warmly for the frost through which it came. It reached and touched
like sunlight. Garden sunlight that had been missing through all the
wandering years.

Did all these people emanate from high walled gardens, scorning
everything that was outside?

In any case, here she was, indefinitely committed to live at close
quarters with a scorn she was not sure of being able to share. Must at
least beware at the times, this was one of them, when the châtelaine way
of taking life went to her head, of treachery to things that stood
outside it. Meanwhile the experience would be charming. And to be a
little moulded by it would not be atavism. For Miss Holland was more
than the châtelaine. She had broken loose, set herself in adventurous
circumstances; a châtelaine facing both ways.

“I saw you did not like the idea of sacking, though I think it might
have been made quite pretty, painted artistically, as I am sure you
could have done it, with a Grecian key pattern or something of the kind,
along the border.”

She had spoken standing near the heaped material conciliatingly, and now
bent and caught gingerly at an end, as if uncertain of its mood.

“Still, I thought I would get this. It is the new stuff they are calling
‘Casement cloth’ in quality rather like a fine ‘crash.’ Very durable,
and not ruinous in price.”

“Perfect. Tones with the floor and my crocks. But you must let me pay.
It’s my extravagance.”

“Not at all. I quite like it. I shall certainly contribute my share.
Your things are here. They are charming. I perceive that you have
excellent taste.”

“Joy, where are they?”

“I had them set down in here. I thought you would prefer to arrange them
yourself.”

She threw open the connecting door and stood back, a gracious hostess
introducing guests. How tall she was indoors, and big. Heavy in build,
yet limber and light-footed; graceful. The grey in the sleek dark mass
of hair scarcely showed. Her large eyes, set well apart on either side
of her good nose, when there was no street light to show the tired
muscles round about them, were really beautiful. Liquid radiant blue,
with a darker ring.

“I suddenly,” Miriam said, going into the crowded little room,
“remembered crockery and went back to Maple’s. But there’s a tragedy. I
forgot an indispensable.”

She was startled by laughter, an abrupt fairy tinkle, affectionate and
gay.

“Never mind,” said the voice, unchanged. “I will obtain one for you.”

“How?”

“Oh, quite easily, I assure you.”

“And, oh Lord, a pail! I forgot a pail.”

“There is no need to invoke the Deity. I have several pails.”

Miriam turned and saw happiness shine from her. Her presence was balm as
she stood so lightly there—a momentary stillness poised for help, ready
to welcome any confession, shoulder any burden that might be offered—and
then turned on a dancing step towards the big room, thoroughly pleased,
deep, quite deep, in delight at the prospect of settling down here in
intimacy.

And here they were. And it _was_ wonderful. Full of a deep refreshment.
The experiment was turning to success. But not yet quite fully. Not
until the curtain was up and the strips of privacy were secure.

She was not sure that Miss Holland desired a complete privacy. The
curtain, for her, was an affair of modesty, a physical not a spiritual
covering. Spiritually she had nothing to hide.

She had no back premises. No reservations. And here, at last, no doubt,
was the secret of the effortless decorous speech of the “gentlewoman.”
And the secret of its tiresomely unvarying form. The quality it
expressed went right through. They not only spoke as they thought, but
thought as they spoke, guided and fashioned their thought, even to
themselves, in forms of decorous speech. Anything that could not so be
moulded was banished. Anything “unspeakable”—their strongest term of
contempt. Thus they were, even when alone, permanently at attention.

For herself, the coming of the curtain would be the moment of dropping
the mask of attention, the moment of soaring freely within this new
life. Things were going ahead too fast. Strong impressions succeeding
and obliterating each other too swiftly to be absorbed.

“I’ll go round for my things. Must find a greengrocer,” she said,
looking in on Miss Holland cutting a slice from a substantial bar of
plain soap.

“You prefer a greengrocer? I am employing the Church Army myself. They
are most useful. And it is quite the least expensive way of moving. The
men should now be on their way with the last of my things. They could
then, if you like, fetch yours.”

“Ah! Perfect,” said Miriam, and set forth.

Going westwards she met a sky ablaze with fiery rose thrown up behind
clouds that hid the drooping sun, and saw, looking back, the London
scene transformed; pink houses, grey roofs tinged with madder. The sun
had still a good way to drop. The clouds might shift. Coming back she
would walk in brilliance.


                                   3

The Church Army men arrived as she was putting together the last of her
things.

They were oppressive. Met in the freedom of a slum they would have been
dreadful enough. But with their prison air of sullen shyness, overlaid
by an ill-fitting respectability they were, she felt as she stood
telling them what things were to be removed, heart-breaking by reason of
their ignorance of the world they now feared. They did not know that the
evil that in them had come up and out into action was in everybody.

She wanted to fête them, give them tea, somehow make them cease
tiptoeing about the room with that dreadful air of shame. But her voice,
which she tried to make casual, sounded rallying, expressive of
equality, insulting; she could only wish them to finish and be gone.

Her forgotten book was lying on the table. The book that had suddenly
become the centre of her life. Now, with these men here, the very
existence of the volume seemed a mockery. She took it in her hands, felt
it draw her again with its unique power. The men could, must, manage
without supervision. For the second time, during which they stood
listening as though she had not spoken before, she pointed out the
things which were to be taken, and sat down with the book.

Sitting thus with the book in her hands and her eyes upon the title, set
within the golden lines of an upright oblong in letters of gold upon the
red cover, she found herself back within the first moment of meeting it.
In the little book-shop, a treasure house opened by the so small
subscription. Saw again the close-packed ranks of well-known names,
names that had until then, whenever she thought of them, stood large
along the margin of life, and that seemed now, set minutely down upon
neat rows of volumes, suddenly uninteresting, irrelevant to the impulse
of her search. And then this book, for all the neutrality of its title
and of the author’s name, drawing her hands, bringing as she took it
from the shelf and carried it, unexamined, away down the street, the
stillness of contentment.

She could, so long as the men remained, get no further. Within the neat
red binding lay altogether new happiness. But she was aware only of the
sluggishly moving men, of the shelter from whence they had come and
whither presently, when she, free and a millionaire, should have been
shifted from palace to palace, they would, with their dingy barrow,
shamble back.

The men were going downstairs. The last moments in this room that held
the whole of her London life were ticking themselves away, appealing in
vain for some sadness of farewell. Just round the corner in Flaxman’s
Court was Miss Holland, expectantly at work. And here she sat with a
book open upon her knee, asking only to be left in communion with a
style.

She glanced through the pages of its opening chapter, the chapter that
was now part of her own experience; set down at last alive, so that the
few pages stood in her mind, growing as a single good day will grow, in
memory, deep and wide, wider than the year to which it belongs. She was
surprised to find, coming back after the interval of disturbed days, how
little she had read. Just the opening pages, again and again, not
wanting to go forward; wanting the presentation of the two men, talking
outside time and space in the hotel bedroom, to go on for ever. And
presently fearing to go on, lest the perfection of satisfaction should
cease.

Reading a paragraph here and there, looking out once more the two
phrases that had thrilled her more intimately than any others, she found
a stirring of strange statements in her mind. A strange clarity that was
threatening to change the adventure of reading to a shared disaster. For
she remembered now, having hung for a while over Waymarsh’s “sombre
glow” and “his attitude of prolonged impermanence,” that she had already
read on into the next chapter, that something had happened, so bitter as
to have been pushed from her mind. And yet her mind had been at work
upon it. It had happened with the coming of Maria Gostrey, and had
culminated at the dinner-party in her red neck-band. Disappointing. Yes.
Here she was again, drawing on her gloves and being elaborately
mysterious.

The thought, too, of reading in the new room with Miss Holland on the
other side of the curtain, changed the proportions of the adventure.
Made it almost improper. She imagined herself trying to explain why the
phrases that lit the scene were wonderful. And it seemed, thought of as
a public matter, ridiculous to have been so excited by the way he
conveyed information without coming forward to announce it. But even
more disquieting was Miss Holland’s reinforcement of the need to
confront the author with his own cynicism, to tell him that in every
word he came forward with his views, which were the most hopelessly
complacent masculine ignorance.

It was only as private, shared by no one else, that the adventure was
glorious. Thought of as carried under the eye of a witness, it seemed
criminal—“anti-social.” She now for the first time imagined men reading
the magic pages, suffering unconsciously their insidious corruption.
This man was a monstrous unilluminated pride. And joy in him was a mark
of the same corruption. Pride in discovering the secrets of his
technique. Pride in watching it labour with the development of the
story. The deep attention demanded by this new way of statement was in
itself a self-indulgence. Thought of as enjoyed in a world that held
Church Army men it was plain wickedness.

But the cold ignorance of this man was unconscious. And therefore
innocent. And it was he after all who had achieved the first completely
satisfying way of writing a novel. If this were a novel. There _was_
something holy about it. Something to make, like Conrad, the heavens
rejoice. Perhaps at lunch times, or in rare solitudes, she could go on,
get at the whole of the light there was in him. Style was something
beyond good and evil. Sacred and innocent.


                                   4

The new furniture peopled the room with clear reflections. The daylight
was dimmed by the street, but it came in generously through the wide
high window. And upon the polished surfaces of the little bureau, set
down with its back to the curtain, and upon its image, filling the lower
part of the full-length strip of mirror hung opposite against the wall,
were bright plaques of open sky.

The bureau was experience; seen from any angle it was joy complete.
Added to life and independent of it. A little thing that would keep its
power through all accidents of mood and circumstance. The inlaid design
enclosing the lock of the sloping lid formed a triangle with the small
brass candlesticks at either end of the level top, and the brass handles
of the three drawers hung below on either side, garlands, completing the
decoration.

Pools of light rested on the squat moss-green crockery of the
wash-table, set, flanked by clear wall and clear green floor, between
the mirror and the end of the small bed which skirted the wall as far as
the door opening on to the landing. The unencumbered floor made a green
pathway to the window. It was refreshment merely to walk along it,
between clean sightly objects. Squalor was banished. No more smell of
dust. No more sleepless nights under a roof too hot to grow cool even in
the hour before dawn. Here in the mornings there would always be beauty,
the profiles of things growing clear on either side of the pathway of
morning light, the profiles of flowers, set in a bowl between the
sentinel candlesticks.

Miss Holland’s voice came unheralded, startlingly out of the silence.
She must have come through from the back room in noiseless slippers.
Miriam answered that she had forgotten about clothes, and proposed nails
in the attic.

“It will be no trouble at all. I have lengths of bamboo and still some
yards of green material. We will regard any provision of French
wardrobes down here as franking me to use the attic for my charts and
other impedimenta. You, I observe, have no débris.”

“Only a few books.”

“You have a goodly store of books. I shall look forward to a treat.”

“There’s a book I’m reading now—” she began walking up and down the
linoleum path in the excitement of wondering whether Miss Holland could
be brought to share the adventure.

“It is in a way the most wonderful I have met. The most real.”

“No doubt you are a connoisseur.”

“I’m not. But I’ve never got so much out of a novel before. I say, this
stuff shows every mark.”

Miss Holland would get nothing from James. She would read patiently for
a while and pronounce him “a little tedious.”

“It will at first. But you need not be concerned about that. I am at
home all day, and it will be a very slight matter to keep things more or
less in order. Perhaps we can make a little bargain. I for my part will
willingly undertake the rooms and the marketing if you will save me from
the _palavering_.”

“Will there be any?”

“Well, for example, the rent. The landlord is a most _odious_ man. I
abhor the thought of tackling him. You, I am sure, will manage anything
of that sort better than I. Yes. Most certainly. You have an air.”

A few words weekly seemed a small price to pay for freedom from the
mysteries of cleaning and catering, and Miriam agreed to pay the rent,
to call next door and pay it; keeping Sheffield away from the house.

Miss Holland went on talking as if to herself. Expostulating. It was a
mistake, she concluded, to drop domesticity. She preferred to keep her
hand in, while safeguarding sufficient leisure for reading and so on.

Miriam saw her keeping house, dressmaking, and yet free to wander abroad
in the sunlight, and to come home, full of the life and brightness of
London, to rest and read, with her feet up, “to counteract the strain
upon the heart, of the upright posture” following the example of “those
sensible Americans who discuss business with their feet on the
mantelshelf.” She judged unconventionalities according as they did or
did not serve the cause of hygiene.

“Much” she finished hurriedly, as if to avoid further postponing
anything Miriam might be going to say, “_Much_ can be done with a damp
duster.”

Miriam wondered whether, after all, housework might not hold some
strange charm. Something that was lacking in a life lived altogether in
the world of men; altogether on the surface of things. Always, in
relation to household women, she felt herself a man. Felt that they
included her with a half-contemptuous indulgence, in the world of men.
Some of them, those to whom the man’s world was still an exciting
mystery, were a little jealous and spiky.

As if encouraged by silence, Miss Holland pursued her theme.

“I have a horror of becoming an _official_ woman. It is, I think, a most
obnoxious type. It abounds. In London it is to be met wherever women are
in positions of responsibility. Real or fancied. And it is on the
increase. There have, of course, always been official women. Even in
rural districts, where, most unfortunately, they have but one sphere of
activity. We used to call them the curates-in-charge.”

Vicarage humour at first hand. Miriam laughed suitably; ensconced, an
eavesdropper.

“Church workers.”

“They are the bane of a parish. Work, yes. That they most certainly do,
to the accompaniment of loud complaints on the score of other people’s
inactivity. Implying, of course, that they themselves hold a monopoly of
intelligence and efficiency. Whereas the truth is to be found in their
inability to attract helpers or to collaborate with those who really
desire to take part in the work. These women are actuated solely by
personal ambition, the desire to run the parish and to be openly
recognised as doing so. Nothing less will content them. Nothing less. It
is a _most_ perturbing spectacle. And I, for one, have no hesitation in
admitting that I am driven to the conclusion that authority is harmful
to women. They grow so _hard_. So _coldly_ self-important and
dictatorial.”

Miriam knew she would want to run the parish, choose the music, edit the
vicar’s mind, lecture the parishioners.

“In London many of them are social workers. They spend their time on
committees. But not in service. They quell.”

She handled her statements as she had handled the pile of green
material, pouncing, taking disdainful hold. Her sentences were sallies,
each one leaving her voice halted on an interval of deprecating sounds.
Her voice came from a height. She must be standing, poised, in her light
way, for movement. Talking as if to herself, assuming a lack of
interest. Yet the air was full of her shy desire for response.

“They must be holy terrors.”

“I fear,” chuckled Miss Holland, “that I am not completely convinced of
their holiness.”

“I’ve never met any of these women. Avoid women on the whole. But I
daresay I should be that type myself if I weren’t too lazy to achieve a
position.”

“Believe me, you could never be official. You are much too artistic.”

Miriam was too disappointed to feel flattered. There was no illumination
here. Exposing herself before the tribunal, she had been judged in a
class of which the judge knew nothing. Compared to Miss Holland, she
might perhaps be called artistic. But it was grievous to be supplied
already with a false reputation. To be imagined as cultured in a way
that was respected in vicarages.

She glanced around upon the poor things that already she loved with an
immemorial love whose secret eluded her, whose going forth she knew to
be blind and personal. Her eye was at once arrested by a small dark
something upon the white coverlet of her bed. A ladybird. Too square.
Perfectly square and motionless. Even as she called to Miss Holland to
come through and observe, the sight of it thrilled her in every nerve.

A swish of the curtain and Miss Holland was at her side, bent and
peering.

“Dear, dear, _dear_!” she moaned. “I feared, I _feared_. I’ll get the
dustpan.”

The floor rocked with her swift departure. Miriam stood fascinated. The
unspeakable thing had revealed itself, and she was not only calm but
curious. A moment ago it had existed only in her mind, an ultimate she
could not imagine herself seeing and surviving. It looked like a
fragment of an autumn leaf. Miss Holland’s voice sounded in the further
room. Miriam listened to the low tones for entertainment while she kept
watch.

“I feared, I feared,” and then a swift ferretting, drowning the anxious
monologue.

Weary of the scene that was holding up her installation, she turned away
to the window, half expecting to be leapt upon from behind. She was
vitalised by the incident; tingling from head to foot. It was strange
that one could recognise at sight an unknown thing; but far stranger
that within a moment of pure shock there should be life, the keen sense
of living that stood away outside the bounds of everyday life.

What a set of circumstances were these that brought only vermin to give
her the pang of immortality. Not a thing one could testify at a
dinner-table. Why not?

When Miss Holland came back she would remind her that monkeys were
timid, and fearful of small creeping things. Being a Protestant she
probably revelled in Evolution—wouldn’t see that it left everything more
spooky than before.

She was looking straight in at a window of the opposite house. The panes
were clean and clear, the curtains on either side a dull dark green,
hanging in straight folds. Sombre. Faintly, clearer as she made it out,
a thick tall white candle rose in the midst of the gloom, just inside
the window, changing the aspect of the curtains, making a picture. Just
visible, right and left, were the shoulders of two high-backed chairs.
She imagined them occupied, the beam of the thick white candle falling
on two forms. But in this street what forms? It was clear that she and
Miss Holland were not the only aliens. Perhaps “artistic” bachelor women
who made a cult of their diggings, wore sage-green dresses and would
emerge to become a spectacle known by heart, now both together, now one
alone, crying cultured witticisms from the street to the window. Women
standing critically aside from life, hugely amused by it. But would such
have achieved that candle, at once a person and a piece of furniture?
Lamps they would have, with art shades. Or if candles, still art shades.
It might be an anchorite. But the company of such a candle was not
solitude. Underneath the window was a cobbler’s shop.

“Just look here,” she cried to Miss Holland coming back preceded by her
voice. The things in her own room seemed to greet, as she turned, the
things in the room across the way. It was a man’s room. It had an air of
waiting for an untimed return.

“I hope,” said Miss Holland, through a rapid scrunching of paper. “I
trust, it was only those Church Army men.”

Miriam watched her go away, with the dustpan at arm’s length, still
gravely expostulating.

“It’s dreadful,” she said to her returning form, “but also fearfully
funny, to find the ultimate horror sitting contentedly, poor little
thing, on the end of your bed.”

She tinkled and tinkled at that, woefully crying out through her
laughter, repudiating and agreeing and contradicting.

“But I admire your spirit,” she wailed finally.

“Do look at this huge candle across the way.”

Miss Holland moved to her side and peered anxiously, frowning in
anticipation.

“Very odd,” she said sceptically. “A ship’s candle, something of the
kind.”

“Where did they get it? Besides, too tall, it would burn a cabin roof.
Perhaps an altar candle.”

“Very eccentric.” She turned away, busily, skittishly. Pleased about
something, but not interested in the candle.


                                   5

Her light busy footfall was audible upstairs as Miriam faced the boxes
and parcels waiting, piled amongst the furniture of the little back
room, to be unpacked.... With Sunday at hand it would never occur to
Miss Holland to leave it all and go out. But she too must be wanting
tea. There could be tea, now, amongst the wreckage. Laughter and
relaxation.

Yet not to go out now was to miss so much. To go out, leaving behind
this treasure of disorder, and sit at leisure in an undisturbed world,
would be to reap the full adventure of being installed. Homekeeping
people missed that adventure. They slaved on and on, saying how nice it
will be when everything is _straight_. And then wondered why it was not
nice.

Left to herself, she would now go out, not only for tea but for the
whole evening, into a world renewed. There would be one of those
incidents that punctually present themselves at such moments, a link in
the chain of life as it appears only when one is cut off from fixed
circumstances. She would come home lost and refreshed. Laze through
Sunday morning. Roam about the rooms amongst things askew as though
thrown up by an earthquake, their exposed strata storied with memory and
promise. There would be indelible hours of reading and dreaming, of
harvesting the lively thought that comes when one is neither here nor
there, but poised in bright light between a life ended and a life not
yet begun. The blissful state would last until dusk deepened towards
evening and would leave her filled with a fresh realisation of the
wonder of being alive and in the midst of life, and with strength to
welcome the week slowly turning its unknown bright face towards her
through the London night. With great speed, at the eleventh hour, she
would get everything roughly in order.

Miss Holland appeared at the sitting-room door, eyeing the disorder.

Miriam groaned her fatigue aloud.

“Let’s leave it,” said Miss Holland, contemptuously. “Oh, let’s _leave_
it,” she wailed in a protesting falsetto, with averted face and
outstretched fingers disgustedly flipping.

“Let’s drop everything and go out for tea,” she went on, relaxing,
looking into space, while with eyebrows raised disdainfully she stood
halted for response.

“Oh, agreed,” said Miriam. “I’m expiring.”

“We will _not_ expire. We will seek tea _immediately_.”

She swung round on one heel and bounded lightly back into the bedroom
with her tinkling laugh. The little scene remained in Miriam’s eyes,
somewhere within it the exchanged glance of delighted understanding that
had driven them both to cover which was not cover, for they were
immediately together again, and the dividing curtain could not mask the
results of their encounter, the quick movements, the duet of cheerful
hummings.


                                   6

Miriam went back into the little room to collect her outdoor things;
checking an impulse to eager snatching, steadying herself against the
sudden arrival of the personal note.

Under her hat was the red book. The _personal note_ repeated itself
before her mind’s eye, in print. And as she searched for her gloves the
note described itself as it were aloud, in a voice speaking urbanely
from the surrounding air. Its indubitable descent; its perhaps too great
and withal so manifestly, so well-nigh woefully irretrievable
precipitancy. Its so charming and for all she could at the moment and
within the straitly beleaguering the so eminently onerous and exciting
circumstances assemble of disturbing uncertainty, so brilliantly, so
almost _dazzlingly_ sunlit height. In simpler words, things were going
too fast and too far. An exact and dramatic landscape of thought. Things
seen as going too fast and too far, distilled into refinement. Cuyp.

She tried to imagine herself producing phrases for the landlord from a
mental landscape of what would be occurring between them in terms of
thought. It would certainly make her dignified, and to the landlord,
mysterious. It might daunt, reduce him, keep him at a distance. But it
was difficult to weave in the word “rent” the so simple, the so potently
humiliating monosyllable that was the immediate, the actual, the
dreadfully unavoidable ... ornate alias. Ah. Clifford Allbutt. James was
the art of beautifully elaborating the ornate alias?


                                   7

Her eyes roamed as she moved about putting on her things. Seeking up and
down the strip of bedroom for a centre, some running together of effects
where her spirit could settle and find its known world about it. There
seemed to be none, though the light was fading and the aspect of the
room as it had been when her things were first set down was already in
the past. Each glance produced the same picture; a picture seen and
judged long ago and with which her eyes could do nothing. She took
refuge with single objects, finding each satisfactory, but nowhere
reaching home. Swimming in transparent shallows, unable to touch bottom,
stand steady, and see forth. Her life had somehow ceased. Behind her
back unawares, while she had flown from newness to newness, its thread
had been snapped. The small frayed end remaining in her hand was drawing
her ahead across a level that showed no coverts; no deep places to be
invaded by unsummoned dreams and their good end in the recreation of
familiar things.


                                   8

Though it was late when they arrived, the club was just as she had seen
it on her first solitary visit. The same hush in the large drawing-room,
the same low murmuring of conversation between women half hidden in the
depths of easy-chairs.

Seated in two little high-backed chairs by the central window, they
found themselves looking down on the square, a small forest dim in the
twilight, asheen where the light poured in from the street lamps. A
twilit loveliness at rest. Walked through, the squares were always a new
loveliness, but even at a stroll they passed too quickly. There, at
last, was one of the best of them arrested for contemplation.

Away behind was a roomful of independent strangers, also aware of the
square set ever before their eyes. This was freedom, in company,
enriched. The sense of imprisonment she had felt on coming down the
street with Miss Holland, the tangible confirmation when Miss Holland,
laughter sounding in the tones of her confidently talking voice,
suddenly took her arm, of the note struck too soon, and too high,
vanished altogether in the freedom of this neutral territory.

Miss Holland was responding formally, in low tones, to her comments on
the aspect of the square. Spontaneity it was evident was to be shelved
just where it might be safely indulged; just where one attained an
impersonality as wide as the wide world.

Suddenly she found herself wanting to say outrageous things. The
decorous voices sounding all about her seemed to call for violence. With
difficulty she kept her tone subdued. Level it refused to be. The gift
of the square imparted to every word the sound of exciting news. News
upon which the dear, the for-the-first-time-so-comfortably,
so-opulently-visible London twilight closed gently in.

It was to a morning and not to Miss Holland she was speaking. The wide
deep spaces of a London Sunday morning that showed invariably within the
witnessed falling of a Saturday twilight. Miss Holland’s responses
showed her struggling between charmed appreciation and a sense that
audible comments were not quite within the boundaries of club etiquette.
Silence fell, and within it Miriam saw the scales of judgment descend
equally balanced. She had, it was true, given no thought to her
neighbours and only now in retrospect heard her lively tones penetrate
the murmurings of the gathered ladies. But—she was wearing her
lavender-grey, her mushroom hat of silky straw, both still quite able to
hold their own, and still conquering fatigue whenever she put them on.
While Miss Holland, though clothed in awareness of her surroundings, was
not even stylishly dowdy. Piled upon her head was a mass of blue
crinoline, not only faded, but dulled with inextricable dust. Beneath
its shapelessness wisps of lank hair made fun of her dignified bearing.
A black tie, running from neck to waist of the skimped blouse uniting
her coat and skirt, fought with the millinery hat. Only her eyes took
the light, and they were at a loss, turned unseeing, under faintly
frowning brows, upon the prospect beyond the window.

She was uneasy, disapproving equally of silence and of speech that was
not smoothly decorous.

Tea came. Lights went up all over the room; brilliant light shone down
upon the stately Queen Anne service, shone through the thinness of the
shallow flowered cups.

“Tea,” cried Miriam, through the shifting of chairs that followed the
coming of the light, “should never be drunk from cold white cups.”

Miss Holland laughed her laugh, and began with large, composed movements
to pour out. At once her appearance was redeemed. For a moment Miriam
sat basking in her manner. Then her eyes were drawn to two tall figures
risen together from deep chairs far away.

“One ought,” she went on to lend a casual air to her first inspection of
fellow-members, “to drink down to a pattern.” They were without hats and
therefore residents. And unexpectedly impressive.

“Good faience,” Miss Holland was saying, “is certainly a great
enhancement of the charm of the tea-table.”

They were most strange. They radiated a definitely familiar quality as
they stood there gazing down the room. At nothing. There was no trace of
the awareness of exposure that set the faces of the women sitting about
within view, large-hatted in deep chairs; awareness or careful
unawareness. Yet as they moved, now, slowly along the clear spaces of
the room, they were visibly the figures of an ordeal. Stately in their
white-robed splendour, they were still piteous. Something was dispelling
the conventional charm usually inseparable from the spectacle of beauty,
tall and well-clothed, moving slowly through a room.

The depth of her interest inspired Miriam to feed her conversation with
Miss Holland and remain at the same time free to watch. The mystery
cleared as the figures drew near. They were sisters, the one quite
ordinary, fully aware and fitted out with the regulation feminine charm
of bearing. Conscious of piled brown hair, of brilliant oval cheeks, of
dark and lively eyes. The upturning bow of her mouth was set in a smile.
So it would be set, thought Miriam, years ahead, when the nose and the
chin began to approach each other. She was the elder. But her few extra
years, the ardour of her head and her splendid form, were in leash to
the being of the other. She it was who came unseeing and produced the
strange effect. Slender, in childish muslin beside her sister’s opulent
sophisticated lace, she was formidable. Below her dark hair, drawn flat
to the shape of her head, yet set round it like a mist, was the strong
calm face of a healthy child, a mask clear of expression and colourless
but for the eyes that were startling. Life flowed from her eyes as if it
would wither the air before them. Where was she? Whence, round-faced
child, had she gathered her wealth of suffering? Her beauty was the
beauty of a transfiguration. Here, on this plain afternoon, at the
Belmont, amongst friends.

Reluctantly, as they came quite near, Miriam averted her screened gaze
and met the eyes of the other. Here was conciliation, a deprecating
fearfulness changing suddenly as she came in view of Miss Holland.

“My,” she vowed, wide-mouthed for the leisurely vowel, “it’s Miss
Halland.”

Americans! Then perhaps the other girl merely had neuralgia. Miss
Holland had turned, and Miriam saw her swift disclaiming glance and its
change into the shy but brightly charmed and charming smile,
accompanying the greeting that was yet so formal and in its apologetic
disdainfulness so like her voice. She was hidden now behind the tall
white figures. Their voices, playing about her and expanding into the
room, killed Miriam’s interest. There was, for her, something in the
American voice that robbed its communications of any depth of meaning.
The very ease of their talk, its expressiveness, the direct swift way
they handled their stores of information and communicated their
thoughts, made even the most fascinating topics fall dead, rifled of
essential significance.


                                   9

Her stranded attention was caught by the sound of blended voices
approaching from the door. Voices in the midst of talk, having come into
the room talking, but not in the least in the English way of making
conversation to cover an entry. They were in full swing, their sentences
overlapping. Obviously noticing nothing and no one. They were using the
club as a place to talk in, and were one voice. Sisters or cousins. Yet
they had arranged themselves in chairs without breaking their talk,
which went forward so eagerly that they seemed to be exchanging opinions
for the first time. Now where had she heard, between sisters, exactly
that effect? Somewhere between members of a large family that formed a
society in itself?

No, the three Bannerman girls, just three, no more, living in seclusion
with their parents, marching about all over Barnes for years, in
perpetual conversation in high, rapid voices....

They had suddenly appeared at the church decorations, keeping it up even
there, amongst themselves. Speaking to no one else. Being really
interested, but somehow conveying their conviction that the people all
around them were too stupid even to be noticed. They had accepted work
politely, making clever comments without looking at those who instructed
them, and then sat there with quickly moving fingers and a ceaseless
fretting of voices. Always one shape of tone: beginning on a refined
argumentative switchback of sound. Harriett had caught it, taking them
off, for days.

“Isn’t it verray re_mar_kable, my dear Miriam, that such a singularly
tall man as Mr. Spiffkins should be a radical?”

“Don’t you, my dear Miriam, consider it highly alarming that rain falls
_down_ instead of up?”

She listened. Here, perhaps, as the Bannermans now appeared in her mind
for the first time since she left home, would be light upon that
long-forgotten mystery. But a question intruded. Why, since their voices
followed the same pattern of sound and bore the same suggestion of being
at loggerheads with the social order, why had not the Lycurgans recalled
the Bannerman girls? Certainly if they were alive and in London, all
three were now active members of the Lycurgan society; the amused
superiority in their voices added to the Lycurgan tide of amused
superiority to everything on earth.

Yet these women who had brought them back, though they had the Lycurgan
voice, had nothing of the crisp cocksureness of the socialist
intelligentsia. They were unanimously belabouring someone, hitting out
right and left, but within their expressive voices, moulding their
lively scorn, animating the unvarying tone-shape of the
intelligentsia-in-argument, was _sorrow_.

The coming of their tea brought a pause. With the ceasing of their
voices warmth withdrew from the sound of the room, and returned at the
first phrase sounding together with the cheerful gush of tea hurriedly
poured.

“Well, I think it’s just simply incomprehensible.”

Miriam knew it was not. She half turned, strangely sure that they would
welcome her and quite simply state a case. They were not a clique.
Something in their voices related them to everybody in the world. They
had the selflessness of those who keep an eye everywhere, without
discrimination of persons. They would be at once interested, even in
herself, and quite blind. She turned and found a group of three, three
small women with one face; a face she knew well at Lycurgan meetings and
liked, but always with a queer thrill of uncertainty. It was vital,
intimately intelligent, and yet alien, seeming at once to light up and
to darken its surroundings.

The club, she thought as she turned gladly back to the loneliness
created by Miss Holland’s surrounded state, was going to get hold of her
in a way of which she had never dreamed, since at the outset it had
brought her to the edge of the whirlpool of people with whom this dark
face was in her mind so richly associated. Set in a row of Lycurgan
faces, all screened, more or less, in the English way and not different,
in silence, from a row of Primrose League faces, this one face would
stand out, a pale, bony oval set with crisp hair; and eyes, under dark
brows, richly despairingly intent. The moment the lecture was over it
would be visible, now here now there, and always in eager speech.

Small wonder, since it turned out to be three, that she was always
seeing it.

“Now Mrs. Wilson _is_ charming,” said one. “A far more charming
personality than he.”

However indiscreet, the remark was illuminating. Set up thus on a
placard she need have no hesitation in carrying it away, for Hypo. But
she must acknowledge the receipt of it. Turning full round, she met a
vivid face that boldly smiled, and, smiling, was drowned in a vivid
flush. Miriam smiled too, basking for a moment in the charm, glowing so
brightly in its rôle of a prolonged haunting impression come suddenly to
life at her elbow. But so formidably. In place of one figure a whole
group, a multiplicity of attraction. She turned away to find the white
figures had disappeared.


                                   10

Miss Holland sat, flushed with talk, quietly but quite evidently
summoning composure; as nearly flustered as it was possible for her to
be.

“How tall those women are,” said Miriam, still intent on the group
behind.

“I did not introduce them,” replied Miss Holland, busying herself, with
downcast eyes, amongst the flowered tea-cups. “I—well—I thought——” her
deprecating tone collapsed into a murmur and rose again, recovering.
“Yes, they are tall, both mother and daughter.”

“Astounding. I thought they were sisters.”

“Their name is Wheeler. It is a most interesting story.”

Nothing about Americans could be really interesting. But Miss Holland,
without looking up, was launched upon her narrative.

“They are from San Antonio in Texas. The child Estella is just fifteen
years of age. Yes, it is remarkable. A warmer clime, I suppose. Still it
is very remarkable. Her grandmother was Spanish. And that perhaps may
account for her exceptional temperament. She is a musician. The ’cello.
They have travelled to London for her training. It seems that her
teachers at home were obliged to confess they could do nothing further
for her.”

“Why not Germany?”

“Well, that is just it. The reason for their coming to London is the
strangest part of the story. It seems that there is a Pole, a celebrated
’cellist. The child heard him once, years ago, in New York, and has been
saying ever since that he is the only man in the world who can teach
her. He, it appears, is giving performances in London this winter. So
they have come. The child thinks of nothing else. For the moment she is
at the Philharmonic Academy. She dislikes it. I am sincerely sorry for
her mother. She is most courageous; and so wise. Insists on physical
culture. Very wise. Skipping and so on. At a gymnasium. The great
trouble at the moment is that it now appears that the Pole takes no
pupils. Also that they are not too well off. Estella, however, is
determined to see him.”

“Has she given concerts?”

“Not so far. But the Academy wishes to bring her out. At the Queen’s
Hall.”

“Wicked!”

“Certainly she is young.”

Miss Holland hesitated. She was evidently still full of communications
about the Wheelers, but suddenly unwilling to continue. She was guarding
them. Miriam saw plainly that her interest was not to go too far. That,
she felt, was all to the good. Here was the beginning of an
understanding that their interests were to be independent. But the
possessiveness and the mystery was making her dislike these Wheelers.
They had Miss Holland’s interest in a way she was sure she would never
do, and Miss Holland was admitting it and saying too, with her honest
embarrassment, that she believed these wonderful people would not be
interested in her fellow-lodger.

She was her fellow-lodger. Now that personal depths had been revealed,
that strange fact remained; an achievement.




                               CHAPTER II


                                   1

Miriam sat through the evening reading by lamplight in the disorderly
little room. Unsatisfactorily. Her attention wandered to Miss Holland
lecturing in the East End, and to the thoughts in Miss Holland’s mind as
she stood confronted by the roomful of dilapidated people.

The shaded lamplight left everything in gloom but the page whose words,
yesterday so potent, brought to-night only a sense of the gulf between
life and the expression of it. She had reached the conclusion that
fiction was at worst a highly flavoured drug and at best as much an
abstraction as metaphysics, when Miss Holland came back.


                                   2

She stood in the doorway tall and dim; silent and dubious with fatigue.
But when Miriam suggested going out in search of coffee she came to life
in horrified resistance, announced her belief in the restorative power
of weak tea, and vowed that not on any account would she issue forth
without good cause at such an hour.

And out in the blue-lit gloom of the Euston Road, hurrying timidly
along, she still protested. But behind her woeful protests was delight.
And once they were safely inside the heavily frosted inner doors and the
little padrone, as Miriam had predicted, came forward to welcome them,
and waving away a hovering waiter, himself found them places and took
their small order, she sat back upon her red velvet sofa evidently
enjoying the adventure. But beyond a single comprehensive glance, she
had not noticed her surroundings. She remarked upon the cleanliness, the
cheerful Alpine oleographs. Of all the rest she was unaware.

To have her here, disarmed of her fears, was not enough. But even if
they came again and again there would never be more than that. She would
never expand to the atmosphere. Would always sit as she was doing now,
upright and insulated, making formal conversation; decorously busy with
the small meal.

The place was not crowded. Everyone there was distinctly visible—the
lonely intent women in gaudy finery, the old men fêting bored, laughing
girls who glanced about; the habitués, solitary figures in elderly
bondage to the resources of the place.

“Of course,” said Miriam at last, “there are all sorts of queer people
here.”

She sat back, unwilling to go, looking out into the room as if unaware
of Miss Holland’s preparations to depart, following immediately on her
last sip of the excellent coffee. But supposing Miss Holland should even
for a moment sit back and contemplate her surroundings? She would see
only material for pity or disgust. See only morally. Her interest in
individuals would be an uninteresting interest. That young man, with his
pose of careful conscious detachment would not for her be any kind of
epitome, but just a young man—“probably some sort of student.”

“It is now,” said Miss Holland, glancing at her wrist-watch, “well past
midnight. This has been a unique experience. And, just for this once, I
do not object to it. But it must certainly not be repeated.”

Miriam gazed at her. She was blushing. She had seen all that there was
to see. Miriam remembered her own first horror. But that had been alone
and in youthful ignorance.

“I’m sorry you don’t like my little haunt.”

“It is scarcely that. The place is clean and pleasant and doubtless a
great convenience to many people. But, dear me, dear me, I can only
imagine the horror of my chief in beholding me sitting here, and at such
an hour.”

Astonishment kept Miriam dumb and passed into resentment. Having
delivered her judgment, Miss Holland now sat contemptuously drawing on
her gloves. The episode over and escape at hand, she released a scorn
that was almost venomous. It lingered about her politely smiling relief,
an abominable look of triumph. Of personal triumph.

Miriam clung to her silence. She felt the advantage fall to her own side
as she saw Miss Holland’s acceptance of her unspoken thoughts.

“It is different for yourself,” she said in answer to them. “You are
free from the necessity of considering appearances.”

“I’m a guttersnipe, thank Heaven,” said Miriam.

Miss Holland laughed. A small sound incapable of reaching the next
table. She was really amused.

“You are anything but that. And in certain respects you may consider
yourself fortunate.”

Donizetti’s had been insulted. At sight of Miss Holland hurrying with
bent head, as if weathering a gale of contamination, down the aisle
between the rows of little tables, Miriam hated her. Hated her refusal
to place herself outside the pale of feminine dignity. The narrow pale.
Deep. But were they deep, these people who went about considering their
dignity? “Dignity is absurdity,” she vowed, keeping step with Miss
Holland’s light swift walk.

There is one thing worse than a dignified man and that is an undignified
woman. Chesterton. It sounded so respectful; chivalrous. Made me try to
remember to be dignified for a whole day. I tried to crush Hypo by
quoting it.

“Just so,” he said. “Dignity is the privilege of the weak.”

She tried to imagine Miss Holland undignified. Rushing about and
babbling inconsequently. Tiresome, men called those women, but were glad
of them if they had kind hearts. Mrs. Orly has no dignity. But she is
neither weak nor tiresome. Her heart is a ... er ... domesticated
tornado.


                                   3

Walking home, estranged from Miss Holland, Miriam found her own life,
that had stood all day far away and forgotten, all about her again;
declaring itself independent of the success or the failure of this new
relationship. Like a husband’s life ... the life he goes off into in the
morning and can lose himself in, no matter what may be going on at home.
If this new arrangement were a success, something would be added to
life. If it were a failure nothing would be taken away.

By the time they reached home she felt free from all interest in Miss
Holland and saw their contract as it had at first appeared, a marriage
of convenience; a bringing down of expenses that would allow them both
to live more comfortably than they could alone. Miss Holland no doubt
saw it in the same light. The extremest differences of outlook were
neither here nor there. There would be no need, now that these first
disordered hours were over, for any association beyond what was needed
for the running of their quarters.

She looked forward to getting to bed in the new surroundings,
recapturing singleness and the usual Saturday night’s sense of the
spaces of Sunday opening ahead. Fatigue had given way to the new lease
of strength that always came if she stayed up long enough, and when she
found herself safely behind the curtain, she hoped that Miss Holland,
audible on the other side, was sharing her sense of refreshment. She
began to regret the incident that had reduced their exchange to
courteous formalities, and to wish for an impossible re-establishment of
the inexperience of the earlier part of the day.

Only impossible because of the way people were influenced by things said
and done. She was herself, she knew, but never quite permanently: never
believing that what people thought themselves to be and thought other
people to be, went quite through.... Always certain that underneath was
something else, the same in everybody.

“Of course, I could never feel the same again.” She could never make up
her mind whether it was good or bad not to be able to make that
statement from the heart. Whether it was good fortune to have access to
a region where everything was forgotten, and within which it was
impossible to believe people were what they represented themselves to
be. Yet speaking or acting suddenly from this region where she lived
with herself was always disastrous. And still there remained that
unalterable certainty that invisibly others were exactly what she
thought them, and would suddenly turn into the person she was seeking
all the time in everyone ... the person she knew was there.

It seemed now, so far off were those first bright early hours, that Miss
Holland and she had been long associated. The first freshness had gone,
or she would not now find herself with her hand on her own life. But
although that was recovered, there was now also something else.
Something going forward even as she moved about, slowly, delightfully
hindered by new things and the need for new movements that made the
process of going to bed a conscious ceremonial.

On the other side of the curtain Miss Holland was moving about in the
same leisurely obstructed way. Her things were not new; but she was
having to find her way amongst them afresh. This must be bringing all
sorts of things into her mind. They were sharing adventure. At the very
least, there was that. It was a great deal. From the point of view of
the amazingness of life and people, it was everything. And now the
strange something was growing clearer. Their prolonged silence was
speaking.... Of course ... “_C’est dans le silence que les âmes se
révèlent._”

Miriam tiptoed about, breathlessly listening. Clearly, almost audibly,
the silence was knitting up the broken fabric of their intercourse.
Thought of now, Miss Holland seemed young and small. She had been, once.
Alone with herself, of course, she still was. And at the centre of her
consciousness there was an image of her new friend, not as she appeared
to be, but as she really was; just as within her own consciousness there
was an image of the real Miss Holland.

Miss Holland did not know this. Only one here and there seemed to know
it. And those one never came across, except in the street suddenly,
walking by themselves. But Miss Holland was feeling the result of the
silence. The result of their having been, _à force de préoccupations_,
alone in company. Maeterlinck would call them _menus préoccupations_.
But a person standing lighting candles and moving about a room is ...
what?

A puff of wind touched the large window, rattling it gently in its
frame. Miss Holland muttered to herself.

“I fear that window rattles,” she said at the next sound, but still to
herself, a meditative tone.

“Yes,” said Miriam in cheerful conversational voice, and at once felt
its irrelevance. She had answered only the tone. In the actual
communication there was a fresh source of division. She loved rattling
windows; loved, loved them. Anything the wind could do, especially at
night. The window was old. It would certainly rattle: perhaps bump and
bang. It would be better even than the small squeak, squeak, of the
small lattice at Tansley Street. And with each sound she would be aware
of Miss Holland, disliking it.

“I can’t _abide_ rattling windows,” said Miss Holland, vindictively.

“I love them.”

“What a strange taste,” said Miss Holland ruefully, and immediately
laughed her tinkling laugh. They laughed together, and began moving more
briskly, creating a cheerful noise to emphasise small jests. Again and
again Miss Holland’s laugh sounded. She was happy and pleased. How
embarrassing it would have been, Miriam reflected, if the last stage of
the toilet had presented itself without this cover of bright sound. The
trial once happily over, was over for good.

She sat on her pillow and slid down carefully into the freshness of the
new bed. Its compactness was not disturbed. Her things were all out of
sight. The room about her was exactly as it had been when freshly
arranged.

“Oh,” she cried, listening to the pleasant bumping of the window as her
body relaxed on the unyielding level of the new mattress and the low
pillow fitted itself to her neck. “Oh, music that softlier on the spirit
lies——”

“I hope you are not alluding to the window,” chuckled Miss Holland.

“Oh, my bed, my angelic little bed. I thought it might seem narrow, but
it is so hard and flat that I feel as if I were lying on the plane of
the ecliptic with no sides. And I seem so long. I can see myself like
someone laid out.”

“What a very dismal idea!”

“Oh, no. I always think of it when I sleep in beds that don’t let you
down. It doesn’t depress me a bit. You see, I have no imagination. But
my bed at Tansley Street was all hummocks. There was only one way I
could lie at all and I made no shape. Now I feel like a crusader on a
tomb, and utterly comfortable. And the little light coming through the
curtain from your side makes a quite perfect effect, a green twilight.”

“You shall enjoy the perfect effect for a few moments longer. I am going
to wedge that abominable window.”

Something almost like fear took possession of Miriam. Protest was
impossible. It was clear Miss Holland must not be tormented. Her mind
clung to the wind sounds, whilst with small exasperated mutterings Miss
Holland sought about for something to fit the gap. An immense discomfort
settled upon her when the window was finally dumb. Its silence seemed to
press upon the air. And though the window was open at the top, the room
seemed close. It was as if Miss Holland had robbed her of a companion
and as if far away the companion were reproaching her for yielding
without protest to the world that keeps a suspicious eye on the doings
of the weather, an attitude she hated like an infection. The room seemed
now full of Miss Holland; rebuked by her into a dead stillness. That
would be there on all the nights. Each one, dumb and dead. The prospect
was unnerving. There was something of the atmosphere of the sick-room in
this awful calm. Miss Holland’s candle was the nightlight, keeping going
the hot pressure of the evening. Yet most people probably disliked a
rattling window, the sound that made a stillness in the room and in the
street. It was bad to be so different and to like being different.

How difficult to sleep in this consciously quiet enclosure. For it was
not the quiet of a still night, the kind of night in which you listen to
the expanse of space. It was a stillness filled with the coiling
emanation of a humanity recognising only itself, intent only on its own
circlings. The darkness when it presently came would be thick with the
remainder of the continuous coiling and fret of all those people who
live perpetually at war with everything that is not perfectly secure.


                                   4

Miss Holland’s light was out. She was apparently sitting up in bed
arranging draperies at great length.

“I have not locked the door,” she said, suddenly: Miriam despaired.

“I think for to-night it does not matter. We can make a point of
remembering it in future.”

“I’m afraid,” said Miriam, “I should _never_ remember it.”

“Have you not been in the habit of locking your door?”

“I never even thought of it.”

“Strange,” said Miss Holland. And Miriam began to suppose that it was
strange. She ran over in her mind some of the odd people from time to
time sharing her lonely top floor. Foreign waiters when Mrs. Bailey was
doing well, or queer odd men who could not afford the downstairs rooms.
She had never, at night, given them a single thought. But that was not
the sort of thought Miss Holland meant, or not consciously. But all this
was perfectly horrible.... Yet was it foolish, or perhaps unkind, never
to have been aware? O’Laughlin, dear O’Laughlin. She had been aware of
him. Sorry.

“There was,” she said, “a drunken Irish journalist who used to come
blundering up the stairs at all hours of the night.”

“Horrible, horrible,” breathed Miss Holland.

“His door,” it occurred to her for the first time, “was at right angles
to mine.” Miss Holland was gasping. “He used to stumble about on the
landing, and sometimes, poor dear, be sick.”

“Dear, dear, dear! It was a most extraordinary establishment. But I
think the oddest thing is that you should not have made fast the door.”

“I suppose so. But I would trust Tommy O’Laughlin drunk or sober, now I
come to think of it.... He never paid his bills, poor dear, and he
borrowed.”

“He must have been a worthless creature.”

“He was a gentleman, Tommy was, and a dear. Though he once embarrassed
me frightfully. It was at dinner. Of course he was intoxicated, though
not looking so. In the midst of a long tirade about Home Rule he burst
into tears and said if he had only seen Miss Henderson earlier in his
life he would have been a different fellow.”

“No doubt he admired you immensely!”

“I’d never spoken to him.”

Miss Holland laughed wisely, but a little scornfully. No châtelaine, of
course, would boast of scalps.

“He was married!”

“Dear, dear!” breathed Miss Holland.

“Trying for a divorce.”

“Dear, dear, _dear_!”


                                   5

Miriam awoke in the darkness abruptly. About her were the images that
had filled her mind when Miss Holland’s candle had gone out. She
regarded them sleepily, wondering what could so soon have called her
back. What was calling her now, urgently, out from the thickness of
sleep. She stirred and woke completely.

“Are you awake?” Miss Holland’s voice coming anxious and reproachful
through the stillness was added to the minute unmistakable irritations.

“Yes, are you? I mean are you being devoured alive?”

“Indeed, indeed, I _am_,” wailed Miss Holland. “It is a _disaster_.”

“It’s weird,” said Miriam, lunging. “Where can they all come from? I’m
going to get up.”

“Indeed, that is all we can do. Light candles and make instant warfare.”

“I’m so sleepy. I think I shall change in the dark.”

“I fear that will be useless,” groaned Miss Holland, striking a match.
“I fear, I fear the worst.”

Out on the green floor and with the two candles cheerfully gleaming....
Alone such an adventure would have been misery.

She grew interested in following Miss Holland’s instructions, and was
almost disappointed when the white expanse of her bed offered no further
prey.

“Seven,” she announced.

“All drowned?” asked Miss Holland suspiciously.

“Mm, poor things.”

“I fear I do not share your solicitude,” chuckled Miss Holland.

“Well, perhaps I associate them with summer. In a London summer there
are always one or two, having their little day. I’ve tried once or twice
to keep still and endure.”

“And then?”

“I shake my nightgown out of the window, but always feel mean.”

“You are _most_ tender-hearted.”

“I agree with the Frenchman, ‘_ce n’est point la piqûre dont je me
plains, c’est le promenade._’”

“You speak French delightfully, toote ah fay kom oon Parisienne.”

“Imitation; I can imitate any sound. But where do all these fleas _come_
from?”

“The floor, the floor, I fear.”

“Heaven and earth! We must leave at once.”

“Well, I think perhaps with perchloride in the cracks ...”

“Meantime?”

“We must do our best.”

“It goes from the brain to the toes.”

“To the _toes_. But only for the unfortunate possessors of thin skins.
And them, the wretches seek. If there were in the universe only one
flea, it would make straight for me.”

Her voice ended on a childish wail. _Fleee_, she had said, making it
innocent and pretty.

“Do you mean to say there are people ...”

“I do indeed. During my first period of training in the slums I was
amazed at the complete insensibility of many of my fellow-workers.
Amazed, and under the circumstances, envious.”

“Oh, I don’t envy them a bit. Those people with skins like felt; they
miss everything.”

“I agree. At the same time, I think a moderately thick skin is a boon. I
see no disadvantage in escaping intolerable discomforts. It is possible
to have too thin a skin.”

“For survival, yes. Blond people are dying out, they say.”

“Blondes have not a monopoly of thin skins.”

“No. I have a friend who slums. She loathes the poor.”

“Dear, dear; a most unfortunate qualification for her work.”

“Not their poverty. Their sameness. She is one of the kindest people I
know.”

“Strange....”

“They ought to be pensioned.”

“The poor?”

“Everybody. I should love to be pensioned.”

“And remain in idleness and dependence? Oh, no.”

“Not dependence. Interdependence. No compulsion.”

“What would you do?”

“Spend several years staring; and then go round the world.”

“You are delightful! I am not sure that I approve of the years of
staring. But to go round the world would, of course, be most
enchanting.”

“Yes: but I should not want to improve my mind. I should still stare. If
I went. Probably I shouldn’t go. Nothing short of dynamite will shift
me. I am astounded to find myself shifted here.”

“I fear at the moment you must be wishing yourself safely back again.”

She had no realisation of the adventure it was to be anywhere at all. To
her it was not a strange, strange adventure that their two voices should
be sounding together in the night, a double thread of sound in a private
darkness, making a pattern with all the other sounds in the world. But
she had accepted the compliment. There was a vibration in her voice:
joyful.

Again and again they were awakened for battle, until their slumber was
too deep to be disturbed.


                                   6

St. Pancras bells were cheerfully thumping the air when Miriam got up to
wander about in the dark brilliance that filled the room like the
presence of a guest, and was so exaggerated that it not only supplied a
topic wherewith to start the morning, but an occupation engrossing
enough to free her, even in thought, from descent into the detail of the
day. It held everything off and yet kept her in happy communion with
Miss Holland moving busily the other side of the curtain.

Yet the night had done its work. A host of statements were plucking at
her mind: balancing the quality of life here and life at Tansley Street.
At week-ends. Behind them was a would-be disquieting assertion of the
now complete remoteness of both her working life and the eventful
leisure that had for so long ousted the old-time Tansley Street
evenings. It was a bill of costs, flourished; demanding to know what she
had done.

But it stood off, powerless to gain the centre of her attention, making
no break in her sense of being nowhere; of inhabiting, within a
shadowless brilliance, a living peace that held her immensely
unoccupied, and ready, whenever things should once more present
themselves in detail, to see them all in a fresh light.

For a while it seemed that they could never again so present themselves.
The light as she gazed into it was endless, multiplying upon itself;
drawing her away from all known things. Life henceforth would more fully
attain her, lived as at this moment she knew it could be lived,
uncalculating from the deeps of a masked splendour.

It would not last. Already the strange moments were linking themselves
with kindred strange moments in the past. But like them it set itself
while it lasted over against the rest of her experience, with a
challenge.

It was growing steadily darker.

“It’s a thunderstorm.”

“I think so. The air is most oppressive.”

Miss Holland came and stood at her own half of the window so that they
were side by side and visible to each other. Above the curtain screening
the lower part of their window, they looked across to the white pillar
of candle. A flash of bright daylight lit up the grey street, and soon
the wheels of the storm rumbled high up across the sky. Heavy drops fell
slowly, increasing until they came in a torrent.

“That will carry it off.”

“Sometimes I don’t mind storms. I don’t to-day.”

They held their places at the window, watching the pale lightning light
the rain, hearing the thunder follow more swiftly. Presently a blinding
white fire and a splintering crash just above their heads made them both
exclaim.

As the thunder rolled bumping and snarling away across the sky they saw
the figure of a man appear from the darkness beyond the candle and stand
pressed close to the window with arms upstretched and laid against the
panes. Through the sheets of rain his face was not quite clear. But he
was dark and pale and tall and shouting at the storm. So he lived there
alone. The storm was a companion. He was alone and aware. Had he seen
the new people across the way?

A brilliant flash lit up the white face and its frame of heavy hair. The
dark eyes were looking straight across.

_Sayce_: and he lived _here_. Miriam drew back and sat down on the end
of her bed. This queer alley was then the place in all London in which
to live. He had found it for himself. Was he dismayed at the sight of
philistines invading the retreat where he lived hidden amongst unseeing
villagers? She vowed not again to look across when there was any sign of
his presence. He should be invaded without knowing it. She would see him
go in and out, see without seeing: screening him even from her own
observation. And all the time his presence would cast its light upon
their frontage.

“The strange room,” said Miss Holland, who also had left the window,
“has a tenant as eccentric as itself.”

“Do you know who it _is_?” Miriam stole back to the window to learn the
disposition of the door of his house. He had disappeared. It was a side
door, next to the cobbler’s window, like theirs next to the
stonemason’s.

“It is Sayce. E. W. Sayce ... the poet.”

“Indeed?” exclaimed Miss Holland delightedly. “A poet. That is charming.
Quite enchanting to feel that poetry is being written so near at hand.”

She was peering out, as if looking for verses on the air between the
opposing windows. She had no feeling of shyness in mentioning his work.
If unobserved she could catch him at it, she would note his methods.
Perhaps he would sit there at work in his window. But the least they
could do, having innocently become witnesses of his workshop, would be
to stand off and leave him free.

To disperse Miss Holland’s concentration, she rushed into speech.

“I’ve known him by sight for years, wandering about in a black cloak.
One night I was strolling along the strip of pavement round one of the
Square gardens. It was quite dark under the trees between the stretches
of lamplight, and there was nobody about. Suddenly in a patch of light I
was confronted by a tall figure, also strolling. We both stood quite
still, staring into each other’s eyes with thoughts far away, each
taking in only the fact of an obstruction. Then I realised it was Sayce.
I can’t remember how we got past each other. One of us must presently
have plunged into the gutter. But, looking back, it seems as if we
walked through each other.”

Miss Holland produced a series of bird-like sounds, each seeming in turn
to refuse to make a word.

The storm was moving on and the strange light, lifting as the sky
cleared, left a blankness.


                                   7

Later in the morning the light from a clear high sky broke up the
harmony between the things in the room and set a pallor upon the green
pathway to the window. It was the end of a story, the story of the first
morning—a single prolonged moment that would last.

It was over, and here she was, conscious of her surroundings.

Something must be swiftly woven up with the treasure she held in her
hands or she would drop into the crude spaces of this midday light and
lose the threads. She heard Miss Holland, as if in response to her need,
leave the little back room and go upstairs. It would be in order, the
little back room. A room apart, like Mag’s and Jan’s old sitting-room in
Kenneth Street that used to seem such a triumph of elaborate living. Her
spirit went forth and nested incredulously within the little back room.

“It will mean growing plump and sedentary. Not wanting to sail forth and
see people. Wanting people to come to me, hear the tinkle of my
tea-things, sink into the world a bright little afternoon-tea scene
makes on Sundays for people who have no centre.”

By Jove, yes. One of the reasons why household people like the odd,
homeless sort is that they make them realise the snugness by revelling
in it.

Miss Holland was audible upstairs rattling saucepan lids. They were to
feed up there, kept warm by the ugly oil-cooker, and reserve the back
room for elegant life and tea-parties.

Already Miss Holland had made breakfast on the cooker. By means of some
mechanism in its interior. Interesting to explore. One day she would
explore it. Find out its secret and then to be quite sure, ask Miss
Holland. It stood out, as she thought of it, as the most fascinating
thing upstairs, next to the way the light came through the long lattice;
and the shadows upon the slopes of the roof.

“You shall teach me,” she heard her own sleepy voice over the welcome
tray; “how to kick——”

“How to kick a cooper!” Miss Holland had trilled without a moment’s
hesitation, and, after they had laughed: “Kippers require _very_ little
in the way of cooking.” A memory of Eleanor: “’Addocks don’t ’ardly
_need_ any cooking de-er.”

She tipped herself off the little bed that made such an excellent sofa,
and strolled into the back room.

It was darker than ever. Round and round she looked, taking in the
things. Looking for more, and different, things. Absurdly half believing
that the things she saw would change, would somehow become different
under her eyes.

Green serge curtains, patched and faded, hung dismally on either side of
the window. Two easy-chairs covered with faded threadbare cretonne
filled, with their huge ugliness, the main part of the floor-space.
Between them stood a stained and battered bamboo table and an ancient
footstool, worn colourless. Pushed into a corner was a treadle
sewing-machine, and at its side a small round table bearing a tarnished
lamp. That was all. That was all there would be in their sitting-room.

The worst was that nothing shone. Nothing reflected light. It suddenly
struck her as an odd truth that nothing of Miss Holland’s reflected
light. Even the domed wooden cover of the sewing-machine, which was
polished and should have shone, was filmed and dull.

The only suggestion of life in the room would be the backs of the books
stacked in piles on the mantelshelf. She found relief for her oppression
in the minute gilded titles of some of the books. They gleamed faintly
in the gloom, minute threads of gold.

Well, here it was, the lovely little sitting-room....

She moved about in it, still unable quite to exorcise the idea that it
would change. With eyes cast down, she made her way from part to part,
imagined varnish on the floor. Flowers set about. People, hiding the
chairs. It would be pain to bring friends in. Cruelty to ask anyone to
endure the room for an hour.

There would be no tea-parties.

When her attention returned, Miss Holland’s dead belongings had changed
a little. They were forgotten and familiar. Here, after all, was a room
and a window, and the things were sufficient. Unobtrusive, like dowdy
clothes. She remembered how, between-whiles, she loved dowdiness. How
her heart went forth with mysterious desire to thoroughly dowdy,
flat-haired women. Women who had no style but their set of beliefs.

Something of this kind must have drawn her to Miss Holland, even while
she saw her only as a possible sharer of expenses....

Miss Holland had been brought by her star. She was moving about on the
upstair landing in her heavy, light-footed way, busy and intent. She
coughed. Her cough had exactly the sound of her voice.

Would it be possible to go through life in the state of permanent
protest expressed by that eloquent cough? For a day perhaps. But a
night’s sleep plays strange tricks.

Yet the shock of the furniture had confirmed her sense that something
was being offered. Low-toned, apparently gloomy, yet having a strange
fascination, a _quality_. If she put forth no resistance it might be the
most exciting, revealing, adventure she had yet had. It was an offer; an
offer of the chance of becoming a postulant châtelaine.


                                   8

“But you make tea with a _charm_! This is Nectar!”

Miriam stood with the teapot in her hand, looking forward to everlasting
Sundays of making tea for Miss Holland and charming her with
conversation. They had talked all the afternoon without weariness. The
day stretched back long and eventful, full of talk and laughter, to the
far-off episode of the morning. Filled with memories, the rooms had
grown dear. And the evening lay ahead, secure, if they chose to remain
shut up here together. Then a week apart. No evenings. Miss Holland
coming home late and tired. There would be only the week-ends for the
continuation of their talk.

“The fiancée came to tea yesterday,” she said, unawares and stopped.
Miss Holland, surely, must be weary of her stories. “I must stop,” she
said, “finish my tea and absolutely, really unpack.”

“By no means, mademoiselle, having uttered the fascinating word, you
must continue.”

Forcing back a smile, Miriam went on with her story. Marvelling at a
world that had left this woman to loneliness. Lonely as she was, she
scanned life unenviously, placed herself at once sympathetically within
the experience of anyone presented to her. It was as if she herself had
had vast experience. Yet in her life there were only those two parts;
the vicarage home until she was thirty-five and then the life in London.
She had brought with her all the old-fashioned ideas, and yet, without
being a socialist, had a forward-going mind, a surer certainty of social
transformation than was to be found amongst the Lycurgans.

“I told her I hoped she knew she was marrying the best man in the
world.”

“Delightful. You made her very happy.”

“Although extremely strong-minded and in the midst of a successful
career, she is a girl, the English girl in the midst of the divine
illusion.”

“Why Divine _illusion_? So contradictory.”

“Well, illusion because its picture of what life with the beloved will
be is mistaken. Divine because it reveals to both the best in themselves
and each other, what they really _are_, without knowing it until then.”

“Y ... es,” said Miss Holland, clasping the edge of the table and gazing
out through the window. “It is unfortunate that it is so frequently
doomed to die and inevitably to change.”

“Never. In women, absolutely never, once it’s there.”

“Ah, in _women_.”

“She’s an amazing person. Can fall out of a moving cab without being
hurt. She said, of course, that she knew. But wanted to hear all about
him.”

“You were able to render her a charming service.”

“No. It frightened me for her sake that she wanted to talk about him. Of
course, she thought me tongue-tied. I was. But only because feeling that
her best realisation was just that moment with me. If we had talked,
there would have been a wilderness of detail, and the moment gone
without taking its full effect.”

“Yet it is most natural that she should have wished to talk of him.”

“It frightened me. She had a charming white hat.”

Though she went on for a while humouring Miss Holland’s desire for
pictures and stories, she now framed her discourse in ready-made
phrases, and was interested in seeing the way they made effects such as
she herself had often gathered up from heard conversations, and in
discovering how they fitted a shape of thought about life and led on
automatically to other phrases, little touches that finished them off;
till she began to believe that life was expressible in these forms of
thought which yet she knew left everything untouched.

But the centre of her interest, the thing that was making her talk grow
absent and careless, and consist more and more of sounds in response to
Miss Holland’s lingering consideration of all that had pleased her, was
the way that unawares during their long sitting the room had come to
life. Nothing now looked dingy. There was a warm brightness; within the
air.

When their talk had drifted to a pause and she was alone, she ruefully
regarded the day’s interchange. Shadowless only by being an excursion
into a world she had long ago ceased to inhabit. By using only materials
that would make common ground, she had woven a fabric of false
impressions.

Again and again as they talked the set of circumstances that were the
zest of her personal life had risen before her, in terms such as Miss
Holland would use in describing them, and made a preoccupation that had
kept her a bright and interesting talker. Yet Miss Holland was aware.
Though in her eagerness for every word she had shown only awareness of a
different reach and different perceptions, she knew, without recognising
its nature, that between them there was a gulf.

To keep back even half-accepted points of view was not fair play.
Brought uneasiness. Yet why tell her of things that might not happen?




                              CHAPTER III


                                   1

Serenity had retreated outdoors, and increased there. To-day, in the
space between the week’s work and the week-end with its pattern
ready-set, was serenity immeasurable; given by autumn. Autumn gleaming
beyond the park railings through sunlit mist.

Autumn had accumulated unawares. But this meeting with it had begun
early this morning in the balmy stillness of the square. Just when the
lame old woman had crossed the street. Cheerfully; unhampered by heat or
cold or wind.

It had made the happiness of the morning’s work, its gaiety and ease.
And now at its midday fulness it made the visit of the Brooms—so central
as she had sat at her ledgers—retreat into the background. This still
air passing into her spirit, the great trees standing in it, thick with
coloured leaves upon the spread of misty grass, stamping their image,
would remain when the rest of the holiday was forgotten.

Yet the Brooms, both Grace and Florrie, belonged to the unfathomable
depth of autumn. Not to its wholeness. To single features. Any single
feature contemplated brought them there to look and love. Only in
London. They belonged to London from the first. To the heavy, tinted
trees. To the first breath of exciting, on-coming cold, distilling the
radiance of the sun-warmed earth. To the mauve twilights of fogless
November days. To Christmas, and to June with spring and summer together
in the scent of sweet briar wafted across their suburban garden; making,
in its small green space with masonry visible all about, a sharper sense
of summer than was to be found in the open country. They belonged to
every feature of the London weather. Taking the sting from the worst and
adding brightness to the best.

But this opening with its view of the short broad path belongs to no
one. The sight of it is always a stepping forward into nowhere with eyes
on the low fence at the end, the gap, the two poplars pluming up on
either side, making it a stately portal to the green expanses beyond.

The poplars say:

   Les yeux gris
   Vont au paradis.

And the picture remains after the high railings have come back again.
Its message brings more light than there is into the thickets of shrubs
and bushes, and takes the suggestion of sadness from the stretches of
grass dulled even in sunlight by the thick autumn air.

_Les yeux gris_; in spring and autumn.

But most clearly in autumn when the air of the park is rich with
outbreathed summer. Answering everything with the unanswerable beauty of
autumn.


                                   2

The afternoon streets were bustling with farewells to the week. Out
across them went her own glances of farewell, making them newly dear and
keeping them still echoing about her when she arrived to be alone by
daylight for the first time in the ancient stillness of the house.

She hurried upstairs to take possession and prepare for the coming of
the Brooms.

The stillness was absolute. New in her experience and disquieting. Her
old room had always greeted her. Had been full at once with the sound
and colour of her life.

This stillness was impermeable. Wrapped within it the rooms disowned
her. Maliciously, now that they had her to themselves, they announced
the fact behind the charms of the week of settling in. Bereavement. Not
only of her self, left behind irrevocably in the old room, but also now
that she surveyed it undisturbed by Miss Holland’s supporting presence,
of the bright motley of her outside life. Everything had thinned, was
going thinly forward without depth of background. Against these ancient
rooms she was powerless.

If she were living alone in them? She imagined herself living alone in
them, and at once the tide of her life began to rise and flow out and
change them. They dropped their ancient preoccupations and turned
friendly faces towards her, promising welfare.

But as long as she stayed in them accompanied they would acquire no
depth. Their depth was the level of her relationship to Miss Holland.
Without her she was lost in them, a moving form whose sounds impinged
less surely upon their stillness than the sounds of the mice scampering
over the attic floor.

All through the week in coming home late each evening to the certainty
of talk, to hurried sleep in the orderliness created by Miss Holland,
there had been a glad sense of life renewed. New, exciting life,
bringing at first the surprise of an escape homeward that had left the
London years unreal; a tale told busily day by day to drown the voices
calling her home. That first sense of home-coming had vanished, lost
among the entertainments of unfamiliar ways of living. But it had been
at work all the week. All the week, serving as space for continuous
talk, the rooms had been changing, growing larger, expanding together
with the life lived there, a wealth falling into her hands too swiftly
for counting.

Apart from that life they were nothing. They stood defined, mean and
dismal, crushing her. And for these mean and dismal rooms, set above a
thick ascending darkness where other lives were hemmed and crushed, she
had sacrificed the spacious house with its unexplored distances and its
perpetual familiar strangeness.

And haunting each room, as in solitude she surveyed it, was the mocking
image of Sheffield.


                                   3

And at this moment Miss Holland, in half-holiday mood, would be
buoyantly pacing some chosen part of the glad open wilderness of London.
Well had she known what she escaped in refusing to deal with Sheffield.
But she did not know that life set to weekly meetings with him was
darkened not only because he was “odious,” but also because the paying
of rent tore life up by the roots.

The payment of Mrs. Bailey’s bills, looked back to now, seemed to be all
a single transaction: a chance meeting on the stairs, a hurried handing
of money, eye to eye, smiling. A single guilty moment and then a
resumption of a relationship not based on money. It had marked, not the
passage of time, but its rest, at an unchanging centre. Paying rent to
this man would be counting off time; and a weekly reminder of the
payment for life going on all over the world. To be obliged at the best
moment of each week to face Sheffield, acknowledging another week passed
in the world as he saw it, would be to fight without weapons against the
mocking reflection in the mirror he held up.

Putting off the ordeal until the last moment, she prepared for the
coming of the Brooms. Reflected in the long mirror was her gay carefree
self, the self that bore in the eyes watching it from their distant
suburb, a charmed life; offering no resting-place for the pity they
wanted to bestow. It would remain when they had gone, and would carry
off the rent-paying with a high hand.

They were coming. Soon their voices would sound about her in the
different rooms.


                                   4

It was her happiness that had hailed them from afar and summoned them
without a thought of how these new quarters would appear in their eyes.
In the eyes of Mrs. Philps, dressed for an afternoon call and now
already on her way....

Unless she said Miss Holland was at home and ill and at once took them
to the club, they would come up, through the smells and gloom of the
passage and stairway, expecting at least a bright, flowered-chintz
flat....

The ordeal of facing Sheffield had now turned into a reprieve. She ran
downstairs and knocked peremptorily at his door, which opened
immediately upon him shirt-sleeved, his sparse hair in wisps about a
preoccupied face. His private face, caught unawares, reflecting thoughts
turned upon detail. After all, he had a personal life, perplexities.
There was nothing in the poor thing to dread. It was idiotic to hold him
in mind as waiting there behind the door for her coming.

His eager, inattentive voice, bidding her upstairs, sounded about her as
she stated her errand. She went up the uncarpeted stairs to set the
rapid tapping of her shoes against the influences brooding in the
ancient gloom.

“My _mother_ is upstairs,” he said from behind, in his mocking
sing-song. Hearing it again, Miriam thought of it as a silence, with
mocking speech extending before and after; the uniform sound of his
mind. A good mind, ill-fed and circling. Recognisable English
prejudices, soured.

“_This_ is Miss Henderson,” he cried gleefully closing the door behind
her, the door of a room already, with its coffee-coloured lace curtains
keeping out the shadowed light of the court, in a heavy twilight. The
same voice, feebler, but deeper and flexibly rumbling, came from a mass
risen up at the fireside, a mass of draperies about a tall form
unsteadily bowing and capped with ponderous lace.

The voice rumbled on while Sheffield put a chair for her, and it seemed
at the end of a few minutes that she had been sitting there
indefinitely, listening to a flow of speech that communicated nothing
but its tone. Yet she had spoken. She remembered the sound of her own
voice in the room, the voice of all her family. And there was the
semblance of conversation, Sheffield standing by, chanting refrains,
presiding. Triumphantly, as if he had purposely brought her to face and
be overwhelmed by their united voices.

She braced herself to resist the influence of this life-stuff seething
bitterly in its corner. But it cast shadow everywhere. Sitting smiling
and inattentive, she heard the continuation backwards through the years,
through all the years she had known and further back into those
differently lovely years her parents had known, of these bitter
life-shadowing voices. They went forward too, shadowing the future,
until death should silence them.

Opposition would be futile. Her words would fly like chaff before the
wind of their large bitterness, a general arraignment, she gathered,
growing used to the angry sing-song, of everything in the world.

She thought of the autumn sunlight, held it in her mind, thought of it
as existing in their minds and in the minds of everyone in London
to-day; the hint of an answer, the moment one paused to look at it, to
every problem in the world. But these two were not perceiving the
sunlight in her mind. Aware of her submissive attention, they were
growing more explicit, going into detail, one against the other, cantori
and decani. Mother and son, bitterness embodied, thought out, added to,
grown old behind a close hedge of contempt for everything _new_.

They had a sort of clear-sighted observation. Humanity, they would say
if they had the words, doesn’t change _essentially_. But to get anywhere
with that conviction they ought to be religious. To be in a group. They
were cut off from the religion that goes with the attitude. An amateur
church, self-ended. They were the offshoots of the worst kind of
Protestantism. Protestant enlightenment in a vacuum....

Sadness grew in her with the sense of the utter absence in herself of
anything wherewith to stem the bitter flood. The refuge she was taking
in apparent acceptance was a condemnation. Leaving her less than they.

When at last the rent was paid and she was free to go, such a length of
life had been passed in the sad room, so much unfamiliar experience
lived through, that the parting was like a parting with old friends.
Unawares, she found herself voicing regret for her forced departure and
promising to come again. She felt her future divided between the two
houses set so closely side by side. They smiled, pleased. Stood close,
flattering and fondling her with their voices. They had had a happy
hour. The old woman came to the top of the stairs to speed her on her
way. Standing on the landing with escape at hand, she had a moment of
hesitation. Voicelessly she cancelled her compliance, stood free and
remote and felt as she went how their scorn followed her, scorn of
anything that could not ring against their hardness any hardness of its
own.

Outside in the court, she paced to-and-fro between her door and the
entrance to the main street, waiting in the free air of her own world
for the coming of her friends. But no oblivion could draw out the
bitterness folded into her memory. And though the voices of the friends
would drown the sound of that murderous chanting, the thing behind it,
the thing she had recognised in Sheffield a week ago was something
ultimate. Inexorable; a flourishing part of the world’s life not
hitherto clearly known to her, all the time taking effect in the sum
total. Life being hated, seen only as material for bitter laughter.

She looked up at the neat respectable house-front, the best in the
court, at the shrouded windows of the room where still her spirit
lingered. Next week she would stand firm and pay the rent at the door.
Better still, the inspiration came together with the sound of the
Brooms’ voices behind her, slip it into the letter-box. The Sheffields
were banished. The scene ahead held now no shadow but the weekly call of
the raucous-voiced, knocker-slamming men from the Snow-white laundry
that had for so long impersonally fetched and returned her things,
losing nothing, and now turning out to be linked to its delighted
clients not as she had imagined by some fresh, kindly, middle-aged
woman, but by these grubby cigarette-smoking, impatient men with the
voices of mutinous slaves.


                                   5

It was not only Mrs. Philps who was dumb. The girls, too, came up in
pensive amazement through the darkness and smells of the lower floors to
arrive silent on the bleak top landing. Miriam displayed the rooms,
making much, as they stood about gathering up with trained eyes the
mournful details, of the general loftiness, the large windows, the many
doors. On the way up to the attic she remembered that she had not shown
the painted ceiling.

Since the first shock of Miss Holland’s furniture she had forgotten the
existence of the ancient splendour brooding above. Each going into the
little room had brought the hope of finding it changed, less gloomy,
less dull and lifeless. Until accepting, she had ceased to see anything
but the light travelling through the square window to die. Reappearing
now in her mind, the faded ceiling restored her first vision of the
rooms. The way they had seemed porous to the sound and sunlight of the
open.

Her visitors stood in the doorway of the attic looking in vain for
something upon which their eyes might rest. In her half of the bedroom,
kept till the last, they would find what they sought, feel radiating
there the more brightly for their coming, something of what it was that
held her life entranced and held them to herself. She, too, would feel
it; the incommunicable quality that crept sooner or later into her
surroundings, deep and central within the air. It was there waiting for
everyone, within their own surroundings. But so many seemed to ignore
it, and others, chafing, imagined it elsewhere, far off.

The girls made straight for the bureau, admiring, repeating phrases of
warm admiration in tones whose relief voiced all their earlier
embarrassment.

“Pretty,” said Mrs. Philps, who had come down the room to look.
“Imitation Chippendale.”

Glancing round, she brought her eyes quickly back to the bureau, at
which the girls were gazing as if afraid to look elsewhere. Joining them
near the window, to which presently all three had turned as if in the
hope of finding material for comment outside, Miriam remembered Sayce.
Sayce would enlighten them. The sight of his chosen dwelling-place would
bring them, nearer than anything she might try to say, a vision of her
world not as a thing pitiful compared to the world they knew, but as
something differently real.

“Across the way,” she said lightly, “in rooms exactly matching these, is
a poet, a great poet.” She watched Mrs. Philps glance across to the
opposite house.

“He might have an _office_ there perhaps,” said Mrs. Philps with an
expression Miriam had seen on the faces of gentlewomen doing distasteful
kitchen jobs, lips held in, the upper lip drawn slightly back showing
the teeth.

She hurried them off to the club.

Out in the street, the three were at once acting upon her in their old
way, revealing the power built up in their sheltered lives. How far,
with their untaxed strength, they outdid her in swiftness of
observation. How well they knew and how warmly they cherished every
stock and stone upon the highways of London. They had due knowledge. But
it was knowledge enclosed, multiplying only upon itself.

Vainly as they carried her along, surrounding her, accustomed to her
silence and unresentful, she sought for a clear centre where these old
friends and the friends with whom her life was now involved, might meet
and understand each other. Philistia. The mental immobility of
Philistines. But Philistines within their own world were rich and racy.
Their critics in failing to savour the essence of middle-class life,
missed the essence of all life whatsoever. They feared the _power_ of
the Philistines. Their power of stifling freedom. Freedom for what?
Freedom, unless people became samurai, slid down into a pit. Perhaps
these clever scornful ones, the moderns and the Lycurgans, were all
escaped Philistines?

Hearing the life in their voices, she loved them as they were,
unchangeable. Through philistinism lay perhaps one of the ways of
salvation. No. In the midst of the happiness they brought there was
always a lurking shadow. The shadow of incompatibility; of the
impossibility of being at once bound and free. The garden breeds a
longing for the wild; the wild a homesickness for the garden. Is there
no way of life where the two can meet?


                                   6

And here, she realised as they went up the wide staircase, the broad way
leading easily to the destruction of home-made ideas, was a small
beginning of such a way of life. Within it the Brooms were small and
helpless. Travellers in an unknown land, not yet able to take their
bearings. They would recover. Later on, at home, they might make their
severe comments, but unawares the range of their vision would have been
enlarged. Gleefully she felt their irrevocable experience as they stood
ranged just as they had been at the door of her sitting-room, in the
doorway of the club smoking-room looking in upon women, unmistakable
gentlewomen, lounging insouciantly. Representing not names and families
but selves in their own right.

The drawing-room was again crowded, and again there was one free table
near a window looking out upon the stately autumn trees and upon it tea
set ready, waiting for them as the result of the order they had not seen
her give in the hall. It was a perfect moment. Here they were at last
after all the years, her guests at a table of her own. And they were
much more than at home and happy. They were at court, in the heart of
splendours. The girls admired openly. And Mrs. Philps, whose affection
for her had flourished upon a background of pity and half-indulgent
disapproval, withdrew all their past battlings in one glance, arch,
bridling, altogether delighted and approving.

But in the perfect moment a light had gone up that showed Miriam a new
self and a new world. It was she, not they, who was abroad in a strange
land. She who was travelling ahead beyond recall. The decoration
bestowed upon her by Mrs. Philps was already askew, not suiting her, not
desired. The understanding exchanged between them was of a pact she
would never willingly fulfil. The women’s pact. And while dispensing
tea, talking as they liked her to talk, making a little drama for their
delight, she privately thanked life for turning on this light in the
presence of friends who, cherishing her smallest expressiveness, left
her free to survey this new aspect of things whilst the light was still
at its first brilliance.

A disquieting brilliance. For her initiation as a hostess was so slight.
To sit thus, irresponsibly dispensing club fare, was the merest hint and
shadow of hostess-ship. Yet it had been enough to make the world anew.

To feel charming, to want to be charming, to join for a moment the great
army of hostesses as an equal was proud experience. But it was also a
sort of death. For it included letting everything in the world go by.
Feeling ready to do or say anything that would contribute to the comfort
and happiness of one’s guests. In Mrs. Philps’ smile there had been,
unknown to Mrs. Philps, the recognition of another victim joining the
conspiracy of the regiment. And she had recognised aright.

For here, complete and full-grown within herself, was one alert to avoid
anything leading to discord. Aware of convictions and points of view,
personal feelings, everything that made one’s own intimate vision of
life, shelved; receding and falling as if shamed, into the loneliest
background of consciousness. If all this and much more, things revealed
and sliding away too swiftly be caught and examined, were the price of
merely entertaining friends at a club, what of the _real_ hostess? What
of the millions of women serving life sentences? Hostesses not only to
friends but to households, willing or unwilling humbugs for life.

Yet the game is enchanting. And brings within an immense loneliness a
sort of freedom. That was there distinctly. A sort of enforced freedom.
To have nothing oneself. To seek only the being of others, regardless of
their quality as persons; feel only their weight as mere humanity.
Humanity seen thus as guests without distinction brought back the wonder
of life renewed. Pitiful and splendid. If these strange large beings
taking tea were thieves and murderers, the joy of tending them would be
the same. Perhaps greater. It was more thrilling to wait upon Florrie
and Mrs. Philps, whose lives she shared only imaginatively, than upon
Grace, with whom she had a sort of identity.




                               CHAPTER IV


                                   1

Swaggering along the middle of the empty pavement, the long cape of his
short overcoat swinging like the cloak of a stage villain. With bent
head he is playing his part to an imagined audience. He knows nothing of
the contrast between the small figure and the big arrogance.

He swung round into Flaxman’s Court, and Miriam, following, paused for
joy, mentally summoning heralds to precede and a brass band to follow
him, so stately with head held high and plunging gait controlled to a
military strut, was his entry into the humble street. He stopped just as
she moved aside to gain her door, swung right about and bore down upon
her, bowing, slouch hat in hand.

“_Allow_ me!” a deep hollow stage voice.

She halted surprised. He was close by her side, his hat replaced with a
flourishing movement that released from his person the thick odour of
stale smoke, the permanent smell of the ground floor. The grotesque
figure, now crouching, all dilapidated cape and battered sombrero, over
the keyhole, was the owner of the windowful of stone and marble.

“Enter madam,” he declaimed, flinging open the door. Thanking him, she
moved into the passage and was going on towards the stairs, but the
hollow tones broke forth again, reverberating in the narrow space made
dark by the closing of the door:

“I am greatly honoured,” he was saying, “by this event.”

She turned perforce. He was again profoundly bowing. She could just
discern the dim outlines, the cape winged out by his deep
obsequiousness.

“You will, I trust,” the voice was meditative, suggesting words ahead to
be delivered with care: “not deem me intrewsive in expressing in your
gracious presence,” indeed, Miriam felt, her presence was gracious
compared to this exhalation of concentrated odours stifling and making
her long to be away and up the stairs, “my respect and furthermore the
great and happy en’ancement arriving upon this house by your coming,
with your lady friend, _also_ most gracious, to abide beneath the roof
that shelters my spouse and myself.”

“We like being here,” said Miriam, politely, smiling into the darkness.

“Lady, I thank you for your graciousness.”

“Not at all,” she said, and felt him silent for an instant before an
evidently unexpected lapse from gracious ladyhood.

This was all most dreadful. His tone had been deep and broken; touching.
Behind his bombast was something genuine, making high demands upon her,
including her with Miss Holland, crowning her as a châtelaine. She had
undeceived him, spoken brusquely, revealed her different state.

“I am glad,” she added quickly, in Miss Holland’s most stately manner,
reflecting that a gracious aloofness was an excellent protection, “that
you find us pleasant neighbours.”

“More than that,” came the low broken voice, and her eyes, used now to
the dim light, saw that he bowed more deeply than ever. “No poor words
of mine could avail to express the felicity experienced in the presence
of beauty and graciousness. I would have you to know:” he reared his
head and spoke upwards to the staircase, “that I am a repairer of
statoos.”

Ah, here was the secret, the real origin of the attack. But it was
interesting. A queer trade.

“You have made all those things in your window,” she said to encourage
him, and standing a little nearer to the stairs composed herself to
endure and listen.

“I am a repairer of statoos. But let not that mislead you. These hands,”
he upheld and waved them in the air, “recall to pristine loveliness
_only_ the classic. In preference, the _Greek_.” He was breathing
quickly, angrily. Poor man, without an audience. In his whole
circumstances, no audience. Her interest in his work changed to a desire
to give him freedom from minding.

“It would be dreadful to waste your time repairing rubbish,” she said
quickly and added, suddenly feeling that he was strong enough for an
attempted truth, “only people sometimes love rubbish _very_ much. For
them it is not rubbish.”

“Let them love their rubbish, gracious lady, let them love—mistake me
not. I have no quarrel with love. The love of the Saviour, the greatest
of all lovers, redeems the statoo badly made to honour it. But not to
Perrance, not to _Perrance_ let them come if their rubbish be broken.
The classical, the Greek, that alone of the work of man’s hands can
command the love of Perrance.

“So great a love that he has,” he drew a deep breath, “it may surprise
you but it is nevertheless trew, he has mastered the characters of the
Greek tongue it_self_.”

“Greek is very difficult,” said Miriam.

“He can, in the rendering of an account for ’Ermes repaired, equally as
well use the original _Greek_.” He threw open the door leading to his
little shop, but with no air of inviting her to enter. He wanted to
provide a clearer light for her contemplation of the marvel he
represented?

The light revealed weakness. Large watery eyes fierce with self-conceit,
grown old in unchallenged self-conceit. An angry mouth, tremulous
beneath branching buccaneer moustachios. He was waiting for responsive
wonder, ready the moment it should be spoken to break forth again. His
violence calmed her pity. He was proof against the whole world.
Determined to escape she smiled approval and remarked in the voice of
departure on the amount of industry represented by the house as a whole.

“Stay,” he cried, “yet one moment,” and disappeared into the shop, to
return in an instant with some small object clasped, hidden by his cape,
to his breast.

“I have here,” he patted his breast with a free hand, “a small work, a
work of my own hands, dedicated as is seeming and suitable, to
_womankind_. Deign, gracious lady, to accept the same as a token of
gratitude and esteem for your presence under this roof.” With a deft
movement he flung back the cape and presented the hidden object. It was
the alabaster finger.

“Oh, no!” Miriam cried. “You must not give me _that_.” But he was
embarrassed, holding it forth, his head bent, his voice once more low
and broken.

“Take, take,” he said, “I will not sell it and I shall find no recipient
more worthy. Take, I beg you.”

The heavy little block came into her hands. She gazed at it murmuring
appreciations, trying to thank him in the way he wanted to be thanked.
His eloquence was at an end. He bowed silently at each phrase, saying
only, when at last she turned to go, “Lady, I thank you.”

He had said his say.

But what of the future chance meetings? What could she give in return
for the burden of this gift, so much heavier than its weight in her
hands?


                                   2

On her way upstairs, pondering this disquieting confirmation of her
half-hearted candidature for the estate of dignified ladyhood, she saw
that the first floor rooms were open and the luggage disappeared from
the landing. Passing the door of the front room she caught a glimpse of
a young woman, her head pillowed on arms outstretched upon a small bare
table, talking and sobbing in a strangled cockney voice. The light from
the large window fell bright amongst the coiled masses of her brown
hair, shone through their upper fluffiness, making a nimbus. She was
young and slight; an air of refinement in the set of her black dress.
Come to live _here_. Seeking now, of course, stranded alone in two rooms
of this dingy aged house, her old self, life as she had known it before
she was isolated with him. The absent him she was so fully revealing.

This was marriage, thought Miriam, going on up the stairs, a bright
young couple welcomed by Sheffield for being so nice and respectable.
Tragedy; the beginnings before its dry-eyed acceptance, of womanly
tragedy, the loss of self in the procession of unfamiliar unwanted
things. In the company of a partner already reimmersed in his own
familiar life.

There was weakness in such public careless abandonment. And subject for
the mirth of cynics. But strength, too, strength of which cynics,
comfortable well-fed people in armchairs, had no inkling. The strength
was broken for a moment against the walls of a man’s massive
unconsciousness. Upon that the woman would be avenged; breaking fiercely
through in her search for something in the world about her to respond to
her known self with its all-embracing radiance. That strange
indestructible _radiance_, discoverable in all women, even in those who
professed the utmost callousness....


                                   3

How bright, how unfairly upon a gay and sunlit peak seemed the lives on
the top floor compared to those being lived below! How mean it seemed to
be going eagerly up to talk to Miss Holland, with an evening ahead full
of varied enchantments. Miss Holland to come back to when it was over;
for more talk.

The door of her room stood open, twilight within. Miss Holland was at
home. In the sitting-room. There would be lamplight, heralding the
brighter radiances ahead.

The sitting-room was almost dark. The light of a guttering candle set on
a chair struck dimly upwards over Miss Holland in her flannel
dressing-gown; mending an ancient skirt. Her hair in wisps round a face
harshly lit from below, and heavy with shadows. The reek of spilt
paraffin came from the small stove in the fireplace. It was only an
instant’s vision, rapidly erased by Miss Holland’s surprised greeting
and eager rearrangements. But the picture of her intense private
concentration on gloomy economies had added itself to the scene
downstairs.

While Miss Holland cleared away, Miriam retreated to her bedroom and set
Perrance’s gift down in several places in turn. Everywhere it refused to
harmonise. The delicate elegant finger suggested a life moving in
refined paths towards extinction; an effigy of that conscious refinement
that speaks more clearly than anything else of the ugliness of
dissolution. In this room so warm with life there was no place for a
hint from the tomb.

   “Ah, mon enfant, tout cela _pourrira_.”
   “Oui, mon père, mais ce n’est pas encore pourri.”

She went back to the gloomy sitting-room eager to communicate to Miss
Holland the newly revealed life of the household.

“M’no,” said Miss Holland, “the man Perrance I have not so far seen. His
wife I fear is a poor thing. A countrywoman, from Devonshire. London
conditions, though I gather she has lived here ever since her marriage,
are too much for her. And it is only too evident that she does not
recognise the necessity for hygiene. Everything in their quarters is, I
fear, most unwholesome. And to make matters worse, they keep, like so
many childless Londoners of that class, innumerable _cats_. I fear she
rarely bestirs herself. He, I understand, brings in all foods. And
requires a great deal of cookery. She complains in a mopy, resigned way,
about _that_. I fear they do not agree any too well. There are, very
frequently, loud discussions going on when I come in at night.”

She spoke with disdainful rapidity, as if eager to make way for other
themes.

“He’s a freak, from a circus, the perfect mountebank. But there’s
something, as there always is in a charlatan.”

“I fear I’m no psychologist. I’ve not seen the man as yet, but I fear, I
_fear_ his voice sounds suspiciously _thick_. M—— you’ve seen him?”

“He’s given me that finger from the window. I suppose it’s a
paper-weight.”

Miss Holland was transformed. Flushed and frowning with incredulous
approval.

“But what a _charming_ tribute!” she cried. “_Indeed_, I am surprised.
Most certainly I should not have credited Perrance with so much
perception.”

“I wish he hadn’t. _I_ can’t live up to graceful attentions.”

“No need, no need.” She was speaking meditatively towards the shaded
lamp. “You have the secret of charm, an enchanting possession. Is it not
enough?”

“That’s an illusion. I haven’t.” She described the scene on the first
floor.

“Yes, yes, dear, dear,” interrupted Miss Holland, waving it away. “We
are in _strange_ surroundings. Those poor things are _not_ married. That
odious Sheffield who made their arrival an excuse for calling on me—I
did not tell you. Eh, he is odious,” she shook her head, childishly
screwing up her features. “_Odious_—believes, of course, that they
_are_. They are both hotel employés. It is one of those unfortunate
cases. And they are _quite_ without circumspection, talking loudly, with
open doors. The young man is a presentable fellow, nice-looking and
respectful in manner. He intends, I gather, to marry her. There is, of
course, an infant on the way.” Without waiting for response she waved
her glasses towards the mantelshelf.


                                   4

“I have been looking at your books. That Shoppenore is an abominable
fellow.”

“Oh, those old essays——”

“He permits himself the most unpardonable insolences.”

The châtelaine’s response to Schopenhauer. Yet since she had not simply
cut him and turned away, since she had read on and been disturbed, he
was not quite disposed of. Evidently, even for her, the bare fact of his
being no gentleman was not enough. She had thrown an indignant glance
and was waiting.

What would she do, if he were sturdily defended, wondered Miriam,
smiling at the thought of herself as champion of this man whose very
name brought a pang out of the past. For years she had forgotten him,
together with the reflections that had exorcised him. It would be a
weary business to recall the steps of that furious battle.

“He was most frightfully sincere.”

Miss Holland’s face turned a dull red. She had really suffered, then,
under the lash of those rhythmic phrases; a little believing. This was
an abyss. Here indeed was the worst Schopenhauer could do. His least
pardonable outrage. She felt the shock of it reflected along her own
nerves. It roused her to battle.

But as she felt her way back to the centre of the fray she found herself
once more siding with the man, fearing and hating the mere semblance of
woman. Its soft feebleness, its helpless blind strength in keeping life
going. Felt again all her old horror and loathing of femininity, still
faintly persisting. What was the answer to Schopenhauer? Swiftly seeking
she passed again the point where she had first realised the collapse of
the Lady, the absurdity, in the face of ordered thought, of oblivious
dignity and refinement.

“He was a Weary Willy. That is to say a pessimist. A man who attends, by
the way the schoolboy was right, only to the _feet_. Feet being, of
course, always of clay. He saw life for everybody, going from gold to
black, no escape, and each generation in turn fooled by nature, through
woman, into going on.”

“How beautiful upon the mountains,” whispered Miss Holland, “are the
feet——”

“Peace. Yes. But the staggering thing about all these men, the Hamlets
and the Schopenhauers, is that they don’t notice that people are
_miserable_ about being miserable. And uncomfortable, in varying
degrees, in wrong-doing. When they make up their philosophies of life
they leave out _themselves_. Like the people who talk of the vastness of
space and the ant-like smallness of humanity. If _one_ man, say
Schopenhauer, _sees_ quite clearly all the misery of life, and that it
ends, for everybody, in disease and pain and death, then there is
something in mankind that is not corruption.

“Then again all these thought-system people must have an illogical as
well as a logical side. A side where they don’t believe their own
systems. If they quite believed, instead of making a living out of their
bitterness they would make an end of _themselves_. But you know it’s
popular. There are lots of people who revel in it. Men particularly. It
makes them feel superior.

“And there’s another thing in these people. By the way they generally
have long _thin_ noses. Perhaps they don’t breathe properly. But the
great thing is that you must consider life _obscene_. You must look at
it from the outside, as shapes, helplessly writhing in the dark. If you
_see_ all this and Schopenhauer did, you grin and snort and stand aside.
Women, he proves, don’t see it. And so they _are_ obscenity, blind
servants of obscenity, forever.”

“Horrible. Horrible.”

“That doesn’t matter. It isn’t true. It’s words. Nothing can ever be
expressed in words.”




                               CHAPTER V


                                   1

Every friend to tea at the club is an event. Never-to-be-forgotten. What
each one says is written in my memory. And all of them are more real
there than on their own backgrounds. Simpler.

They are overwhelming, bringing both life and themselves; at large.
Shining; so that I want not to talk to them, but to keep them there in
place and contemplate them.

But for them it is dull. Perhaps embarrassing. They find me
empty-minded, distraite. And do not know why I am distraite. When they
go, there is no reason for asking them to come again, but my desire to
contemplate them.

Except Mrs. Orly.

Every moment in her presence is realisation. She babbles.... Has no
ideas. No self. Knows nothing about anyone. But redeems everyone.... God
can’t be worse than Mrs. Orly. And if she were on the judgment-seat,
everyone would be recklessly forgiven. With a flushed little face and
flashing eyes she would spank. Flare and scold. And then, pitiful
helping hands. Unscrupulously covering.

Having no self, she brings everyone a rich sense of self.

Most people, all the time, in every relationship, seek only themselves.
Past selves, if they are old....

Affection is joy in things past or things to come? Bereavement is losing
one’s deposits.... That would explain why old people always think the
past, the world of their own time, better than the one that is
developing under their eyes. We can take only what we have. Even from
genius. The accepting party must have within himself the same genius.
Otherwise, no taking what is given. There comes a new way of thinking; a
new world. But ultimately the changed world is the action of one’s own
spirit. The only sureness in things is the action of one’s own spirit.
Egoism. But egoism carried far enough....

Whoso would save his life must lose it. But not for the sake of saving
it. And first he must have a life he loves well enough to make it worth
losing. Perhaps all those big sayings of Christ are dangerous for small
people. So the Catholics won’t trust them with the Bible. The Bible let
loose means a crowd of uncultured little churches; fighting each other.

Insufficient egoism keeps people plaintive. That’s another line of
thought, but it joins. Egoism must be huge. Free from self.

Then I am the smallest thing I know. Caring only for the come and go of
days, and the promise of more days. There is not a soul I would
sacrifice myself for. Nor even Michael, in his helplessness. When I felt
that the world must stop to prevent his going to the Russian war, it was
myself I feared to lose. Otherwise I should want to stop the world for
all who go to be killed on battlefields. I do; a little. But that may be
fear.


                                   2

“You were a lovely person in your blue gown.” A lovely person in your
blue gown....

“You were a lovely person in your blue gown.”

For that moment, walking across the empty spaces of the large high room
full of blazing lights—that was when it was I felt him looking, and felt
myself not there but looking on, with his eyes—I was a lovely person in
a blue gown....

“You were a lovely person in your blue gown. Again you surprise me with
a new aspect. I’ve seen you look charming, in Miriam’s quiet way. Didn’t
know you could be splendid. Don’t fly out. It’s all right. I’m staying
friends. Honour bright. For the present.”

That was written in the study in some luminous interval, eyes on a
person crossing a room in a blue gown. Written on his principle of the
niceness of saying nice things and having them said.... He is right. It
works.

“You were a lovely person....”

Yet there is something wrong in his way of wanting effects, illusions.
Seeing through them even while he goes under to them. Outline and
surface, the lines of flowing draperies, carriage, the shape of a skull,
he sees as fine because he sees them emerging from a fire-mist and a
planet. Pitiful, and passing in their turn towards other forms. Yet
those he singles out are at once in a solemn compulsion. Comically
consecrated. Set somewhere between heaven and earth.

But for a while it is a real state ... changing you.

What a difference it made to the sitting here in the club smoking-room,
waiting for people to arrive. This might have been shivering loneliness,
nervous anticipation of coming guests. Instead, there was calm, easy
anticipation and forgetfulness. Yet even now he might be moving forward
to some fresh beginning that would set her definitely in the past.

Meanwhile she was launched in a tide flowing brightly to music....
Launched with her own hands still steering the fragile barque ... how to
continue the metaphor? ... the bright firelight was intruding another.
The launched barque was best, suggesting cool freedom and movement. If
it stayed in mind it would serve to shape the letter to be written
to-day or to-morrow. To-morrow it must be, with the full evening ahead
to be followed by the disappearance of the secret life in the
companionship of Miss Holland.

To-morrow at Wimpole Street, where perhaps already another letter would
have arrived....

The fragile barque; ships that pass in the Light. In sunlight. There is
no night. For those who are alive there is no darkness. Meetings and
meetings and meetings, and every time a new setting.

“You are being made. You’ve no idea how you are growing.”

Better to find out for oneself and be grateful. But he must always be
instructing.... Yet there was joy apart from him. Joy that had lived so
long in secret, flowing out now across the strange world of people and
events.

She blessed the club. Its gift at the moment when solitude had departed
from her home-life, of a new solitude; strange lives surrounding her
without pressure, and sometimes granting these large quiet moments.

The door opened upon Miss Holland....

Miss Holland at an immense distance. And somehow changed; coming in like
a visitor. She was dressed, what she called twollettay, and evidently at
the height of her social form. Free for the evening and looking in here
on her way almost as if she knew how supporting would be her familiar
figure, ceremonially transformed, at this moment of first launching out
as an evening hostess.

Miriam watched her come largely down the empty room. Ah, hers was
splendour, par exemple! How well she bore the high spaciousness. Hers
was an effectiveness that made its own terms, in advance.

“They’ve made you an enchanting table,” said Miss Holland, reaching the
fireplace to stand sideways, firm hand on the mantelpiece and well-shod
foot extended to the blaze.

Miriam had given no thought to the table. She gazed admiringly. What
nobility of form and outline....

The large shady hat hid the limp hair and gave the eyes more than their
usual depth. They were alight altogether, hesitating. She was communing
with herself, eager to communicate. What? Something about Flaxman’s. No,
or she would be frowning. And this high social moment was not for such
things.

Miriam plunged into the story of her visit to Dr. Densley, compressing
it to a few phrases, and throwing up her hands with the despairing
gesture of the correct hostess off duty, told how he had invited himself
to her party as an awkward fifth.

“But he gave you good news, or you would not look so bonny and happy.”

“Said Densleyish things. A number of old saws. Overwork, late hours,
heading for a crash. Said that for a New Woman I am disquietingly sane,
and that my criminal carelessness about things that most women are in a
reasonable hurry over, may possibly mean that I’m in for a long life.”

“A most ingenious theory!”

“I don’t know. He’s been reading Shaw. Can’t believe that women really
think about anything but capturing a man; for life. He wound up by
imploring me not to miss marriage and what of all things do you think is
his idea, or at least the idea that most appeals to him in marriage? The
famous ‘conflict for supremacy!’”

“Indeed an unfortunate definition of matrimony.”

“Yes, but wait. That’s not all. Talk about women getting hypnotised by
ideas! His mind, his so scientific mind—is putty. With immense solemnity
he informed me, ‘_No_ woman, dear girl, is truly happy until she is the
loser in that supreme conflict.’”

“Dear, dear! An essentially pagan view.”

“It’s the view of a man who knows he would lose.”

“I trust you did not tell the poor thing that!”

“Oh, but I did. I know it’s begging the question. But I say things like
that on principle. Anything to break up addlepated masculine
complacency. Not that it matters a toss to women, but because it’s all
over everything in the world like a fungus, hiding the revelations
waiting on every bush.”

“What was his response?”

“He looked very sick for a moment, and then laughed his laugh and began
repeating himself. Went back to his saws about wasting youth.”

“Indeed, indeed, many are doomed to that. There at least he is right.
Though most certainly not in regard to yourself. A propos, I am dining
here, with the Wheelers. The child is in great trouble. The Polish
’cellist, it seems, is not after all to be in London this season. She is
in despair.

“Of course, after coming across the world to see him.”

“In despair. They must now, if they can raise sufficient funds, go to
Poland. It seems that there is a lady, high up in the social scale and a
patroness of musicians in general, who might be willing to help,
provided that the ’cellist is willing to see the child and to make an
exception to his rule of not taking pupils. It is therefore imperative
to communicate with him by _letter_. I have been wondering whether your
Russian friend ...”

“Michael. Of course. I’ll ask him to-night. What is he to say?”

Miss Holland was flurried, transfigured; but still polite. Managing to
phrase her decorous thanks before she hurried, almost running, away down
the room. She returned in an instant, radiant.

“The Wheelers are _delighted_.”

But she was blushing. Evidently the Wheelers were in the next room.
Could easily be brought in to state their needs. She wanted to keep them
to herself. Be all in all to their stranded helplessness. And when a
moment later a maid announced Dr. Densley, she made at once for the
door, where she was held up for a moment by his entry, and so escaped
back to the tremendous consultation.


                                   3

Dr. Densley, hands outstretched, had made his smiling rush down the room
and taken her lightly by the shoulders when the door opened to admit
Michael. Summoning Densley from the hearthrug to the bright central
light, she introduced them. They stood in a strange little silence.
Densley, robbed of his usual soft-voiced flow of words and laughter by
the spectacle of Michael, of whom he had heard so much, was taking a
moment for contemplation, sure no doubt that she, like all the women of
his world, would immediately emit suitable remarks. She ignored the
obligation, flouted a suddenly realised desire to please him by filling
up the measure of his large admiration, for the sake of watching these
two old friends for the first time confronted.

It made them strangers to herself, people seen for the first time.
Divested of their relationship to her they were at once diminished and
enlarged. Large and separate, each set in the stream of his own life.
And small; small figures in a moving crowd.

It was Michael who broke the silence, announcing with stern shyness and
courteously bent head that the profession of medicine was arduous and at
the same time most fascinating. Miriam saw the other man, as he stood
listening with a dawning smile to the slow stately English, read
Michael’s gentle spirit and hand him on the spot a protective affection.
They stood talking. Michael bowing to punctuate his phrases but with a
pleased smile shining behind his pale features, ready to emerge when the
gravity he thought fitting to the occasion should have had its due.
Densley, below a brow grave and thoughtful as Michael’s but without its
sadness, smiled his smile that was laughter, the laughter of his
everlasting enchantment.

She left them to spy from the landing for any sign of the arrival of the
Taylors. The silent empty hall brought her a vision of Dora, hurrying
home to dress, meeting a friend on an island in the midst of traffic,
one of those encounters that occur whenever one is in a hurry, and to
which Dora would give herself as if space and time had no existence.

The gong rang out and residents became audible descending from the upper
rooms.

She went back to summon the men and warn Densley that he had committed
himself to a meal prepared in honour of the Taylors, without meat. Also
that he would hear from Mrs. Taylor all about the medical profession.
His to-and-fro gust of laughter left him open-mouthed like a mask of
Comedy, silently gazing at her his assurance of his readiness for all
her friends might do.

Through the open door she heard the continuous rustling descent of
residents. All the tables would be full. So much the better, in case her
oddly asserted party should produce long silences. She felt no desire
for conversation and wondered as she led the way downstairs whether
hostesses in general suffered the indifference that now held her in its
grip. And if they did, why the business of entertainment was not
abolished. She remembered how porous to the onlooking eye were people
gathered talking at a feast. To be merely a silent guest was troublesome
enough, but it was nothing to the burden of being obliged to produce,
before the assembled eyes of the twenty residents even the semblance of
a dinner-party.

The dining-room was full of sound as she went in followed by the two
men, held a little in the rear by the backward sweep of her long gown; a
fabric of sound unbroken at any point in the rows of tables set against
the walls, and all, even the one she had selected, fully occupied. All
heads were averted, intent towards centres.

Gentlewomen. Yes; but those were just the people who saw without
looking.

Here was the secretary at her elbow, smilingly indicating.... Miss
Holland was right, there in the central pool of light, well away from
the serried ranks of small square tables, was the club’s settlement of
the problem of five diners, a round table, gleaming with silver and
glass and festive with bowls of flowers.

As they took their places, falling accidentally into the best
distribution for her serenity, herself facing away from the main wall
and its unbroken row of diners, Michael on her right giving them his
impressive profile, and Densley across the way, his fine easy presence
set full towards them, a servant announced the arrival of the Taylors.
She left her party begun, with Densley, grave and kindly, set towards
Michael to draw from him and cherish, just anything it might occur to
him to say.

Dora and George, unbelievably there, brought to the decorous hall its
furthest reach of odd experience. They came from so much further than
the long distance they had travelled across London to spend an evening
in the land that to them was not even Philistia, but just Bedlam. The
Bedlam of an illusion so monstrous as to be comic—for all observers but
those who toiled helplessly at its provisioning; George’s “under-dog.”

They stood face to face, not seeing her. George in the half-light and
against the dark ancient furniture, looking more than ever like the
young Beethoven, his searching eyes bent beneath a frowning brow upon
Dora’s serene face of an intellectual madonna upturned in absent-minded
protest, while he explained, certainly not for the first time, exactly
where, in their passage across London, they had missed their way. For an
instant Miriam watched them, the beauty that together they made standing
there in perfect physical contrast, a rare pure balance, as rare as
their unmistakable equality of spirit. She rejoiced in the thought of
them set down with Michael and Densley. Four widely separated worlds met
together.

When actually they were so set down, George on her left and Dora all
delicately harmonious colour between Michael’s and Densley’s black and
white, the enchantment was so strong that she felt it must radiate to
the four corners of the room. It served to support her in face of the
absence in her thoughts of anything that could form a starting-point for
general conversation.

She took refuge with Dora. Dora’s was the mind that could enclose all
the others, and gaze over each of their territories in turn. She began
at once by accusing Dora. Making her the culprit of the wandering
pilgrimage.

Delicately flushing, her limpid absent eyes aware of the presence about
her of disturbed people waiting for conversational openings, aware also
of the restraining influence of her serene beauty, Dora defended herself
in the leisurely dimpling way that showed her armed for no matter what
conflict. Dora was at her best. Densley hung towards her delighted at
once.

Here in strange garb and unfamiliar bearing was yet, he was assuming,
the woman he understood, the woman existing in such numbers in his own
set, and vocal, until Miriam had revolted and silenced her, in all his
conversation; the woman who professes to be either amused or shocked by
sexual allusions, disguised in commonplace remarks, and jests back, or
tactfully heads off. How far, she wondered, would Dora, with her hobby
of endless cool sampling of humanity, go out to meet this naïve
masculinity? So far she sat screened, gently glowing, harmless.

If she held to this mood, went on turning upon him her lovely mild eyes,
and Densley’s warm-hearted worldliness took the field, then it was
George, indulgent to Dora’s adventure, who would be the enclosing,
contemplating mind. Already, amidst the jests that carried them through
the first courses, he was gathering fuel for the sole recreation
afforded him by chance social festivities. For mirth over the spectacle
of evasions. To-night the spectacle was all about him, all over the
room, rampant and unconscious, distracting him almost completely.


                                   4

By the time the sweets appeared there were two groups at the table, Dora
and Densley, averted towards each other in animated talk. George and
Michael responding to everything Miriam offered, usually both at once,
refusing to blend. Here, already, at her first party, was the English
separation. No general conversation. Not even the English alternative,
the duel between two men; the prize-fight. The party had fallen to bits.
But it was worth while. For on the far side of the table, Dora’s sweet
mezzo was dominating Densley’s baritone. She had tackled him. It was his
opportunity, perhaps his utmost chance of being lifted outside his
complacent dogmas.

It was presently evident that he was remaining impermeable. Though still
listening and responding, he had lost interest, discovered that she did
not for all her soft appeal, fall into either of the classes he thought
he understood, either into the fascinating, the maternal, or the
saintly. His mind gave her its ear, but his eyes with their everlasting
message went again and again to a far corner of the room. Which of the
disdainful club residents had become his chosen companion?

Dora was questioning him now, collecting physiology. Her voice
penetrated the subdued, rapidly thinning talk coming from the small
tables. Glancing round as if in search of an attendant, Miriam
discovered the long row of diners, lingering over their coffee, one and
all intent upon the centre table. And in the far corner that was drawing
Densley’s glances, Mrs. Wheeler, talking with Miss Holland and her
daughter, both with their backs to the room and unable to see the
distant bourne of her eyes, dark and gleaming above the heightened flush
upon her cheeks as she sat there, mutely wise, telling him a plain tale
of gallant endeavour.

The women at the table near the fireside were now openly staring.

As if by arrangement, by some operation of the fascinated attention of
these two listeners, there was a sudden silence all over the room.

“Of course,” said Dora’s voice into the midst of it, dreamy as her pose,
elbow on table, hand supporting chin, brow lifted in thought above eyes
gazing into space: “we shan’t get parthenogenesis until we want it.”

The silence ended in abrupt risings and departures.

“Not in our time,” Densley had said, encircling the departing ladies
with a smile that was not only homage and benediction, but glee. Private
glee over the addition to his store of anecdotes, of such a fine new
specimen. He, at least, thought Miriam, as they rose from the table,
would not regret the evening spent outside his world.

Michael, half risen, bowing towards the centre of the group, had
something to say. One of his generalisations. The party was united at
last.

“These speculations,” he announced to the group Miriam rejoiced to see
not only arrested by the inevitable topic but charmed by his gentleness,
feeling the pull of him in their midst, “are most-interesting. There are
it is sure in these matters no absolute certainties, but what is sure
is, that the realisation of this idea would be, not advance, but
retrogression.”

“Hear, hear,” said Densley, in his smoothest girlish falsetto.

As they all went down Fleet Street on their way to the Lycurgan meeting,
Miriam wondered whether she would be asked to resign from the club. But
much more pressing than this question was the feeling that her party
had, in bringing together three of her worlds, shown her more clearly
than she had known it before, that there was no place for her in either
one of them. So clearly that she now wished it could end and leave her
to go to the meeting alone.

There was in Lycurgan meetings some sort of reality, either coming from
the platform or more often from irrelevant things rising in her own mind
as she sat surrounded by so many speculative minds.

But to-night she would not reach unconsciousness of her surroundings.
And the ideas coming from the platform would be severely tested by these
alien presences. Already in advance, these ideas looked like a mere
caprice of her leisure hours, a more or less congenial background of
thought upon which presently might emerge a sudden enlargement of her
own life. More and more lately they had been growing to mean things
shared with Hypo, bright with life because they were his, and for the
same reason suspect, suspect because of his unrivalled expressiveness, a
faculty that might be turned with equal conviction in a quite opposite
direction.

And once they were in the hall and she was sitting with the serene
worlds of Michael and Densley and the Taylors close to her, the urgency
of all the Lycurgans stood for grew immediately less. This world of
clear ideas summoning mankind to follow like an army, seemed again, as
when she had first met it, to contain a trick, to be too clear, too
hard, too logical to embrace the rich fabric of life. She experimented
in unthinking it; and a silence fell on many of the flagrant cruelties
of civilisation. They lost their voice. Their only educated, instructed
voice. The Lycurgans were a league to arrest cruelties. But a cold,
cynical, jesting league, cold and hard as thought, cynical as paganism
and cultivating a wit that left mankind small and bleak, in a darkness
where there was no hope but in intelligent scheming. Even the women. The
Lycurgan women were all either as hopelessly logical as men, or
methodically pink. And the men; the everlasting prize-fight, the perfect
unsociability underlying their cold ideas. Except for one or two. And
they were idealists, blind with the illusion that humanity moves with
one accord.

Each one moves singly. To join the movements of others is harmful until
you have moved yourself. Movement is with the whole of you. Ideas come
afterwards.

How much time had passed? Only a moment or two. The chairman was still
bleating. And they had not noticed her inattention.

They were sitting in a row at the back of the hall. The proceedings
seemed very far away. Held off by their nearness to each other, by the
way after one short hour and in spite of their incompatibilities, they
were, when placed amongst strangers, in touch with each other.

It was worth while. Worth while to miss the intensities. To be happily
surrounded. And this way, the social and domestic way of meeting things,
the cool easy way of normal people, was perhaps the best way. It robbed
things of all but their obvious surfaces, the practical data of life.
Reduced them to the terms of what could be said about them and handed
round from one to the other. Small wonder that reformers tended to
become tub-thumpers, so immense must be the resistance offered by people
living as nearly everyone did, in groups, closely related and drawn this
way and that by perpetual single instances.

Less wonder that most people assumed the fact of life, took it without
amazement, for granted, so thinly of necessity was spread their
awareness of anything whatever. Homeopathic.

She gave herself up to joy in her party, in being linked with them in
profane, mirthful detachment from all that was going forward, shockingly
accompanied by the crackling of Michael’s disgraceful bag of hardbake.
Was it her fault that they were so detached? The result of some
demoralising influence at work behind her imagined interest in
socialism? She felt it was not. They were all on a moral holiday, not
only from their own worlds, but from any world whatsoever. Happy in
being together, passing through an uncalculated interval, a strange
small time that they would remember with pleasure.


                                   5

Going homewards through the spring evening with Densley she felt the
world even further off; thin, irrelevant. That was his influence. For
him the world was something against which everyone was fighting with
weapons feeble or stout. Single people, the individual battle, that was
the centre of his preoccupation. His interest in Mrs. Wheeler was his
sense that she was making a good fight, sturdily, perhaps unscrupulously
... that she was what he would call a real woman. Herself he regarded as
so far unreal, good material for reality, holding back.

His wide, varied experience of humanity seemed all about them, as they
wandered at truce arm-in-arm through the darkened evening streets. And
she found herself, as always, leaning upon his ordered knowledge and yet
repudiating it, so entirely did it imply an incomplete conception of
life. Every symbol he used called up the image of life as process, never
in any direction as completeness.

Faced alone, it appeared to him as bitterly sad, and the last disaster
of an unhappy fate.

Faced in groups as he knew it best, it showed in his eyes only as
material for comedy. It was of the comedy he was always trying to
convince her. In life itself the bare fact of life, there seemed for him
to be no splendour. For men there was ambition, hard work and kindly
deeds by the way. And for women motherhood. Sacred. The way to it pure
comedy; but once attained, life for the mother in a mansion of the
spirit unknown to men, closed against them and forever inaccessible. The
attainment of full womanhood was farewell, a lonely treading of a
temple, surrounded by outcasts.

He stood, it was true, to some extent within the lives of women, but
witnessed again and again the farewell, saw the man lessened, left
behind for ever on the threshold of magnificence, the woman left in a
loneliness mitigated only by the fireside companionship.

The strange thing was that seeming to value her for what he called the
intellectual heights that had kept her uncorrupted by petty social life,
he yet wanted her to come down from them and join the crowd. That if
even for one moment she could show any unguarded feeling, anything free
from criticism, even deliberately freed from criticism, he was ready to
become the gay priest of initiation into the comedy whose every dramatic
possibility he knew by heart.




                               CHAPTER VI


                                   1

The morning lays cool fingers on my heart and stands there an intensity
of light all about me and there is no weight or tiredness. When I open
my eyes there is a certain amount of light—much less than I felt before
I opened them—and things that make, before I see them clearly, an
interesting pattern of dark shapes; holding worlds and worlds, all the
many lives ahead. And I lie wandering within them, a different person
every moment. Until some small thing seen very clearly brings back the
present life and I find a head too heavy to lift from the pillow and
weariness in all my frame, that is unwilling to endure the burden of
work to be done before the evening can come again bringing strength.

Yet what ease of mind I have now. What riches and criminal ease,
exemptions and riches. Everything is done for me and I am petted and
screened from details. Secretly she plans my comfort, saying nothing.

And at Wimpole Street it is the same. And there also it is the work of a
woman. The fiancée, who has altered so many tiresome things, lifted off
so many burdens.

“You ought not to carry those heavy ledgers up and down stairs. You are
killing yourself.” Perhaps it was the heavy ledgers. Anyhow there is now
always this fearful weariness side by side with the happiness.

Life flowed in a new way. Many of the old shadows were gone;
apprehensions about the future had disappeared. Side by side with the
weariness, and with nothing to explain its confidence, was the
apprehension of joy.

Wearily she tumbled her happy self out of bed feeling as her feet
touched the floor the thrill of the coming day send a small current of
strength through her nerves. If only she could preserve it. But
everything nowadays came headlong and smiling, everything and everybody.
No enemies, no difficulties. With every hour glad tidings calling.
Calling from yesterday. Crowding to-day so closely that much must be
missed, joy scamped and missed and waiting and pouring over into
to-morrow that would bring yet more things.

Why me? What have I done? Why is it that something seems to be looking
after me?

One can’t change one’s nature, which is one’s fate. Yet there is a sense
of guilt in finding everything so easy.

Perhaps I shall have an awful old age? No, from forty to sixty is the
best of life. I shall go on getting happier and happier. Because it
takes almost nothing to make me as happy as I can bear.

But there is this terrible tiredness. Densley may be right. But one
can’t marry just to escape fatigue. “Have you noticed, dear girl, that
we have spent a whole evening together without argument?”

“I never argue, bless you.”

“You give me your blessing?”

“What need have you?”

“My dear girl.”

“I’m neither dear nor in the least girlish.”

“You’re a girl, my dear, unspoiled by worldly women, the dearest I
know—with a man’s mind.”

“It’s your fashionable patients, parasites, helpless parasites, I’m not
blaming them, who make you think women are all cats.”

“My dear golden girl, all grace and charm if only she chose, when do I
see you again?”

The milk boiled over and Miss Holland laughed from her bed. Again it had
made a frightful mess on the oil-stove. Nearly every day Miss Holland
had somehow to make that mess disappear. Yet she always laughed. Was now
gaily getting up to the accompaniment of her usual jests on the
catastrophe.

It seemed enough for her that she lived in a glow of another life. For
that she seemed willing to pay any price in unseen labour.

“Did you speak to your friend about writing to the musician?”

“No.”

“Indeed?” What a strange, sharp note....

“Not last night. I shall see him to-day probably, or to-morrow.”

Miriam could feel wrath coming through the curtain.

Miss Holland was speechless, her large frame, moving now impatiently
about, a boiling wrath. Evidently she had undertaken; would now have to
explain to these cherished friends. But what a turmoil! How easy to find
words for them and carry them along a little. Was the whole world to be
stopped for their letter?

She was glad she had spoken with serene indifference. Evidently her
evening, the shape of her evening entertaining friends, was nothing. Her
usefulness, to these wonderful acquaintances, all she was worth. It was
careless, of course, to have forgotten. But she was glad now that she
had forgotten. Glad to see for how little Miss Holland could adopt a
tone of frigid annoyance. Damn, she thought, I’ve undertaken it. I’ll do
it in my own time.

Almost immediately on the heels of her own words and preceded by little
sounds expressing the depth of impatient scorn, came Miss Holland’s most
fastidious voice:

“Had it been made to a _man_, your promise would at once have been
carried out.”

Miriam forgot her anger in amazement at the spectacle of a châtelaine
with a volcanic temper and a spiteful tongue. She searched her memory in
vain for anything to equal the venom of this attack.

“After that, you count upon my asking him?” she said, feeling herself
adream, lost in pity before the revelation of the importance to Miss
Holland of these club acquaintances.

For herself, the little idyll in the rooms was at an end. That could be
marked off at once, at the cost of a small pang that turned, even as she
wondered in what form short of an instant withdrawal of herself and her
belongings the insult could be wiped out, to an indrawn breath of
freedom. But side by side with the thought of vengeance, came
forgiveness. It was all simply pitiful....

The answer to her quiet question, reaching her as she passed into the
next room, was a burst of weeping. She paused for a moment to be sure of
the astonishing sound and fled from it, closing the connecting door.
This, she felt, was the last depth of shame, to be involved, to have
been subject to this meanest of all abandonments....

She and Miss Holland were separated now, utterly. The principle at stake
was before her like a sanction, holding her at peace. She dressed
serenely, her thoughts browsing far away. The milk, boiled afresh, made
a tea more excellent than usual. The two biscuits were a pleasant feast.
The dreadful little room seemed for the first time to establish a direct
relationship with herself.

With never a backward thought, she went out into the spring sunshine,
five letters found waiting in the box, rich in her hand. One from him.
There might be another on her table at Wimpole Street. But the letters,
even for to-day, his letter, stood away, waiting friends around her
spellbound calm. It was not, she told herself, the calm of mere
indifference. It was the calm of perfect opposition to a certain form of
baseness. It brought peace and strength.

In beatific mood she sat down at her table and wrote to Miss Holland
that on the terms set by her this morning she must decline to discuss
anything whatever. The moment her letter was dispatched, anger seized
her. She hoped Miss Holland would suffer all she could in anxiety over
the success of her project.

Miss Holland, it was clear, despised her and wished, had found, in
wishing to make her look small in her own eyes, crushing eloquence. And
what she had said was true, in a general way. Often and often, memory
told her, she had sacrificed women for men, baldly, visibly. But then
there had always seemed to be something at stake. Now there seemed to be
nothing at stake. She wanted nothing so much as to be charmed and
charming. And that she was so, or her thoughtless happiness mysteriously
made her so, things multiplied perpetually around her to declare. Apart
from the menace of devastating fatigue, she swam in joy, felt even dark
things turn to joy within her mind.

The old life and death struggle between conflicting ideas had died down.
She could see the self who had lived so long upon that battle ground,
far-off; annoying, when thought of as suffered by others. But it was not
without a pang that she looked back at that retiring figure. It had
been, at least, with all its blindness, desperately sincere. She was
growing worldly now, capable of concealments in the interest of social
joys, worse, capable of assumed cynicism for the sake of advertising her
readiness for larks she was not quite sure of wishing to share. And
thought was still there, a guilty secret, quiet as a rule. Sometimes
inconveniently obtrusive at moments when she wished most to approximate
to the approved pattern of charming femininity.

Fearful of really forgetting her commission she wrote at once to Michael
and floated off into her day, her mind away in the bright pattern of
life, the scenes of the many dramas being played out all round her, of
the new worlds into which unawares her obscure career had led her,
secure in the knowledge that while she lived thus sunnily, all
difficulties in the daily routine would solve themselves under her hand.

A charm, the charm that came over the leads where the birds hopped, and
into the conservatory-office in the spring sunshine, lay over
everything. Shadows were there. The shadow of Nietzsche, the problem of
free-love, the challenge of Weiniger, the triple tangle of art, sex and
religion. Poverty and Henry George. But she was out in the dance of
youth, within hearing of all that was happening along the rim of life as
it pressed forward into a future that was to be free of much that had
darkened the being of those who went before, and had freed her already
from the fear of isolation and resourcelessness. She was ready now to
drop all props and wander forth.

Lo here, lo there. But the Kingdom of Heaven is within. Communist
colonies were not a solution of anything.

Yet the kingdom within is a little grey and lonely. Marriage is no
solution, only a postponement. A part solution for some people.

I am a greedy butterfly flitting in sunlight. Enviable, despicable. But
approval of my way of being speaks in me, a secret voice that knows no
tribunals. The joy and ease of this evening-lit life is a presage
because it is a fulfilment. Man never is, but always to be blest. But I
_am_ blest. _Alles ist relativ._ I am blessed beyond anything I ever
dreamed of, within these inexorable circumstances.

The happiness that came when they were even bleaker was a presage. Of
what? Someone says there is nothing meaner than making the best of
things. But happiness is incurable. A thing you can’t help. Perhaps it
is the result of being a woman. One of Wells’ crawling cabs waiting to
be hailed? Bosh. If I wait for anyone it is for one who will show
himself to have been hailed by the same kind of happiness.


                                   2

Mrs. Cameron running singing up the stairs, pushed open the door and
stood tall, a bright questing figure; determinedly bright, a
deliberately cheerful blue overall covering all but the sleeves of her
multi-coloured gown; hanging from her arm a great basket of primroses.

“Good morning,” she laughed. “How ist with thee?”

Miriam delighted in the gaiety of colour she made standing there in the
flood of top-light; in the heroic tilt of her head, in everything but
the deliberately rousing, deliberately gloom-flouting ring of her laugh,
which yet so frequently breaking forth, was the thing that compelled her
tired eyes, tired bright hair and thin face into harmony with the gay
colours of her house and clothing.

She smiled from her place at the table, made room for Mrs. Cameron in
her mind and prepared to squander, in seeing life with her, a bit more
of the morning hour. Mrs. Cameron came in pleased, and began at once
with her legends. Miriam read off in her own thoughts legends to match.
It was a clear shape, deliberate. A way of ignoring all but the shining
surfaces. Of setting everything, even the old woman dying penniless in
the Mews, in a light that made surfaces shine.

But her way of denying gloom brought gloom in the end. Spread it
everywhere. Miriam felt herself drooping, was glad when she rose
spindling up to her full gay height and settling herself on her feet
with a little spring that made the primrose bunches jostle each other in
the basket.

“I’m off to kirk with Donald. A special service. There’s a call,” for
the first time her face clouded, “a need abroad in the air for
intercession, Mr. Groat says, a _wonderful_ turning for help and
guidance. _Such_ a hopeful sign.”

“Yes,” said Miriam sympathetically, “certainly it is.” But her mind was
arguing that there is nothing in the world that is not a hopeful sign.

“The state of _society_,” breathed Mrs. Cameron, eagerly dropping her
voice. But Miriam had left her. The whole day would not be long enough
for the enterprise of getting Mrs. Cameron down to underlying things.
She wanted the bright figure to stay, gathering the beams of the spring
sunlight before her eyes, but Mrs. Cameron had read the opposition in
her face.

“Fare thee well, lassie,” she chanted in hillside voice and flung, as
she went, a bunch of primroses on to the table. Miriam pursued her for a
word of thanks. From half-way down the stairs she turned with a piercing
smile, and sang out:

“It’s your _life_ you are living here, lassie, and flowers are for all.”

Miriam turned back. The small bunch lying upon the scatter of charts and
letters was there to brighten her life that was spending itself, had
spent itself for the ten years since she left home, the years that are
called “the best.” So Mrs. Cameron saw it. So perhaps everyone would see
it. She herself the only blind spectator. It was true. This scene that
she persisted in seeing as a background, stationary, not moving on,
_was_ her life, was counting off years. The unlimited future she meted
out for the life she was one day to lead appeared to Mrs. Cameron
defined, a short span.

A tap at the door and Eve coming in with the mid-morning soup and her
look of adoring care. She moved in the room with a restrained eagerness.
Taking her time. Never still, yet waiting, savouring as Miriam was
savouring, their perfect interchange, the sudden lift into happiness
that came to them in each other’s presence. Miriam stood motionless,
suddenly conscious of herself as standing considering Mrs. Cameron’s
judgment with bent head, and then as utterly relieved of it by Eve who
passed to and fro close by her as if she were not there, and was gone
with a light click of the gently closing door. And there had been an
endless moment of communion, a moment for both of them, of oblivion and
renewal in the presence of a lover.

It was part of Eve’s wonderfulness that she should have come in just
then, to answer Mrs. Cameron. Miriam held the image of her in her mind,
her gently rounded, ever so little stocky and stumpy figure; the deep
rose flush on her cheeks over which the cloudy black hair cast a margin
of shadow; the pure serenity that radiated from her, that was
independent and ultimate. Past accounting for, and independent of
knowledge. That was itself knowledge.

And ever since, a year ago, she had first appeared in the house, she had
come punctually at bad moments, into the room. And had grown shyly and
quite silently to know how near she was and how precious. She had come
so unobtrusively, replacing the jaunty careless Ellen gone away with the
Orlys. It was strange, one of those strange hints life brought that she
should have appeared at the very time of the other Eve’s unbearable
death, bearing not only her name, but her gentle certainties. And her
way of gathering all spears to her own breast.


                                   3

Miss Holland’s reply came by hand at teatime. Victorian hand-writing,
with a difference. Something of rounded warmth in the longish uprights.
She strongly deprecated the unfriendly tone of Miriam’s note. In after
teatime mood, her mind flooded with the bright light of the evening
ahead, Miriam faced the distasteful problem. Clearly Miss Holland wanted
her to admit that they had both been foolish and to suggest that the
incident should be forgotten and a fresh beginning made. But the balance
was not equal between a deadly insult and an unfriendly tone. Or was it?

Was passionate anger better than cool reason? Perhaps Miss Holland was
right all through. Be that as it might, it was impossible to countenance
emotional scenes or run any risk of a touching reconciliation. Still
less any bright amiable forgiveness with its wicked life-insulting
suggestion of “fresh beginnings.”

To-morrow, perhaps, in faraway mood after the evening’s revels,
something would come in words that would straighten things out without
offence. There is a straightening-out process going on in life itself,
if left alone. Already it was possible to smile at the whole occurrence,
at both parties.

“I can’t,” she wrote at top speed, “be a party to the way of settling
differences that is known as feminine. Can’t play any part in scenes.
Can’t face explanations, apologise or be apologised to. So there we are.
My friend has been written to and will probably act without delay. There
for me the matter ends. Any further consideration of it would induce a
regrettable attack of profanity.”




                              CHAPTER VII


                                   1

The enclosed golden light of a party. People transformed. All wearing
the air of festival. All wandering about with happy eyes, expectant; the
eyes of the beginning of a party. All but a few, at every party there
were those few.

And at this party, very soon almost all were like the few. For a while
they had gone in and out of the three rooms as if looking for something
that was about to reveal itself. Something they know is there and are
always seeking.

Something very joyous. The joy of a party is the newness of people to
each other, renewed strikingness of humanity. They love each other, to
distraction. Really to distraction. Before they fall into conversation
and separate.

A large party. More than large enough and varied enough, as the crowd
thickens, to represent the world. Whatever that is.... And because at
least by sight, all are known to each other, each one’s quality already
tested, expectation is baffled. A few go on seeking, will go on all the
evening, looking forth from themselves as if sooner or later the
gathering would assume a single shape and perform a miracle.

This must be true of all gatherings, of all except religious meetings.
The strangeness, and the hopes aroused by strangeness, are illusions.
Mirages arising wherever people gather expectantly together. The few who
at parties have not the glint of expectation in their eyes are those who
know this. Some are cynical. Some enduring. One or two ignore people as
persons. See them only as parts of a process.

It is true then, though town-life hides the fact, that individual life
cannot begin until the illusion of wonderful people presently to be met,
is vanquished. The whole world, all the scattered people brought
together and made known to each other, would soon be like this party,
each tested and placed. Even the best of them known as limited.

Then domestic life, troglodyte life, is the severest test of quality.
The coming to the end of the charm of strangeness. Of Exogamy. The
making terms and going on, or the hard work of silently discovering near
things afresh. Re-thinking them. Keeping them near, as strange things
are at first near, and, like strange things, beloved.

“What have I to do with thee?” Yes. But that was a man who had a message
for everyone in the world and very little time to get round with it. Not
the voice of one who is weary of the near in space and time and hopes to
find the distant more appreciative.

Yet even he demanded a personal allegiance. “If ye love me, keep my
commandments.” What is love? Who can interpret commandments? They all
stood round adoring, begging for explanations and instructions. Perhaps
he meant, “You admire what I am. Take my hints. You will find out the
rest.”

Wandering eyes were growing rarer, though still new-comers arrived and
toured hopefully. Groups were forming of people masked, or visibly
bored, sustaining the familiar. Wit, surrounded, was hard at work. Here
and there rival theorists were audible, disarmed by the occasion and
affably wrangling. And everyone, even the schemers circulating girt and
keen, or wearing the veil of nonchalance, waited now for the gathering
to do something of itself. For here for good or ill in the circling
Lycurgan year, was a party, and everyone counting on at least a moment’s
distraction.

How intolerable with its challenge, its throwing back the self empty on
to the self, and its revelation of the weariness of selves, would be the
whole spectacle, but for here and there a figure of sincerity bearing
the burdens of the rest, drawing nerve-poisoning influences from the
air.

Full, the rooms were now. A moving bright maze of people and amongst
them many strangers, guests. A leaven of the unthinking world, as the
Lycurgans were the leaven that was to drive through the world of
thought. But the strangers were not the zest of the meeting. Now that
they were here, with their bearing of eager curiosity or amused polite
deference, being introduced, talked to, some already the centres of
arguing groups, it was through the familiar figures that life seemed
most strongly to flow. Again as in family life; the quality of the
familiar showing clearest under the beam of an alien light.

Densley, hurrying from far away with arms outstretched.

With the sense of coming down through space, that held her still, yet
welcoming, with a welcome not for him, but for the strange journeying,
his and hers, she reached level in time to rise and greet him as he
seized her hands. For a moment he surveyed her through his laugh. Then
they were off, arms linked, on a tour of the rooms.

Eyes gleamed at him as he went debonnair, talking, not listening,
needing no response but her radiance and abandon to his guiding arm.
Solace at once; a rebuilding of strength to face this crowd that now
stood off, no longer impinging, no longer eloquent except of a friendly
indifference. Life, through all happenings, could pass like this.
Happenings would be disarmed, bright strangeness rooted in an unexamined
sameness. There would be solace for all the wounds of thought in his
unconsciousness. But no companionship. For a long while nothing at all
of profound experience and then, perhaps, her whole being arranged round
a new centre and reality once more accessible, but in a loneliness
beside which the loneliness of the single life was nothing.

He would never know this. A listening radiance and superficial
statements and activities would satisfy him. Yet he suspected a rival
and respected, while contesting its power. Offered as a substitute his
own secret life of faith in human kind, his shining love. For him all
these special people gathered here represented not a determined movement
to arrest juggernaut, but material for joyous existence.

... Is civilisation juggernaut? Are there not within it as many, and
more, of those who promote its best qualities as there are of socialists
attacking its defects? And of those like Densley, who work consciously
for the increase of human happiness, how many there are and how much
kindlier than these people, most of whom seem so little kind, so much
merely the jealous custodians of ideas....

“Ideas are such chancy things. We not only can’t get along without them.
There’s no escaping them, and they are all figures of speech.”

“_Homo sapiens_, eh? Well, so long as he has a good figure ...” Kind
imbecile, imbecile, but kind. “But ideas, my dear girl, are not the
greatest thing in the world. And they easily take one too far away from
life.”

“That wouldn’t matter. But while they last they keep you on a monorail.
All specialists are on monorails.”

“Monomaniacs, eh? Now tell me who is the lassie in the white smock?”

“That’s a djibbêh. And her name is Nora Beaworthy. Keep your pun.
Although I daresay in the end she will. All those pink people will be
worthy when they’re grey. Anyhow it’s no good. Having had a thoroughly
vivid time and made a number of hurried young men take up socialism,
she’s now engaged.”

“She leaves me heart-whole, my dear. But I saw her on the way here,
running at top speed down Pall Mall in her white gown, the spirit of
spring.”

His glance was wandering as it always would, gathering up and delighting
in bright youth, in the appearance of animation; utterly blind to all
the tricks of conscious attractiveness. Blind, too, to cattish
subtleties. He was wax in the hands of his mondaines.

She looked round for people upon whom he might exercise his social
graces. Who would give him what he needed to keep him at his glowing
best. But there were none here of his kind. None who rushed
thoughtlessly through ready-made evolutions. Refusal to accept these
evolutions at their surface value he would see only as uncharitableness.

Alone together, he and she might make terms. But in his ready-made
social surroundings they would at once be antagonists. The so much less
sociable, so much more discriminating socialists became suddenly dear,
the salt of the earth. They were, after all, little as she knew them,
her own people. She thought with them, was ready to act with them. They,
and not those others, were her family.

She chose a group of young women and set him in the midst of their ready
smiles and swift replies. Saw them sum him up.

Dancing was beginning in the end room. The first dancing she had seen
since she left home. It held her eyes. People transfigured, circling,
lit from above. But only for a moment. It was memory that had put the
happy haze about them. They were clear and cold, not lost in their
dancing. Not even those whose heads gleamed with youth. They danced with
a difference. They were the new generation.

She longed to dance and drop the years. And here, as if in ironic
commentary, was old Hayle-Vernon, handsome in smooth evening dress,
stepping elegantly towards her. With a light in his young dark eyes. He
too felt his youth beckon and come close.

“Shall we dance?” His pallor was flushed. With boyish uncertainty. With
the distance he came in ignoring that they were strangers.

To him her twenty-eight years were infancy. He was saying so with his
smile. Knew, besides, no more of their number than of her. She felt her
youth rise to lead him back to his, and his gratitude for the gift
vibrating in his smooth voice as he began, the moment they swung in
amongst the dancers, by remarking that it was pleasing to see Lycurgans
as ready to hop as they were to hope. On and on as they circled—the
tails of djibbêhs beating about them, every couple vocal, some straining
away from each other as they danced, to argue more effectually—his voice
persisted. Her scraps of reply, though he bent his head for them until
his beard brushed her cheek, did not get through his slight deafness.
But all they had in common, known to them both, was speaking between
them, making a sadness; making them hate each other for apprehending.
Never again would they attract each other from afar, nor ever now that
they had spoken, want to speak again. Unless presently they could meet
in some mental difference. She gathered as his voice went on, emerging
suavely above the primitive swinging pressure of his body and theorising
now, about art in the socialist state, material for discussion when
presently they should be seated.

But on their sofa in the alcove they were immediately joined by Arnold
Englehart who stood before them deferentially, yet like a threat;
equally oblivious of Hayle-Vernon’s deep-seated indifference to
socialism and of the sacredness of sitting-out couples, pouring out his
newest plan to bring about socialism in a fortnight.

Englehart was real, and his plans burned as enthusiastically as upon his
bent head his hair, lit from behind and standing out like a bush above
his unseeing face. Hayle-Vernon was alight in pursuance of his hobby of
pulling a thread of thought through shapeless assertions. But in every
word he spoke sounded his central unbelief. Prominent Lycurgans. Good
men. Keeping an eye on injustices. Trying, from whatever motive, to
reform the world. One chasing an abstraction called humanity, and the
other an abstraction called intelligence.

It seemed that the air grew icy about them. It was a relief to catch
sight of Densley, beaming with social happiness. Through the rising tide
of Englehart’s talk she watched him afar. Tall and lean and swiftly
graceful in all his movements. Yet padded. A lean tall firmly-padded
baby. The slight rotundity of his slenderness, like his bantering
man-of-the-world society talk, was the radiation of his substantially
nourished mind. His mind spoke from his broad unconscious brow. Serene
and attentive between his frivolous words and friendly curling hair. A
Harley Street brow. Calm where all these Lycurgans were irritable. And
in his shapely nose, slightly blunted, like so many professional noses,
was the cause, or the explanation, of his interest in philosophy.
Flirtatious interest, in the intervals of listening for the
ever-changing gossip of science and accepting, because they bore out his
own kindly experience, the statements of evangelistic religion.

“Multiple shops, proliferating—” she glanced in time to catch
Hayle-Vernon’s flicker of amusement—“like a cancerous growth.” But
Englehart’s adoration of Wells was a charming _décor_, taking nothing
from his individuality. He had so much intensity that it blazed, like
paraffin, a little wildly, but never with the wind. That was the great
thing about the Lycurgans. That they thought. They were not
impressionists further than everyone, by being merely alive and not sure
of the whence and the whither, must be helplessly impressionist.

The accumulations of two years of attention to Lycurgan thought, the
images fashioned by their more articulate intelligentsia to express
their sense of the destruction of modern civilisation by disorderly
forces grown out of that civilisation were again uppermost as she
returned to the thought of Densley and his indiscriminate social
happiness. His friendship, for instance, with little Mr. Taunton.
Perhaps that was inevitable. Poor little Taunton, shocked into worldly
wisdom by his experience at the hands of Eleanor, flying, from his
refuge under the tiles with his Plato, into marriage, must now have
visitors. And doctors and clergy and lawyers must hang together. And
their wives support the fabric. “A _charming_ little woman,” said
Densley, “she listened while her man and I discussed the sacraments.”
Meaning that Densley and Taunton putting their heads together about
religion were swimming in waters beyond her depth; that she being not
only a woman, but charming, that is to say an apparently uncritical
listener, sat respectfully by and earned in due course the indulgent
lowering of the conversation to matters she could understand. But would
they have talked so busily, kept on their amicable duel, without an
audience? And would they have been so serene if they had seen into her
thoughts, seen her read them as she watched their play?

Conversation of this type, comfortably fed and armchaired men discussing
in the presence of deferential wives, was the recreation of his less
frivolous leisure. And for the rest, fashionable dinner-parties,
opinions about the latest plays and the latest novels, scandals, the
comparing of notes about foreign travel, hotels and so on—always the
same world, always shut in however far away, with the same assumptions,
not about life, for these people never thought about the fact of life,
only about the details of living, and about behaviour. His world was
ready-made, and clearly now as she watched him for the first time from
afar and socially surrounded, she saw that if she went into that world
she would fail him; fail just where a rising doctor’s wife must be a
tower of strength.

The sadness of farewell, bringing with it in equal companionship a
humiliating annoyance, was shallow; farewell to a selfish coveting,
doomed all along by its heartlessness. Yet even as she saw him cut off,
going his own bright way, it stirred within her, asserting a depth she
had not guessed; prompting to recklessness, reminding her with a long
backward glance how clearly, through all the years she had known him,
“fate” had been at work throwing them together in solitude, carefully
not revealing him in association with grouped humanity until now. To
draw back now was to reduce their common past from the moment of his
coming, bounding lightly at midnight into Eleanor Dear’s garret, an
abrupt tired man, prescribing a sleeping draught and thankful to get
away as soon as he knew there was someone prepared to stay all night and
not afraid to go out and ring up a chemist, to waste of time.

Waste of time in an alcove—a comfortable alcove inviting waste of time
by being there and being unable to protest. Waste of time; except for
the gathered knowledge of his goodness? Perhaps Hayle-Vernon, whose
elegant sophistries had at last broken the tide of Englehart’s talk and
left him standing, still eager, aware that his ardour had miscarried,
and though not actually looking about him, yet already on the lookout
for another listener, had gathered, in the time Englehart had wasted
with him, a knowledge of Englehart’s unconscious goodness?

Wilkins the author, gesticulating greetings, came up and hooked
Englehart away by the arm.

With Englehart gone, Hayle-Vernon was left in a void, statuesque, draped
only with his manner of a prominent Lycurgan. He had joined the society
for the sake of self-realisation, consciously contributing his proud
talent for straightening out the statements of those who in so far as
they were driven by feelings that were clearer than their thoughts, were
careless about language? Separated from passionate conviction he was
inoperative. Perhaps, identifying me with the new group of young
Lycurgans, he credits me with passionate convictions? And here I
sit—while from far away in the cold centre where he formulates his
criticisms, facing cessation, he is coming back to make suitable
remarks—equally stranded, in a perfect equality of inoperativeness.

“You are going to write for _The New Order_?”

“Not in _The New Order_. I write about socialism in an anarchist paper.”

“The Impossibility of Anarchy?”

“No. That anarchy and socialism are the same in spirit. Only that
socialists think they can define the future and anarchists know they
can’t.”

“That’s very amusing. But, I think, scarcely true. To begin with,
anarchy, as defined——”

Densley, swinging about on his tall stride, halting for a moment with
head turned, near at hand; seeing her sitting at the feet of a
distinguished looking elderly Lycurgan, moving clear of groups, keeping
himself free to come forward when the next dance should begin. Sounding
through Hayle-Vernon’s undulating vocalisation came her own thoughts, as
if he were speaking them.

Farewell to Densley is farewell to my one chance of launching into life
as my people have lived it. I am left with these strangers—people
without traditions, without local references and who despise marriage or
on principle disapprove of it. And in my mind I agree. Yet affairs not
ending in marriage are even more objectionable than marriage. And
celibates, outside religion, though acceptable when thought of as alone,
are always, socially, a little absurd. Then I must be absurd. Growing
absurd. To others I am already absurd.

There is no one on earth who knows the right and wrong of these things.
There are only prejudices. Where do they come from? People are
prejudices. Life is a prejudice. Or it wouldn’t go on. Your life is the
prejudices you are born with. That is determinism. But something must be
determined. By their prejudices ye shall know them. Not by anything
acquired. By instincts. Which are judgments ready-made.

Free-lovers seem all in some indefinable way shoddy. Born shoddy. Men as
well as women. Marriage is not an institution, it is an intuition.
Marriage, or sooner or later absurdity. Free-love is better than
absurdity....

Yet the free-lovers dancing there seemed both sadness and mockery.
Dancing is shimmer. Satin and silk and white slippers. Rooms white and
gold. Massed flowers. Rapt faces to whom problems and socialism are
unknown. Youth, and an audience of elderly parents and friends. It seems
mockery for these people with their brains full of ideas and their
bodies decked in protests, to dance. Dancing brings an endlessness in
which nothing matters but to go on dancing—in a room, till the walls
disappear—in the open, till the sky, moving as you dance, seems to
cleave and let you through.


                                   2

People from South Place, gravely circling.

“That’s not dancing, it’s the Ethical Movement.”

Shaw. The darling. Religiously enduring. Coming to Lycurgan gatherings
as others go to church.


                                   3

The ring, made by those who remained, extended when their linked hands
were stretched at arm’s length, all the way round the large room. These
people were part of the crowd that had stood shouting the refrains of
the folk-songs led by the woman on the estrade with the determined
voice. Seen thus they had seemed threatening, inhuman; and _édition de
luxe_ of the noisy elements in a street crowd. And more threatening,
because they were driven by ideas. The massed effect of djibbêhs and
tweeds and dress-suits, bellowing, was of a wilful culture banded
together in defiance of a world it could not see.

But now, standing ringed round the room with linked hands they were
charming. Innocent; children linked for a game, dependent on each other.
In the midst of them, somehow in the centre to which all their faces
were turned, was something beyond the reach of socialism. It sounded
even in the dismal notes of _Auld Lang Syne_ with its suggestion of
mournful survival from a golden past. To stand thus linked and singing
was to lose the weight of individuality and keep its essence, its queer
power of being one with every one alive.

But it was also embarrassing. Made an embarrassment that everyone had to
share. For the thread of song was stronger than anyone there. Even those
who meeting known eyes above an unusually opened mouth, or imagining
themselves to be objects of hilarious scrutiny, tried to be individually
funny, were presently overwhelmed and drawn along. The thin beginning on
a few voices had swelled to a unison of varying octaves and strengths.
She heard her own voice within it and felt as she sang how short and
wavering and shapeless was her life, and short and wavering even the
most shapely lives about her.

As the dismal refrain was lifting its third monotonous howl there came
from behind her, where a door opened on to a cloakroom, a woman’s voice
angry, deep and emphatic, like an ox roaring at a gate. Her hand was
torn from her nearest companion’s and the newcomer was in the ring
singing with stern lustiness below a hat askew. The last words of the
song echoed round the room upon the might of her voice.




                              CHAPTER VIII


Another spring vanished....

A sheet of crocuses singing along the grass alley. White, under trees
still bare. Crocuses dotting the open grass with June gold....

Suddenly a mist of green on the trees, as quiet as thought.... Small
leaves in broad daylight, magic reality, silent at midday amidst the
noise of traffic....

Then full spring for three days. Holding life still, when the dawn mists
drew off the sea and garden and revealed their colour.

Everyone had loved it, independent of other loves. Become for a while
single. Wanting and trying and failing to utter its beauty. Everyone had
had those moments of reality in forgetfulness. Quickly passing. Growing
afterwards longer than other moments, spreading out over the whole
season; representing it in memory....




                               CHAPTER IX


                                   1

The room is still in midnight darkness and full of the feeling of
midnight. There must have been a sudden sound—perhaps a wild squealing
of cats, too soon after I fell asleep. In a minute it will begin again;
a low yowling, just beneath the window, growing louder. Then a scuffle
and piercing shrieks. Silence; and more shrieks, at a comfortable
distance.

Savage night-life of cats. Welcome, heard far off making shrill streaks
of light in the darkness and suggesting daytime; all the friendly little
cats of London.

There is no sound. Not a breath. In spite of the wide open window the
air is stifling. And though there is no breeze, the reek of cats comes
up and in. All the summer it has come in. It is part of the air of the
room.

Yet the nights in here have been paradise. Cool sleep. Escape from the
night-sounds of the court. Escape from Miss Holland’s obliviousness of
the sounds of the court.

She is dull not to hear. Or strong? Dull strength in not hearing.

Noisy home-comings in the spring. Strident, hideous voices in a reeling
procession along the court and dying away in the distance. Drunken
monologues. Every sound echoing near and clear in the narrow court. And
she heard _nothing_. The cobbler, noisily taking down his shutters in
the early light had called her from sleep, not from feverish dreams. And
when the summer came and sounds filled the court till dawn, still she
heard nothing.

Why is all this saying itself over so freshly? At some moment every
night before I go down into sleep, it says itself. And now I have come
back from half-way to sleep it is all there is in my mind. Because I am
always trying to ignore it. Never thinking of it by day. And here it is,
belonging to me. Closer than anything that happened yesterday.

Hoarse-voiced lovers lingering on after the roystering has died down.
Men and women coming in quarrelling from the main street. Voices that
had been gentle for each other madly seeking lost gentleness in curses.
Curses and blows dying down to a panting stillness; out there, in the
dismal court.

Night-long, through open windows, thick, distorted voices in strife.
Shut in, maddened. Maddened confined man. Women despairingly mocking.
Worst of all, children’s voices sane and sweet in protest, shrilling up,
driven by fear, beyond the constriction of malformed throats, into
sweetness.

And she had heard _nothing_.

But this same thickness or dullness had kept her unaware of what it was
that in the end had turned this stuffy little back room into a refuge.

She did not know that there were sounds more intolerable than those
coming in from the street. The street sounds varied. Were sometimes
obliterated by wind and rain, and were at their worst only at the height
of the summer. And even at their worst they were life, fierce and
coarse, driving off sleep; but real, exciting. Only unendurable because
there was no hope during their lifetimes of any alteration in the
circumstances within which all these people were confined.

But those other sounds never varied. And spoke of death. That was the
worst, that they filled the room with the sense of death and the end.

They cast a long shadow backwards over the whole of life, mocking it.

Night after night they had to be anticipated and then lived through. One
by one. To come home late was not to escape them. They were all there
collected in the quiet room. Centring in the imagined spectacle of the
teeth waiting in their saucer for the morning.

To sleep early was to wake to the splutter of a match and see the glare
of candlelight come through the porous curtain. To hear with senses
sharpened by sleep, the leisurely preparations, the slow careful
sipping, the weary sighing, muttered prayers, the slow removal of the
many unlovely garments, the prolonged swishing and dripping of the
dismal sponge. All heralding and leading at last to the dreadful numb
rattle of vulcanite in the basin.

Yet the worst to bear was the discovery of the hatred these innocent
sounds could inspire. Still there unchanged, pure helpless hatred,
rising up as it had risen in childhood, against forced association with
unalterable personal habits....

But the shock of discovering that hatred anew, finding I have not moved
on, only been lulled into good humour by solitude, did not lessen the
first joy of the little back room. For a while, in spite of the ugly
things in it, and the never-ending reek streaming in through the window,
the joy remained. There was that night when I sat writing until morning.
Once more able to expand and think. And the air seemed as pure as if it
had come in over the country-side....

And something of the first joy has remained. A lower tone. But still
here. In the quietude. In the certainty of deep sleep and a happy mood
in the morning.


                                   2

To-night, with Miss Holland away, there is a double stillness. Perhaps I
woke because she is away? For some _reason_, I woke. Something to say
itself. And all these thoughts, bringing back the joy of the little room
anew, are getting in the way. Idling along, going round and round. Me,
gossiping with myself.

And all the time something is waiting. Just at hand. Behind the things
in my mind. And now, with me more awake here came the remains of
yesterday. Crowding in to be looked at. Taking me back to stand and look
again to find out what remains; what really meant something to me, if I
could find out what it meant....

Strangeness of London on Bank Holiday. Its underside turned uppermost
and spread over the whole surface. Daily London grown invisible,
incredible. Never to come back.

I’m glad I’ve spent one Bank Holiday in London. Seen and heard its
reality. I’m glad it’s over. It’s like being separated from a lover. The
blank feeling, at the end of the afternoon, that it is forever.

The certainty that this wild tumult of people is the reality and the
rest a sham. I almost feared to look at them lest they should see me
wondering _why_ they all go back. Why they don’t know their power and
end the system that holds them. I fear them. And to-morrow, with my
lover back again, I shall feel more glad of that than sorry at the
thought of all these people who keep London what it is to me, gagged
again, and chained. Taken out of my sight. Toiling, out of my sight.

Mean. Fear of losing small comforts and accustomed dreams. Like a timid
elderly man of fixed habits settling comfortably in the autumn into his
usual chair at the club. The peacefully noisy streets. Kept clean.
Unconsciousness in the lulling song of the traffic.

Why should I wander in bliss while they toil in grime and darkness?

In the evening _Sayce_. Far away from the tumult; hidden, untroubled in
his green room. Sitting in the window-space, not giving a thought to the
rampant multitudes. Not minding, not giving a thought to them. Yet they
threatened him as he sat there. Made his joy small and absurd. Even
while it was balm to see his unconsidered detachment. To see him, poor
and outcast, a king for the evening, throned in his shadowy little
kingdom in the security of the London night. If he had given a thought
to the unleashed thousands, or to anyone watching, in some way his face
would have changed. But he was aware only of his poetry and the
sounding-board, the green-robed woman sitting low in the opposite chair.
Radiant and composed. But not only listening, not as he thought, just
listening. She, like him, was special, lived in his world, as an
appreciator. But besides hearing, seeing what he saw, feeling as he
felt, she saw him. Saw, far away within the form turned towards her
alone—declaiming from the book held sideways so that he could see her
face and make towards her delighted hand-swayings for the passages that
pleased him most—the halting, half man’s half woman’s adoration he gave
to the world he saw, his only reality....

And while she admired, she pitied.

And fifty yards away the toilers raged. The sound of them made the two
engrossed figures, softly lit by the high presiding candle, a little
absurd. Irrelevant and insecure. As if they might topple. Ought to
topple. Ought to listen and topple down....

                   *       *       *       *       *

Gerald and Harriett. Drawn, driven, washed about by tides they do not
see. Flung on rocks, washed off and flung forward. Their unaware faces.
Strength of unawareness; pushing on. That was my comfort—that they did
not know. And because they did not know, I would not. Clung only to the
things they saw and got away without realisation. Yet I realised it all.
Here it is, tormenting me.

There is no choice of what one shall see on waking by accident. Things
are there, set out clearly, stating their essence. What they meant when
I passed through them feeling only the movement, from behind closed
doors of _le sort_. Not thinking, because they were long prepared and
there was nothing to be done. But there is always when _le sort_ moves,
a sense of guilt. Of having brought things about; let things happen that
need not have happened. That is why, when they happen, one does not
think. The fear of being crippled by condemnation. Yet it is all written
in the book of consciousness.

Written indelibly. Because one can look to and fro, from one thing to
another and each remains in place, presenting always one face, like a
photograph.

Gerald and Harriett and Elspeth starting for Canada. Without good-bye.
None of us dared to say good-bye. Outside the gaslit compartment seemed
nothing but whirling darkness and cruel laughter. We jested without a
gap. Annoying Elspeth, who longed only for the train to start and the
relations who kept attention from centring on herself, to be gone. The
sound of her childish complaints was one with the laughter of the outer
darkness. She stood on the seat, a shining little figure in the harsh
gaslight, clutching the doll Sarah had found time, on that awful last
day, to dress. Beneath her unconscious feet was the machinery that would
carry her into exile.

There they were in the imprisoning carriage. And then gone. It was a
death. Something buried alive. I dared not feel. There was relief
afterwards in walking down the platform with Gerald’s sister, a stranger
just met, in knowing by the hard clutch of her hand that she, too, was
not daring to feel. We both knew we had witnessed a crime.

“Can you get home?”

“Yes.” Our voices were rough and shuddering.

“We’ll meet again.”

We unclasped our hands and parted abruptly, our faces distorted with not
weeping.

I came home and read the _Punch_ Gerald had left behind.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Michael’s telegram. Once more the presence of him in the early morning,
plunging along across the wide shadow of St. Pancras Church, his voice
at my side and again the discomfort of hearing unknown people lightly
and swiftly described as they appeared to him: delocalised, people in a
void. The things he said about her told me nothing but that she was
courting him and he had no idea of it. And I let him go in ignorance.
Pushed him into the arms of a stranger.

“Take flowers. One always takes flowers to people when they are ill. And
stay long enough to tell her all she wants to know about the congress.”

And I knew when he told me of the engagement that he was uneasy, neither
happy nor confident. And it was broken. Broken by him. And no one will
ever know why, and the obstinate little gentleman can’t see that it
casts a greater shadow on her than if he spoke out and that if he can’t
speak out he should invent. There she goes, back into her life with a
shadow, cast by Michael.

                   *       *       *       *       *

“Methodical culture, my dear young lady, yes. But with plenty of
revolution.”

Raymond wanted me to look at the programme and I told him crossly that I
wanted the music first and didn’t believe in methodical culture. That
was before I noticed the man in the cloak on my right.

“And now it’s over, by way of methodical culture, I’ll look.”

Raymond was genuine and the strange man was genuine. I was more pleased
by his manner than by the truth in either of them. I held both their
views. But wanted to impress both of them. Partly for the sake of the
truth. Men are either-or, all the time. But what I liked best was
peacocking out of the hall with both of them talking, one in each ear.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Strangeness of the seaside at Christmas time. Sunlit frost on the
morning grass. Green garden in full sunlight. Blaze of blue sea and blue
transparent sky. Blue and green and gold of summer, and warmth in the
tingling air.

All the things of an old-fashioned Christmas except religion. Deliberate
Christmassing without belief.

And she came to midday dinner in an old woollen tam held in place by a
grubby motor-veil tied under her chin.

“She gets _one_ good, annihilating dress. Devastates about in it. On
occasions. For the rest of the time she allows her things ... to
accumulate atmosphere.”

He thought her a bit of a charlatan. “No end of a rogue really. But when
she smiles that _brown_ smile—she’s a gipsy you know, a certain amount
of grime sets her off—one would do _anything_ for her.”

He’s always complaining that women don’t do anything, and when they do,
and make others do, he’s at once ready with some belittling explanation.

And I hated them both. Was surly behind politeness till she had gone.
When at once I forgot she was still in the world. _There’s_ stupidity.
Enough to exclude from the élite of all worlds.

Yet Selina Holland is afraid of losing me.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Selina Holland has no doubt that death will transfer her into the
presence of God. Yet she wants, for the time that remains to her, wide
circumstances, ease. Is willing, for the sake of the ease and space she
sees so clearly, to go to the ends of the earth. “_Wide_ sky; unstinted
air; _room_ to move” exactly in the voice she uses for “_Good_
Bermaline.”

A religious woman, living on prayer; blossoming, in middle age, into
splendid health on the power of prayer and teaspoonsful of Listerine.
Ready to give up her work amongst the poor and systematically seek
wealth and comfort.

Perhaps in the end she will actually go; to California. Make her way.
Master hotel-keeping as she has mastered hygiene and midwifery, and
confectionery. Leave London as coolly as years ago she came. And
contrive her transference just as she had contrived this holiday to
Edinburgh. Ingeniously. Horrible ingenuity of genteel poverty: Two coats
and skirts, one on the top of the other, and a little handbag. By the
midnight train.

She despises the world, yet uses it. Is using it now to accumulate
money. The being here with me is now altogether an affair of economy.
But if I were religious, it would not be. I should be the centre of her
personal life. She would try to get me to California. “Would you like to
come?” and then answering herself before I had time to speak: “No; you
are too cultured.” But that was long ago. Whilst there was still the
sense of being her great adventure. Before the trouble about the letter.
Before Miss Trevelyan came to tea. Badly dressed, with a cold in her
head. Tall, like Miss Holland. Two tall figures sitting upright in front
of the little fire, not lounging, sitting as if they were just going to
move. Both looking into the fire, Miss Holland with a pleased smile,
Miss Trevelyan stolidly, as she told without a break and almost without
questions from Miss Holland everything that had happened to her family
and friends during the year. She had Miss Holland’s indifference to
surroundings and her obliviousness of differences in the quality of
experience. Assumed that everything affected everyone in the same way.

“Miss Brown has married and gone to live in Birmingham.”

To hear them talk was to feel that one person was making remarks aloud;
talking to herself of shadows in a dream. I began to understand why Miss
Holland found me lively and charming.

And then, when they had formally said good-bye and Miss Trevelyan had
gone out into the rain in her cloak: “A perfectly happy year together.
We would both gladly repeat it.” I can see their year. A peaceful
association of two workers. Both disciplined and incessantly active.
Sharing disapprovals. Living as if in a siege; enclosed and
conspiratorial and happy. Prayers and puns and loyally exchanged
services. A life of perfect agreement untroubled by thought. And I am
jealous. Perhaps it was then, knowing that if she still desired a
renewal of life with Trevelyan, I was only second-best, that I really
moved away from her. Feeling inferior as well as superior to Miss
Trevelyan. Feeling hidden in them both something I cannot reach. That I
shall reach one day and meet them suddenly, when they have both passed
out of my life. Something they have given without knowing it.

It is since then that she has more and more effaced herself and no
longer courted every opportunity of standing, if only for a moment and
deprecatingly, at fresh angles of vision. Miss Trevelyan reinforced her.
But she still thinks there ought to be personal affection between us.
Doesn’t notice that I can’t call her Selina.

Failing with her leaves other successes shadowed.

                   *       *       *       *       *

To and fro, linked by their common quality of condemnation, went small
forgotten incidents of the year, covering it. There was nothing else.
The central things standing so brightly in her daytime consciousness
were nothing. Unfounded. Mirage of youth. Sunlit reflections on the sea
within whose depths she would presently be lost. Life was being spent in
watching the glint of sunlight upon waves, believing it her own sunlight
and permanent, while all the time it was light created by others, by
millions of lives in the past, by all the labour that now kept the world
going. And while she had watched the penalty had been piling up.

“I am left in a corner with death.” But it is I who am left, and not
dead. Only out of my own element in which, if I were alone, even death
would look quite different.

And far away below evidence and the clear speech of events, even now
something was answering. Suddenly like a blow bringing her sharply
awake, it came: refusal. Surging up and out over everything, clearing
the air, bringing a touch of coolness in the stifling air.

“Profanity. My everlasting profanity.”

She listened guiltily, glad of its imperiousness. Everything had been
thought out. There was nothing appearing behind it. There was in the
depths of her nothing but this single knowledge that she was going away
from this corner where she had been dying by inches. No consideration of
right or wrong. No feeling for persons; either Miss Holland or those
people downstairs, or those of her own she had been able to help by this
cheaper way of living.

She sighed in pure sadness as she faced this deeper self. For it was
clear now forever that to be good was not all in all to her. To endure,
suffer long, and be kind was not her aim. She had never been quite sure
whether it was not the hidden secret of all her decisions, born in her,
independent of thought. Now and then hearing commendation of endurances
that did not bring bitterness, she had been tempted to feel that there
must be, since she had endured much and not become bitter, in her own
character the things called sweetness and fortitude.

It had always been a strange moment. Two impressions side by side. The
certainty that conscious fortitude and sweetness could not persist in
their own right, and the uncertainty of approving of these things in
their unconscious simplicity; a dislike of being discovered in a state
of helpless merit.

Greater than the sadness of not being good, more thrilling, was the joy
of feeling ready to take responsibility for oneself.

I must create my life. Life is creation. Self and circumstances the raw
material. But so many lives I can’t create. And in going off to create
my own I must leave behind uncreated lives. Lives set in motionless
circumstances.

A voice sounded in the hot darkness. Just outside the window. Almost in
the room.

“I’ll do you _in_. If I get you I’ll do you in.” Sound of furniture
violently collided with. Perrance. Mrs. Perrance.

And I’m sitting up trembling. This, the beginning of this, was what woke
me a few moments ago. The end of their Bank Holiday.

Again a crash.

I’m full of horror. Too full of horror for pity. It is _my_ voice this
time that must sound that awful cry from a window.

With her feet on the floor and her hands feeling for garments, she
listened. Perrance was in monologue. Perhaps he was helpless. Probably
more drunk than Mrs. Perrance. Perhaps he would talk himself out. Poor
man. Poor woman.

This is life. However far I go away, this will go on. To go away is only
to get mental oblivion of it. Yet that is just what I am planning. Here
in the midst of it is the hope that my lucky star, the star that keeps
even my sympathies clear of being actively involved, will carry me
through this, too, without bringing it into my hands.

The voice of Perrance was growing high and thin. Lying down once more in
the darkness she could hear each word wailing out into the night. He was
chanting his loathing of the mystery of womanhood, cursing it, its
physical manifestations, cursing them to heaven in the vile den created
by his ignorance and helpless poverty. The den where lived the despair
of his isolated mind. Miriam felt its dailyness. Seemed to be within it
and to breathe its thick odours as she listened. And to rebel and curse
with him. In his soul was light. Something he felt his wife fought
against with her dark, silent ways. Why did he not murder her?

And the woman was there with her youth. Before her eyes, pictures of
Devonshire. In her mind wonder at the way things had slipped down and
down, to this; and fear, of this maddened stranger who desired only her
death.

Well, they adore each other, they adore each other, muttered Miriam as
quietness fell. It is terrifying to me because I’m not accustomed.

A shriek brought her to the middle of the floor feeling cool and strong.
“Stop! stop!” she shouted down out of the window. “I’m coming.” But her
voice was drowned in the tumult below. A blazing lamp crashed out into
the garden and then came the man’s voice feeble and sane:

“We mighta been killed. We mighta been before our maker, Maria.” And a
sobbing. Mrs. Perrance sobbing in serene despair. Without fear.

Away. Away....




                          Transcriber’s Notes


The original spelling and punctuation were mostly preserved.

A few obvious typographical and formatting errors were silently
corrected. Further careful corrections, some after consulting other
editions, are listed here (before/after):

   [p. 47]:
   ... drawing her head across a level that showed no ...
   ... drawing her ahead across a level that showed no ...

   [p. 73]:
   ... le silence que les âmes se revêlent.” ...
   ... le silence que les âmes se révèlent.” ...

   [p. 73]:
   ... The result of their having been, a force de préoccupations, ...
   ... The result of their having been, à force de préoccupations, ...

   [p. 75]:
   ... and the low pillow fitted itself to her neck. Oh, ...
   ... and the low pillow fitted itself to her neck. “Oh, ...

   [p. 75]:
   ... “music that softlier on the spirit lies——” ...
   ... music that softlier on the spirit lies——” ...

   [p. 97]:
   ... But a night’s sleep play’s strange tricks. ...
   ... But a night’s sleep plays strange tricks. ...

   [p. 127]:
   ... suggesting works ahead to be delivered ...
   ... suggesting words ahead to be delivered ...

   [p. 142]:
   ... know its popular. There are lots of people who ...
   ... know it’s popular. There are lots of people who ...

   [p. 142]:
   ... grin and snort and stand aside. Woman, he ...
   ... grin and snort and stand aside. Women, he ...

   [p. 147]:
   ... what would set her definitely in the ...
   ... that would set her definitely in the ...

   [p. 174]:
   ... fiancée, who has altered so, any tiresome things, ...
   ... fiancée, who has altered so many tiresome things, ...

   [p. 207]:
   ... and through not actually looking about him, yet ...
   ... and though not actually looking about him, yet ...

   [p. 211]:
   ... édition de luxe if the noisy elements in a street ...
   ... édition de luxe of the noisy elements in a street ...

   [p. 222]:
   ... thought, just listening. She, like he, was ...
   ... thought, just listening. She, like him, was ...


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