1
"Been to church?" said Gerald digging his shoulders into his chair.
"No. Have you?"
"We've not been for weeks.... Everybody thinks us awful heathens."
"P'raps you are."
"It's Curls. She says she's hanged if she's going any more."
"I can't stand the vicar" said Harriett. "He doesn't believe a word he
says."
Fancy Harriett!...
"Besides, what's the good?"
"Oh, there you are."
"There's nothing the matter with church once in a way to my way of
thinking if it's a decent high musical service."
"Even Eve hardly ever goes now--and nobody could possibly be more goody
than she is."
This was disquieting. It was one thing to be the agnostic of the
family--but Eve and Harriett. Miriam pondered resentfully while Gerald
smoked and flicked his clothing and Harriett sat upright and pursed and
untroubled in her great chair. She wondered whether she ought to say
something about Unitarianism. But after all there might not be anything
in it and they might not feel the relief of the way it cleared up the
trouble about Christ. Besides there was no worry here in the room. A
discussion would lead nowhere. They could all three look at each other
if they wanted to and laugh everything off. In the middle of a sleepy
Sunday afternoon with nothing to do sitting in three huge chairs and
looking at each other they were all right. Harriett's strength and scorn
were directed against everything in the world but not against herself
... never against herself. Harriett often thought her grumpy and
ill-tempered, but she approved of her. She was approving now.
"After all Frills it's good form to go" Gerald said idly. "Go on. Smart
people go to show their clothes."
"Well, we've shown ours."
Harriett flew out of her chair and daintily kicked him.
He grabbed and missed and sank back wailing, his face hidden in a
cushion. Her dainty foot flew out once more and he smothered a shriek.
"Shut up" said Harriett curling herself up in her chair.
Gerald wailed on.
"Do we smoke in here?" said Miriam, wanting the scene to drop or change
while it was perfect. She would tell them now about her change of
lodgings.
"Yes" said Harriett absently with an eye on Gerald.
"I've changed my diggings" began Miriam formally, fumbling for her
packet of cigarettes. Harriett was hurling a cushion. Gerald crumpled
into the depths of his chair and sobbed aloud, beating with his arms.
"Stop it silly" piped Harriett blushing.
"I've changed my diggings" repeated Miriam uncomfortably. Harriett's
face flashed a response. Gerald's loud wailings were broken by
beseeching cries. Real, absolutely real and satisfying. Miriam answered
them from some far deep in herself as if they were her own cries. Harry
was embarrassed. Her bright strength was answering. She was ashamed at
being seen answering.
Miriam got up conversationally and began looking about for matches in
the soft curtained drawing-room light. There were swift movements and
Harriett's voice busily chiding. When she turned Gerald was sitting on
the floor at Harriett's knee beating it gently with his head.
"Got a match, G?" she said seeing in imagination the flare of the match
in the soft greenish glare of the room. There was bright light all round
the house and a glare of brightness in the garden, beyond the curtains.
"Rather," said Gerald, "dozens." He sat up and handed out a box. Leaning
back against Harriett's knee he began intoning a little poem of appeal.
There was a ring at the front door bell. Miriam got herself to the piano
putting cigarettes and matches behind a vase on the mantelshelf. "That's
old Tremayne" said Gerald cheerfully, shooting his linen and glancing in
the strip of mirror in the overmantel. The door opened admitting the
light from the hall. The curtains at the open French windows swayed
forward flooding the room with the bright garden light. Into the
brightness stepped Mr. Tremayne, grey-clad and with a pink rose in his
buttonhole.
Over tea they heard the story of his morning and how it had been
interrupted by the man on the floor above who had come down in his
dressing gown to tell him about a birthday party ... the two men sitting
telling each other stories about drinks and people seeing each other
home. After tea he settled back easily in his chair and went on with his
stories. Miriam found it almost impossible to follow him. She grew weary
of his bantering tone. It smeared over everything he touched and made
him appear to be saying one thing over and over again in innuendo.
Something he could not say out and would never get away from. He made
little pauses and then it gleamed horribly about all his refinement of
dress and bearing and Gerald laughed encouragingly and he went on,
making a story that was like a play, that looked like life did when you
looked at it, a maddening fussiness about nothing and people getting
into states of mind. He went on into a story about business life ...
people getting the better of each other. It made her feel sick with
apprehension. Anybody in business might be ruined any minute unless he
could be sure of getting the better of someone else. She had never
realised that before.... It pressed on her breathing and made her feel
that she had had too much tea.... She hated the exponent sitting there
so coolly. It made the cool green-lit afternoon room an island amongst
horrors. But it was that to him too ... he felt the need of something
beyond the everlasting innuendo of social life and the everlasting
smartness of business life. She felt it was true that he spent Sunday
mornings picking out hymn tunes with one finger and liked "Sabbath
music" and remembered the things his mother used to play to him. He
wanted a home, something away from business life and away from social
life. He saw her as a woman in a home, nicely dressed in a quiet drawing
room, lit by softly screened clear fresh garden daylight.... "Business
is business." ... "Man's love is of man's life a thing apart--'tis
woman's whole existence." Tennyson did not know what he was saying when
he wrote it in his calm patronising way. Mr. Tremayne would admire it as
a "great truth"--thinking it like a man in the way Tennyson thought it.
What a hopeless thing a man's consciousness was. How awful to have
nothing but a man's consciousness. One could test it so easily if one
were a little careful, and know exactly how it would behave....
Opening a volume of Mendelssohn she played from his point of view one of
the Songs without Words quietly into the conversation. The room grew
still. She felt herself and Mr. Tremayne as duplicates of Harriett and
Gerald only that she was a very religious very womanly woman, the ideal
wife and mother and he was a bad fast man who wanted to be saved. It was
such an easy part to play. She could go on playing it to the end of her
life, if he went on in business and made enough money, being a "gracious
silence," taking an interest in his affairs, ordering all things well,
quietly training the servants, never losing her temper or raising her
voice, making the home a sanctuary of rest and refreshment and religious
aspiration, going to church.... She felt all these things expressing
themselves in her bearing. At the end of her piece she was touched to
the heart by the look of adoration in his eyes, the innocent
youthfulness shining through his face. There was something in him she
could have and guard and keep if she chose. Something that would die if
there were no woman to keep it there. There was nothing in his life of
business and music halls to keep it there, nothing but the memory of his
mother and he joined her on to that memory. His mother and his wife were
sacred ... apart from life. But he could not be really happy with a
woman unless he could also despise her. Any interest in generalities,
any argument or criticism or opposition would turn him into a towering
bully. All men were like that in some way. They each had a set of
notions and fought with each other about them whenever they were
together and not eating or drinking. If a woman opposed them they went
mad. He would like one or two more Mendelssohns and then supper. And if
she kept out of the conversation and listened and smiled a little he
would go away adoring. She played the Duetto; the chords made her think
of Beethoven and play the last page carelessly and glance at Harriett.
Harriett had felt her response to the chords and knew she was getting
away from Mendelssohn. Mr. Tremayne had moved to a chair quite close to
the piano, just behind her. She found the Beethoven and played the first
movement of a sonata. It leapt about the piano breaking up her pose,
using her body as the instrument of its gay wild shapeliness, spreading
her arms inelegantly, swaying her, lifting her from the stool with the
crash and vibration of its chords.... "Go on" said Harriett when it came
to an end. The Largo came with a single voice deep and broad and quiet;
the great truth behind the fuss of things. She felt her hearers grow
weary of its reiterations and dashed on alone recklessly into the storm
of the last movement. Through its tuneless raging she could hear the
steady voice and see the steady shining of the broad clear light.
Daylight and gaiety and night and storm and a great song and truth, the
great truth that was bigger than anything. Beethoven. She got up,
charged to the fingertips with a glow that transfigured all the
inanimate things in the room. The party was wrecked ... a young lady who
banged the piano till her hair nearly came down.... Mr. Tremayne had
heard nothing but noise.... His eyes smiled and his uneasy mouth felt
for compliments.
2
"Why didn't you ask him to supper La Fée?"
"The Bollingdons are coming round, silly."
"Well?"
"With one small chicken and a blancmange."
"Heaven help us."
When they sat down to play halfpenny nap after supper Miriam recovered
her cigarette from its hiding place. She did not know the game. She sat
at Harriett's new card-table wrapped in the unbroken jesting of the
Bollingdons and the Ducaynes, happily learning and smoking and feeling
happily wicked. The Bollingdons taught her simply with a complete
trustful friendliness, Mrs. Bollingdon leaning across in her pink satin
blouse, her clear clean bulging cheeks and dark velvet hair like a full
blown dark rose. Between the rounds they poured out anecdotes of earlier
nap parties, all talking at once. The pauses at the fresh beginnings
were full of the echoes of their laughter. Miriam in the character of
the Honourable Miss Henderson had just accepted Lord Bollingdon's
invitation to join the Duke and Duchess of Ducayne and himself and Lady
Bollingdon in an all-day party to Wembley Park in a break and four on
Easter Monday and had lit a second cigarette and accepted a small whisky
and soda when Mr. Grove was announced. Harriett's face flushed jocular
consternation.
When the party subsided after Mr. Grove's spasmodic handshakings Miriam
got herself into a chair in a far corner, smoking her cigarette with
burning cheeks. Sitting isolated with her cigarette and her whisky while
he twice sent his low harsh clearly murmuring voice into the suddenly
empty air to say that he had been to evensong at the Carmelites and was
on his way home, she examined the relief of his presence and the nature
of her farewell. Mr. Bollingdon responded to him remarking each time on
the splendour of the evening.
3
Strolling home towards midnight along the narrow pavement of Endsleigh
Gardens Miriam felt as fresh and untroubled as if it were early morning.
When she had got out of her Hammersmith omnibus into the Tottenham Court
Road she had found that the street had lost its first terrifying
impression and had become part of her home. It was the borderland of the
part of London she had found for herself; the part where she was going
to live, in freedom, hidden, on her pound a week. It was all she wanted.
That was why she was young and glad; that was why fatigue had gone out
of her life. There was nothing in the world that could come nearer to
her than the curious half twilight half moonlight effect of lamplit
Endsleigh Gardens opening out of Gower Place; its huge high trees, their
sharp shadows on the little pavement running by the side of the
railings, the neighbouring gloom of the Euston Road dimly lit by lamps
standing high in the middle of the roadway at long intervals, the great
high quiet porched houses, black and still, the shadow mass of St.
Pancras church, the great dark open space in front of the church, a
shadowy figure-haunted darkness with the vague stream of the Euston Road
running to one side of it and the corridor of Woburn Place opening on
the other. The harsh voice of an invisible woman sounded out from it as
she turned off into her own street.... "Dressed up--he was--to the
bloody death." ... The words echoed about her as she strolled down the
street controlling her impulse to flinch and hurry. The woman was there,
there and real and that was what she had said. Resentment was lurking
about the street. The woman's harsh voice seemed close. Miriam pictured
her glaring eyes. There was no pretence about her. She felt what she
said. She belonged to the darkness about St. Pancras church ... people
had been garrotted in that part of the Euston Road not so very long
ago.... Tansley Street was a soft grey gloaming after the darkness. When
she rattled her key into the keyhole of number seven she felt that her
day was beginning. It would be perpetually beginning now. Nights and
days were all one day; all hers, unlimited. Her life and work at Wimpole
Street were something extra, thrown in with her own life of endless day.
Sarah and Harriett, their lives and friends, her own friends, the
Brooms, the girls in Kennett Street, all thrown in. She lit her table
lamp and the gas and two candles, making her little brown room brilliant
under a brilliant white ceiling and sat down eager to tell someone of
her wealth and freedom.
4
Someone must know she was in London, free, earning her own living.
Lilla? She would not see the extraordinary freedom; earning would seem
strange and dreadful to her ... someone who would understand the
extraordinary freedom.... Alma. _Alma!_ Setting forth the London address
in a heavy careless hand at the head of a postcard she wrote from the
midst of her seventeenth year, "Dear A. Where are you?"
* * * * *
Walking home along the Upper Richmond Road; not liking to buy sweets;
not enjoying anything to the full--always afraid of her refinements;
always in a way wanting to be like her; wanting to share her mysterious
knowledge of how things were done in the world and the things one had to
do to get on in some clever world where people were doing things. Never
really wanting it because the mere thought of that would take the beauty
of the syringa and make it look sad. Never being able to explain why one
did not want to do reasonable clever things in a clever brisk reasonable
way; why one disliked the way she went behaving up and down the Upper
Richmond Road with her pretty neat brisk bustling sidling walk, keeping
her secret with a sort of prickly brightness. The Upper Richmond Road
was heaven, pure heaven; smelling of syringa. She liked flowers but she
did not seem to know.... _Syringa._ I had forgotten. That is one of the
things I have always wanted to stop and remember.... What was it all
about? What was she doing now? Anyhow the London post-card would be an
answer. A letter, making her see Germany and bits of Newlands and what
life was now would answer everything, all her snubs and cleverness and
bring back the Upper Richmond Road and make it beautiful. She will know
something of what it was to me then. Perhaps that was why she liked me
even though she thought me vulgar and very lazy and stupid.