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.