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?