1
Serenity had retreated outdoors, and increased there. To-day, in the
space between the week’s work and the week-end with its pattern
ready-set, was serenity immeasurable; given by autumn. Autumn gleaming
beyond the park railings through sunlit mist.
Autumn had accumulated unawares. But this meeting with it had begun
early this morning in the balmy stillness of the square. Just when the
lame old woman had crossed the street. Cheerfully; unhampered by heat or
cold or wind.
It had made the happiness of the morning’s work, its gaiety and ease.
And now at its midday fulness it made the visit of the Brooms—so central
as she had sat at her ledgers—retreat into the background. This still
air passing into her spirit, the great trees standing in it, thick with
coloured leaves upon the spread of misty grass, stamping their image,
would remain when the rest of the holiday was forgotten.
Yet the Brooms, both Grace and Florrie, belonged to the unfathomable
depth of autumn. Not to its wholeness. To single features. Any single
feature contemplated brought them there to look and love. Only in
London. They belonged to London from the first. To the heavy, tinted
trees. To the first breath of exciting, on-coming cold, distilling the
radiance of the sun-warmed earth. To the mauve twilights of fogless
November days. To Christmas, and to June with spring and summer together
in the scent of sweet briar wafted across their suburban garden; making,
in its small green space with masonry visible all about, a sharper sense
of summer than was to be found in the open country. They belonged to
every feature of the London weather. Taking the sting from the worst and
adding brightness to the best.
But this opening with its view of the short broad path belongs to no
one. The sight of it is always a stepping forward into nowhere with eyes
on the low fence at the end, the gap, the two poplars pluming up on
either side, making it a stately portal to the green expanses beyond.
The poplars say:
Les yeux gris
Vont au paradis.
And the picture remains after the high railings have come back again.
Its message brings more light than there is into the thickets of shrubs
and bushes, and takes the suggestion of sadness from the stretches of
grass dulled even in sunlight by the thick autumn air.
_Les yeux gris_; in spring and autumn.
But most clearly in autumn when the air of the park is rich with
outbreathed summer. Answering everything with the unanswerable beauty of
autumn.
2
The afternoon streets were bustling with farewells to the week. Out
across them went her own glances of farewell, making them newly dear and
keeping them still echoing about her when she arrived to be alone by
daylight for the first time in the ancient stillness of the house.
She hurried upstairs to take possession and prepare for the coming of
the Brooms.
The stillness was absolute. New in her experience and disquieting. Her
old room had always greeted her. Had been full at once with the sound
and colour of her life.
This stillness was impermeable. Wrapped within it the rooms disowned
her. Maliciously, now that they had her to themselves, they announced
the fact behind the charms of the week of settling in. Bereavement. Not
only of her self, left behind irrevocably in the old room, but also now
that she surveyed it undisturbed by Miss Holland’s supporting presence,
of the bright motley of her outside life. Everything had thinned, was
going thinly forward without depth of background. Against these ancient
rooms she was powerless.
If she were living alone in them? She imagined herself living alone in
them, and at once the tide of her life began to rise and flow out and
change them. They dropped their ancient preoccupations and turned
friendly faces towards her, promising welfare.
But as long as she stayed in them accompanied they would acquire no
depth. Their depth was the level of her relationship to Miss Holland.
Without her she was lost in them, a moving form whose sounds impinged
less surely upon their stillness than the sounds of the mice scampering
over the attic floor.
All through the week in coming home late each evening to the certainty
of talk, to hurried sleep in the orderliness created by Miss Holland,
there had been a glad sense of life renewed. New, exciting life,
bringing at first the surprise of an escape homeward that had left the
London years unreal; a tale told busily day by day to drown the voices
calling her home. That first sense of home-coming had vanished, lost
among the entertainments of unfamiliar ways of living. But it had been
at work all the week. All the week, serving as space for continuous
talk, the rooms had been changing, growing larger, expanding together
with the life lived there, a wealth falling into her hands too swiftly
for counting.
Apart from that life they were nothing. They stood defined, mean and
dismal, crushing her. And for these mean and dismal rooms, set above a
thick ascending darkness where other lives were hemmed and crushed, she
had sacrificed the spacious house with its unexplored distances and its
perpetual familiar strangeness.
And haunting each room, as in solitude she surveyed it, was the mocking
image of Sheffield.
3
And at this moment Miss Holland, in half-holiday mood, would be
buoyantly pacing some chosen part of the glad open wilderness of London.
Well had she known what she escaped in refusing to deal with Sheffield.
But she did not know that life set to weekly meetings with him was
darkened not only because he was “odious,” but also because the paying
of rent tore life up by the roots.
The payment of Mrs. Bailey’s bills, looked back to now, seemed to be all
a single transaction: a chance meeting on the stairs, a hurried handing
of money, eye to eye, smiling. A single guilty moment and then a
resumption of a relationship not based on money. It had marked, not the
passage of time, but its rest, at an unchanging centre. Paying rent to
this man would be counting off time; and a weekly reminder of the
payment for life going on all over the world. To be obliged at the best
moment of each week to face Sheffield, acknowledging another week passed
in the world as he saw it, would be to fight without weapons against the
mocking reflection in the mirror he held up.
Putting off the ordeal until the last moment, she prepared for the
coming of the Brooms. Reflected in the long mirror was her gay carefree
self, the self that bore in the eyes watching it from their distant
suburb, a charmed life; offering no resting-place for the pity they
wanted to bestow. It would remain when they had gone, and would carry
off the rent-paying with a high hand.
They were coming. Soon their voices would sound about her in the
different rooms.
4
It was her happiness that had hailed them from afar and summoned them
without a thought of how these new quarters would appear in their eyes.
In the eyes of Mrs. Philps, dressed for an afternoon call and now
already on her way....
Unless she said Miss Holland was at home and ill and at once took them
to the club, they would come up, through the smells and gloom of the
passage and stairway, expecting at least a bright, flowered-chintz
flat....
The ordeal of facing Sheffield had now turned into a reprieve. She ran
downstairs and knocked peremptorily at his door, which opened
immediately upon him shirt-sleeved, his sparse hair in wisps about a
preoccupied face. His private face, caught unawares, reflecting thoughts
turned upon detail. After all, he had a personal life, perplexities.
There was nothing in the poor thing to dread. It was idiotic to hold him
in mind as waiting there behind the door for her coming.
His eager, inattentive voice, bidding her upstairs, sounded about her as
she stated her errand. She went up the uncarpeted stairs to set the
rapid tapping of her shoes against the influences brooding in the
ancient gloom.
“My _mother_ is upstairs,” he said from behind, in his mocking
sing-song. Hearing it again, Miriam thought of it as a silence, with
mocking speech extending before and after; the uniform sound of his
mind. A good mind, ill-fed and circling. Recognisable English
prejudices, soured.
“_This_ is Miss Henderson,” he cried gleefully closing the door behind
her, the door of a room already, with its coffee-coloured lace curtains
keeping out the shadowed light of the court, in a heavy twilight. The
same voice, feebler, but deeper and flexibly rumbling, came from a mass
risen up at the fireside, a mass of draperies about a tall form
unsteadily bowing and capped with ponderous lace.
The voice rumbled on while Sheffield put a chair for her, and it seemed
at the end of a few minutes that she had been sitting there
indefinitely, listening to a flow of speech that communicated nothing
but its tone. Yet she had spoken. She remembered the sound of her own
voice in the room, the voice of all her family. And there was the
semblance of conversation, Sheffield standing by, chanting refrains,
presiding. Triumphantly, as if he had purposely brought her to face and
be overwhelmed by their united voices.
She braced herself to resist the influence of this life-stuff seething
bitterly in its corner. But it cast shadow everywhere. Sitting smiling
and inattentive, she heard the continuation backwards through the years,
through all the years she had known and further back into those
differently lovely years her parents had known, of these bitter
life-shadowing voices. They went forward too, shadowing the future,
until death should silence them.
Opposition would be futile. Her words would fly like chaff before the
wind of their large bitterness, a general arraignment, she gathered,
growing used to the angry sing-song, of everything in the world.
She thought of the autumn sunlight, held it in her mind, thought of it
as existing in their minds and in the minds of everyone in London
to-day; the hint of an answer, the moment one paused to look at it, to
every problem in the world. But these two were not perceiving the
sunlight in her mind. Aware of her submissive attention, they were
growing more explicit, going into detail, one against the other, cantori
and decani. Mother and son, bitterness embodied, thought out, added to,
grown old behind a close hedge of contempt for everything _new_.
They had a sort of clear-sighted observation. Humanity, they would say
if they had the words, doesn’t change _essentially_. But to get anywhere
with that conviction they ought to be religious. To be in a group. They
were cut off from the religion that goes with the attitude. An amateur
church, self-ended. They were the offshoots of the worst kind of
Protestantism. Protestant enlightenment in a vacuum....
Sadness grew in her with the sense of the utter absence in herself of
anything wherewith to stem the bitter flood. The refuge she was taking
in apparent acceptance was a condemnation. Leaving her less than they.
When at last the rent was paid and she was free to go, such a length of
life had been passed in the sad room, so much unfamiliar experience
lived through, that the parting was like a parting with old friends.
Unawares, she found herself voicing regret for her forced departure and
promising to come again. She felt her future divided between the two
houses set so closely side by side. They smiled, pleased. Stood close,
flattering and fondling her with their voices. They had had a happy
hour. The old woman came to the top of the stairs to speed her on her
way. Standing on the landing with escape at hand, she had a moment of
hesitation. Voicelessly she cancelled her compliance, stood free and
remote and felt as she went how their scorn followed her, scorn of
anything that could not ring against their hardness any hardness of its
own.
Outside in the court, she paced to-and-fro between her door and the
entrance to the main street, waiting in the free air of her own world
for the coming of her friends. But no oblivion could draw out the
bitterness folded into her memory. And though the voices of the friends
would drown the sound of that murderous chanting, the thing behind it,
the thing she had recognised in Sheffield a week ago was something
ultimate. Inexorable; a flourishing part of the world’s life not
hitherto clearly known to her, all the time taking effect in the sum
total. Life being hated, seen only as material for bitter laughter.
She looked up at the neat respectable house-front, the best in the
court, at the shrouded windows of the room where still her spirit
lingered. Next week she would stand firm and pay the rent at the door.
Better still, the inspiration came together with the sound of the
Brooms’ voices behind her, slip it into the letter-box. The Sheffields
were banished. The scene ahead held now no shadow but the weekly call of
the raucous-voiced, knocker-slamming men from the Snow-white laundry
that had for so long impersonally fetched and returned her things,
losing nothing, and now turning out to be linked to its delighted
clients not as she had imagined by some fresh, kindly, middle-aged
woman, but by these grubby cigarette-smoking, impatient men with the
voices of mutinous slaves.
5
It was not only Mrs. Philps who was dumb. The girls, too, came up in
pensive amazement through the darkness and smells of the lower floors to
arrive silent on the bleak top landing. Miriam displayed the rooms,
making much, as they stood about gathering up with trained eyes the
mournful details, of the general loftiness, the large windows, the many
doors. On the way up to the attic she remembered that she had not shown
the painted ceiling.
Since the first shock of Miss Holland’s furniture she had forgotten the
existence of the ancient splendour brooding above. Each going into the
little room had brought the hope of finding it changed, less gloomy,
less dull and lifeless. Until accepting, she had ceased to see anything
but the light travelling through the square window to die. Reappearing
now in her mind, the faded ceiling restored her first vision of the
rooms. The way they had seemed porous to the sound and sunlight of the
open.
Her visitors stood in the doorway of the attic looking in vain for
something upon which their eyes might rest. In her half of the bedroom,
kept till the last, they would find what they sought, feel radiating
there the more brightly for their coming, something of what it was that
held her life entranced and held them to herself. She, too, would feel
it; the incommunicable quality that crept sooner or later into her
surroundings, deep and central within the air. It was there waiting for
everyone, within their own surroundings. But so many seemed to ignore
it, and others, chafing, imagined it elsewhere, far off.
The girls made straight for the bureau, admiring, repeating phrases of
warm admiration in tones whose relief voiced all their earlier
embarrassment.
“Pretty,” said Mrs. Philps, who had come down the room to look.
“Imitation Chippendale.”
Glancing round, she brought her eyes quickly back to the bureau, at
which the girls were gazing as if afraid to look elsewhere. Joining them
near the window, to which presently all three had turned as if in the
hope of finding material for comment outside, Miriam remembered Sayce.
Sayce would enlighten them. The sight of his chosen dwelling-place would
bring them, nearer than anything she might try to say, a vision of her
world not as a thing pitiful compared to the world they knew, but as
something differently real.
“Across the way,” she said lightly, “in rooms exactly matching these, is
a poet, a great poet.” She watched Mrs. Philps glance across to the
opposite house.
“He might have an _office_ there perhaps,” said Mrs. Philps with an
expression Miriam had seen on the faces of gentlewomen doing distasteful
kitchen jobs, lips held in, the upper lip drawn slightly back showing
the teeth.
She hurried them off to the club.
Out in the street, the three were at once acting upon her in their old
way, revealing the power built up in their sheltered lives. How far,
with their untaxed strength, they outdid her in swiftness of
observation. How well they knew and how warmly they cherished every
stock and stone upon the highways of London. They had due knowledge. But
it was knowledge enclosed, multiplying only upon itself.
Vainly as they carried her along, surrounding her, accustomed to her
silence and unresentful, she sought for a clear centre where these old
friends and the friends with whom her life was now involved, might meet
and understand each other. Philistia. The mental immobility of
Philistines. But Philistines within their own world were rich and racy.
Their critics in failing to savour the essence of middle-class life,
missed the essence of all life whatsoever. They feared the _power_ of
the Philistines. Their power of stifling freedom. Freedom for what?
Freedom, unless people became samurai, slid down into a pit. Perhaps
these clever scornful ones, the moderns and the Lycurgans, were all
escaped Philistines?
Hearing the life in their voices, she loved them as they were,
unchangeable. Through philistinism lay perhaps one of the ways of
salvation. No. In the midst of the happiness they brought there was
always a lurking shadow. The shadow of incompatibility; of the
impossibility of being at once bound and free. The garden breeds a
longing for the wild; the wild a homesickness for the garden. Is there
no way of life where the two can meet?
6
And here, she realised as they went up the wide staircase, the broad way
leading easily to the destruction of home-made ideas, was a small
beginning of such a way of life. Within it the Brooms were small and
helpless. Travellers in an unknown land, not yet able to take their
bearings. They would recover. Later on, at home, they might make their
severe comments, but unawares the range of their vision would have been
enlarged. Gleefully she felt their irrevocable experience as they stood
ranged just as they had been at the door of her sitting-room, in the
doorway of the club smoking-room looking in upon women, unmistakable
gentlewomen, lounging insouciantly. Representing not names and families
but selves in their own right.
The drawing-room was again crowded, and again there was one free table
near a window looking out upon the stately autumn trees and upon it tea
set ready, waiting for them as the result of the order they had not seen
her give in the hall. It was a perfect moment. Here they were at last
after all the years, her guests at a table of her own. And they were
much more than at home and happy. They were at court, in the heart of
splendours. The girls admired openly. And Mrs. Philps, whose affection
for her had flourished upon a background of pity and half-indulgent
disapproval, withdrew all their past battlings in one glance, arch,
bridling, altogether delighted and approving.
But in the perfect moment a light had gone up that showed Miriam a new
self and a new world. It was she, not they, who was abroad in a strange
land. She who was travelling ahead beyond recall. The decoration
bestowed upon her by Mrs. Philps was already askew, not suiting her, not
desired. The understanding exchanged between them was of a pact she
would never willingly fulfil. The women’s pact. And while dispensing
tea, talking as they liked her to talk, making a little drama for their
delight, she privately thanked life for turning on this light in the
presence of friends who, cherishing her smallest expressiveness, left
her free to survey this new aspect of things whilst the light was still
at its first brilliance.
A disquieting brilliance. For her initiation as a hostess was so slight.
To sit thus, irresponsibly dispensing club fare, was the merest hint and
shadow of hostess-ship. Yet it had been enough to make the world anew.
To feel charming, to want to be charming, to join for a moment the great
army of hostesses as an equal was proud experience. But it was also a
sort of death. For it included letting everything in the world go by.
Feeling ready to do or say anything that would contribute to the comfort
and happiness of one’s guests. In Mrs. Philps’ smile there had been,
unknown to Mrs. Philps, the recognition of another victim joining the
conspiracy of the regiment. And she had recognised aright.
For here, complete and full-grown within herself, was one alert to avoid
anything leading to discord. Aware of convictions and points of view,
personal feelings, everything that made one’s own intimate vision of
life, shelved; receding and falling as if shamed, into the loneliest
background of consciousness. If all this and much more, things revealed
and sliding away too swiftly be caught and examined, were the price of
merely entertaining friends at a club, what of the _real_ hostess? What
of the millions of women serving life sentences? Hostesses not only to
friends but to households, willing or unwilling humbugs for life.
Yet the game is enchanting. And brings within an immense loneliness a
sort of freedom. That was there distinctly. A sort of enforced freedom.
To have nothing oneself. To seek only the being of others, regardless of
their quality as persons; feel only their weight as mere humanity.
Humanity seen thus as guests without distinction brought back the wonder
of life renewed. Pitiful and splendid. If these strange large beings
taking tea were thieves and murderers, the joy of tending them would be
the same. Perhaps greater. It was more thrilling to wait upon Florrie
and Mrs. Philps, whose lives she shared only imaginatively, than upon
Grace, with whom she had a sort of identity.