1
During her second week of giving the children their morning’s lessons
Miriam saw finally that it was impossible and would always be impossible
to make their two hours of application anything but an irrelevant
interval in their lives. They came into the schoolroom with languid
reluctance, dreamily indolent from breakfast in bed, fragrant from warm
baths. They made no resistance. She sat with the appointed tasks clearly
in mind, holding on to the certainty that they were to be done as the
only means of getting through the morning. The excitement of taking up
everything afresh with her was over and beyond occasional moments of
brightness when she tried to impress a fact or lift them over a
difficulty with a jest and they would exchange their glance of secret
delight, their curious conspirators’ glance of some great certainty
shared, they went through their tasks with well-bred preoccupation,
sighing deeply now and again and sometimes groaning, with clenched hands
pressed between their knees. Their accustomed life of events was close
round them, in the garden just beyond the undraped window, on the mat
outside the schoolroom door, where at any moment a footstep crossing the
landing might fall softly and pause, when their heads would go up in
tense listening. “Rollo!” they would say, waiting for the turning of the
handle, holding themselves in for the subdued shoutings they would utter
when Mrs. Corrie appeared standing in the doorway with a finger on her
lips. “Happy?” she would breathe; “working like nigger boys?” Unless
Miriam looked gravely detached she would glide in blushing, and
passionately caress them. When this happened, sighs and groanings filled
the time that remained. Their nearest approach to open rebellion
included a tacit appeal to her as a fellow-sufferer to throw up the
stupid game. It was quite clear that they did not blame her for their
sufferings and they were so much prepared to do the decent thing that
her experiment of reading to them regularly at some convenient half-hour
each day from a book of adventures or fairy tale, not only reconciled
them to endure the morning’s ordeal, but filled them with a gratitude
that astonished her and the beginnings of a personal regard for her that
shook her heart. During the readings they would lose their air of
well-bred detachment and would come near. They would be relaxed and
silent; the girl with bent head and brooding defiant curiously smiling
and frowning face, the boy gazing at the reader, rapturous. She would
sometimes feel against each arm the pressure of a head.
She had felt instinctively and at once that she could not use their
lesson hours as opportunities for talking at large on general ideas as
she had done with the children in the Banbury Park school. Those
children, the children of tradesmen most of them, could be allowed to
take up the beginnings of ideas; “ideals,” the sense of modern reforms,
they could be allowed to discuss anything from any point of view and
take up attitudes and have opinions. The opportunity for discussion and
for encouraging a definite attitude towards life was much greater in
this quiet room with only the two children; but it would have been mean,
Miriam felt, to take advantage of this opportunity; to be anything but
strictly neutral and wary of generalisations. It would have been so
easy. Probably a really “conscientious” woman would have done it, have
“influenced” them, given the girl a bias in the direction of some life
of devotion, hospital nursing or slum missionary work, and have filled
the boy with ideas as to the essential superiority of “Radicals.” Their
minds were so soft and untouched.... It ended in a conspiracy, they all
sat masquerading, and finished their morning exhausted and relieved. The
children knew the lessons tortured her and made her ill at ease, and
they were puzzled without disapproving. Through it all she felt their
gratitude to her for not being “simple,” like Bunnikin.
2
There was to be another week-end. Again there would be the sense of
being a visitor amongst other visitors; visitor was not the word; there
was a French word which described the thing, “convive,” “les convives”
... people sitting easily about a table with flushed faces ... someone
standing drunkenly up with eyes blazing with friendliness and a raised
wineglass ... women and wine, the roses of Heliogabalus; but he was a
Greek and dreadful in some way, convives were Latin, Roman; fountains,
water flowing over marble, white-robed strong-faced people reclining on
marble couches, feasting ... taking each fair mask for what it shows
itself; that was what this kind of wealthy English people did, perhaps
what all wealthy people did ... the maimed, the halt, the blind,
_compel_ them to come in ... but that was after the others had refused.
The thing that made you feel jolliest and strongest was to forget the
maimed, to _be_ a fair mask, to keep everything else out and be a little
circle of people knowing that everything was kept out. Suppose a
skeleton walked in? Offer it a glass of wine. People have no right to be
skeletons, or if they are to make a fuss about it. These people would be
all the brighter if they happened to have neuralgia; some strong pain or
emotion made you able to do things. Taking each fair mask was a fine
grown-up game. Perhaps it could be kept up to the end? Perhaps _that_
was the meaning of the man playing cards on his death-bed. Defying God.
That was what Satan did. He was brave; defying a tyrant ... “nothing to
do but curse God and die.” Who said that? there was something silly
about it; giving in, not real defiance. It didn’t settle anything; if
the new ideas were true; the thing went on. The love of God was like the
love of a mother; always forgiving you, ready to die for you, always
waiting for you to be good. Why? It was mean. The things one wanted one
could not have if one were just tame and good.... It is morbid to think
about being good; better the fair mask--anything. But it did not make
people happy. These people were not happy. They were not real.
3
Spring; everywhere, inside and outside the house. The spring outside had
a meaning here. It came in through the windows without obstruction and
passed into everything. At home it had sent one nearly mad with joy and
anticipation and passed and left you looking for it for the rest of the
year; in Germany it had brought music and wild joy--the secret had
passed from eye to eye; all the girls had known it. At Wordsworth House
it had stood far away, like a picture in a dream, something that could
be seen from windows, and found for a moment in the park, but powerless
to get into the house. Here it came in; you could not forget it for a
moment; and it was a background for something more wonderful than
itself; something that made it wonderful; something there were no words
for; voices, movements from room to room, strange food, the soft chink
of Venetian glass, amber wine, the light drowned in wine, through the
window a sharp gleam on things that reflected, day and night, into
everything, even into one’s thoughts. Why was the spring suddenly so
real? Why was it that you could stand as it were in a shaft of it all
the time, feeling in your breathing, hearing in your voice the sound of
the spring, the blood in your fingertips seeming like the roses that
they would touch soon in the garden?
How ignorant the man was who said, “each fair mask for what it shows
itself.” Life is not a mask, it is fair; the gold in one’s hair is real.
4
Friday brought an atmosphere of expectation. Mr. Kronen, an old friend
of the Corries, was coming down, with a new Mrs. Kronen.
By the early afternoon the house was full of fragrance; coming
downstairs dressed for an errand in the little town two miles away,
Miriam saw the hall all pink and saffron with azaleas. Coming across the
hall she found a scent in the air that did not come from the azaleas, a
sweet familiar syrupy distillation ... the blaze of childhood’s garden
was round her again, bright magic flowers in the sunlight, magic
flowers, still there, nearer to her than ever in this happy house; she
could almost hear the humming of the bees, and flung back the bead
curtain with unseeing eyes half expecting some doorway to open on the
remembered garden; the scent was overpowering ... the drawing-room was
cool and silent with closed windows and drawn blinds; bowls of roses
stood in every available place; she tiptoed about in the room gathering
their scent.
As she opened the hall door Mrs. Corrie’s voice startled her from the
dining-room.
Going into the dining-room she found her with a flushed face and excited
eyes and the children dancing round her. “Another tin! One more tin!”
they exclaimed, plucking at Miriam. From the billiard-room came the
smell of fresh varnish. Wiggerson was on her knees near the door.
“She’s done some stupid thing,” thought Miriam, looking at Mrs. Corrie’s
excited, unconscious face with sudden anxiety; “some womanish overdoing
it, wanting to do too much and spoiling everything.” She felt as if she
were representing Mr. Corrie.
“Will it be dry in time?” she asked, half angrily, scarcely knowing what
she said and in the midst of Mrs. Corrie’s apologetic petition that she
would bring a tin of oak stain back with her.
“Lordy, don’t you think so?” whispered Mrs. Corrie, only half dismayed.
Miriam had not patience to follow her as she went to survey the floor
ruefully chanting, “Oh, Wiggerson, Wiggerson.”
“Anyhow I’m sure it oughtn’t to have any more on as late as when I come
back,” she scolded boldly. How annoyed Mr. Corrie would be....
5
As she was going down the quiet road past the high oak garden palings of
the nearest house she heard the bumping and scrabbling of a heavy body
against the palings and a dog leapt into the road almost at her feet,
making the dust fly. It was an Irish terrier. It smiled and barked a
little, waiting, looking up into her face and up and down the road. “It
thought it knew me,” she pondered; “it mistook me for someone else.” She
patted its head and went forward thinking of the joyful scrabbling, its
headlong determination. The dog jerked back its head with a wide smile,
tore down the road and came back leaping and smiling. Something
disappeared from the vista of the roadway as the dog rushed along it
nosing after scents, looking round now and again, and now and again
rushing back to greet her. It brought back the sense of the house and
the strange gay life she had just left to go on her errand to the little
unknown town. It wore a smart collar; it belonged to that life. People
in it were never alone; when they went out there was always a dog with
them. “It thinks I’m one of them.” But it liked the wild; when they came
out on to the common it rushed up a sandy pathway and disappeared
amongst the gorse bushes. For a while Miriam hoped it would come back
and kept looking about for it; then she gave it up and went ahead with
the commons drifting slowly by on either side; she wished that the
action of walking were not so jerky, that the expanses on either side
might pass more smoothly and easily by: “that’s why people drive,” she
thought; “you can only really see the country when you are not moving
yourself.” Standing still for a moment she looked across the open
stretch to her left and smiled at it and went on again, walking more
quickly; the soft beauty that had retreated to the horizon when the dog
was with her was spreading back again across the whole expanse and
coming towards her; she hurried on singing softly at random, “Scorn such
a _foe_ ... though I could fell thee at a blow, though I-i, cou-uld
fe-ell thee-ee a-at a-a _blow_” ... people walking and thinking and
fussing, people driving somewhere in victorias were always coming along
the road, to them it was a sort of suburb, quite ordinary, the bit near
home. But it was big enough to be full of waves and waves of something
real, something cool and true and unchanging. Had anybody seen it, did
the people who lived there know it? Did anybody know this strange thing?
She almost ran; _my_ “commons,” she said. “I know how beautiful you are;
if only I knew whether you know that I know. I know, I know,” she said,
“I shan’t forget you.” “True, true till death; bear it, oh wind, on thy
lightning breath.”
6
The sun was very warm; before she reached the end of the long road the
sandy pathways were beginning to glare. There was the river and the
little bridge and the first shop just beyond it, where her purchase was
to be made. Its wood-work was very bright white; it had a seaside look.
She stood still on the slight ascent of the bridge mopping her face and
preparing to represent Mrs. Corrie in the shop. Scrambling up the
shallow bank from the common came the yellow dog. “Oh, hooray--you
duck,” she breathed, patting the warm stubbly head and listening to his
breathless snortings. A piano-organ broke into loud music in the little
street. It was not a mysterious little town, there was nothing of the
village about it. The white framed windows held things you would see in
a Regent Street confectioner’s; it was a special shop for the kind of
people who lived here. Miriam felt for her three and six and asked for
her pound of coffee creams with a bored air, wishing she knew the dog’s
name so that she could claim him familiarly. She contented herself with
telling him to lie down in an angry whisper repeatedly, as the creams
were being weighed. He stood panting and gazing at her wagging his
stump. “’Ullo, Bushy,” said the shopwoman languidly; the dog faced round
panting more loudly. “There you are, Bush,” she said, as the scales
balanced, and flung the dog a chocolate wafer which he caught with a
snap. Miriam gazed vaguely at the unfamiliar spectacle, angrily feeling
that the shopwoman was observing her. “You’re not going to take him
through the town?” said the shopwoman severely.
“Oh, no,” said Miriam nervously.
“He’s the worst fighter in the parish; they never bring him into the
town unless it’s the groom sometimes.”
“Thank you,” said Miriam, taking her bag of coffee creams. “Dogs _are_ a
nuisance, aren’t they?” she added, in an emphatically sympathetic tone,
getting away through the swing door almost hating the yellow body that
squeezed through at her side and stood eagerly facing towards the
market-place waiting for her movements.
7
She hurried up over the bridge calling to the dog without looking round,
listening fearfully for sounds of conflict with a brown collie she had
caught sight of standing with head high and ears pricked, twenty yards
down the street. The piano-organ jingled angrily. The dog came
thoughtfully trotting over the bridge and ambled off across the
common--safe. He might have been killed, or killed another dog; how
cruel dogs were, without knowing better. She looked to the common asking
consolation for her beating heart. The bag of creams was safe and heavy
in her hand, the dog had gone, the little town was behind, it had hurt
her; it was spoiled; she would never like it. It had done nothing but
remind her that she was a helpless dingy little governess. She toiled
along, feeling dreadfully tired; the sounds of her boot soles on the
firm, sand-powdered road mocked her, telling her she must go on. If she
could be quite sure of finding a kind woman, not a hard-featured woman
with black and grey hair, like the shopwoman, but kind, knowing and
understanding everything, in a large print apron with her sleeves rolled
up to the elbows, living in a large cottage with a family, who would
look at her and smile a quiet short certain smile, as if she had been
waiting for her, and take her in and let her help and stay there for
ever, she would put down the bag of coffee creams on the edge of the
common and go straight across it to her; but there would not be a woman
like that here; all that the women round here would think about her
would be to wonder which of the families she belonged to. If a victoria
came along and in it a delicate, lonely old gentleman who had a large
empty house with deep quiet rooms and a large sunny garden with high
walls and wanted someone to be about there singing and happy till he
died she would go. He would drive away with her and shut her up in the
quiet beautiful house, protecting her and keeping people off, and she
would sing all day in the garden and the house and play to him and read
sometimes aloud, and he would forget he was old and ill, and they would
share the great secret, dying of happiness. Die of happiness. People
ought to be able to die of happiness if they were able to admit how
happy they were. If they admitted it aloud they would pass straight out
of their bodies, alive; unhappiness was the same as death, not
suffering; but letting suffering make you unhappy--curse God and die,
curse life, that was letting life beat you; letting God beat you. God
did not want that. No one admitted it. No one seemed to know anything
about it. People just went on fussing.
The violent beating of her heart died down. The sun was behind her; the
commons glowed. She must have been looking at them for some time because
she could close her eyes and see exactly how they looked, all alive in
steady colour, gleaming and fresh. The thumping and trilling of the
distant piano-organ offered itself equally to everybody. It knew the
secret and twirled and swept all the fussing away into a tune. Quietly
the clock of the church in the little town struck four. She would be
late for tea. The children would have tea with Mrs. Corrie. Wiggerson
would make a fresh pot for her when she got in. There would be a little
tray in her quiet room, a cup and saucer, the little sprigged silk
tea-cosy, the “Human Document.” It would be the beginning of the
week-end. It would link her up again with the early afternoon, the
rose-filled drawing-room, the excited dining-room, the smell of varnish
from the billiard-room floor.
8
Mrs. Corrie and the children were dancing in a lingering patch of
sunlight at the far end of the lawn as Miriam came up the drive with her
chocolates. They waved and shouted to her, trumpeting questions through
their hands. She held up the bag. “Go and have _tea_, you poor soul,”
sang Mrs. Corrie. How excited they were. In the flower-filled hall
Stokes, muttering excitedly to herself, was lighting the fire. The
crackling of wood came from the dining-room.
Wiggerson was swishing about in the dining-room clearing away tea.
9
Sitting in her low basket chair with her dismantled tea-tray at her side
and a picture in her mind of the new Mrs. Kronen coming down from London
in the train in bright new clothes and a dust-cloak, Miriam was startled
by hearing frightened footsteps rush across the landing and a frightened
voice calling for Wiggerson.
“Something’s happened,” she told herself angrily, “it always does when
everybody’s so excited--‘tel qui rit vendredi dimanche pleurera.’”
Opening the door she found the landing empty and quiet, the setting sun
streamed across its coloured spaces, the flowers blazed as if they were
standing in a garden.... Joey always went for walks if she were feeling
thick and fat, she always went for a long walk; in coats with skirts to
match; a costume; never a jacket with a different skirt ... the long
cool passage leading away to the invisible door of Mr. Corrie’s room was
full of wreathing smoke. Wiggerson rushed across the landing along the
passage, followed by Mrs. Corrie, with her head up and her handkerchief
to her nose and all her figure tense and angular and strong. Both had
passed silently; but there were shriekings on the stairs and the
children came at Miriam with cries and screams. “Rollo’ll be _killed_”;
“Go to her”; “Go and save vem”; the children shrieked and leaped up and
down in front of her. The boy’s white features worked as if they must
dislocate; his eyes were black with terror; he wrung his hands. Sybil’s
face, scarlet and shapeless and streaming with tears, blazed wrath at
Miriam through her green eyes. “Be quiet,” Miriam said in loud tones. “I
shall do nothing till you are quiet.” With a shriek the girl lashed at
her with the dog-whip. “Save vem, _save_ vem,” shrieked the boy,
twisting his arms in the air. “Will you both be quiet _instantly_?”
shouted Miriam, as the blood rose to her head, catching and holding the
boy. Both children howled and choked; Sybil flung herself forward
howling, and Miriam felt her teeth in her wrist. The smoke came pouring
out of the little hidden room, coiling itself against the air of the
passage like some fascinating silent inevitable grimace. Wiggerson’s
figure flying through it stirred it strangely, but it closed behind her
and billowed horribly out towards Mrs. Corrie standing just clear of its
advance with her handkerchief pressed to her face, quiet, not calling to
Wiggerson, waiting where she had disappeared. Miriam could not move.
Sybil’s body hung fastened to her own with entwining limbs ... “a fight
in the jungle,” a tiger flung fixed like a leech against the breast of a
screaming elephant ... the boy had the whip and was slashing at her legs
through her thin dress and uttering piercing shrieks.
10
“Stokes is an idjut,” said Mrs. Corrie, going gaily downstairs with the
two exhausted white-faced children followed by Wiggerson flitting along
with bloodshot blinking eyes.
Stokes, sullenly brooding, lighting Mr. Corrie’s fire without putting
back the register. What was it that made Stokes sullen and brooding so
that the accident had happened and the smoke had come? Stokes had seen
something, someone, like the fearful oncoming curving stare of the
smoke. Mrs. Corrie and Wiggerson did not brood like that. They laughed
and wept and snatched things out of danger. They had thin faces. Mrs.
Corrie was alone, like an aspen shaking its leaves in windless air. She
knew she was alone. Wiggerson ... Wiggerson was...? Making her toilet in
the spring sunset Miriam saw all that time Wiggerson’s tall body
hurtling about in her small pantry, quickly selecting and packing things
on a tray--her eyes glancing swiftly downwards as her foot caught, the
swift bending of her body, the rip, rip as she tore the braiding from
her skirt, her intent face as she threw it from her and swept sinuously
upright, her undisturbed hands once more at their swift work.
11
What a strange photograph ... a woman in Grecian drapery seated on a
stonework chair with a small harp on her knees, one hand limply tweaking
the strings of her harp; her head thrown back, her eyes, hard and
bright, staring up into the sky, “Inspiration” printed in ink on the
white margin under the photograph. It was an Englishwoman, a large stiff
square body, a coil of carefully crimped hair and a curled fringe,
pretending. There were people who would say, “What a pretty photograph,”
and mean it ... the draperies and the attitude. How easy it was to take
people in, just by acting. Not the real people. There were real people.
Where were they? That horrid thing could get itself on to Mrs. Corrie’s
drawing-room table and sit there unbroken. All women were inspired in a
way. It was true enough. But it was a secret. Men ought not to be told.
They must find it out for themselves. To dress up and try to make it
something to attract somebody. She was not a woman, she was a _woman_
... oh, curse it all. But men liked actresses. They liked being fooled.
Miriam looked closely at the photograph with hatred in her eyes. Why not
the stone steps and the chair and the sense of sunlight; sunlit air?
That would be enough. “You get in the way of the air, you _thing_,” she
muttered, and the woman’s helpless unconscious sandalled feet reproached
her. Voices were shouting to each other on the upper landing. It was
Mrs. Kronen’s photograph, of course. Miriam moved quickly away, ashamed
of having stared. But it was too late; she had done a horrid thing
again. She saw, as if it were in the room with her, the affair of the
taking of the photograph, a cross face coming down from its pose to
argue with the photographer, and then flung upwards again, waiting. And
she had put or let someone put it, in a frame, at once on a strange
drawing-room table. Perhaps her husband had put it there. But if he
valued it he would hide and shelter it.... When we meet, she will know I
have stared at her photograph.
Mrs. Kronen came suddenly in with Mrs. Corrie, talking in a rich deep
thick voice that moved, with large intervals, up and down a long scale
and yet produced a curious effect of toneless flatness, just as if she
were speaking a narrow nasal Cockney. There was a Cockney sound
somewhere in her voice. She began at once loudly praising everything in
the room, hardly pausing when Miriam was introduced to her, and giving
no sign of having seen her. If I were alone with her, thought Miriam, I
should want to say “’Ullo, ’ow’s yourself?” and grin. It would be the
only thing one could genuinely do. Mrs. Corrie almost giggled at the end
of each of Mrs. Kronen’s exclamations, but she was very gay and animated
and so was Mr. Corrie when he came in with Mr. Kronen. They all went in
to dinner talking and laughing loudly. And they went on laughing and
joking and talking loudly against each other through dinner.
12
Mr. and Mrs. Corrie looked thin and small and very young. Once or twice
they laughed at the same moment and glanced at each other. Mr. Corrie’s
face was flushed. Mr. and Mrs. Kronen looked like brother and
sister--only that she said South Africa as if it were a phrase in a
tragic recitative from an oratorio and he as if it were something he had
behind him that gave him a sort of advantage over everyone. It seemed to
be all he had. They had both been in South Africa, travelling in bullock
waggons blinded by the fierce light and choked with sand. It seemed to
linger in the curious brickish look of their complexions and the hard
yellow of their hair. The talk about South Africa lasted all dinnertime.
It seemed to interest Mr. Corrie. His eyes gleamed strangely as he
talked about I.D.B.’s. Everybody at the table said, “Illicit dahmond
bah” at least once with a little thrill of the face. Why was it illicit
to buy diamonds?--strange people out there in the glare buying gleaming
stones from miners and this curious feeling about it all round the
table, everybody with hot glinting excited eyes--and somebody, some man,
a business man who had handed round diamonds like chocolates to his
friends in his box at the opera, a Stock Exchange man in a frock-coat
throwing himself into the sea somewhere between England and South
Africa--ah, what a pity, worried to death, with an excited head. He
wanted diamonds. And when Mr. Corrie handed Mrs. Kronen a dish of fruit
and said, “A banana? A bite of a barnato?” they all laughed, so
comfortably. Something illicit seemed to creep into the very pictures
and flow over the walls. The poor man’s body falling desperately into
the sea. He could not endure his own excited eyes.
13
Early on Monday morning Miriam heard Mrs. Kronen singing in the
bathroom. She tried not to listen and listened. The bold sound had come
in through her open door when Stokes brought her breakfast tray. With it
had come the smell of a downstairs breakfast, coffee, a curious fresh,
sustaining odour of coffee and freshly frying rashers. There was coffee
on her own tray this morning and a letter addressed to her in a bold
unknown hand. She sipped her coffee at once and put the overwhelming
letter aside on her blue coverlet. It was an overweight, something
thrown in on the surface of the tide on which she had awakened in the
soft fresh harmonies of rose and blue of her curtained room. It could
wait. It had come out of the world for her; but she felt independent of
it. It did not disturb her. Its overwhelming quality was in the fact
that she had called it to her out of the world. It was as if she had
herself addressed the large bold envelope. She left it. Her sipped
coffee steered her into the tide of the downstairs life. There was
breakfast downstairs, steaming coffee and entrée dishes for Mr. Corrie
and the Kronens, and they were all going off by the early train.
“C’est si bon,” sang Mrs. Kronen in a deep baritone, as Miriam drank her
coffee; “de con-fon-dre en un, deu-eux bai-sers.” She sang it out
through the quiet upstairs rooms, she met with it the bustle of
preparation downstairs. It was a world she lived in that made her able
to carry off these things without being disturbed by them, a rosy secret
world in which she lived secure. A richness at the heart of things. She
was there. She possessed it with her large strong brick-red and
rose-white frame and her strong yellow hair. Did she, really? At any
rate she wanted to suggest that she did--that that secret richness was
the heart of things. She flung out boldly that it was and that she was
there, but a sort of soft horrible slurring flatness in her voice
suggested evil, as if a sort of restless acceptance of something evil
was the price of her carelessness. Perhaps that was how things were.
Perhaps that was part of taking each fair mask for what it shows itself.
She made everyone else seem cloudy and shrivelled and dim. Miriam took
up the stupendous envelope and held its solid weight in her hand as Mrs.
Kronen sang on. “All right,” she said, and smiled at it, feeling daring
and strong. Its arrival would have been quite different if Mrs. Kronen
had not been there; this curious powerful independent morning in the
rose-blue room would not have happened in the same way without Mrs.
Kronen.... Live, don’t worry.... I’ve always been worrying and
bothering. I’m going to be like Mrs. Kronen; but quite different,
because she hasn’t the least idea how beautiful things really are. She
doesn’t know that everyone is living a beautiful strange life that has
never been lived before. If she did she would not be ashamed of herself.
Miriam gave a great sigh and smiled.
14
Her breakfast was a feast. Sitting back under the softly tinted canopy
with the soft folds of the bed curtains hanging near on either side she
stared at the bright light pouring in through the lattices. Her room was
a great square of happy light ... happy, happy. She gathered up all the
sadness she had ever known and flung it from her. All the dark things of
the past flashed with a strange beauty as she flung them out. The light
had been there all the time; but she had known it only at moments. Now
she knew what she wanted. Bright mornings, beautiful bright rooms, a
wilderness of beauty all round her all the time--at any cost. Any life
that had not these things she would refuse.... Roses in her blood and
gold in her hair ... it was something belonging to them, something that
made them gleam. It was her right; even if they gleamed only for her.
They gleamed, she knew it. Youth, the glory of youth. So strong. She had
got herself into this beautiful life, found her way to it; she would
stay in it for ever, work in it, make money and when she was old, have
soft, pink curtains and fragrant things to remind her, as long as she
could lift her hand. No more ugliness, no more schools or mean little
houses. Luxuries, beautiful gleaming things ... a secret happy life.
She smiled securely, with her eyes, the strange happy smile that had
come in the brougham....
15
How strong Mrs. Kronen was.... How huge and strong she had looked
standing in the hall while Mr. Corrie said cruel laughing little things
about the billiard-room floor.... “She’ll paint Madonna lilies on the
table next.” ... Mrs. Kronen saying nothing, smiling more and more
without moving her face, growing bigger and stronger and taller as Mr.
Corrie grumbled and Mr. Kronen fidgeted, cross and disappointed by the
hall fire and then suddenly lifting her head and singing, a great
flourish of clear strong notes filling the hall and pealing up through
the house as she swept into the drawing-room.
Singing song after song to her own loud accompaniment, great emphatic
sweeps of song, so that everyone came and sat about in the room
listening and waiting, the men staring at the back of her head as she
sat at the piano. Waiting, for music--they did not know they were
waiting for music, waiting for her to stop getting between them and the
music. They admired her, her magnificent singing and waited,
unsatisfied, in the sweetness of the lamp-lit flower-filled room that
her music did not touch. She sang on and on and they all grew smaller
and smaller in the great sea of sound, more and more hopelessly waiting.
16
And Mrs. Corrie had sat deep in her large chair, dead and drowned. Dead
because of something she had never known. Dead in ignorance and living
bravely on--her sweet thin voice rising above the gloom where she lay
hid--a gloom where there were no thoughts. Nearly all women were like
that, living in a gloom where there were no thoughts. If anyone could
persuade her that she was alive she would do nothing but rush about and
dance and sing ... how irritating that would be ... making men smile and
trot about and look silly ... no room for ideas; except in
smoking-rooms--and--laboratories.... She was a good woman; a God woman;
the sweetness of her bones and her thin sweet voice of tears and
laughter were of God. Everyone knew that and worshipped her. Men’s ideas
were devilish; clever and mean.... Was God a woman? Was God really
irritating? No one could endure God really.... Men could not.... Women
were of God in some way. That is what men could never forgive; the
superiority of women.... “Perhaps I can’t stand women because I’m a sort
of horrid man.”
Mrs. Kronen was a sort of man too. She was not perplexed. But she was a
woman too--because she was not mean and petty and fussy as men are ...
sitting tall and square at the piano with the square tall form of her
husband standing ready to turn the pages--her strong baritone voice
rolling out, “Ai-me-moi ... car ton charme-est étrange ...
et-je-t’ai-me.”
17
Recalling the song as she sat back in the alcove of her bed motionless,
keeping the brightness of her room at its first intensity, Miriam
remembered that it had brought her a moment when the flower-filled
drawing-room had seemed to be lit, from within herself, a sudden light
that had kept her very still and made the bowls of roses blaze with
deepening colours. In her mind she had seen garden beyond garden of
roses, sunlit, brighter and brighter and had made a rapturous prayer.
She remembered the words ... God.... I’m not afraid of you. Look at the
gardens ... and something had smiled through the lit gardens exultantly,
and Mrs. Kronen’s voice had raged through the room like a storm,
“Ai-me-moi!...” and Mr. Corrie’s eyes were strange and hard with
shadows.... He knew, in some strange way men knew there were gardens
everywhere, not always visible. Women did not seem to know....
The letter on her tray was a sort of response to her prayer.