1
The West End street ... grey buildings rising on either side, feeling
away into the approaching distance--angles sharp against the sky ...
softened angles of buildings against other buildings ... high moulded
angles soft as crumb, with deep undershadows ... creepers fraying from
balconies ... strips of window blossoms across the buildings, scarlet,
yellow, high up; a confusion of lavender and white pouching out along a
dipping sill ... a wash of green creeper up a white painted house front
... patches of shadow and bright light.... Sounds of visible near things
streaked and scored with broken light as they moved, led off into
untraced distant sounds ... chiming together.
2
Wide golden streaming Regent Street was quite near. Some near narrow
street would lead into it.
3
Flags of pavement flowing along--smooth clean grey squares and oblongs,
faintly polished, shaping and drawing away--sliding into each other....
I am part of the dense smooth clean paving stone ... sunlit; gleaming
under dark winter rain; shining under warm sunlit rain, sending up a
fresh stony smell ... always there ... dark and light ... dawn,
stealing....
4
Life streamed up from the close dense stone. With every footstep she
felt she could fly.
5
The little dignified high-built cut-through street, with its sudden
walled-in church, swept round and opened into brightness and a clamour
of central sounds ringing harshly up into the sky.
6
The pavement of heaven.
To walk along the radiant pavement of sunlit Regent Street forever.
7
She sped along looking at nothing. Shops passed by, bright endless
caverns screened with glass ... the bright teeth of a grand piano
running along the edge of its darkness, a cataract of light pouring down
its raised lid; forests of hats; dresses, shining against darkness,
bright headless crumpling stalks; sly, silky, ominous furs; metals, cold
and clanging, brandishing the light; close prickling fire of jewels ...
strange people who bought these things, touched and bought them.
8
She pulled up sharply in front of a window. The pavement round it was
clear, allowing her to stand rooted where she had been walking, in the
middle of the pavement, in the midst of the tide flowing from the clear
window, a soft fresh tide of sunlit colours ... clear green glass
shelves laden with shapes of fluted glass, glinting transparencies of
mauve and amber and green, rose-pearl and milky blue, welded to a
flowing tide, freshening and flowing through her blood, a sea rising and
falling with her breathing.
9
The edge had gone from the keenness of the light. The street was a
happy, sunny, simple street--small. She was vast. She could gather up
the buildings in her arms and push them away, clearing the sky ... a
strange darkling and she would sleep. She felt drowsy, a drowsiness in
her brain and limbs and great strength, and hunger.
A clock told her she had been away from Brook Street ten minutes. Twenty
minutes to spare. What should she do with her strength? Talk to someone
or write ... Bob; where was Bob? Somewhere in the West End. She would
write from the West End a note to him in the West End.
10
There were no cheap shops in Regent Street. She looked about. Across the
way a little side street showing a small newspaper shop offered help.
11
Thoroughly frightened she hurried with clenched hands down the little
mean street ready to give up her scheme at the first sight of an
unfriendly eye. “We went through those _awful_ side streets off the West
End; I was _terrified_; I didn’t know _where_ he was driving us,” Mrs.
Poole had said about a cabman driving to the theatre ... and her face as
she sat in her thick pink dress by the dining-room fire had been cunning
and mean and full of terror. A small shop appeared close at hand, there
were newspaper posters propped outside it and its window was full of
fly-blown pipes, toilet requisites, stationery and odd-looking books.
“Letters may be left here,” said a dirty square of cardboard in the
corner of the window. “That’s all right,” thought Miriam, “it’s a sort
of agency.” She plunged into the gloomy interior. “_Yes!_” shouted a
tall stout man with a red coarse face coming forward, as if she had
asked something that had made him angry. “I want some notepaper, just a
little, the smallest quantity you have and an envelope,” said Miriam,
quivering and panic-stricken in the hostile atmosphere. The man turned
and whisked a small packet off a shelf, throwing it down on the counter
before her. “One penny!” bellowed the man as she took it up. “Oh, thank
you,” murmured Miriam ingratiatingly putting down twopence. “Do you sell
pencils?” The man’s great fingers seemed an endless time wrenching a
small metal-sheathed pencil from its card. The street outside would have
closed in and swallowed her up forever if she did not quickly get away.
12
“Dear Mr. Greville,” she wrote in a clear bold hand.... He won’t expect
me to have that kind of handwriting, like his own, but stronger. He’ll
admire it on the page and then hear a man’s voice, Pater’s voice talking
behind it and not like it. Me. He’d be a little afraid of it. She felt
her hard self standing there as she wrote, and shifted her feet a
little, raising one heel from the ground, trying to feminise her
attitude; but her hat was hard against her forehead, her clothes would
not flow.... “Just imagine that I am in town--I could have helped you
with your shopping if I had known I was coming....” The first page was
half filled. She glanced at her neighbours, a woman on one side and a
man on the other, both bending over telegram forms in a careless
preoccupied way--wealthy, with expensive clothes with West End lines....
Regent Street was Salviati’s. It was Liberty’s and a music shop and the
shop with the chickens. But most of all it was Salviati’s. She feared
the officials behind the long grating could see by the expression of her
shoulders that she was a scrubby person who was breaking the rules by
using one of the little compartments with its generosity of ink and pen
and blotting paper, for letter writing. Someone was standing impatiently
just behind her, waiting for her place. “Telle est la vie,” she
concluded with a flourish, “yours sincerely,” and addressed the envelope
in almost illegible scrawls. Guiltily she bought a stamp and dropped the
letter with a darkening sense of guilt into the box. It fell with a
little muffled plop that resounded through her as she hurried away
towards Brook Street. She walked quickly, to make everything surrounding
her move more quickly. London revelled and clamoured softly all round
her; she strode her swiftest heightening its clamorous joy. The West End
people, their clothes, their carriages and hansoms, their clean bright
spring-filled houses, their restaurants and the theatres waiting for
them this evening, their easy way with each other, the mysterious
something behind their faces, was hers. She, too, now had a mysterious
secret face--a West End life of her own....