1
But the next evening when Mr. Corrie came down for the week-end with a
party of guests, Mrs. Corrie appeared with swift suddenness in Miriam’s
room and glanced at her morning dress.
“I say, missy, you’ll have to hurry up.”
“Oh, I didn’t dress ... the house is full of strangers.”
“No, it isn’t; there’s Mélie and Tom ... Tommy and Mélie.”
“Yes, but I know there are crowds.”
She did not want to meet the Cravens again, and the strangers would turn
out to be some sort of people saying certain sorts of things over and
over again, and if she went down she would not be able to get away as
soon as she knew all about them. She would be fixed; obliged to listen.
When anyone spoke to her, grimacing as the patronised governess or
saying what she thought and being hated for it.
“Crowds,” she repeated, as Mrs. Corrie placed a large lump in the centre
of the blaze.
They had her here, in this beautiful room and looked after her comfort
as if she were a guest.
“Nonsensy-nonsense. You _must_ come down and see the fun.” Miriam
glanced at her empty table. In the drawer hidden underneath the
table-cover were her block and paints. Presently she could, if she held
firm, be alone, in a grey space inside this alien room, cold and lonely
and with the beginning of something ... dark painful beginning of
something that could not come if people were there.... Downstairs,
warmth and revelry.
“You _must_ come down and see the fun,” said Mrs. Corrie, getting up
from the fire and trailing across the room with bent head. “A nun--a nun
in amber satin,” thought Miriam, surveying her back.
“_Want_ you to come down,” said Mrs. Corrie plaintively from the door.
Cold air came in from the landing; the warmth of the room stirred to a
strange vitality, the light glowed clearer within its ruby globe. The
silvery clatter of entrée dishes came up from the hall.
“All right,” said Miriam, turning exultantly to the chest of drawers.
“A victory over myself or some sort of treachery?” ... The long drawer
which held her evening things seemed full of wonders. She dragged out a
little home-made smocked blouse of pale blue nun’s veiling that had
seemed too dowdy for Newlands and put it on over her morning skirt. It
shone upon her. Rapidly washing her hands, away from the glamour of the
looking-glass, she mentally took stock of her hair, untouched since the
morning, the amateur blouse, its crude clear blue hard against the harsh
black skirt. Back again at the dressing-table as she dried her hands she
found the miracle renewed. The figure that confronted her in the mirror
was wrapped in some strange harmonising radiance. She looked at it for a
moment as she would have looked at an unknown picture, in tranquil
disinterested contemplation. The sound of the gong came softly into the
room, bringing her no apprehensive contraction of nerves. She wove its
lingering note into the imagined tinkling of an old melody from a wooden
musical box. Opening the door before turning out her gas she found a
small bunch of hothouse lilies of the valley lying on the
writing-table.... Mrs. Corrie--“you must come.”
2
Tucking them into her belt she went slowly downstairs, confused by a
picture coming between her and her surroundings like a filmy lantern
slide, of Portland Bill lying on a smooth sea in a clear afterglow....
“Quite a madonna,” said Mrs. Staple-Craven querulously. She sat low in
her chair, her round gold head on its short stalk standing firmly up
from billowy frills of green silk ... “a fat water-lily,” mused Miriam,
and went wandering through the great steamy glass-houses at Kew, while
the names that had been murmured during the introductions echoed
irrelevantly in her brain.
“She _must_ wear her host’s colours sometimes,” said Mr. Corrie quickly
and gently.
Miriam glanced her surprise and smiled shyly in response to his shy
smile. It was as if the faint radiance that she felt all round her had
been outlined by a flashing blade. Mrs. Craven might go on resenting it;
she could not touch it again. It steadied and concentrated; flowing from
some inexhaustible inner centre, it did not get beyond the circle
outlined by the flashing blade, but flowed back on her and out again and
back until it seemed as if it must lift her to her feet. Her eyes caught
the clear brow and smooth innocently sleeked dark hair of a man at the
other end of the table--under the fine level brows was a loudly talking,
busily eating face--all the noise of the world, and the brooding
grieving unconscious brow above it. Everyone was talking. She glanced.
The women showed no foreheads; but their faces were not noisy; they were
like the brows of the men, except Mrs. Craven’s. Her silent face was
mouthing and complaining aloud all the time.
3
“Old Felix has secured himself the best partner,” Miriam heard someone
mutter as she made her fluke, a resounding little cannon and pocket in
one stroke. Wandering after her ball she fought against the suggesting
voice. It had come from one of the men moving about in the gloom
surrounding the radiance cast by the green-shaded lamps upon the long
green table. Faces moving in the upper darkness were indistinguishable.
The white patch of Mrs. Corrie’s face gleamed from the settee as she sat
bent forward with her hands clasped in front of her knees. Beyond her,
sitting back under the shadow of the mantelpiece and the marking board
was Mrs. Craven, a faint mass of soft green and mealy white. All the
other forms were standing or moving in the gloom; standing watchful and
silent, the gleaming stems of their cues held in rest, shifting and
moving and strolling with uncolliding ordered movements and little
murmurs of commentary after the little drama--the sudden snap of the
stroke breaking the stillness, the faint thundering roll of the single
ball, the click of the concussion, the gentle angular explosion of
pieces into a new relation and the breaking of the varying triangle as a
ball rolled to its hidden destination held by all the eyes in the room
until its rumbling pilgrimage ended out of sight in a soft thud. It was
pure joy to Miriam to wander round the table after her ball, sheltered
in the gloom, through an endless “grand chain” of undifferentiated
figures that passed and repassed without awkwardness or the need for
forced exchange; held together and separated by the ceremony of the
game. Comments came after each stroke, words and sentences sped and
smoothed and polished by the gloom like the easy talking of friends in a
deep twilight; but between each stroke were vast intervals of untroubled
silent intercourse. The competition of the men, the sense of the desire
to win, that rose and strained in the room could not spoil this
communion. After a stroke, pondering the balls while the room and the
radiance and the darkness moved and flowed and the dim figures settled
to a fresh miracle of grouping, it was joy to lean along the board to
her ball, keeping punctual appointment with her partner whose jaunty
little figure would appear in supporting opposition under the bright
light, drawing at his cigarette with a puckering half-smile, awaiting
her suggestion and ready with counsel. Doing her best to measure angles
and regulate the force of her blow she struck careless little lifting
strokes that made her feel as if she danced, and managed three more
cannons and a pocket before her little break came to an end.
4
“It must be jolly to smoke in the in-between times,” said Miriam,
standing about at a loss during a long break by one of her opponents.
“Yes, you ought to learn to smoke,” responded Mr. Corrie judicially. The
quiet smile--the serene offer of companionship, the whole room troubled
with the sense of the two parties, the men with whom she was linked in
the joyous forward going strife of the game and the women on the sofa,
suddenly grown monstrous in their opposition of clothes and kindliness
and the fuss of distracting personal insincerities of voice and speech
attempting to judge and condemn the roomful of quiet players, shouting
aloud to her that she was a fool to be drawn in to talking to men
seriously on their own level, a fool to parade about as if she really
enjoyed their silly game. “I hate women and they’ve got to know it,” she
retorted with all her strength, hitting blindly out towards the sofa,
feeling all the contrivances of toilet and coiffure fall in meaningless
horrible detail under her blows.
“I do smoke,” she said, leaving her partner’s side and going boldly to
the sofa corner. “Ragbags, bundles of pretence,” she thought, as she
confronted the women. They glanced up with cunning eyes. They looked
small and cringing. She rushed on, sweeping them aside.... Who had made
them so small and cheated, and for all their smiles so angry? What was
it they wanted? What was it women wanted that always made them so angry?
“Would you mind if I _smoked_?” she asked in a clear gay tone, cutting
herself from Mrs. Corrie with a wrench as she faced her glittering
frightened eyes.
“Of _course_ not, my dear lady--I don’t mind, if you don’t,” she said,
tweaking affectionately at Miriam’s skirt. “Ain’t she a gay dog, Mélie,
ain’t she a gay dog!”
5
“It’s a pleasure to see you smoke,” murmured Mr. Corrie fervently,
“you’re the first woman I’ve seen smoke _con amore_.”
Contemplating the little screwed-up appreciative smile on the features
of her partner, bunched to the lighting of his own cigarette, Miriam
discharged a double stream of smoke violently through her
nostrils--breaking out at last a public defiance of the freemasonry of
women. “I suppose I’m a new woman--I’ve said I am now, anyhow,” she
reflected, wondering in the background of her determination how she
would reconcile the rôle with her work as a children’s governess. “I’m
not in their crowd, anyhow; I despise their silly secret,” she pursued,
feeling out ahead towards some lonely solution of her difficulty that
seemed to come shapelessly towards her, but surely--the happy weariness
of conquest gave her a sense of some unknown strength in her.
For the rest of the evening the group in the sofa-corner presented her a
frontage of fawning and flattery.
6
Coming down with the children to lunch the next day, Miriam found the
room dark and chill in the bright midday. It was as if it were empty.
But if it had been empty it would have been beautiful in the still light
and tranquil. There was a dark cruel tide in the room, she sought in
vain for a foothold. A loud busy voice was talking from Mr. Corrie’s
place at the head of the table. Mr. Staple-Craven, busy with cold words
to hide the truth. He paused as the nursery trio came in and settled at
the table and then shouted softly and suddenly at Mrs. Corrie, “What’s
Corrie having?”
“Biscuits,” chirped Mrs. Corrie eagerly, “biscuits and sally in the
study.” She sat forward, gathering herself to disperse the gloom. But
Mrs. Craven’s deep voice drowned her unspoken gaieties ... ah--he’s not
gone away, thought Miriam rapidly, he’s in the house....
“Best thing for biliousness,” gonged Mrs. Craven, and Mr. Craven busily
resumed.
“It’s only the fisherman who knows anything, anything whatever about the
silver stream. Necessarily. Necessarily. It is the--the _concentration_,
the--the _absorption_ of the passion that enables him to see. Er, the
fisherman, the poet-tantamount; exchangeable terms. Fishing is, indeed
one might say----”
The men of the party were devouring their food with the air of people
just about to separate to fulfil urgent engagements. They bent and
gobbled busily and cast smouldering glances about the table, as if with
their eyes they would suggest important mysteries brooding above their
animated muzzles.
Miriam’s stricken eyes sought their foreheads for relief. Smooth brows
and neatly brushed hair above; but the smooth motionless brows were
ramparts of hate; pure murderous hate. That’s men, she said, with a
sudden flash of certainty, that’s men as they are, when they are
opposed, when they are real. All the rest is pretence. Her thoughts
flashed forward to a final clear issue of opposition, with a husband.
Just a cold blank hating forehead and neatly brushed hair above it. If a
man doesn’t understand or doesn’t agree he’s just a blank bony
conceitedly thinking, absolutely condemning forehead, a face below,
going on eating--and going off somewhere. Men are all hard angry bones;
always thinking something, only one thing at a time and unless that is
agreed to, they murder. My husband shan’t kill me.... I’ll shatter his
conceited brow--_make_ him see ... two sides to every question ... a
million sides ... no questions, only sides ... always changing. Men
argue, think they prove things; their foreheads recover--cool and calm.
Damn them all--all men.
7
“Fee ought to be out here,” said Mrs. Corrie, moving her basket chair to
face away from the sun.
The garden blazed in the fresh warm air. But there was no happiness in
it. Everything was lost and astray. The house-party had dispersed and
disappeared. Mrs. Corrie sat and strolled about the garden, joyless, as
if weighed down by some immovable oppression. If Mr. Corrie were to come
out, and sit there too it would be worse. It was curious to think that
the garden was his at all. He would come feebly out, looking ill and
they would all sit, uneasy and afraid. But Mrs. Corrie wanted him to
come out, knew he ought to be there. It was she who had thought of it.
It was intolerable to think of his coming. Yet he had been “crazy mad”
about her for five years. Five years and then this. Whose fault was it?
His or hers? Or was marriage always like that? Perhaps that was why she
and Mrs. Craven had laughed when they were asked whether marriage was a
failure. Mrs. Craven had no children. Nothing to think about but stars
and spirits and her food and baths and little silk dresses and Mr.
Craven treated her as if she were a child he had got tired of petting.
She did not even go fishing with him. She was lying down in her room and
tea would be taken up to her. At least she thought of herself and seemed
to enjoy life. But she was getting fatter and fatter. Mrs. Corrie did
not want anything for herself, except for the fun of getting things. She
cared only for the children and when they grew up they would have
nothing to talk to her about. Sybil would have thoughts behind her ugly
strong face. She would tell them to no one. The boy would adore her,
until his wife whom he would adore came between them. So there was
nothing for women in marriage and children. Because they had no
thoughts. Their husbands grew to hate them because they had no thoughts.
But if a woman had thoughts a man would not be “silly” about her for
five years. And Mrs. Corrie had her garden. She would always have that,
when he was not there.
“If you were to go and ask him,” said Mrs. Corrie, brushing out her
dress with her hands, “he’d come out.”
“_Me!_” said Miriam in amazement.
“Yes, go on, my dear, you see; he’ll come.”
“But perhaps he doesn’t want to,” said Miriam, suddenly feeling that she
was playing a familiar part in a novel and wanting to feel quite sure
she was reading her rôle aright.
“You go and try,” laughed Mrs. Corrie gently. “_Make_ him come out.”
“I’ll tell him you wish him to come,” said Miriam gravely, getting to
her feet. “All _right_,” she thought, “if I have more influence over him
than you it’s not my fault, not anybody’s fault, but how horrid you must
feel.”
8
Miriam’s trembling fingers gave a frightened fumbling tap at the study
door. “Come in,” said Mr. Corrie officially, and coughed a loose, wheezy
cough. He was sitting by the fire in one of the huge armchairs and
didn’t look up as she entered. She stood with the door half closed
behind her, fighting against her fear and the cold heavy impression of
his dull grey dressing-gown and the grey rug over his knees.
“It’s so lovely in the garden,” she said, fervently fixing her eyes on
the small white face, a little puffy under its grizzled hair. He looked
stiffly in her direction.
“The sun is so warm,” she went on hurriedly. “Mrs. Corrie thought----”
she stopped. Of course the man was too ill to be worried. For, an
eternity she stood, waiting. Mr. Corrie coughed his little cough and
turned again to the fire. If only she could sit down in the other chair,
saying nothing and just be there. He looked so unspeakably desolate. He
hated being there, not able to play or work.
“I hate being ill,” she said at last, “it always seems such waste of
time.” She knew she had borrowed that from someone and that it would
only increase the man’s impatience. “I always have to act and play
parts,” she thought angrily--and called impatiently to her everyday
vision of him to dispel the obstructive figure in the armchair.
“Umph,” said Mr. Corrie judicially.
“You could have a chair,” she ventured, “and just sit quietly.”
“No thanks, I’m not coming out.” He turned a kind face in her direction
without meeting her eyes.
“You have such a nice room,” said Miriam vaguely, getting to the door.
“Do you like it?” It was his everyday voice, and Miriam stopped at the
door without turning.
“It’s so absolutely your own,” she said.
Mr. Corrie laughed. “That’s a strange definition of charm.”
“I didn’t say charming. I said your own.”
Mr. Corrie laughed out. “Because it’s mine it’s nice, but it is, for the
same reason, not charming.”
“You’re tying me up into something I haven’t said. There’s a fallacy in
what you have just said, somewhere.”
“You’ll never be tied up in anything, mademoiselle--you’ll tie other
people up. But there was no fallacy.”
“No verbal fallacy,” said Miriam eagerly, “a fallacy of intention,
deliberate misreading.”
“No wonder you think the sun would do me good.”
“How do you mean?”
“I’m such a miscreant.”
“Oh no, you’re not,” said Miriam comfortingly, turning round. “I don’t
want you to come out”--she advanced boldly and stirred the fire. “I
always like to be alone when I’m ill.”
“That’s better,” said Mr. Corrie.
“Good-bye,” breathed Miriam, getting rapidly to the door ... poor
wretched man ... wanting quiet kindness.
“Thank you; good-bye,” said Mr. Corrie gently.
9
“Then you’d say, Corrie,” said Mr. Staple-Craven, as they all sat down
to dinner on Sunday, evening ... now comes flattery, thought Miriam
calmly--nothing mattered, the curtains were back, the light not yet gone
from the garden and birds were fluting and chirruping out there on the
lawn where she had played tennis all the afternoon--at home there was
the same light in the little garden and Sarah and Harriett were there in
happiness, she would see them soon and meantime, the wonder, the fresh
rosebuds, this year’s, under the clear soft lamplight.
“You’d say that no one was to blame for the accident.”
“The cause of the accident was undoubtedly the signalman’s sudden attack
of illness.”
Pause. “It sounds,” thought Miriam, “as if he were reading from the Book
of Judgment. It isn’t true either. Perhaps a judgment can never be
true.” She pondered to the singing of her blood.
“In other words,” said one of the younger men, in a narrow nasal
sneering clever voice, “it was a purely accidental accident.”
“Purely,” gurgled Mr. Corrie, in a low, pleased tone.
“They think they’re really beginning,” mused Miriam, rousing herself.
“A genuine accident within the meaning of the act,” blared Mr. Craven.
“An actident,” murmured Mr. Corrie.
“In that case,” said another man, “I mean since the man was discovered
ill, not drunk, by a doctor in his box, all the elaborate legal
proceedings would appear to be rather--superfluous.”
“Not at all, not at all,” said Mr. Corrie testily.
Miriam listened gladly to the anger in his voice, watching the faint
movement of the window curtains and waiting for the justification of the
law.
“The thing must be subject to a detailed inquiry before the man can be
cleared.”
“He might have felt ill before he took up his duties--you’d hardly get
him to admit that.”
“Lawyers can get people to admit anything,” said Mr. Craven cheerfully,
and broke the silence that followed his sally by a hooting monotonous
recitative which he delivered, swaying right and left from his hips,
“that is to say--they by beneficently pursuing unexpected--quite
_unexpected_ bypaths--suddenly confront--their--their examinees--with
the truth--the Truth.”
“It’s quite a good point to suggest that the chap felt ill earlier in
the day--that’s one of the things you’d have to find out. You’d have, at
any rate, to know all the circumstances of the seizure.”
“Indigestible food,” said Miriam, “or badly cooked food.”
“Ah,” said Mr. Corrie, his face clearing, “that’s an excellent
refinement.”
“In that case the cause of the accident would be the cook.”
Mr. Corrie laughed delightedly.
“I don’t say that because I’m interested, but because I wanted to take
sides with him,” thought Miriam, “the others know that and resent it and
now I’m interested.”
“Perhaps,” she said, feeling anxiously about the incriminated cook, “the
real cause then would be a fault in her upbringing, I mean he may have
lately married a young woman whose mother had not taught her cooking.”
“Oh, you can’t go back further than the cook,” said Mr. Corrie finally.
“But the cause,” she persisted, in a low, anxious voice, “is the sum
total of all the circumstances.”
“No, no,” said Mr. Corrie impenetrably, with a hard face--“you can’t
take the thing back into the mists of the past.”
He dropped her and took up a lead coming from a man at the other end of
the table.
“Oh,” thought Miriam coldly, appraising him with a glance, the slightly
hollow temples, the small skull, a little flattened, the lack of height
in the straight forehead, why had she not noticed that before?--the
general stinginess of the head balancing the soft keen eyes and
whimsical mouth--“that’s you; you won’t, you can’t look at anything from
the point of view of life as a whole”--she shivered and drew away from
the whole spectacle and pageant of Newlands’ life. It all had this
behind it, a man, able to do and decide things who looked about like a
ferret for small clever things, causes, immediate near causes that
appeared to explain, and explained nothing and had nothing to do with
anything. Her hot brain whirled back--signalmen, in bad little houses
with bad cooking--tinned foods--they’re a link--they bring all sorts of
things into their signal boxes. They ought to bring the fewest possible
dangerous things. Something ought to be done.
Lawyers were quite happy, pleased with themselves if they made some one
person guilty--put their finger on him. “Can’t go back into the mists of
the past ... you _didn’t understand_, you’re not capable of
understanding any real _movements_ of thought. I always knew it. You
think--in propositions. Can’t go back. Of course you can go back, and
round and up and everywhere. Things as a whole ... you understand
nothing. We’ve done. That’s you. Mr. Corrie--a leading Q.C. Heavens.”
In that moment Miriam felt that she left Newlands for ever. She glanced
at Mrs. Corrie and Mrs. Craven--bright beautiful coloured birds, fading
slowly year by year in the stifling atmosphere, the hard brutal laughing
complacent atmosphere of men’s minds ... men’s minds, staring at things,
ignorantly, knowing “everything” in an irritating way and yet
_ignorant_.