CHAPTER III

She was inside the dark little hall, her luggage being set down in the

shadows by the brisk silent maid. At the sight of the wide green

staircase ascending to the upper world, the incidents of the journey,

translated as she drove to the house into material for conversation,

fell away and vanished.

The thud of the swing door, the flurry of summer skirts threshed by

flying footsteps; Alma hurrying to meet her.... It was folly; _madness_;

to flout the year's fatigue by coming here to stay, instead of going

away with friends also tired and seeking holiday....

With the first step on the yielding pile of the stair-carpet she forgot

everything but the escape from noise and gloom and grime. She was going

up for four endless weeks into the clean light streaming down from

above. This time there should be no brisk beginning. She would act out

Alma's promise to accept her as an invalid deaf mute. There was so much

time that fatigue was an asset, the shadow against which all this

brightness shone out.

But Alma was not welcoming an invalid. There she stood, at the end of

her rush, daintily jigging from foot to foot, in a delicate frilly

little dress; heading the perspective of pure white and green, surfaces

and angles sharp in the east light coming through the long casement. She

checked the bright perspective with the thought in her dress, the

careful arrangement of her softly woven pile of bright hair, the

afternoon's excitement, from which she had rushed forth, shining through

her always newly charming little pointed square face.

"Shall I labour up the rest of the stairs, or sit down here and burst

into tears?"

"Oh, come up, dear ole fing," she cried with tender irony; but _irony_.

"Paw fing. Is it _very_ tired?" But her gentle arms and hands were

perfectly, wonderfully understanding; though her face withdrawn from her

gentle kiss still mocked; always within the limpid brown eyes that

belabouring, rallying, mocking spirit. She held her smile radiantly,

against a long troubled stare, and then it broke into her abrupt gurgle

of laughter.

"_Come_ along," she cried and carried a guest at a run along the passage

and through the swing door.

It was the downstairs spare room.... Miriam had expected the winding

stair, the room upstairs, where all her shorter visits were stored up.

She was to be down here at the centre of the house, just behind low

casements, right on the garden, touched by the sound of the sea. And

within the curtain-shaded sound-bathed green-lit space there was a

deeper remoteness than even in the far high room, so weirdly shaped by

the burning roof; its orange light always full of a strange listening

silence....

"_Alma._ How _perfectly_ glorious." She stood still, turned away, as

Alma closed the door, contemplating the screened light falling

everywhere on spaces of pure fresh colour, against which the deep tones

of single objects shone brightly.

Alma neighed gently and with little gurgles of laughter put her hands

about her and gently shook her. "It _is_ rather a duck of a room. It

_is_ rather a duck of a room." Another little affectionate, clutching

shake. Her face was crinkled, her eyes twinkling with mirth; as if she

gave the room a little sportive push that left it bashed amusingly

sideways. In just this way had she jested when they walked, wearing long

pigtails, down the Upper Richmond Road. If she could have echoed the

words and joined in Alma's laughter, she would have been, in Alma's

eyes, suitably launched on her visit. But she couldn't. _Amused_

approval was an outrage on something. Yet the kind of woman who would be

gravely pleased and presently depart to her own quarters proud and

possessive, would also leave everything unexpressed. But that kind of

person would not have achieved this kind of room ... and to Alma the

wonder of it was of course inseparable from the adventure of getting it

together. It was something in the independent effect of things that was

violated by regarding them merely as successful larks.... Yet Alma's

sense of beauty, her recognition of its unfamiliar forms was keener,

more experienced, more highly-wrought than her own.

"I shall spend the whole of my time in here, doing absolutely nothing."

"You shall! You shall! _Dear_ old Mira." She was laughing again. "But

you'll come out and have tea. Sometimes. Won't you, for instance, come

out and have tea _now_? In a few minutes? There'll be tea; in _ever_

such a few minutes. Wouldn't that be a bright idea?" How dainty she was;

how pretty. A Dresden china shepherdess, without the simper; a

sturdiness behind her sparkling mirth. If only she would stop trying to

liven her up. It seemed always when they were alone, as if she were

still brightly in the midst of people keeping things going....

"Tea! Bright idea! Tea!" A little parting shake and a brisk whirling

turn and she was sitting away on the side of the bed, meditatively, with

both hands, using a small filmy handkerchief, having given up hope of

galvanising; saying gravely, "Take off your things and tell me really

how you are."

"I'm at my last gasp," said Miriam sinking into a chair. It was clear

now that she would not be alone with the first expressiveness of the

room. Returning later on she would find it changed. The first, already

fading, wonderful moment would return, painfully, only when she was

packing up to go. After all it was Alma's home. But it was no use trying

to fight this monstrous conviction that the things she liked of other

people, were more hers than their own. The door opened again upon a

servant with her pilgrim baskets.

"I nearly always _am_ at my last gasp nowadays." Clean, strong neatly

cuffed hands setting the dusty London baskets down to rest in the quiet

freshness.

Alma spoke formally; her voice a comment on expressiveness in the

presence of the maid; and an obliteration of the expressiveness of the

room; making it just a square enclosure set about with independent

things, each telling, one against the other, a separate history.... When

the maid was gone the air was parched with silence. Miriam felt

suspended; impatient; eager to be out in whatever grouping Alma had come

from, to recover there in the open the sense of life that had departed

from the sheltering room.

"How is Sarah?" Alma felt the strain. But for her it was the difficulty

of finding common ground for interchange with anyone whose life was

lacking in brilliant features. She was behaving, kindly trying for

topics; but also, partly, underlining the featurelessness, as a

punishment for bad behaviour.

"Oh--flourishing--I think." She rose, unpinning her stifling veil. She

would have to brace herself to reach out to something with which to

break into the questions Alma's kind patience would one by one produce.

A catechism leading her thoughts down into a wilderness of unexamined

detail that would unfit her for the coming emergence.

"And Harriett?"

"Harriett's simply _splendid_. You know, if she only had a little

capital she could take another house. She's sending people away all the

time."

"Oh yes?" Alma did not want to spend time over Harriett's apartment

house, unless it was brightly described. It was too soon for bright

descriptions. The item had been dragged in and wasted, out of place. A

single distasteful fact. The servants, hidden away beyond the velvet

staircase, seemed to be hearing the unsuitable disclosure. She sought

about in her mind for something that would hold its own; one of the

points of conflict that had cleared, since she was last here, to single

unanswerable statements. But Alma forestalled her, attacking the silence

with her gayest voice. "Oh Miriam, what _do_ you think. I saw a Speck;

yesterday; on the Grand Esplanade. _Do_ you remember the Specks?"

Miriam beamed and agreed, breathing in reminiscences. But they would be

endless; and would not satisfy them, or bring them together. She could

not, with Alma alone, pretend that those memories were merely amusing.

It was a treachery. The mere mention of a name sent her back to the

unbearable happiness of that last school summer, a sunlit flower-filled

world opening before her, the feeling of being herself a flower,

expanding in the sunlight. She could not regard it as a past. All that

had happened since was a momentary straying aside, to be forgotten. To

that other world she was still going forward. One day she would suddenly

come upon it, as she did in her dreams. The flower-scented air of it was

in her nostrils as she sat reluctantly rousing herself to take Alma's

cue. "There were millions of them." It had never occurred to her that

they were funny. Alma, even then, outside her set of grave romantic

friendships, had seen almost everything as a comic spectacle and had no

desire to go back. "Yes, _weren't_ they innumerable! And so _large_! It

was a large one I saw. The very biggest Speck of all I think it must

have been."

"I expect it was Belinda."

"Oh, my _dear_! _Could_ you tell them apart?"

"Belinda was one of the middle ones. Absolutely _square_. I liked her

for that and her deep bass voice and her silence."

"Oh, but Miriam, such a _heavy_ silence."

"That was _why_. Perhaps because she made me feel sylph like and

elegant. Me, Susan.... Or it might have been _Mehetabel_; the eldest of

the younger ones. I once heard her answer in class...."

"My _dear_! Could a Speck really speak?"

"Hetta did. In a boo; like the voice of the wind."

She contemplated her thoughtless simile. It was exactly true. First a

sound, breathy and resonant, and then words _blown_ on it.... Alma's

amused laughter was tailing off into little snickers; repeated while she

looked for something else. But the revived Specks marshalled themselves

more and more clearly, playing their parts in the crowded scene.

"And you know the eldest, Alathea, was quite willowy. Darker than the

others. They were all mid-brown."

"Oh Miriam; doesn't that express them?"

"I wonder what they are all doing?"

"Nothing, my dear. Oh _nothing_. Now _can_ you imagine a Speck doing

anything whatever?"

"All sitting about in the big house; going mad; on their father's

money."

"Yes," said Alma simply, gathering her face into gravity. "It's rather

terrible, you know." A black shadow bearing slowly down upon the golden

picture.... But they were so determined to see women's lives in that way

... yet there was Miss Lane, and Mildred Gaunt and Eunice Bradley ...

three of their own small group; all gone mad.

"Well," said Alma rising, her hands moving up to her bright hair,

adjusting it, with delicate wreathing movements, "I'm so glad you've

come, old fing." She hummed herself to the door with a little tune to

which Miriam listened standing in the middle of the room in a numb

suspension. The door was opened. Alma would be gliding gracefully out.

Her song ceased, and she cleared her throat with that little sound that

was the sound of her voice in quiet comment.

"Wow. Old brown-study." She turned to look. Alma's pretty head was

thrust back into the room. To shake things off, to make one shake things

off.... She smiled, groaning in spirit at her accentuated fatigue. One

more little amused gurgle, and Alma was gone.

She went into her own room. Next door. Opposite to it was Hypo's room.

Opposite to her own door, the door of the bathroom, and just beyond, the

swing door leading to the landing and the rooms grouped about it.

Outside the low curtained windows was the midst of the garden. She was

set down at the heart of the house. Sounds circled about her instead of

coming faintly up.... She drew back the endmost curtain an inch or two.

Bright light fell on her reflection in the long mirror. She was

transformed already. It would be impossible to convince anyone that she

was a tired Londoner. Here was already the self that no one in London

knew. The removal of pressure had relaxed the nerves of her face,

restoring its contours. Her mushroom hat had crushed the mass of her

hair into a good shape. The sharp light called out its bright golds,

deepened the colour of her eyes and the clear tints of her skin. The

little old washed out muslin blouse flatly defining her shoulders and

arms, pouched softly above the pale grey skirt.... I _do_ understand

colour ... that tinge of lavender in such a pale, pale grey; just

warming it ... and belonging perfectly to Grannie's spidery old Honiton

collar.... The whole little toilet was quite good; could be forgotten,

and would keep fresh, bleached by the dry bright air to paler grey and

whiter white, while the notes of bright living colour in her face and

hair intensified from day to day. She hunted out her handglass and

consulted her unknown eyes. It was true. They were brown; not grey. In

the bright light there was a web, thorny golden brown, round the iris.

She gazed into its tangled depths. So strange. So warm and bright; her

unknown self. The self she was meant to be, living in that bright, goldy

brown filbert tint, irradiating the grey into which it merged. It was a

discovery. She was a goldy brown person, not cold grey. With half a

chance, goldy brown and rose. And the whites of her eyes were pearly

grey-blue. What a number of strange live colours, warmly asserting

themselves; independently. But only at close quarters.

* * * * *

She followed Alma back through the swing door. Alma hummed a little

song; an overture; its low tones filled the enclosed space, opened all

the doors, showed her the whole of the interior in one moment and the

coming month in an endless bright panorama passing unbroken from room to

room, each scene enriched by those accumulated behind it, and those

waiting ahead; the whole, for her, perpetually returning upon its own

perfection. Alma paused before a scatter of letters on the table below

the long lattice. Links with their other world; with things she would

hear of, stated and shaped in their way, revealing a world to which they

alone seemed to have an interpreting key; making it hold together; but

inacceptable ... but the _statement_ was forever fascinating.... Through

the leaded panes she caught a glimpse of the upper slope of the little

town. A row of grey seaside boarding-houses slanting up-hill. A

ramshackle little omnibus rumbling down the steep road.

"Edna Prout's with us for the week-end." Alma's social tone,

deliberately clear and level. It made a little scene, the beginning of a

novel, the opening of a play, warning the players to stand off and make

a good shape, smoothly moving without pause or hitch, playing and saying

their parts, always with an eye to the good shape, conscious of a

critical audience. There would be no expansive bright beginning, alone

with Alma and Hypo, the centre of their attention.

"Who is Edna Prout?" she demanded jealously.

Alma turned with a little bundle of the letters in her hand, speaking

thoughtfully away through the window. "She writes; rather wonderful

stuff."

Away outside the window stood the wonderful stuff, being written, rolled

off; the vague figure of a woman, cleverly dressed, rising pen in hand

from her work to be socially brilliant. Popular. Divided between

mysteriously clever work and successful femineity. Alma glanced,

pausing, and looked away again.

"She has a most amazing sense of the past," she murmured reflectively.

As if it had just occurred to her. But it must be the current

description. His description.

"The Stone Age?"

"Oh _no_, my dear!" She shrieked gently; wheeling round to share her

mirth. "The Past. _'Istry._ The Mediterranean past."

"Her stones are precious stones." From this beginning, to go on looking

only at things, ignoring surroundings....

"That's it! Come along!" Alma went blithely forward, again humming her

tune. But there was a faint change in her confident manner. She too, was

conscious of going to meet an ordeal.

Through the still, open-windowed brightness of the brown-green room, out

into the naked blaze. Rocky dryness and sea freshness mingled in the

huge air. The little baked pathway ribboning the level grass,

disappearing round the angle of the enclosing edge, the perfect sharp

edge, irises feathering along it, sharp green spikes and deep blue hoods

of filmy blossom patterned against the paler misty blueness of the sea.

Perfect. Hidden beyond the sharp edge, the pathway winding down the

terraced slope of the cliff to the little gate opening from the tangled

bottom on to the tamarisk-trimmed sea road. Seats set at the angles of

the winding path. The sea glinting at your side between the leaf

patterns of the creeper covered pergola. The little roughstone shelter,

trapping the sunblaze. The plain bench along the centre of a piece of

pathway, looking straight out to the midmost sea; sun-baked gravel under

your feet, clumps of flowers in sight. Somewhere the rockery, its face

catching the full blaze of the light, green bosses clumped upon it, with

small pure-toned flowers, mauvy pink and tender eastern blue. On the

level just below it, a sudden little flat of grass, small flowered

shrubs at its edge towards the sea.

All waiting for tomorrow, endless tomorrows, in the morning, when the

sunlight poured from the other side of the sky and the face of the cliff

was cool and coloured. For tonight when the blaze had deepened into

sunset and afterglow, making a little Naples of the glimpse of white

town, winding street and curve of blue bay visible in the distance

beyond the shoulder of the sidemost clump of shrubs along the end of the

sunk lawn.

Alma had halted, just behind, letting her gaze her fill. There was no

one to be seen. No sound. Nothing to break the perfect expressiveness.

"We've taken refuge at the back," suggested Alma into her arm-stretching

groan of contentment. Down across the lawn into the little pathway

between the shrubs. There they were, in the cool shadows under the small

trees. Large bamboo chairs, a cushioned hammock, tea going on, Hypo

rising in the middle of a sentence. Miss Prout sitting opposite,

upright, posed, knee over knee, feet shod in peacock blue, one pointing

downwards in the air, exactly above the other pointing on to the gravel.

A wide silky gown, loose; held flat above the chest by brilliant bold

embroidery; a broad dark head; short wide tanned face.

The eyes were not brown but wide starry blue; unseeing; contradicting

her matronly shape. Now that the arrival was over and Hypo had begun

again, she still had the look of waiting, apart. As if she were sitting

alone. Yet her clever clothes and all her outlines diffused

companionship.

The lizards must have looked perfect, darting and basking on the

rockery. But why have his heart won only by the one that quickly

wriggled out of the box?... Paying attention only to the people who were

strong enough to fuss all the time. Not seeing that half their animation

was assumed.... "Do you still," the bells of the blue flowers in the

deepest shadow were like lanterns hung on little trees crowded upon the

brown earth. The sound of grass and flowers in blissful shade poured

into the voices, making agreement, giving them all the quality of

blossoming in the surrounding coolness, aware of it, aware of the outer

huge splintering sunlight that made it perfect, fled away from, left to

itself to prepare another perfection ... "divide people into those who

like 'The Reading Girl' and those who prefer the Dresden teapot?"

"_Sudden_ Miriam. Miriam, Edna, is ... is _terrifying_...." He turned

full round to hand the buns, both firm neatly moulded hands holding the

dish ironically-carefully. The wide blue eyes looked across. Where was

she all the time; so calm and starry.... "She comes down from London,

into our rustic solitude, primed...."

"She's a fighter," said Miss Prout roundly, as if she had not spoken.

"Fighting is too mild for Miriam. She crushes. She demolishes. When

words fail her," the lifting, descriptive, outlining laughter coming

into the husky voice, filling out its insistence, "she uses her fists.

Then she departs; back to London; fires off not so much letters as

reinforcements of the prostrating blow." _Kind_ Hypo. Doing his best for

her. Launching her on her holiday with approval; knowing how little was

to be expected of her.... Ages already she had been here blissful.

Getting every moment more blissful. And this was only the first tea. The

four weeks of long days, each day in four long bright separate pieces,

spread out ahead, enclosed; a long unbroken magic. Poor Miss Prout with

her short week-end.... But she went from country-house to country-house.

Certainly. Her garments, even on this languid afternoon, were electric

with social life. Then hostesses were a necessary part of her

equipment.... She must fear them, like a man. She herself could not be

imagined as a hostess. There was no look of strain about her. Only that

look of insulated waiting. Boredom if her eyes had been the thing-filled

eyes of a man, bored in the intervals between meals and talk and events.

"Yes, but _do_ you?" Lame. But Hypo turned, accepting, not departing

afresh to tone up the talk. The ringed, lightning-quick grey eyes

glanced again, as when she had arrived, taking in the detail and the

whole of her effect, but this time directly messaging approval. The

luminous clouded grey, clear ringed, the voice husky and clear, the

strange repellent mouth below the scraggly moustache, kept from weakness

only by the perpetually hovering disclaiming ironic smile ...

fascination that could not be defined; that drove its way through all

the evidence against it.... Married, yet always seeming nearer and more

sympathetic than other men.... Her cup brimmed over. She saw herself as

she had been this morning, in dingy black, pallid, tired to death,

hurriedly finishing off at Wimpole Street. And now an accepted

harmonious part of this so different scene. But this power of blossoming

in response to surroundings was misleading. Beneath it she was utterly

weary. Tomorrow she would feel wrecked, longing for silence.

"Any more tea, anybody? More _tea_, Miriam." Alma waved the teapot. The

little scene gleamed to the sound of her voice, a bright, intense

grouping in the green shade, with the earth thrilling beneath and the

sky arching down over its completeness.

"Yes," said Hypo, on his feet. "She'll have, just one more cup. Let me

see," he went on, from the tea-table, "you liked; the Girl. Yes.... No.

The teapot. I accuse you of the teapot."

"I liked both." Not true. But the answer to the wrongness of the

division.

"Catholic Miriam. That's quite a feat. Even for you, Miriam, that is, I

think ..."

"But she didn't! She called my teapot messy!"

"It's true. I _do_ think Dresden china messy. But I mean that it's

possible----" She spoke her argument through his answer, volleyed over

his shoulder as he brought back her cup, to a remark from Miss Prout.

The next moment he was away in the hammock near Miss Prout's low chair,

throwing cushions out on to the grass, gathering up a sheaf of printed

leaves; leaving her classed with the teapot people....

"Buoyed up by _tea_, Edna," he chuckled, flinging away the end of a

cigarette; propping the pages against his knee. "By the way who is

Olga?"

"The eldest Featherstonhaugh." She spoke carelessly; sat half turned

away from him serenely smoking; a small buff cigarette in a long amber

tube; but her voice vibrated.

He was _reading_, in her presence, a book she had written.... Those

pages were _proofs_.... My arrival was an interruption in a

companionship that made conversation superfluous.... What need for her

to talk when she could put into his hands, alive and finished, something

that she had made; that could bring into his face that look of attention

and curiosity. How not sit suspended, and dreaming, through the small

break in her tremendous afternoon? Yet he was getting the characters

mixed up....

"And Cyril. Do I know Cyril?"

She had put _people_ in.... People he knew of. They joked about it.

Horrible.... She gazed, revolted and fascinated, at the bundle of pages.

Someone ought to prevent, destroy.... This peaceful beauty.... Life

going so wonderfully on. And people being helplessly picked out and put

into books.

"This is the episode of the _greenhouse_!" His voice broke on the word

into its utmost wail of amusement.

_That_ was 'writing'; from behind the scenes. People and things from

life, a little altered, and described from the author's point of view.

Easy; if your life was amongst a great many people and things and you

were hard enough to be sceptical and superior. But an impossibly mean

advantage ... a cheap easy way. Cold clever way of making people look

seen-through and foolish; to be laughed at, while the authors remained

admired, special people, independent, leading easy airy sunlit lives,

supposed, by readers who did not know where they got their material, to

be _creators_. He was reading on steadily now, the look of amused

curiosity gone.

Alma came over with a box of cigarettes and a remark; kindly thinking

she might be feeling left; offering distraction. Or wishing to make her

behave, launch out, with pretended interest upon a separate

conversation, instead of hanging upon theirs. Of course she was sitting

staring, without knowing it.... And already she had taken a cigarette

and murmured an answer obliviously, and Alma had gone, accepting her

engrossment, humming herself about amongst the trees, missing his

remarks. Deliberately asserting a separate existence? Really loving her

garden and enjoying the chance of being alone? Or because she knew all

he had to say about _everything_. She came back and subsided in a low

chair near Miss Prout just as he dropped his pages and looked out on to

the air with a grave unconscious face. Lost in contemplation. This

woman, so feminine and crafty, was a great writer. Extraordinary.

Impossible. In a second he had turned to her.

"How do you do it, Edna? You do it. It's _shattering_, that

chapter-end."

Miss Prout was speechless, not smiling. Crushed with joy.... Alma, at

her side, smiled in delight, genuine sympathetic appreciation.

"I'm done in, Edna," he wailed, taking up the leaves to go on, "shan't

write another line. And the worst of it is I know you'll keep it up.

That I've got to make; before dinner; my--my _via dolorosa_; through

your abominably good penultimate and final chapters."

"Am I allowed to read?" Miriam said rising and going with hands

outstretched for the magic leaves.

"Yes," he chuckled, gathering up and handing. "Let's try it on Miriam. I

warn you she's deadly. And of a voracity. She reads at a gulp; spots

everything; _more_ than everything; turns on you and lays you out."

Miriam stood considering him. Happy. He had really noticed and

remembered the things she had said from time to time. But they were

expecting a response.

"I shan't understand. I know I shan't. May I really take them away?"

"Now don't, Miriam ..." taking his time, keeping her arrested before

them, with his held-up minatory finger and mocking friendly smile,

"don't under-rate your intelligence."

"May I really take them," she flounced, ignoring him; holding herself

apart with Miss Prout. The air danced between them sunlit from between

branches. A fresh perspective opened. She was to meet her. See her

unfold before her eyes in the pages of the book.

"Yes, _do_," she smiled, a swift nice look, not scrutinising.

"How _alive_ they look; much more alive than a book in its suit of neat

binding."

"Are we _all_ literary?"

"We're all literary," joined his quick voice. She blushed with pleasure.

Included; with only those ghastly little reviews. Not mocking. Quite

gravely. She beamed her gratitude and turned away blissful.

"Is Miriam going?"

"I've got to unpack." He wanted an audience, an outsider, for the scene

of the reading. Alma had disappeared.

"Won't _they_ do all that for you?"

"Still I think I'll go.... Addio." She backed along the little pathway

watching him seek and find his words, crying each one forth in a

thoughtful falsetto, while he turned conversationally towards Miss

Prout. The scene was cut off by the bushes, but she could still hear his

voice, after the break-down of his Italian into an ironic squeal, going

on in charge of it. She sped across the lawn and up on to the open above

the unexplored terraces. They could wait. For the moment, unpeopled,

they were nothing. They would be the background of further scenes, all

threaded by the sound of Hypo's voice, lit by the innumerable things she

would hear him say, obliterating the surroundings, making far-off things

seem more real.... Mental liveliness _did_ obliterate surroundings, stop

their expressiveness. Already the first expressiveness had gone from the

garden. She did not want to create it afresh. There was hurry and

pressure now in the glances she threw. A wrongness. Something left out.

There was something left out, left behind, in his scheme of things. She

wandered as far as the horizon row of irises to look out over the sea,

chased and pulled back as she went. Until the distant prospect opened

and part of the slope of the garden lay at her feet. The light had

ripened. The sun no longer towered, but blazed across at her from above

the rightmost edge of the picture. Short shadows jutted from the feet of

every standing thing. The light was deepening in perfect stillness. Wind

and rain had left the world for good. _This_ was her holiday. Everything

behind her broke down into irrelevance.... How go back to it.... How not

stay and live through the changing of the light in this perfect

stillness....

* * * * *

There was no feeling of Sunday in the house. But when Miriam wandered

into her room during the after breakfast lull, she found it waiting for

her; pouring into the room from afar, from all over the world, breaking

her march, breaking up the lines of the past and of the future,

isolating her with itself. The openings of the long lattice framed wide

strips of morning brilliance between short close-drawn folds of flowered

chintz. Everything outside was sharp and near, but changed since

yesterday. The flowers stood vivid in the sunlight; very still. The

humming of the bees sounded careful and secret; not wishing to disturb.

The sea sparkled to itself, refusing to call the eye. Yet outside there,

as in the room, something called. She leaned out. Into the enlarged

picture the sky poured down. The pure blue moved within itself as you

looked, letting you through and up. An unbroken fabric of light, yet

opening all over, taking you up into endless light....

Sunday is in the sky....

Hypo, coming round the corner from the terrace, his arms threshing the

air to the beat of his swift walk; knitting up the moment, casting kind

radiance as he came. Married, but casting radiance. He was making for

the house. Then Miss Prout was somewhere down there alone.... She

hurried to be out, seeking her. On the landing she ran into Hypo.

"Hullo, Miriametta. Going out?"

"I think so. Where's everybody?"

"Everybody, and chairs, is down on the terrace. But you'll want a

_hat_."

"I shan't." He had often admired her ability to go without. He had been

talking to Miss Prout for the last half hour and was now abstractedly

making a shapely thing of a chance meeting with a stranger.... His words

had carried him to the study door. He began inventing his retort, the

unfelt shape of words that would carry him on undisturbed, facing the

door with his back to her, hand on the doorknob. The end of it would

find him within. She cried out at random into the making of his phrase

and escaped into the dining-room to the sound of his voice. In the empty

dining-room she found again the listening presence of Sunday and hurried

to be through it and away at whatever centre had formed down there in

the open. Going down the steps and along the paths she entered the

movement of the day, the beginning of the sense of tomorrow, that would

strengthen with the slow shifting of the sabbath light. Miss Prout came

into view round the first bend, a sunlit figure in a tub chair on the

grassy level at the end of the terrace. _She_ had no hat. Her dark head

was bent over the peak made in her flowing draperies by her crossed

knees. She was _sewing_. Here. In public, serenely, the first thing in

the morning.

Strolling to join her Miriam saw her as she had been last night, set

like a flower, unaccented and harmonious, in her pleated gown of old

rose silk, towards the oval of dinner-table, an island of softly bright

silk-shaded radiance in the midst of the twilit room; under the

brightest of the central light, filmy flowers massed low in a wide

shallow bowl ... a gentleness about her, touching the easy beginnings of

talk, each phrase pearly, catching the light, expanding; expressing a

secret joy. Then the gathering and settling of the flow of talk between

him and her, lifting, shaking itself out, flashing into sharp clear

light; the fabric of words pierced by his wails of amusement as he

looked, still talking, at the pictures they drew.... People they knew

passing to and fro; _all_ laughable, all brought to their strange shared

judgment. The charm of the scene destroyed by the surrounding vision of

a wit-wrecked world.

After dinner that moment when she had drawn herself up before him,

suddenly young, with radiant eyes; looking like a flower in her petaled

gown. He had responded standing very upright, smiling back at her,

admiring her deliberate effect....

The break away across the landing, white and green night brightness

under the switched-on lights, into the dusk of the study, ready peopled

with its own stillness; the last of the twilight glimmering outside the

open windows. Each figure changed by the gloom into an invisible,

memorable presence. Hypo moving in and out of the cone of soft light

amongst the shadows at the far end.

"We'll try the contralto laugh on the lady in the window-seat."

The fear of missing the music in looking for his discovery. And then

into the waiting stillness _Bach_. Of all people. He found a contralto

laugh in _Bach_. There were no people, no women, in Bach. Looking for

the phrase. Forgetting to look for it. The feeling of the twilight

expanding within itself, too small. The on-coming vast of night held

back, swirling, swept away by broad bright morning light running through

forest tracery. Shining into a house. The clean cool poise of everyday

morning. The sounds of work and voices, separate, united by surroundings

greeted by everyone from within. The secret joy in everyone pouring

through the close pattern of life, going on forever, the end in the

first small phrase, every phrase a fresh end and a beginning. Going on

when the last chord stood still on the air.... And if he liked Bach, how

not believe in people? How not be certain of God?... And then remarks,

breaking thinly against the vast nearness.

"What does the lady in the window think?"

"She's asleep." Miss Prout had really thought that....

"Oh no she _isn't_."

Miss Prout looked up as she approached but kept on with her sewing and

held her easy silence as she dropped into one of the low chairs. She was

working a pattern of bright threads on a small strip of saffron-coloured

silk ... looking much older in the blaze of hard light. But far-off, not

minding, sitting there as if enthroned, for the morning, placid and

matronly and indifferent. The heavenly morning freshness was still here.

But the remarks about the day had all been made on the lawn after

breakfast.... She admired the close bright work. Miss Prout's voice came

at once, a little eagerly, explaining. She was really keen about her

lovely work.

She was saying something about Paris. Miriam attended swiftly, not

having grasped the beginning, only the fact that she was talking and the

curious dry level of her voice. Beginning on something as everyone did,

ignoring the present, leaving herself sitting there outside life.... She

made a vague response, hoping to hear about Paris. Only to be startled

by the tone and colour of her own voice. Miss Prout would imagine that

her life had been full. In any case could not imagine....

"How long are you staying?" The question shot across at her. She did not

know as she answered whether she had seen the swift hot glance of the

blue eyes, or heard it in the voice. But she had found the woman who

wrote the searing scenes, the strange abrupt phrases that lashed out

from the page.

"Tomorrow I shall be grilling in my flat," went on Miss Prout. Alma's

laughter tinkled from above. She was coming this way. Miss Prout's voice

hurried on incisive, splitting the air, ending with a rush of low words

as Alma appeared round the corner. Miriam watched their little scene,

smooth, unbroken by a single pause or hesitation, saw them go away

together, still talking.

"My hat," she murmured to the thrilled surroundings, and again "My

_hat_." She clutched at the fading reverberations, marvelling at her own

imperviousness, at the way the drama had turned, even while it touched

her, to a painted scene, leaving her unmoved. Miss Prout's little London

eyrie. A distasteful refuge between visits.... Had it been a flattering

appeal, or an insult?

She is like the characters in her book, direct, swift, ruthless, using

any means.... She saw me as a fool, offered me the rôle of one of the

negligible minor characters, there to be used by the successful ones.

She is one with her work, with her picture of life.... But it is not a

true picture. The glinting sea, all the influences pouring in from the

garden denied its existence. It was just a fuss, the biggest drama in

the world was a fuss in which people competed, gambling, everyone losing

in the end. Dead, empty loss, on the whole, because there was always the

commission to be paid. Life in the world is a vice; to which those who

take it up gradually became accustomed.... Her eyes clung to the

splinters of gold on the rippling blue sea. Dropped them, and she was

confined in the hot little rooms of a London flat. If Miss Prout was not

enviable, so _feared_ her lonely independence, then no one was enviable.

"Hullo, Miriametta! All alone?"

"They've gone to look at an enormous book; too big to lift."

"Yes. And what's Miriam doing?"

"Isn't it a perfect morning?"

"It's a good day. It'll be a _corker_ later on. Very pleasant here till

about lunch time. You camping here for the morning?" She looked up.

He was standing in profile, listening, with his head inclined; like a

person suffering from deafness; and pointing towards her his upheld

questioning finger; a German classmaster.

"I don't know."

"Then you will. That's settled?" She murmured a speculative promise,

lazily, a comment on his taut, strung-up bearing. What, to him, if she

did or didn't?

"That's agreed then. You camp here," he dropped neatly into the chair

between hers and Miss Prout's, his face hidden behind the frill of its

canopy, "for the morning." He looked out and round at her, flushed and

grinning. "I want you to," he murmured, "now don't you go and forget."

"All right," she beamed ... the _hours_ he was wasting spinning out his

mysterious drama ... "wild horses shan't move me." He did not want her

society. But it was miles more than wildly interesting enough that he

wished to avoid being alone with Miss Prout. But then why not dump her

as he always did guests he had run through, on to Alma? He left her a

moment for reflections, wound them up with a husky chuckle and began on

one of his improvisations; paying her in advance ... putting in time....

She listened withheld, drawing the weft of his words through the

surrounding picture, watching it enlivened, with fresher colours and

stronger outlines ... a pause, the familiar lifting tone and the drop,

into a single italic phrase; one of his destructive conclusions. His

voice went on, but she had seized the hard glittering thread, rending

it, and watched the developing bright pattern coldly, her opposition

ready phrased for the next break. She could stay forever like this,

watching his thought; thrusting in remarks, making him reconsider. But

Miss Prout was coming. There would be a morning of improvisations with

no chance of arresting him. It was only when they were alone that he

would take opposition seriously, not turning it into materials for

spirals of wit, where nobody could stand against him. The whole morning,

hearing him and Miss Prout chant their duet about people ... helped out

no doubt by the presence of an apparently uncritical audience.... I'm

hanged if I will....

"I must have a book or something. I'll get a book," she said, rising. He

peeped out, as if weighing her suggestion.

"All right.... Get a book.... But come back?"

"Eurasians _are_ different," she said. "Have you ever _known_ any;

really _well_."

"Never known _anybody_, Miriam. Take back everything I ever said. Get

your book and come out with it."

On her way back she heard his voice, high; words broken and carried

along by a squeal of laughter. They were at it already, reducing

everything to absurdity. Turning the corner she found them engrossed,

sitting close at right angles, Miss Prout leaning forward, her

embroidery neglected on her knee. It was monstrous to break in.... She

wandered up and down the terrace, staring at the various views, catching

his eye upon her as she went to and fro; almost deciding to depart and

leave him to his fate. If he was engrossed he was engrossed. If not, he

shouldn't pretend to be. When she was at a distance their voices fell,

low short sentences, sounding set and colourless; but _intimate_.

"Found your book, Miriam?" he cried, as she came near.

"No. I couldn't see anything. So I shut my eyes and whirled round and

pointed."

"Your shameless superstitions, Miriam."

"I _am_. I've got a lovely one I hadn't seen."

"A lovely one. A----"

"I'm not going to tell you what it is."

"You're just going to sit down and munch it up. Miriam's a paradox.

She's the omnivorous _gourmet_."

"Can I have a cigarette?"

"Her authors--we'll _get_ you a cigarette, Miriam, no, alright, here

they are--her authors, the only authors she allows, can be counted

rather more than twice, on the fingers of one hand."

She took two cigarettes, lighting one from his neatly struck match and

retired to a distant chair.

"You'll have the sun in your eyes there."

"I like it." Their voices began again, his social and expansive, hers

clipped and solitary ... the bank of blazing snapdragon grew prominent,

told of nothing but the passing of time. What was the time? How much of

the morning had gone? There was a moment of clear silence....

"Is Miriam there?"

"She is indeed; very _much_ there." Again silence, filled with the echo

of his comprehensive little chuckle. Miss Prout knew now that it was not

the stupidity of a fool that had spoiled her morning. But, if she could

go so far, why not carry him off to talk unembarrassed, or talk, here,

freely, as she wanted to, like those women in her book?

A servant, coming briskly through the sunlight, stopping half way along

the terrace.

"Mr. Simpson."

"Yes. What have you done with him?"

"He's in the study."

"Fetch him out of the study. Bring him here. And bring, lemonade and

things." But he rose as the maid wheeled round and departed. "I'd better

get him, I think. He's Nemesis."

Miriam rose to escape. "Now don't you go, Miriam. You stay and see it

out. You haven't met Simpson, Edna. I haven't. _No_ one has."

"What is he?"

"He's--he's a postscript. The letter came this morning. Now don't either

of you desert." He disappeared, leaving the terrace stricken. The rest

of the morning, lunch, perhaps the whole day ... Simpson. His voice

returned a moment later, encouraging, as if shepherding an invalid,

across the garden and round the angle. A very tall young man, in a blue

serge suit, a _pink_ collar and a face sunburnt all over, an even red.

He was sitting upright in a headlong silence, holding on to the thoughts

with which he had come. But they were being scattered. He had held them

through the introductions and Hypo's witty distribution of drinks. But

now the bright air rang with the rapid questions, volleyed swiftly upon

the beginnings of the young man's meditative answers, and he was sitting

alone in the circle in a puzzled embarrassment, listening, but not won

by Hypo's picture of Norwich, not joining in the expansion and the

laughter, aware only of the scattering of his precious handful of

thoughts. Towards lunch-time Hypo carried him off to the study.

"Exit the postscript," said Miss Prout. Charmingly ... dropping back

into her pose, but talkatively, a kindliness in the blue eyes gazing out

to sea. Again she bemoaned her return to London, but added at once a

little picture of her old servant; the woman's gladness at getting her

back again.

"Only until the end of the week," said Miriam seeing the old servant,

perpetually left alone, getting older. Sad. Left out. But what an awful

way of living in London; alone with one old servant. A brilliant light

came into Miss Prout's eyes. She was looking fixedly along the terrace.

"He wouldn't stay to lunch." Hypo, alone and gay. "He's _done_ with me.

Given me up. Gone away a wise young man."

"He was _appalling_."

"You didn't hear him, Miriam."

"I saw him."

"You didn't hear him on the subject of his guild."

"He's founded a _guild_?"

"It's much worse than that. He's gone about, poor dear, in sublime, in

the most _sublime_ faith, collecting all the young men in Norfolk, under

my banner. I have heard this morning all I might become if I could

contrive to be ... as wooden as he is. Come along. Let's have lunch. You

know, Edna, there's a great work to be done on you. _You've_ got to be

turned into a socialist." He turned as they walked, to watch her face.

She was looking down, smiling, withdrawn, revealing nothing. Seething

with anticipation. She would be willing. For the sake of the long

conversations. They would sit apart talking, for the rest of her time.

There would be long argumentative letters. No. She would not argue. She

would be another of those women in the Lycurgan, posing and dressing and

consciously shining at soirées. Making havoc and complications. Worse

than they. How could he imagine her a socialist with her view of

humanity and human motives.

"No. We _won't_ make you a socialist, Edna. You're too good as you are."

Beautiful, different; too good for socialism? Then he really thought her

wonderful. In some way beyond himself....

* * * * *

Turning just in time to be caught by the sun dipping behind the cliff.

Perfect sudden moment. No sunset effects. No radiance. Clean dull

colours. Mealy grey-blue sky, dull gold ball, half hidden, tilted by the

slope of the green cliff. Feeling him arrested, compelled to receptive

watching; watching a sunset, like anyone else.... The last third of the

disc, going, bent intently, asserting the moment, asserting uniqueness;

unanswerable mystery of beauty.

"God, reading a newspaper."

"The way to see a sunset is to be _indoors_. Oblivious. Then ... just a

ruddy glow, reflected from a bright surface.... The indirect method's

the method. Old Conrad."

"Madeleine has no use for this storm-rent sky. She wants untroubled

blue, one small pink cloud, and presently, a single star." Then he must

have wanted these things himself once. Why did he try to jest young

people into his disillusionment?

Yet tonight the sun had set without comment. With his approval. He was

openly sharing the unspoken response to the scene of its magnificent

departure.

The reproachful, watching eye of Sunday disappeared, drawn down over the

horizon with the setting sun. Leaving a blissful refreshment, the

strange unearned sense falling always somewhere in the space between

Sunday and Monday, of a test survived, leaving one free to go forward to

the cheerful cluster of oncoming days.

The afterglow faded to a bright twilight, deepening in the garden to a

violet dusk. The sea glimmered in the remaining light that glared along

its further rim like a yawn, holding up the lid of the sky. The figures

in the chairs had grown dim, each face a pale disc set towards the

falling light. The talk died down to small shreds, simple and slow,

steeped in the beauty of the evening, deferring to it, as to a host.

They were still the guests of the evening while they sat grouped round

the lamplit verandah supper-table that turned the dusk into night. But

the end was coming. The voices in the lamplight were growing excited and

forgetful. Indoors and separation were close at hand.

He was oblivious. Given up to his jesting ... she watched his jesting

face, shiny now and a little loose, the pouching of his lips as he

spoke, the animal glimmer of teeth below the scraggy moustache,

repellent, yet part of the fascination of his smile, and perpetually

redeemed by the charm of his talk, the intense charm of the glancing

eyes, seeing and understanding, comforting even when they mistook, and

yet all the time withheld, preoccupied behind their clean rings and

filmy sightless grey--fixed always on the shifting changing mass of

obstructive mannish knowledge, always on _science_, the only thing in

the world that could get his full attention.... She felt her voice pour

out suddenly, violently quenching a flicker of speech. He glanced,

attentive, healing her despair with his quick interest. The women awoke

from their conspiring trance, alert towards her, watching.

"Yes." His voice followed hers without a break, cool, a comment on her

violence. He turned, looking into the night. His shaggy intelligent

gaze, the reflective slight lift of his eyebrows gave him the look of an

old man lost. The rosy scene was chilled. Cold light and harsh black

shadow, his averted form in profile, helpless, making empty the deeps of

the thing that was called a summer night. Her desire beat no longer

towards the open scene. She hated it. For its sake she had pulled him

up, brought down this desolation.

"It's a good night. It's about the human optime in nights. We ought to

sleep out." He turned back to the table, gathering up expressions,

radiating his amusement at the disarray caused by his absence.

"Let's sleep out. Miriam will. Unless we lock her in." He was on his

feet, eagerly halted, gathering opinions. His eyes came to rest on Alma.

"Let's be dogs. Be driven, by Miriam, into fresh fields of experience."

Would it happen? Would she agree? He was impatient, but deferring. Alma

sat considering, in the attitude Mr. Stoner had called a pretty snap,

her elbows meeting on the table, her chin on her slender hands; just its

point, resting on the bridge they made laid flatly one upon the other.

It was natural in her. But by now she knew that men admired natural

poses. _He_ was admiring, even through his impatience.

"I didn't suggest it. I've never slept out in my life."

"You suggested it, Miriam. My death, all our little deaths from

exposure, will lie at your door." The swift personal glance he dealt her

from the midst of his watching swept round to Miss Prout and flashed

into admiration as he turned, still sideways surveying her, to bend his

voice on Alma.

"It's quite manageable, eh, Susan?" Miriam followed his eyes. Miss Prout

had risen and was standing away from the table posed like a

Gainsborough; challenging head, skirts that draped and spread of

themselves, gracefully, from the slenderness of her body. She was

waiting, indifferent, interpreting the scene in her way, interpreting

the other women for him, united with him in interpreting them....

Alma relaxed and looked up, holding the matter poised, deliberately

locating the casting vote before breaking into enthusiasm. He paid

tribute, coming round the table companionably to her side, but still

looking from face to face, claiming audience.

"We'll break out. Each bring its little mattress and things. After

they've retired. Yes, I think, _after_ they've retired." Why the

conspirator's smile? The look of daring? What of the servants? They were

bound, anyhow, to know in the morning.

It was glorious to rush about in the lit house, shouting unnecessary

remarks. People shouting back. Nobody attending. Shouting and laughing

for the sake of the jolly noise. Saying more than could be said in talk.

Admitting.

And then just to lie extinguished in the darkness wondering what point

there was in sleeping out if you went to sleep at once. All that jolly

tumult. And he had been so intent on the adventure that he had let Miss

Prout change her mind without protest, _only_ crying out from the midst

of busily arranging his bed on the lawn.... "Have you seen Miriam's

pigtails?"

And suddenly everything was prim; the joy of being out in the night

surging in the air, waiting for some form of expression. They didn't

_know_ how to be joyful; only how to be clever.... She hummed a little

song and stopped. It wreathed about her, telling off the beauties of the

night, a song sung by someone else, heard, understood, a perfect

agreement.

"What is she doing?"

"She's sitting up, waving her banana in the air; conducting an

orchestra, I think."

"Tell her to _eat_ the banana and lie down." Alma, Rose Gauntlett, Mrs.

Perry and me, starting off just after I came, to paddle in the

moonlight.... "Don't, _don't_ do anything that would make a cabman

laugh." Why not? Why should he always imagine someone waiting to be

shocked? Damn the silly cabman if he _did_ laugh. Who need care? As soon

as her head was on the pillow, nothing visible but the huge night and

the stars, she spoke quietly to herself, flouting them. He should see,

hear, that it was wicked to simmer stuffily down as if they were in the

house. He didn't want to. She was making his sounds for him.

"Tell Miriam this is not a conversazione."

His voice was actually sleepy. Kindly, long-suffering, but simply

wanting to go to sleep. There was to be no time of being out in the

night with him. He was too far off. She imagined herself at his side, a

little space of grass between. Silent communication, understanding and

peace. All the things that were lost, obliterated by his swift speech,

communicated to him at leisure, clear in the night. Here under the

verandah, with its roof cutting off a part of the sky, they were still

attached to the house. Alma had been quietly posed for sleep from the

first moment. They were all more separated than in their separate rooms

indoors.

The lingering faint light reflected the day, the large open space of

misunderstandings, held off the cloak of darkness in which things grew

clear. She lay watching for the night to turn to night.

But the light seemed to grow clearer as the stillness went on. The

surrounding objects lost their night-time mystery. Teased her mind with

their names as she looked from point to point. Drove up her eyes to

search for night in the sky. But there was no night there. Only a wide

high thinness bringing an expansion of sight that could not be recalled;

drawing her out, beyond return, into a wakefulness that was more than

day-time wakefulness; a breathless feeling of being poised untethered in

the thin blue-lit air, without weight of body; going forward, more and

more thinly expanded, into the pale wide space....

There is no night.... Compared to this expanse of thin, shadowless,

boundless light the sunlit sky is a sort of darkness.... Even in a

motionless high midday the sky is small, part of it invisible,

obliterated by light. After sunset it is hidden by changing colours....

_This_ is the real sky, in full power, stripping away sleep. Time,

visible, pouring itself out. Day, not night, is forgetfulness of time.

Its movement is a dream. Only in its noise is real silence and peace.

This awful stillness is made of sound; the sound of time, _pouring_

itself out; ceaselessly winding off short strips of life, each life a

strip of sleepless light, so much, no more, lessening all the time.

What rubbish to talk about the stars. Vast suns, at immense distances,

and beyond them, more. What then? If you imagine yourself at any point

in space or wafting freely about from star to star you are not changed.

Like enlarging the circle of your acquaintance. And finding it, in the

end, the same circle, yourself. A difference in degree is also a

difference in kind. Yes. But the _same_ difference. Relations remain the

same however much things are changed. Interest in the stars is like

interest in your neighbours before you get to know them. A way of

running away from yourself.

What is there to do? How know what is anyone's best welfare?

To be alive, and to know it, makes a selfless life impossible. Any kind

of life accompanied by that stupendous knowledge, is selfish.

Christ? But all the time he was alone with a certainty. Today thou shalt

be with me.... He was booked for Paradise from the beginning ... like

the man in No. 5 John Street going to live in a slum, imagining he was

experiencing a slum, with the latchkey of his west-end house in his

pocket.... Now if he had sacrificed Paradise. But he couldn't. Then

where was selflessness?

Yet if Christ had never been, the sky would look different. A Grecian or

a Jewish sky. Awful. If the personal delight that the sky showed to be

nothing were put away? Nothing held on to but the endless pouring down

of time? Till an answer came.... Get up tomorrow showing indifference to

everything, refusing to be bewitched. There _is_ an answer or there

would be no question. Night is torment. That is why people go to sleep.

To avoid clear sight and torment.

Tomorrow, certainly, gloriously, the daytime scenes, undeserved,

uncontributed to, would go forward again in the sunlight. Forgetfulness

would come of itself. Even the thought of the bright scenes, the scenes

that did not matter and were nothing, spread over the sky the sense of

the dawn it would be obliged to bring; ... the permitted postponement of

the problems set by night. Dawn stole into the heart. With a sudden

answer. That had no words. An answer that lost itself again in the day.

But there would be no dawn; only the pitiless beginning of a day spoiled

by the fever of a sleepless night. Torment, for nothing. The sky gazed

down mocking at fruitless folly. She turned away. She must, would,

sleep. But her eyes were full of the down-bent stars. Condemnation, and

the communication that would not speak; stopping short, poised, probing

for a memory that was there....

A harsh hissing sigh, far away; gone. The unconscious sea. Coming back.

Bringing the morning tide. The sound would increase. The sky would

thicken and come near, fill up with increasing blind light, ignoring

unanswered pain.

"You can put tea in the bedrooms."

Alma, folded in her dressing-gown, disappearing into the house. The

tumbled empty bed on the lawn, white in the open stare of the

morning....

"Edna wants to know how we're getting on." Duplication in light and

darkness, of memories of the night.... Their two figures, side by side,

silhouetted against dark starry blue. Dismantled voices. His

_simplicity_. His sharp turn and toga'd march towards the house. A

memory of dawn; a deep of sleep ending in faint light tinting the

garden? "Edna wants to know how we're getting on." _Then_ starlit

darkness? Angry sleep leading direct to this open of morning.

Everyone in the house had plunged already into new beginnings. Panoplied

in advantages; able to feel in strong refreshed bodies the crystal

brightness of the morning; not worn out as if by long illness.

It was Miss Prout, coming from her quiet night indoors, who was reaping

the adventure. She had some strange conscious power. She knew that it

was she who was the symbol of morning. Her look of age was gone. She had

dared to come out in a wrapper of mealy white, folded softly; and with

bare feet that gleamed against the green of the flat grass. Consciously

using the glow of adventure left over from the night to engrave her

triumphant effect upon the adventurers; of marvellous youth that was not

hers but belonged to some secret living in her stillness.... It was not

an illusion. He saw it too; let her stand for the morning; was crowning

her all the time, preoccupied in everything he said with the business of

rendering half-amused approval of her miracle. The talk was hampered, as

if, by common consent, prevented from getting far enough to interfere

with the set shape of spectacle and spectators; yet easy, its quality

heightened by the common recognition of an indelible impression. For a

moment it made her power seem almost innocent of its strange horror.

When she had left the day was stricken. Evil had gone from the air,

leaving it empty. Everything that happened seemed to be a conspiracy to

display emptiness. The daily life of the house came into view, visible

as it was, when no guests were there, going bleakly on its way. Hypo

appeared and disappeared. Rapt and absent, though still swiftly

observant and between whiles his unchanged talking self; falling back,

with his chuckling unspoken commentary, for lack of kindred brilliance;

escaping to his study as if to a waiting guest.

Miriam came to dinner silently raging; invisible, yet compelled to be

seen. Reduced to nonentity by his wrongly directed awareness, his

everlasting demand for bright fussy intelligence. It was her own fault.

The result of having been beguiled by joy into a pretence of conformity.

For the rest of the visit she would be roughly herself. To shreds she

would tear his twofold vision of women as bright intelligent response or

complacently smiling audience. Force him to see the evil in women who

made terms with men, the poison there was in the trivial gaiety of those

who accepted male definitions of life and the world. Somehow make him

aware of the reality that fell, all the time, in the surrounding

silence, outside his shapes and classifications.

Sunk away into separation, she found herself gliding into communion with

surrounding things, shapes gleaming in the twilight, the intense

thrilling beauty of the deep, lessening colours.... She passed into

association with them, feeling him fade, annihilated, while her eased

breathing released the strain of battle. He was spending the seconds of

silence that to him were a void, in observation, misinterpretations. The

air was full of his momentary patience. She turned smiling and caught

his smile halting between amused contemplation of vacuity and despairing

sympathy with boredom. He had not heard the shouts of repudiation with

which she had plunged down into her silence. He dropped her and let his

testing eye, which he knew she followed, rest on Alma. Two vacuities ...

watched by empty primitive eyes, savage eyes, under shaggy brows,

staring speculatively out through a forest of eyelash. Having thus made

his statement and caught Alma's attention he made a little drama of

childish appeal, with plaintive brows, pleading for rescue.

"Let's have some light. We're almost in darkness," said Alma.

"We are, we are," he wailed, and Miriam caught his eyes flashed upon her

to collect her acceptance of his judgment. The central light Alma had

risen to switch on, flashed up over the silk-clad firm little column of

her body winged on either side by the falling drapery of her extended

arms, and revealed as she sat down the triangle of pendant-weighted

necklace on her white throat, the soft squareness of her face, peaked

below by the delicate sharp chin and above by her piled gold hair. The

day had gone; quenched in the decoration of the night set there by Alma,

like the first scene of a play into whose speech and movement she was,

with untroubled impersonal bearing, already steadily launched, conscious

of the audience, untroubled by their anticipation.

"It's _awful_. The evenings are already getting short," cried Miriam,

her voice thrilling in conversation with the outer living spaces beyond

the shut-in play. His swiftly flashed glance lingered a moment;

incredulous of her mental wandering? In stupefaction that was almost

interest, over her persistence, after diagnosis, in anachronism, in

utter banality?

Alma's voice, strangely free, softly lifted a little above its usual

note, but happy and full, as it was with outsiders with whom she was at

her best, took possession of the set scene. His voice came in answer,

deferring, like that of a delighted guest. Presently they were all in an

enchantment. From some small point of departure she had carried them off

abroad, into an Italian holiday. He urged her on with his voice, his

eyes returning perpetually from the business of his meal to rest in

admiring delight upon her face. It was lovely, radiant, full of the joy

of the theme she had set in the midst and was holding there with bright

reflective voice, unattained by the little bursts of laughter, piling up

her monologue, laughing her own laughter in its place, leading on little

bridges of gay laughter that did not break her speech, to the points of

her stories. All absurd. All making the places she described

pathetically absurd, and mysterious strangers, square German housewives

and hotel people, whom Miriam knew she would forever remember as they

looked in Alma's tales, and love, absurd. But vivid; each place, the

look and the sound and the very savour of it, each person....

By the end of dinner, in the midst of eating a peach, Alma was

impersonating a fat shiny Italian opera star, flinging out without

losing her dainty charm, a scrap of a rolling cadence, its swift final

run up and up in curling trills to leap clear at the end to a single

note, terrifically high, just touched and left on the air, the fat

singer silent below it, unmoved and more mountainous than before.

Hypo was wholly won by the enchantment she had felt and cast. His face

was smooth with the pleasure that wreathed it whenever he passed,

listening, from laughter that was not of his own making, to more

laughter. He carried Alma off to the study with the bright eagerness he

gave to an entertaining guest, but intimately, with his arm through

hers.

They sat side by side on the wide settee. There was to be no music. He

did not want to go away by himself to the other end of the room and make

music. Sitting forward with his hands clasped, towards Alma enthroned,

he suddenly improvised a holiday abroad.... "We'll go mad, stark staring

mad. Switzerland. Your ironmongery in my rucksack and off we'll go."

To go away, not the wonderful eventful holiday life here; to go away,

with Alma, was reward and holiday for him.... This life, with its

pattern of guests was the hard work of everyday? These times abroad were

the bright points of their long march together? Then if this life and

its guests were so little, she was once more near to them. She had

shared their times abroad, by first unconsciously kindling them to go.

And presently they were deferring to her. It was strange that having

preceded them, created, even with them, the sense of advantage

persisting so long after they had outdone in such wide sweeps the scope

of her small experience.

She had never deliberately "gone abroad." Following necessity she had

found herself in Germany and in Belgium. Pain and joy in equal balance

all the time and in memory only joy. So that all going abroad by other

people seemed, even while envy rose at the ease and quantity of their

expeditions, their rich collection of notorious beauty, somehow slight.

Envy was incomplete. She could not by stern reasoning and close effort

of imagination persuade herself that they had been so deeply abroad as

she. That they had ever utterly lost themselves in foreign things. She

forgot perpetually, in this glad moment she again found that she had

forgotten, having been abroad. She forgot it when she read and thought

by herself of other parts of the world. Yet when, as now, anyone

reminded her, she was at once alight, weighed down by the sense of

accomplishment, of rich deeps of experience that would never leave her.

Others were bright and gay about their wanderings. But even while pining

for their free movement she was beside herself with longing to convey to

them the clear deep sense they seemed to lack of what they were doing.

The wonder of it. She talked to them about Switzerland, where they had

already been. It was for her the unattainable ideal of a holiday. She

resented it when he belittled the scenery, gathered it up in a few

phrases and offered any good gorge in the Ardennes as an alternative. It

was not true. He _was_ entranced with Switzerland. It was the

protuberance of the back of his head that made him oppose. And his

repudiation of any form of expression that did not jest. She sought and

found a weapon. To go to Switzerland in the summer was not to go. She

had suddenly remembered all she had heard about Swiss winters.

Switzerland in the summer was an oleograph. In winter an engraving. That

impressed him. And when she had described all she remembered, she had

forgotten she had not been. They had forgotten. They had come into her

experience as it looked to herself. Their questions went on, turned to

her life in London. She was besieged by things to communicate, going on

and on, wondering all the time where the interest lay, in remote people,

most of them perceived only once and remembered once as speech, yet

feeling it, and knowing that they felt it. There was a clue, some clue

to some essential thing, in her mood. Suddenly she awoke to see them

sitting propped close against each other, his cheek cushioned on her

crown of hair, both of them blinking beseechingly towards her.

"_How_ long," she raged, "have you been sitting there cursing me?"

"Not been cursing, Miriam. You've been interesting, no end. But there's

a thing, Miriam, an awful thing called tomorrow morning."

"Is it late?" The appalling, the utter and everywhere appalling

scrappiness of social life....

"Not for you, Miriam. We're poor things. We envy. We can't compete with

your appetite, your disgraceful young appetite for late hours."

"Things always end just as they're beginning."

"Things end, Miriam, so that other things may begin."

She roused herself to give battle. But Alma drifted between, crying

gaily that there was tomorrow. A good strong tomorrow. Warranted to

stand hard wear.

"And turn; and take a dye when you're tired of the colour."

He laughed, really amused? Or crediting her with an attempt to talk in a

code?

"A tomorrow that will wear forever and make a petticoat afterwards."

He laughed again. Quite simply. He had not heard that old jest. Seemed

never to have heard the old family jests. Seemed to have grown up

without jests.... Tomorrow, unless no one came, would not be like today.

* * * * *

The morning offered a blissful eternity before lunch. She had wakened

drowsy with strength and the apprehension of good, and gone through

breakfast like a sleepwalker, playing her part without cost, independent

of sight and hearing and thought. Successful. Dreamily watching a play,

taking a part inaudibly dictated, without effort, seeing it turn into

the chief part, more and more turned over to her as she lay still in the

hands of the invisible prompter; withdrawn in an exploration of the

features of this state of being that nothing could reach or disturb. If,

this time, she could discover its secret, she would be launched in it

forever.

Back in her room she prepared swiftly to go out and meet the day in the

open; all the world, waiting in the happy garden.... Through the

house-stillness sounded three single downward-stepping notes ... the

first phrase of the seventh symphony.... Perfect. Eternity stating

itself in the stillness. He knew it, choosing just this thing to play to

himself, alone; living in space alone, at one with everybody, as

everyone was, the moment life allowed. Beethoven's perfect expression of

the perfection of life, first thing in the morning. Morning stillness;

single dreaming notes that blossomed in it and left it undisturbed;

moved on into a pattern and then stood linked together in a single

perfect chord. Another pattern in the same simple notes and another

chord. Dainty little chords bowing to each other; gentle gestures that

gradually became an angelic little dance through which presently a song

leapt forth, the single opening notes brought back, caught up and swept

into song pealing rapturously out.

He was revealing himself as he was when alone, admitting Beethoven's

vision of life as well as seeing the marvellous things Beethoven did

with his themes? But he liked best the slamming, hee-hawing rollick of

the last movement.... Because it did so much with a theme that

was almost nothing.... _Bang_, toodle-oodle-oodle, _Bang_,

toodle-_oodle_-oodle, _Bang_ toodle-oodle-oodle-_oo_. A lumpish phrase;

a Clementi finger exercise played suddenly in startling fortissimo by an

impatient schoolboy; smashed out with the full force of the orchestra,

taken up, slammed here and there, up and down, by a leaping, plunging,

heavy hoofed pantaloon, approving each variation with loud guffaws....

The sly swift dig-in-the-ribs of the sudden pianissimos....

To watch a shape adds interest to listening. But something disappears in

listening with the form put first. Hearing only form is a kind of

perfect happiness. But in coming back there is a reproach; as if it had

been a kind of truancy.... People who care only for form think

themselves superior. Then there is something wrong with them.

On the landing table a letter lay waiting for the post. She passed by,

gladly not caring to glance. But a tingling in her shoulders drew her

back. She had reached the garden door. The music now pouring busily

through from the next room urged her forward. But once outside she would

have become a party to bright reasonableness, a foolish frontage,

caricatured from behind. She fled back along her path to music that was

once more the promise of joy ... to read the address of one of Alma's

tradespeople, a distasteful reminder of the wheels of dull work

perpetually running under the surface of beauty. But this morning it

would not attain her.... It was not Alma's hand, but the small running

shape like a scroll, each part a tiny perfection. She bent over it.

_Miss Edna Prout...._ This, then, was what she had come back to find;

poison for the day. The house was silent as a desert; empty, swept clear

of life. The roomful of music was in another world. Alone in it, he had

written to her and then sat down, thinking of her, to his music.

* * * * *

Complications are enlivening.... Within the sunlight, in the great

spread of glistening sea, in the touch of the free air and the look of

the things set down on the bench there was a lively intensity. A demand

for search; for a thought that would obliterate the smear on the blue

and gold of the day. The thought had been there even at the moment of

shock. The following tumult was the effort to find it. To get round

behind the shock and slay it before it could slay. To agree. That was

the answer. Not to care. To show how much you care by deliberately not

caring? People show disapproval of their own actions by defending them.

By deliberately not hiding or defending them, they show off a version of

their actions. That they don't themselves accept.

Meantime everything passes. There are always the powerful intervals.

Meetings, and then intervals in which other things come up and life

speaks directly, to the individual.... Except for married people. Who

are all a little absurd, to themselves and to all other married people.

That is why they always talk so hard when two couples are together? To

cover the din of their thoughts.... Their marriage was a success without

being an exception to the rule that all marriages are failures, as he

said. Why are they failures? Science, the way of thinking and writing

that makes everybody seem small, in all these new books. Biology,

_Darwin_. The way men, who have no inner convictions, no self, fasten

upon an idea and let it describe life for them. Always a new idea.

Always describing and destroying, filtering down, as time goes on to

quite simple people, poisoning their lives, because men must have a

formula. Men are gossips. Science is ... cosmic scandalmongering.

Science is Cosmic Scandalmongering. Perhaps that might do for the House

of Lords. But those old fogies are not particularly scientific. They

quote the Classics. The same thing. Club gossip. Centuries of unopposed

masculine gossip about the universe.

Years ago he said there will be no more him and her, the novels of the

future will be clear of all that.... Poetry nothing. Religion nothing.

Women a biological contrivance. And now. Women still a sort of

attachment to life, useful, or delightful ... the "civilised women of

the future" to be either bright obedient assistants or providers of

illusion for times of leisure. Two kinds, neatly arranged, each having

only one type of experience, while men have both, _and_ their work, into

which women can only come as Hindus, obediently carrying out tasks set

by men, dressed in uniform, deliberately sexless and deferential. How

can anyone feel romantic about him? Alma. But that is the real

old-fashioned romance of everyday, from her girlhood. Hidden through

loyalty to his shifting man's ideas? Half convinced by them? How can

people be romantic impermanently, just now and again?

Romance is solitary and permanent. Always there. In everybody. That is

why the things one hears about people are like stories, not referring to

life. Why I always forget them when the people themselves are there. Or

believe, when they talk of their experiences, that they misread them. I

can't believe even now in the reality of any of his experiences. But

then I don't believe in the experiences of anyone, except a few people

who have left sayings I know are true.... Everything else, all the

expressions, history and legend and novels and science and everybody's

talk, seems irrelevant. That's why I don't want experience, not to be

caught into the ways of doing and being that drive away solitude, the

marvellous quiet sense of life at first hand.... But he knows that too.

"Life drags one along by the hair shrieking protests at every yard."

"Hullo! What is she doing all alone?"

The surrounding scene that had gradually faded, leaving her eyes

searching in the past for the prospect she could never quite recall,

shone forth again.

"I've got to do a review."

"What's the book?"

"When you are in France, does a French river look different to you;

_French_?"

"No, Miriam. It--doesn't look different."

He glanced for a moment shaggily from point to point of the sunlit scene

and sat companionably down, turned towards her with a smile at her

discomfiture. "What's the book, Miriam? It's jolly down here. We'll have

some chairs. Yes? You can't write on a bench."

He was gone. Meaning to come back. In the midst of the morning; in the

midst of his preoccupations sociably at leisure. She felt herself sink

into indifference. The unique opportunity was offering itself in vain.

He came back just as she had begun to imagine him caught, up at the

house, by a change of impulse. Or perhaps an unexpected guest.

"What's the review?"

"The House of Lords."

"Read it?"

"I can't. It's all post hoc."

"Then you've read it."

"I haven't read it. I've only sniffed the first page."

"That's enough. Glance at the conclusion. Get your statement, three

points; that'll run you through a thousand words. Look here--shall I

write it for you?"

"I've got _fifty_ ideas," she said beginning to write.

"That's too many, Miriam. That's the trouble with you. You've got too

many ideas. You're messing up your mind, quite a good mind, with too

swift a succession of ideas." She wrote busily on, drinking in his

elaboration of his view of the state of her mind. "H'm," he concluded,

stopping suddenly; but she read in the sound no intention of breaking

away because she had nothing to say to him. He was watching, in some way

interested. He sat back in his chair; sympathetically withheld. Actually

deferring to her work....

She tore off the finished page and transfixed it on the grass with a

hatpin. Her pencil flew. The statement was finished and leading to

another. Perhaps he was right about three ideas. A good shape. The last

must come from the book. She would have to consult it. No. It should be

left till later. Her second page joined the first. It was incredible

that he should be sitting there inactive, obliterated by her work.

She tore off the third sheet and dropped her pencil on the grass.

"Finished? Three sheets in less than twenty minutes. How do you do it,

Miriam?"

"It'll do. But I shall have to copy it. I've resisted the temptation to

say what _I_ think about the House of Curmudgeons. Trace it back to the

First Curmudgeon. Yet it seems somehow wrong to write in the air, so

_currently_. The first time I did a review, of a bad little book on

Whitman, I spent a fortnight of evenings reading."

"You began at the Creation. Said everything you had to say about the

history of mankind."

"I went nearly mad with responsibility and the awfulness of discovering

the way words express almost nothing at all."

"It's not quite so bad as that. You've come on no end though, you know.

The last two or three have been astonishingly good. You're not creative.

You've got a good sound mind, a good style and a curious intense

critical perception. You'll be a critic. But writing, Miriam, should be

done with a pen. Can't call yourself a writer till you do it _direct_."

"How can I write with a pen, in bed, on my knee, at midnight or dawn?"

"A fountain pen?"

"No one can write with a fountain pen."

"Quite a number of us do. Quite a number of not altogether unsuccessful

little writers, Miriam."

"Well, it's wrong. How can thought or anything, well thought perhaps

can, which doesn't matter and nobody really cares about, wait a minute,

nothing _else_ can come through a hand whose fingers are held stiffly

apart by a fat slippery barrel. A writing machine. A quill would be the

thing, with a fine flourishing tail. But it is too important. It squeaks

out an important sense of _writing_, makes people too objective, so that

it's as much a man's pen, a mechanical, see life steadily and see it

whole (when nobody knows what life _is_) man's view sort of implement as

a fountain pen. A pen should be thin, not disturbing the hand, and the

nib flexible and silent, with up and down strokes. Fountain pen writing

is like ... democracy."

"Why not go back to clay tablets?"

"Machine-made things are dead things."

"You came down here by _train_, Miriam."

"I ought to have flown."

"You'll fly yet. No. Perhaps you won't. When your dead people have

solved the problem, you'll be found weeping over the rusty skeleton of a

locomotive."

"I don't mean Lilienfeld and Maxim. I can be fearfully interested in all

that when I think of it. But to the people who do not see the beginning

of flying it won't seem wonderful. It won't change anything."

"It'll change, Miriam, pretty well everything. And if you don't mean

Lilienfeld and Maxim what _do_ you mean?"

"Well, by inventing the telephone we've damaged the chances of

telepathy."

"Nonsense, Miriam. You're suffering from too much Taylor."

"The most striking thing about Taylor is that he does not want to

develop his powers."

"What powers?"

"The things in him that have made him discover things that you admit are

true; that make you interested in his little paper."

"They're not right you know about their phosphoric bank; energy is not a

simple calculable affair."

"Now here's a strange thing. That time you met them, the first thing you

said when they'd gone, was what's _wrong_ with them? And the next time I

met them they said there's something _wrong_ with him. The truth is you

are polar opposites and have everything to learn from each other."

"Elizabeth Snowden Poole."

"Yes. And without him no one would have heard of her. No one understood.

And now psychology is going absolutely her way. In fifty years' time her

books will be as clear as daylight."

"Damned obstructive classics. That's what all our books will be. But

I'll give you Mrs. Poole. Mrs. Poole is a very wonderful lady. She's the

unprecedented."

"There you are. Then you must admit the Taylors."

"I'm not so sure about your little Taylors. There's nothing to be said,

you know, for just going about not doing things."

"They _are_ wonderful. Their atmosphere is the freest I know."

"I envy you your enthusiasms, Miriam. Even your misplaced enthusiasms."

"You go there, worn out, at the end of the day, and have to walk, after

a long tram-ride through the wrong part of London, along raw new roads,

dark little houses on either side, solid, without a single break,

darkness, a street-lamp, more darkness, another lamp; and something in

the air that lets you down and down. Partly the thought of these streets

increasing, all the time, all over London. Yet when someone said walking

home after a good evening at the Taylors' that the thought of having to

settle down in one of those houses made him feel suicidal, I felt he was

wrong; and saw them, from inside, bright and big; people's homes."

"They're not big, Miriam. You wanted to marry him."

"Good Heavens. An Adam's apple, sloping shoulders and a Cockney accent."

"_I_ have a Cockney accent, Miriam."

"..."

"Don't go about classifying with your ears. People, you know, are very

much alike."

"They're utterly different."

"Your vanity. Go on with your Taylors."

"They are very much like other people."

"With _my_ Taylors. I'm interested; really."

"Well, suddenly you are in their kitchen. White walls and aluminium and

a smell of fruit. Do you know the smell of root vegetables cooking

slowly in a casserole?"

"I'll imagine it. Right. Where are the Taylors?"

"You are all standing about. Happy and undisturbed. None of that feeling

of darkness and strangeness and the need for a fresh beginning.

Tranquillity. As if someone had gone away."

"The devil; exorcised, poor dear."

"No but glorious. Making everyone move like a song. And talk. You are

all, at once, bursting with talk. All over the flat, in and out of the

rooms. George washing up all the time, wandering about with a dish and a

cloth and Dora probably doing her hair in a dressing-gown, and cooking.

It's the only place where I can talk exhausted and starving."

"What do you talk about?"

"Everything. We find ourselves sitting in the bathroom, engrossed--long

speeches--they talk to each other, like strangers talking intimately on

a 'bus. Then something boils over and we all drift back to the kitchen.

Left to herself Dora would go on forever and sit down to a few walnuts

at midnight."

"Mary."

"But she is an absolutely perfect cook. An artist. She invents and

experiments. But he has a feminine consciousness, though he's a most

manly little man with a head like Beethoven. So he's practical. Meaning

he feels with his nerves and has a perfect sympathetic imagination. So

presently we are all sitting down to a meal and the evening begins to

look short. And yet endless. With them everything feels endless; the

present I mean. They are so immediately alive. Everything and everybody

is abolished. We _do_ abolish them I assure you. And a new world is

there. You feel language changing, every word moving, changed, into the

new world. _But_, when their friends come in the evening, weird people,

real cranks, it disappears. They all seem to be attacking things they

don't understand. I gradually become an old-fashioned Conservative. But

the evening is wonderful. None of these people mind how far or how late

they walk. And it goes on till the small hours."

"You're getting your college time with these little people."

"No. I'm easily the most stupidly cultured person there."

"Then you're feeding your vanity."

"I'm not. Even the charlatans make me feel ashamed of my sham advantage.

No; the thing that is most wonderful about those Tuesdays is waking up

utterly worn out, having a breakfast of cold fruit in the cold grey

morning, a rush for the train, a last sight of the Taylors as they go

off into the London Bridge crowd and then suddenly feeling utterly

refreshed. They do too. It's an effect we have on each other."

"How did you come across them?"

"Michael. Reads _Reynolds's_. A notice of a meeting of London

Tolstoyans. We rushed out in the pouring rain to the Edgware Road and

found nothing at the address but a barred up corner shop-front. Michael

wanted to go home. I told him to go and stood staring at the shop

waiting for it to turn into the Tolstoyans. I knew it would. It did.

Just as Michael was almost screaming in the middle of the road, I turned

down a side street and found a doorway, a bead of gas shining inside

just showing a stone staircase. We crept up and found a bare room,

almost in darkness, a small gas jet, and a few rows of kitchen chairs

and a few people sitting scattered about. A young man at a piano picked

out a few bars of Grieg and played them over and over again. Then the

meeting began. Dora, reading a paper on Tolstoy's ideas. Well, I felt I

was hearing the whole truth spoken aloud for the first time.... But oh

the discussion.... A gaunt man got up and began to rail at everything,

going on till George gently asked him to keep to the subject. He raved

then about some self-help book he had read. Quite incoherent; and

convincing. Then the young man at the piano made a long speech about

hitching your waggon to a star and at the end of it a tall woman, so old

that she could hardly stand, stood up and chanted, in a deep laughing

voice, Waggons and Stars. Waggons and stars. Today I am a waggon.

Tomorrow a star. I'm reminded of the societies who look after young

women. Meet them with a cup of tea, call a cab, put the young woman and

the cup of tea into the cab. Am I to watch my brother's blunderings? No.

I am his lover. Then he becomes a star. And I am a star. Then an awful

man, very broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped, with a low forehead and a

sweeping moustache bounded up and shouted; I am a God! You, madam, are a

goddess! Tolstoy is over-civilised! That's why he loves the godlike

peasant. All metaphysicians, artists and pious people are sensualists.

All living in unnatural excesses. The Zulu is a god. How many women in

filthy London can nurse their children? What is a woman? _Children._

What is the glory of man? Unimaginable to town slaves. They go through

life ignorant of manhood, and the metaphysicians wallow in pleasures.

Men and women are divine. There is no other divinity. Let them not sell

their godhead for filthy food and rotting houses and moloch factories.

What stands in the way? The pious people, the artists and the

metaphysicians.... Then a gentleman, in spectacles at the back, quietly

said that Tolstoy's ideas were eclectic and could never apply

generally.... Of course he was right, but it doesn't make Tolstoy any

the less true. And you know when I hear all these convincing socialists

planning things that really would make the world more comfortable, they

always in the end seem ignorant of _humanity_; always behind them I see

little Taylor, unanswerable, standing for more difficult deep-rooted

individual things. It's _individuals_ who must change, one by one."

"Socialism will give the individual his chance."

"Yes, I know. I agree in a way. You've shown me all that. I know

environment and ways of thinking _do_ partly make people. But Taylor

makes socialism, even when its arguments floor him, look such a

feathery, passing thing."

"You stand firm, Miriam. Socialism isn't feathery. _You're_ feathery.

One thinks you're there and suddenly finds you playing on the other side

of the field."

"It's the fact that socialism is a _side_ that makes it look so shaky.

And then there's Reich; an absolute blaze of light ... on the outside

side of things."

"Not a blaze of anything, my dear Miriam ... a poor, hard-working,

popular lecturer."

"Everybody in London is listening. Hearing the most illuminating

things."

"What do they illuminate?"

"Ourselves. The English. Continuing Buckle. He's got a clear cool hard

unprejudiced foreign mind."

"Your foreigners, Miriam. They haven't the monopoly of intelligence."

"I know. You think the English are _the_ people. But so does Reich.

Really he would interest you. You _must_ let me tell you his idea. Just

the shape of it. Badly. He puts it so well that you know he has

something up his sleeve. He has. He's a Hungarian patriot. That is his

inspiration. That England shall save Europe, and therefore Hungary, from

the Germans. You must let me just tell you without interrupting. Two

minutes."

"_I'm_ intelligent, Miriam. _You're_ intelligent. You have distinction

of mind. But a really surprising lack of expression you know. You

misrepresent yourself most tremendously."

"You mean I haven't a voice, that way of talking about things that makes

one know people don't believe what they say and are thinking most about

the way they are talking. Bah."

"Clear thought makes clear speech."

"Well. Reich says that history so far is always one thing. The

Hellenisation of Europe.... The Greeks were the first to evolve

universal ideals. Which were passed on. Through two channels. Law-giving

Rome. And the Roman church; Paul, who had made Christianity a universal

working scheme. So Europe has been Hellenised. And the Hellenisation of

the _rest_ of the world will be through its Europeanisation. The enemy

to this is the rude materialistic modern Germany. The only hope,

England. Which he calls a nation of ignorant specialists, ignorant of

history; believing only in race, which doesn't exist--a blindfold

humanitarian giant, utterly unaware that other people are growing up in

Europe and have the use of their eyes. The French don't want to do

anything outside their large pleasant home. They are the sedentary

Greeks; townspeople. The English are Romans, official, just, inartistic.

Good colonists, not intrinsically, but because they send so much of

their best away from their little home. A child can see that the English

and Americans care less for money than any people in the western world,

are adventurous and wandering and improvident; the only people with

ideals and a sense of the future. Inartistic...."

"Geography he calls the ground symphony of history, but nothing more, or

Ireland would play first fiddle in Great Britain. The rest is having to

fight for your life and being visited by your neighbours. England has

attracted thousands of brilliant foreigners, who have made her,

including the Scotch, who until they became foreigners in England were

nothing. And the foreigner of foreigners is the permanently alien Jew.

And the genius of all geniuses Loyola, because he made all his followers

permanent aliens. Countries without foreigners are doomed. Like Hungary.

Doomed to extinction if England does not beat Germany. That's all."

"There won't, if we can help it, be any need for England to beat

Germany. There are, you know, possibly unobserved by your rather wildly

rocketting Reich, a few eyes in England. That war can be written away;

by journalists and others, written into absurdity."

"Oh, I'm so glad. Listening to Reich makes one certain that the things

that seem to be happening in the world are illusions and the real result

of the unseen present movement of history is war with Germany. I don't

like Reich. His idea of making everything begin with Greece. His awful

idea that art follows only on pressure and war. Yet it is true that the

harassed little seaboard peoples who lived insecurely _did_ have their

art periods after they had fought for their lives. Then no more wars no

more Art.... _Well_; perhaps Art like war is just male ferocity!"

"Nonsense, Miriam."

"Do you really think the war can be written away? There are so many

opinions, and reading keeps one always balanced between different sets

of ideas."

"You're too omnivorous, Miriam. You get the hang of too many things.

You're scattered."

"The better you hear a thing put, the more certain you are there's

another view. And then there are _motives_."

"Ah, now you're talking.... Motives; can be used. Almost any sort of

motive can be roped in; and directed. You ought to write up that little

meeting by the way. You're lucky you know, Miriam, in your opportunities

for odd experience. Write it up. Don't forget."

"You weren't there. It wasn't a joke. I don't want to be facetious about

it."

"You're too near. But you will. Save it up. You'll see all these little

excursions in perspective when you're round the next corner."

"Oh I _hate_ all these written up things; 'Jones always wore a battered

cricket cap, a little askew.' They simply drive me _mad_. You know the

whole thing is going to be lies from beginning to end."

"You're a romantic, Miriam."

"I'm not. It's the 'always wore.' Trying to get at you, just as much as

'Iseult the Fair.' Just as unreal, just as much in an assumed voice. The

amazing thing is the way men go prosing on for ever and ever, admiring

each other, never suspecting."

"You've got to create an illusion you know."

"Why illusion? Life isn't an illusion."

"We don't know what life is. You don't know what life is. You think too

much. Life's got to be lived. The difference between you and me is that

you think to live and I live to think. You've made a jolly good start.

Done things. Come out and got your economic independence. But you're

stuck."

"Now _there's_ somebody who's writing about life. Who's shown what has

been going on from the beginning. Mrs. Stetson. It was the happiest day

of my life when I read _Women and Economics_."

"It's no good, you know, that idea of hers. Women have got to

specialise. They are specialists from the beginning. They can't run

families, and successful careers at the same time."

"They could if life were differently arranged. They will. It's not that

so much. Though it's a relief to know that homes won't be always a

tangle of nerve-racking heavy industries which ought to be done by men.

But the blaze of light she brings is by showing that women were social

from the first and that _all_ history has been the gradual socialisation

of the male. It is partly complete. But the male world is still savage."

"The squaw, Miriam, was--"

"Absolutely social and therefore civilised, compared to the hunting

male. She went out of herself. Mother and son was society. _He_ had no

chance. Everyone, even his own son, was an enemy and a rival."

"That's old Ellis's idea. There's _been_ a matriarchate all right,

Miriam, for your comfort."

"I don't want comfort, I want truth."

"Oh you _don't_, Miriam. One gives you facts and you slide away from

them."

* * * * *

Household life breaks everything up. Comes crashing down on moments that

cannot recur.... Thought runs on, below the surface to conclusions,

arriving distractingly at the wrong moment.

It always seems a deliberate conspiracy to suppress conclusions. Lunch,

grinning like a Jack-in-the-box, in a bleak emptiness. People ought not

to meet at lunch time. If the bleakness is overcome it is only by

borrowing from the later hours. And the loan is wasted by the absence of

after-time, the business of filling up the afternoon with activities;

leaving everything to be begun all over again later on.

How can guests _allow_ themselves to arrive to lunch? The smooth young

man had come primed for his visit. Carefully talking in the Wilson way;

carefully finding everything in the world amusing. And he was not

amused. He was a cold selfish baffled young man, lost in a set. Welcomed

here as a favoured emissary from a distant potentate....

And now with just the same air of reflected brilliance he was blithely

playing tennis. Later on he would have to begin again with his talk;

able parroting, screening hard coldness, the hard coldness of the pale

yellow-haired Englishman with good features.... A blindfold humanitarian

giant? Where are Reich's English giants? Blind. Amongst the

old-fashioned, conservatives? Gentlepeople with fixed ideas who don't

want to change anything? The Lycurgans are not humanitarians. Because

they are humanitarians deliberately. Liberals and socialists are

humanitarian intellectually, through anger. Humanitarian idealists. The

giants are humanitarian unconsciously, through breeding. Reich said the

strongest motives, the motives that made history, were _unconscious_....

Consciousness is increasing. The battle of unconscious fixed ideas and

conscious chosen fixed ideas. Then the conservatives must always win!

They make socialists and then absorb them. The socialists give them

ideas. Neither of them are quite true. Why doesn't God state truth once

and for all and have done with it?

And all the time, all over the western world, life growing more

monstrous. The human head growing bigger and bigger. A single scientific

fact, threatening humanity. Hypo's _amused_ answer to the claims of the

feminists. The idea of having infants scooped out early on, and

artificially reared. Insane. Science rushing on, more and more clear and

mechanical.... "Life becomes more and more a series of surgical

operations." How _can_ men contemplate the increasing awfulness of life

for women and yet wish it to go on? The awfulness they have created by

swaddling women up; regarding them as instruments of pleasure. Liking

their cooking. _Stereotyping_ in their fixed mechanical men's way a

standard of deadly cooking that is destroying everybody, teeth first.

And they call themselves creators.... Knickers or gym skirts. A free

stride from the hips, weight forward on toes pointing straight, like

Orientals. Squatting, like a savage, keeping the pelvis ventilated and

elastic instead of sitting, knees politely together, stuffy and

compressed and unventilated. All the rules of ladylike deportment ruin

the pelvis.... Ladies are awful. Deportment and a rigid overheated

pelvis. In the kitchen they have to skin rabbits and disembowel fowls.

Otherwise no keep. Polite small mouthfuls of squashy food and pyorrhoea.

Good middleaged church people always suggest stuffy bodies and

pyorrhoea. Somewhere in the east people can be divorced for flatulence.

But the cranks are so uncultured; cut off from books and the past.

Martyrs braving ridicule? The salt of the earth, making here and there a

new world, unseen? Their children will not be cranks....

A rose fell at her feet flung in through the window.

"Come out and play!"

* * * * *

This is joy. To stand back from the court, fall slack, losing sight of

the scatter of watching people round the lawn. Nothing but the clasp of

the cool air and the firm little weight of the rough-coated ball in a

slack hand. The loose-limbed plunge forward to toe the line. One

measuring glance and the whole body a taut projectile driving the ball

barely clear of the net, to swish furrowing along the ground.

"The lady serves from the cliff and Hartopp volleys from the sky.

They're invincible." The yellow young man was charming the other side of

the net. Not yellow. His hair a red gold blaze when the sun was setting,

loose about his pale eager sculptured face; and now dull gold. He had

welcomed her wrangling rush to the net after the first set, rushing

forward at once, wrangling, without hearing, Hypo coming too, squealing

incoherent contributions. And then the young man had done it again, for

her, to make a little scene for the onlookers. But the third time it had

been a failure and Hypo had filled the gap with witty shoutings. And all

the time the tall man with dense features had said not a word, only

swung sympathetically about. Yet he was a friend. From the moment he

came up through the garden from France with his bag, uninvited, and sat

down and murmured gently in response to vociferous greetings. Ill, after

a bad crossing. So huge and so gentle that it had been easy to go up to

his chair as everyone else had done, and say lame things, instead of

their bright ones, and get away with a sense of having had an immense

conversation. He played the game, thinking of nothing else. Understood

the style and rhythm of all the incidental movements. The others were

different. They had learned their tennis; could remember a time when

they did not play. Playing did not take them back to the beginning of

life. Was not pure joy to them.

He was wonderful. He altered the tone. The style and peace of his slow

sentences. Half German. The best kind of German. Now _he_ could prevent

war with Germany, if he could be persuaded to waft to and fro, for

Reich's ten years, between the two countries, talking.

He talked through the evening; keeping his hold of the simplest thread

of speech with his still voice and bearing. Leaving a large, peaceful

space when he paused, into which it was easy to drop any sort of

reflection that might have arisen in one's mind. Hypo scarcely spoke

except to question him and the smooth young man dramatically posed,

smoked, in silence. The huge form was a central spectacle, until the

light faded and the talk began to die down. Then Alma asked him to play.

He rose gigantic in the half light and went to the piano murmuring that

he would be pleased to improvise a little. Amazing. With all his foreign

experience and his serene mind, his musical reflections would be

wonderful. But they were not. His gentle playing was colourless. Vague

and woolly. And it brought a silence in which his own silence stood out.

He seemed to have retired, politely and gently, but definitely, into

himself. The darkness surrounding the one small shaded light began to

state the joy of the day. Everyone was beaming quietly with the sense of

a glorious day. The tall man was at ease in stillness. In his large

quiet atmosphere communication flowed, following serenely on the

cessation of sound. Nun danket alle Gott.... How far was he a believer

in the old things? His consciousness was the widest in the room; seemed

to hold the balance between the old and the new, sympathetically, broad

shouldered and rather weary with his burden. Speaking always in a frayed

tired voice that would not give in to any single brisk idea. There was

room and space and kind shelter in his mind for a woman to state

herself, completely, unopposed. But he would not accept conclusions....

His mild smooth shape of words would survive anything; persisting. It

was his _style_. With it he carried himself through everything, making

his way of talking a thing in itself.... No ideas, no convictions; but

something in him that made a perfect manner. A blow between the eyes,

flattening him out, would not break it. There was nothing there to

break, nothing hard in him. A made mould, chosen, during his growing,

filling itself up from life, but not living ... a gentleman, of course,

that was it. Then there was an abyss beneath. Unstated things that lived

in darkness.

But the silence lasted only an instant. Before its test could reveal

anything further than the sudden sharp division of the sitters into men

and women, Alma made movements to break up the party. Hypo's voice came,

enchanting, familiar and new, its qualities renewed by the fresh

contacts. The thing to do he said rising, coming forward into the

central light, not in farewell, into a self-made arena, with needless

challenging sturdiness from one of the distances of his crowded mind. It

would be one of his unanswerable fascinating misapprehensions. The thing

to _do_ was to go out into the world; leave everything behind, wife, and

child and things; go all over the world and come back; _experienced_.

"And what about the wives?"

"The wives, Miriam, will go to heaven when they die." He turned on his

laugh to the men in the background; and gathered their amused agreement

in a swift glance. They had both risen and were standing, exposed by the

frankness of their spokesman, silent in polite embarrassment. They

_really_ thought, these two nice men, that something had been said. The

spell of the evening was broken up. The show had been given. Dream

picture of moving life. Entertainment and warm forgetfulness. Everyone

enchanted and alive. Now was the time for talk, exchange; beginning with

the shattering of Hypo's silly idea. How could men have experience?

Nothing would make them discover themselves. Either of them. Perhaps the

tall man....

"Men as they are," she began, trusting to the travelling power of her

mental picture of him as an exception, "might go----"

But her words were lost. Alma had come forward and was saying her good

nights, hurriedly. They were to go, just as everything was beginning.

All chance of truth was caught, in a social trap. The men were to be

left, with their illusions, to talk their monstrous lies, unchecked.

Imagining they were really talking, because there was no one to

contradict. Unfair.

She rose perforce and got through her part. It was idiotic, a shameful

farce. Evening dress and the set scene, so beautifully arranged, were

suddenly shameful and useless. Taken to bits; silly. She seemed to be

taking leave of herself, three separate selves, united in the blessed

relief of getting rid of the women. In the person of the tall man she

strode gracefully across the room to open the door for Alma and herself,

breaking out, with the two other men, at once, before the door was

closed, with immeasurable relief, into the abrupt chummy phrases of old

friends newly met.