1
Piecemeal statements in her letter home brought Miriam now and again a
momentary sense of developing activities, but she did not recognise the
completeness of the change in her position at the school until half-way
through her second term she found herself talking to the new pupil
teacher. She had heard apathetically of her existence during
supper-table conversations with the Misses Perne at the beginning of the
term. She was an Irish girl of sixteen, one of a large family living on
the outskirts of Dublin, and would be a boarder, attending the first
class for English and earning pocket money by helping with the lower
school. As the weeks went on and Miriam grew accustomed to hearing her
name--Julia Doyle--she began to associate it with an idea of charm that
brought her a sinking of heart. She knew her position in the esteem of
the Pernes was secure. But this new young teacher would work strange
miracles with the girls. She would do it quite easily and unconsciously.
The girls would be easy with her and would laugh and one would have to
hear them.
However, when at last her arrival was near and the three ladies
discussed the difficulty of having her met, Miriam plied them until they
reluctantly gave her permission to go, taking a workman’s train that
would bring her to Euston station at seven o’clock in the morning.
At the end of an hour spent pacing the half-dark platform exhausted with
cold and excitement and the monotonously reiterated effort to imagine
the arrival of one of Mrs. Hungerford’s heroines from a train journey,
Miriam, whose costume had been described in a letter to the girl’s
mother, was startled wandering amidst the vociferous passengers at the
luggage end of the newly arrived train by a liquid colourless intimate
voice at her elbow. “I think I’ll be right to say how d’you do.”
She turned and saw a slender girl in a middle-aged toque and an ill-cut
old-fashioned coat and skirt. What were they to say to each other, two
dowdy struggling women both in the same box? She must get her to Banbury
Park as quickly as possible. It was dreadful that they should be seen
together there on the platform in their ragbag clothes. At any rate they
must not talk. “Oh, I’m very pleased to see you. I’m glad you’ve come. I
suppose the train must have been late,” she said eagerly.
“Ah, we’ll be late I dare venture. Haven’t an idea of the hour.”
“Oh, yes,” said Miriam emphatically, “I’m sure the train’s _late_.”
“Where’ll we find a core?”
“What?”
“We’ll need a core for the luggage.”
“Oh yes, a cab. We must get a cab. We’d better find a porter.”
“Ah, I’ve a man here seeking out my things.”
Inside the cab Julia’s face shone chalky white, and Miriam found that
her eyes looked like Weymouth Bay--the sea in general, on days when
clouds keep sweeping across the sun. When she laughed she had dimples
and the thick white rims of her eyelids looked like piping cord round
her eyes. But she was not pretty. There were lines in her cheeks as well
as dimples, and there was something apologetic in her little gusty
laugh. She laughed a good deal as they started off, saying things,
little quiet remarks that Miriam could not understand and that did not
seem to be answers to her efforts to make conversation. Perhaps she was
not going the right way to make her talk. Perhaps she had not said any
of the things she thought she had said.
She cleared her throat and looked out of the window thinking over a
possible opening.
“I’ve never been so glad over anything in my life as hearing you’re one
of the teachers,” said Julia presently.
“The Pernes call me by my name, so I suppose you will too as you’re a
teacher,” said Miriam headlong.
“That’s awfully sweet of you,” replied Julia laughing and blushing a
clear deep rose. “It makes anyone feel at home. I’ll be looking out till
I hear it.”
“It’s----” Miriam laughed. “Isn’t it funny that people don’t like saying
their own names.”
“I wish you’d tell me about your teaching. I’m sure you’re awf’ly
clever.”
Miriam gave her a list of the subjects she taught in the lower school.
“You know all there is to know.”
“Oh well, and then I take the top girls now for German and the second
class for French reading, and two arithmetic classes in the upper
school, and a ‘shell’ of two very stupid girls to help with their
College of Preceptors.”
“You’re frightening me.”
2
Miriam looked out of the cab window, hardly hearing Julia’s next remark.
The drab brick walls of King’s Cross station were coming towards them.
When they had got themselves and Julia’s luggage out of the cab and into
the train for Banbury Park she was still pondering uneasily over her own
dislike of appearing as a successful teacher. This stranger saw her only
as a teacher. That was what she had become. If she was really a teacher
now, just that in life, it meant that she must decide at once whether
she really meant to teach always. Everyone now would think of her as a
teacher; as someone who was never going to do anything else, when really
she had not even begun to think about doing any of the things that
professional teachers had to do. She was not qualifying herself for
examinations in her spare time as her predecessor had done. Supposing
she did. This girl Julia would certainly expect her to be doing so. What
then? If she were to work very hard and also develop her character, when
she was fifty she would be like Miss Cramp; good enough to be a special
visiting teacher, giving just a few lectures a week at several schools,
talking in a sad voice, feeling ill and sad, having a yellow face and
faded hair and not enough saved to live on when she was too old to work.
Prospect, said the noisy train. That was it, there was no prospect in
it. There was no prospect in teaching. What was there a prospect in,
going along in this North London train with this girl who took her at
her word?
She turned eagerly to Julia who was saying something and laughing
unconcernedly as she said it. “If you’d like to know what it is I’ve
come over for I’ll tell you at once. I’ve come over to learn Chopang’s
Funeral March. It’s all I think about. When I can play Chopang’s Funeral
March I’ll not call the Queen me aunt.”
3
“Well, my dear child, I’m sure I wish I could arrange your life for ye,”
said Miss Haddie that evening. She was sitting on the edge of the
schoolroom table, having come in at ten o’clock to turn out the gas and
found Miriam sitting unoccupied. The room was cold and close with the
long-burning gas, and Miriam had turned upon her with a scornful half
laugh when she had playfully exclaimed at finding her there so late.
Miss Haddie was obviously still a little excited. She had presided at
schoolroom tea and Julia had filled the room with Dublin--the bay, the
streets, the jarveys and their outside cars, her journey, the channel
boat, her surprise at England.
“Eh, what’s the matter, Miriam, my dear?” For some time Miriam had
parried her questions, fiercely demanding that her mood should be
understood without a clue. Presently they had slid into an irritated
discussion of the respective values of sleep before and sleep after
midnight, in the midst of which Miriam had said savagely, “I wish to
goodness I knew what to do about things.”
Miss Haddie’s kindly desire gave her no relief. What did she mean but
the hopelessness of imagining that anybody could do anything about
anything. Nobody could ever understand what anyone else really wanted.
Only some people were fortunate. Miss Haddie was one of the fortunate
ones. She had her share in the school and many wealthy relatives and the
very best kind of good clothes and a good deal of strange old-fashioned
jewelry. And whatever happened there was money and her sisters and
relatives to look after her without feeling it a burden because of the
expense. And there she sat at the table looking at what she thought she
could see in another person’s life.
“If only one knew in the least what one _ought_ to do,” said Miriam
crossly.
Miss Haddie began speaking in a halting murmur, and Miriam rushed on
with flaming face. “I suppose I shall have to go on teaching all my
life, and I can’t think how on earth I’m going to do it. I don’t see how
I can work in the evenings, my eyes get so tired. If you don’t get
certificates there’s no prospect. And even if I did my throat is simply
agonies at the end of each morning.”
“Eh! my dear child! I’m sorry to hear that. Why have ye taken to that?
Is it something fresh?”
“Oh no, my throat always used to get tired. Mother’s is the same. We
can’t either of us talk for ten minutes without feeling it. It’s
perfectly awful.”
“But, my dear, oughtn’t ye to see someone--have some advice? I mean ye
ought to see a doctor.”
Miriam glanced at Miss Haddie’s concerned face and glanced away with a
flash of hatred. “Oh no. I s’pose I shall manage.”
“D’ye think yer wise--letting it go on?”
Miriam made no reply.
“Well now, my dear,” said Miss Haddie, getting down off the table, “I
think it’s time ye went to bed.”
“Phm,” said Miriam impatiently, “I suppose it is.”
Miss Haddie sat down again. “I wish I could help ye, my dear,” she said
gently.
“Oh, no one can do that,” said Miriam in a hard voice.
“Oh yes,” murmured Miss Haddie cheerfully, “there’s One who can.”
“Oh yes,” said Miriam, tugging a thread out of the fraying edge of the
table cover. “But it’s practically impossible to discover what on earth
they mean you to do.”
“N--aiche, my dear,” she said in an angry guttural, “ye’re always led.”
Miriam tugged at the thread and bit her lips.
“Why do ye suppose ye’ll go on teaching all yer life? Perhaps ye’ll
marry.”
“Oh no.”
“Ye can’t tell.”
“Oh, I never shall--in any case now.”
“Have ye quarrelled with him?”
“Oh, well, _him_,” said Miriam roundly, digging a pencil point between
the grainings of the table-cover. “It’s _they_, I think, goodness knows,
I don’t know; it’s so perfectly extraordinary.”
“You’re a very funny young lady.”
“Well, I shan’t marry _now_ anyhow.”
“Have ye refused somebody?”
“Oh well--there was someone--who went away--went to America--who was
coming back to see me when he came back----”
“Yes, my dear?”
“Well, you see, he’s handed in his checks.”
“Eh, my dear--I don’t understand,” said Miss Haddie thwarted and
frowning.
“Aw,” said Miriam, jabbing the table, “kicked the bucket.”
“My dear child, you use such strange language--I can’t follow ye.”
“Oh well, you see, he went to America. It was in New York. I heard about
it in January. He caught that funny illness. You know. Influenza--and
died.”
“Eh, my poor dear child, I’m very sorry for ye. Ye _do_ seem to have
troubles.”
“Ah well, yes, and then the queer thing is that he was really only the
friend of my real friend. And it was my real friend who told me about it
and gave me a message he sent me and didn’t like it, of course.
Naturally.”
“Well _really_, Miriam,” said Miss Haddie, blushing, with a little laugh
half choked by a cough.
“Oh yes, then of course one meets people--at dances. It’s appalling.”
“I wish I understood ye, my dear.”
“Oh well, it doesn’t make any difference now. I shall hardly ever meet
anybody now.”
Miss Haddie pondered over the table with features that worked slightly
as she made little murmuring sounds. “Eh no. Ye needn’t think that. Ye
shouldn’t think like that.... Things happen sometimes ... just when ye
least expect it.”
“Not to me.”
“Oh, things will happen to ye--never fear.... Now, my dear child, trot
along with ye off to bed.”
Miriam braced herself against Miss Haddie’s gentle shaking of her
shoulders and the quiet kiss on her forehead that followed it.
4
The strengthening of her intimacy with Miss Haddie was the first of the
many changes brought to Miriam by Julia Doyle. At the beginning of the
spring term her two room mates were transferred to Julia’s care. The two
back rooms became a little hive of girls over which Julia seemed to
preside. She handled them all easily. There was rollicking and laughter
in the back bedrooms, but never any sign that the girls were “going too
far,” and their escapades were not allowed to reach across the landing.
Her large front room was, Miriam realised as the term went on, being
secretly and fiercely guarded by Julia.
The fabric of the days too had changed. All day--during the midday
constitutional when she often found Julia at her side walking in her
curious springy lounging way and took the walk in a comforting silence
resting her weary throat, during the evenings of study and the
unemployed intervals of the long Sundays--Julia seemed to come between
her and the girls. She mastered them all with her speech and laughter.
Miriam felt that when they were all together she was always in some
hidden way on the alert. She never jested with Miriam but when they were
alone, and rarely then. Usually she addressed her in a low tone and as
if half beside herself with some overpowering emotion. It was owing too
to Julia’s presence in the school that an unexpected freedom came to
Miriam every day during the hour between afternoon school and tea-time.
Persuaded by the rapid increase towards the end of the winter term of
the half-feverish exhaustion visiting her at the end of each day she had
confided in her mother, who had wept at this suggestion of an attack on
her health and called in the family doctor. “More air,” he said testily,
“air and movement.” Miriam repeated this to Miss Perne, who at once
arranged that she should be free if she chose to go out every afternoon
between school and tea-time.
At first she went into the park every day. It was almost empty during
the week at that hour. The cricket green was sparsely decked with
children and their maids. A few strollers were left along the poplar
avenue and round the asphalt-circled lake; but away on the further
slopes usually avoided in the midday walks because the girls found them
oppressive, Miriam discovered the solitary spring air. Day by day she
went as if by appointment to meet it. It was the same wandering eloquent
air she had known from the beginning of things. Whilst she walked along
the little gravel pathways winding about over the clear green slopes in
the flood of afternoon light it stayed with her. The day she had just
passed through was touched by it; it added a warm promise to the hours
that lay ahead--tea-time, the evening’s reading, the possible visit of
Miss Haddie, the quiet of her solitary room, the coming of sleep.
One day she left the pathways and strayed amongst pools of shadow lying
under the great trees. As she approached the giant trunks and the detail
of their shape and colour grew clearer her breathing quickened. She felt
her prim bearing about her like a cloak. The reality she had found was
leaving her again. Looking up uneasily into the forest of leaves above
her head she found them strange. She walked quickly back into the
sunlight, gazing reproachfully at the trees. There they were as she had
always known them; but between them and herself was her governess’ veil,
close drawn, holding them sternly away from her. The warm comforting
communicative air was round her, but she could not recover its secret.
She looked fearfully about her. To get away somewhere by herself every
day would not be enough. If that was all she could have, there would
come a time when there would be nothing anywhere. For a day or two she
came out and walked feverishly about in other parts of the park,
resentfully questioning the empty vistas. One afternoon, far away, but
coming towards her as if in answer to her question, was the figure of a
man walking quickly. For a moment her heart cried out to him. If he
would come straight on and, understanding, would walk into her life and
she could face things knowing that he was there, the light would come
back and would stay until the end--and there would be other lives, on
and on. She stood transfixed, trembling. He grew more and more distinct
and she saw a handbag and the outline of a bowler hat; a North London
clerk hurrying home to tea. With bent head she turned away and dragged
her shamed heavy limbs rapidly towards home.
5
Early in May came a day of steady rain. Enveloped in a rain-cloak and
sheltered under her lowered umbrella she ventured down the hill towards
the shops. Near the railway arch the overshadowed street began to be
crowded with jostling figures. People were pouring from the city trams
at the terminus and coming out of the station entrance in a steady
stream. Hard intent faces, clashing umbrellas, the harsh snarling
monotone of the North London voice gave her the feeling of being an
intruder. Everything seemed to wonder what she was doing down there
instead of being at home in the schoolroom. A sudden angry eye above a
coarse loudly talking mouth all but made her turn to go with instead of
against the tide; but she pushed blindly on and through and presently
found herself in a quiet side street just off the station road looking
into a shop window.... “1 lb. super cream-laid boudoir note--with
envelopes--1s.” Her eyes moved about the window from packet to packet,
set askew and shining with freshness. If she had not brought so much
note-paper from home she could have bought some. Perhaps she could buy a
packet as a Christmas present for Eve and have it in her top drawer all
the time. But there was plenty of note-paper at home. She half turned to
go, and turning back fastened herself more closely against the window
meaninglessly reading the inscription on each packet. Standing back at
last she still lingered. A little blue-painted tin plate sticking out
from the side of the window announced in white letters “Carter
Paterson.” Miriam dimly wondered at the connection. Underneath it hung a
cardboard printed in ink, “Circulating Library, 2d. weekly.” This was
still more mysterious. She timidly approached the door and met the large
pleasant eye of a man standing back in the doorway.
“Is there a library here?” she said with beating heart.
She stood so long reading and re-reading half familiar titles, “Cometh
up as a Flower,” “Not like other Girls,” “The Heir of Redcliffe,” books
that she and Harriett had read and books that she felt were of a similar
type, that tea was already on the schoolroom table when she reached
Wordsworth House with an unknown volume by Mrs. Hungerford under her
arm. Hiding it upstairs, she came down to tea and sat recovering her
composure over her paper-covered “Cinq Mars,” a relic of the senior
Oxford examination now grown suddenly rich and amazing. To-day it could
not hold her. “The Madcap” was upstairs, and beyond it an unlimited
supply of twopenny volumes and Ouida. Red-bound volumes of Ouida on the
bottom shelf had sent her eyes quickly back to the safety of the upper
rows. Through the whole of tea-time she was quietly aware of a
discussion going on at the back of her mind as to who it was who had
told her that Ouida’s books were bad; evil books. She remembered her
father’s voice saying that Ouida was an extremely able woman, quite a
politician. Then of course her books were all right, for grown-up
people. It must have been someone at a dance who had made her curious
about them, someone she had forgotten. In any case, whatever they were,
there was no one now to prevent her reading them if she chose. She would
read them if she chose. Write to Eve about it first. No. Certainly not.
Eve might say “Better not, my dear. You will regret it if you do. You
won’t be the same.” Eve was different. She must not be led by Eve in any
case. She must leave off being led by Eve--or anybody. The figures
sitting round the table, bent over their books, quietly disinclined for
conversation or mischief under the shrewd eye of Miss Haddie, suddenly
looked exciting and mysterious. But perhaps the man in the shop would be
shocked. It would be impossible to ask for them; unless she could
pretend she did not know anything about them.
6
For the last six weeks of the summer term she sat up night after night
propped against her upright pillow and bolster under the gas jet reading
her twopenny books in her silent room. Almost every night she read until
two o’clock. She felt at once that she was doing wrong; that the secret
novel-reading was a thing she could not confess, even to Miss Haddie.
She was spending hours of the time that was meant for sleep, for restful
preparation for the next day’s work, in a “vicious circle” of
self-indulgence. It was sin. She had read somewhere that sin promises a
satisfaction that it is unable to fulfil. But she found when the house
was still and the trams had ceased jingling up and down outside that she
grew steady and cool and that she rediscovered the self she had known at
home, where the refuge of silence and books was always open. Perhaps
that self, leaving others to do the practical things, erecting a little
wall of unapproachability between herself and her family that she might
be free to dream alone in corners had always been wrong. But it was
herself, the nearest most intimate self she had known. And the discovery
that it was not dead, that her six months in the German school and the
nine long months during which Banbury Park life had drawn a veil even
over the little slices of holiday freedom, had not even touched it,
brought her warm moments of reassurance. It was not perhaps a “good”
self, but it was herself, her own familiar secretly happy and rejoicing
self--not dead. Her hands lying on the coverlet knew it. They were again
at these moments her own old hands, holding very firmly to things that
no one might touch or even approach too nearly, things, everything, the
great thing that would some day communicate itself to someone through
these secret hands with the strangely thrilling finger-tips. Holding
them up in the gaslight she dreamed over their wisdom. They knew
everything and held their secret, even from her. She eyed them, communed
with them, passionately trusted them. They were not “artistic” or
“clever” hands. The fingers did not “taper” nor did the outstretched
thumb curl back on itself like a frond--like Nan Babington’s. They were
long, the tips squarish and firmly padded, the palm square and bony and
supple, and the large thumb joint stood away from the rest of the hand
like the thumb joint of a man. The right hand was larger than the left,
kindlier, friendlier, wiser. The expression of the left hand was less
reassuring. It was a narrower, lighter hand, more flexible, less
sensitive and more even in its touch--more smooth and manageable in
playing scales. It seemed to belong to her much less than the right; but
when the two were firmly interlocked they made a pleasant curious whole,
the right clasping more firmly, its thumb always uppermost, its fingers
separated firmly over the back of the left palm, the left hand clinging,
its fingers close together against the hard knuckles of the right.
It was only when she was alone and in the intervals of quiet reading
that she came into possession of her hands. With others they oppressed
her by their size and their lack of feminine expressiveness. No one
could fall in love with such hands. Loving her, someone might come to
tolerate them. They were utterly unlike Eve’s plump, white, inflexible
little palms. But they were her strength. They came between her and the
world of women. They would be her companions until the end. They would
wither. But the bones would not change. The bones would be laid
unchanged and wise, in her grave.
7
She began her readings with Rosa Nouchette Carey. Reading her at home,
after tea by the breakfast-room fireside with red curtains drawn and the
wind busy outside amongst the evergreen shrubs under the window, it had
seemed quite possible that life might suddenly develop into the thing
the writer described. From somewhere would come an adoring man who
believed in heaven and eternal life. One would grow very good; and after
the excitement and interest had worn off one would go on, with firm
happy lips being good and going to church and making happy matches for
other girls or quietly disapproving of everybody who did not believe
just in the same way and think about good girls and happy marriages and
heaven, keeping such people outside. Smiling, wise and happy inside in
the warm; growing older, but that did not matter because the adored man
was growing older too.
Now it had all changed. The quiet house and fireside, gravity,
responsibility, a greying husband, his reading profile always dear, both
of them going on towards heaven, “all tears wiped away,” tears and
laughter of relief after death, still seemed desirable, but “women.” ...
Those awful, awful women, she murmured to herself stirring in bed. I
never thought of all the _awful_ women there would be in such a life. I
only thought of myself and the house and the garden and the man. What an
escape! Good God in heaven, what an escape! Far better to be alone and
suffering and miserable here in the school, alive....
Then there’ll be whole heaps of books, millions of books I can’t
read--perhaps nearly all the books. She took one more volume of Rosa, in
hope, and haunted its deeps of domesticity. “I’ve gone too far.” ... If
Rosa Nouchette Carey knew me, she’d make me one of the bad characters
who are turned out of the happy homes. I’m some sort of bad unsimple
woman. Oh, damn, damn, she sighed. I don’t know. Her hands seemed to
mock her, barring her way.
8
Then came a series of Mrs. Hungerford--all the volumes she had not
already read. She read them eagerly, inspirited. The gabled country
houses, the sunlit twilit endless gardens, the deep orchards, the
falling of dew, the mists of the summer mornings, masses of flowers in
large rooms with carved oaken furniture, wide staircases with huge
painted windows throwing down strange patches of light on shallow
thickly carpetted stairs. These were the things she wanted; gay
house-parties, people with beautiful wavering complexions and masses of
shimmering hair catching the light, fragrant filmy diaphanous dresses;
these were the people to whom she belonged--a year or two of life like
that, dancing and singing in and out the houses and gardens; and then
marriage. Living alone, sadly estranged, in the house of a husband who
loved her and with whom she was in love, both of them thinking that the
other had married because they had lost their way in a thunderstorm or
spent the night sitting up on a mountain-top or because of a clause in a
will, and then one day both finding out the truth.... That is what is
meant by happiness ... happiness. But these things could only happen to
people with money. She would never have even the smallest share of that
sort of life. She might get into it as a governess--some of Mrs.
Hungerford’s heroines were governesses--but they had clouds of hair and
were pathetically slender and appealing in their deep mourning. She read
volume after volume, forgetting the titles--the single word ‘Hungerford’
on a cover inflamed her. Her days became an irrelevance and her evenings
a dreamy sunlit indulgence. Now and again she wondered what Julia Doyle
would think if she knew what she was reading and how it affected
her--whether she would still watch her in the way she did as she went
about her work pale and tired, whether she would go on guarding her so
fiercely?
9
At last exasperated, tired of the mocking park, the mocking happy books,
she went one day to the lower shelf, and saying very calmly, “I think
I’ll take a Ouida,” drew out “Under Two Flags” with a trembling hand.
The brown-eyed man seemed to take an interminable time noting the number
of the book, and when at last she got into the air her limbs were heavy
with sadness. That night she read until three o’clock and finished the
volume the next night at the same hour, sitting upright when the last
word was read, refreshed. From that moment the red-bound volumes became
the centre of her life. She read “Moths” and “In Maremma” slowly word by
word, with an increasing steadiness and certainty. The mere sitting with
the text held before her eyes gave her the feeling of being strongly
confronted. The strange currents which came whenever she was alone and
at ease flowing to the tips of her fingers, seemed to flow into the book
as she held it and to be met and satisfied. As soon as the door was shut
and the gas alight, she would take the precious, solid trusty volume
from her drawer and fling it on her bed, to have it under her eyes while
she undressed. She ceased to read her Bible and to pray. Ouida, Ouida,
she would muse with the book at last in her hands. I want bad
things--strong bad things.... It doesn’t matter, Italy, the sky, bright
hot landscapes, things happening. I don’t care what people think or say.
I am older than anyone here in this house. I am myself.
10
... If you had loved, if you loved, you could die, laughing, gasping out
your life on a battlefield, fading by inches in a fever-swamp, or living
on, going about seamed and old and ill. Whatever happened to you, if you
had cared, fearing nothing, neither death nor hell. God came. He would
welcome and forgive you. Life, struggle, pain. Happy laughter with
twisted lips--all waiting somewhere outside, beyond. It would come. It
must be made to come.
11
Who was there in the world? Ted had failed. Ted belonged to the Rosa
Nouchette Carey world. He would marry one of those women. Bob knew. Bob
Greville’s profile was real. Sitting on the wide stairs at the Easter
Subscription Dance, his soft fine white hair standing up, the straight
line of polished forehead, the fine nose and compressed lips, the sharp
round chin with the three firm folds underneath it, the point of his
collar cutting across them, the keen blue eyes looking straight out
ahead, across Australia. The whole face listening. He had been listening
to her nearly all the evening. Now and again quiet questions. She could
go on talking to him whenever she liked. Go to him and go on talking,
and talking, safely, being understood. Talking on and on. But he was
old. Living old and alone in chambers in Adam Street--Adelphi.
12
One day just before the end of the summer term, Miss Perne asked Miriam
to preside over the large schoolroom for the morning. The first and
second-class girls were settled there at their written examination in
English history. Rounding the schoolroom door she stood for a moment in
the doorway. The sunlight poured in through the wide bay window and the
roomful of quiet girls seemed like a field. Jessie Wheeler’s voice broke
the silence. “It’s the Hen,” she shouted gently. “It’s the blessed Hen!
Oh, _come_ on. You going to sit with us?”
“Yes. Be quiet,” said Miriam.
“Oh, thank goodness,” groaned Jessie, supported by groans and murmurs
from all over the room.
“Be quiet, girls, and get on with your papers,” said Miriam in a tone of
acid detachment from the top of her tide. She sat feeling that her arms
were round the entire roomful, that each girl struggling alone with the
list of questions was resting against her breast. “I’m going away from
them. I must be going away from them,” ran her thoughts regretfully.
“They can’t keep me. This is the utmost. I’ve won. There’ll never be
anything more than this, here.” It would always be the same--with
different girls. Certainty. Even the sunlight paid a sort of homage to
the fathomless certainty she felt. The sunlight in this little
schoolroom was telling her of other sunlights, vast and unbroken,
somewhere--coming, her own sunlights, when she should have wrenched
herself away. It was there; she glanced up again and again to watch it
breaking and splashing all over the room. It would come again, but how
differently. Quite soon. She might have spared herself all her
agonising. The girls did not know where she belonged. They were holding
her. But she would go away, to some huge open space. Leave them--ah, it
was unkind. But she had left them already in spirit.
If they could all get up together now and sing, let their voices peal
together up and up, throw all the books out of the window, they might go
on together, forward into the sunshine, but they would not want to do
that. Hardly any of them would want to do that. They would look at her
with knowing eyes, and look at the door, and stay where they were.
The room was very close. Polly Allen and Eunice Dupont, sitting together
at a little card-table in the darkest corner of the room, were
whispering. With beating heart Miriam got up and went and stood before
them. “You two are talking,” she said with her eyes on the thickness of
Polly’s shoulders as she sat in profile to the room. Eunice, opposite
her, against the wall, flashed up at her her beautiful fugitive grin as
from the darkness of a wood. History, thought Miriam. What has Eunice to
do with history, laws, Henry II, the English Constitution? “You don’t
talk,” she said coldly, feeling as she watched her that Eunice’s pretty
clothes were stripped away and she were stabbing at her soft rounded
body, “at examinations. Can’t you see that?” Eunice’s pale face grew
livid. “First because it isn’t fair and also because it disturbs other
people.” You can tell all the people who cheat by their smile, she
reflected on her way back. Eunice chuckled serenely two or three times.
“What have these North London girls to do with studies?” ... There was
not a single girl like Eunice at Barnes. Even the very pretty girls were
... refined.
13
That afternoon Miriam spent her hour of leisure in calling on the Brooms
to enquire for Grace, who had been ill the whole of the term. She found
the house after some difficulty in one of a maze of little rows and
crescents just off the tram-filled main road. “She’s almost
perfect--almost perfection,” said Mrs. Philps, the Aunt Lucy Miriam had
heard of and seen in church.
They had been together in the little drawing-room talking about Grace
from the moment when Miriam was shown in to Mrs. Philps sitting darning
a duster in a low chair by the closed conservatory door. The glazed
closed door with the little strips of window on either side giving on to
a crowded conservatory made the little room seem dark. To Miriam it
seemed horribly remote. Her journey to it had been through immense
distances. Threading the little sapling-planted asphalt-pavemented
roadways between houses whose unbroken frontage was so near and so bare
as to forbid scrutiny, she felt she had reached the centre, the home and
secret of North London life. Off every tram-haunted main road, there
must be a neighbourhood like this where lived the common-mouthed
harsh-speaking people who filled the pavements and shops and walked in
the parks. To enter one of the little houses and speak there to its
inmates would be to be finally claimed and infected by the life these
people lived, the thing that made them what they were. At Wordsworth
House she was held up by the presence of the Pernes and Julia Doyle.
Here she was helpless and alone. When she had discovered the number she
sought and, crossing the little tiled pathway separated from the pathway
next door by a single iron rail, had knocked with the lacquered knocker
against the glazed and leaded door, her dreams for the future faded.
They would never be realised. They were just a part of the radiance that
shone now from the spacious houses she had lived in in the past. The
things she had felt this morning in the examination room were that, too.
They had nothing to do with the future. All the space was behind. Things
would grow less and less.
14
Admitted to the dark narrowly echoing tiled passage, she stated her
errand and was conducted past a closed door and the opening of a narrow
staircase which shot steeply, carpeted with a narrow strip of
surprisingly green velvet carpeting, up towards an unlit landing and
admitted to Mrs. Philps.
“Wait a minute, Vashti,” said Mrs. Philps, holding Miriam’s hand as she
murmured her errand. “You’ll stay tea? Well, if you’re sure you can’t
I’ll not press you. Bring the biscuits and the sherry and two white
wine-glasses, Vashti. Get them now and bring them in at once. Sit down,
Miss Henderson. She’s little better than a step-girl. They’re all the
same.” Whilst she described her niece’s illness, Miriam wondered over
the immense bundle of little even black sausage-shaped rolls of hair
which stuck out, larger than her head and smoothed to a sphere by a
tightly drawn net, at the back of her skull. She was short and stout and
had bright red cheeks that shone in the gloom and rather prominent large
blue eyes that roamed as she talked, allowing Miriam to snatch
occasional glimpses of china-filled what-nots and beaded ottomans.
Presently Vashti returned clumsily with the wine, making a great bumping
and rattling round about the door. “You stupid thing, you’ve brought
claret. Don’t you know sherry when you see it? It’s at the back--behind
the Harvest Burgundy.” “I shall have to go soon,” said Miriam, relieved
at the sight of the red wine and longing to escape the sherry. Vashti
put down the tray and stood with open mouth. Even with her very high
heels she looked almost a dwarf. The room seemed less oppressive with
the strange long-necked decanter and the silver biscuit box standing on
a table in the curious greenish light. Mrs. Philps accepted the claret
and returned busily to her story, whilst Miriam sipped and glanced at a
large print in a heavy black frame leaning forward low over the small
white marble mantelpiece. It represented a young knight in armour
kneeling at an altar with joined and pointed hands held to his lips. An
angel standing in mid-air was touching his shoulder with a sword. “Why
doesn’t she kiss the top of his head,” thought Miriam as she sipped her
wine. The distant aisles and pillars of the church made the room seem
larger than it was. “I suppose they all look into that church when they
want to get away from each other,” she mused as Mrs. Philps went on with
her long sentences beginning “And Dr. Newman said--” And there was a
little mirror above a bulging chiffonier which was also an escape from
the confined space. Looking into it, she met Mrs. Philps’s glowing face
with the blue eyes widely staring and fixed upon her own, and heard her
declare, with her bunched cherry-coloured lips, that Grace was ‘almost
perfection.’ “Is she?” she responded eagerly, and Mrs. Philps elaborated
her theme. Grace, then, with her heavy body and strange hot voice, lying
somewhere upstairs in a white bed, was the most important thing in this
dark little house. “She was very near to death then,” Mrs. Philps was
saying tearfully, “very near, and when she came round from her delirium,
one of the first things she said to me as soon as she was strong enough
to whisper, was that she was perfectly certain about there being another
life.” Mrs. Philps’s voice faded and she sat with trembling lips and
eyes downcast. “_Did_ she!” Miriam almost shouted, half-rising from her
seat and turning from contemplating Mrs. Philps in the mirror to look
her full in the face. The dim green light streaming in from the
conservatory seemed like a tide that made everything in the room rock
slightly. A touch would sweep it all away and heaven would be there all
round them. “Did she,” whispered Miriam in a faint voice that shook her
chest. “‘Aunt,’ she said,” went on Mrs. Philps steadily, as the room
grew firm round Miriam and the breath she drew seemed like an early
morning breath, “‘I want to say something quickly,’ she said, ‘in case I
die. It’s that I know--for a positive fact, there is another life.’”
“What a perfectly stupendous thing,” said Miriam. “It’s so important.”
“I was much impressed. Of course, I knew she was nearly perfect. But
we’ve not been in the habit of talking about religion. I asked her if
she would like to see the vicar. ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘there’s no need. He
knows.’ I doubt if he knows as much as she does. But I didn’t make a
point of it.”
“Oh, but it’s simply wonderful. It’s much more important than anything a
vicar could say. It’s their business to say those things.”
“I don’t know about that. But she was so weak that I didn’t press it.”
“But it’s so important. What a wonderful thing to have in your family.
Did she say anything more?”
“She hasn’t returned to the subject again. She’s very weak.”
Wild clutching thoughts shook at Miriam. If only Grace could suddenly
appear in her night-gown, to be questioned. Or if she herself could stay
on there creeping humbly about in this little house, watering the
conservatory and darning dusters, being a relative of the Brooms,
devoting herself to Grace, waiting on her, hearing all she had to say.
What did it matter that the Brooms wore heavy mourning and gloated over
funerals if Grace upstairs in her room had really seen the white light
away in the distance far away beyond the noise of the world?