1
Harriett’s ringed fingers had finished dipping and drying the blue and
white tea-service. She sat for a moment staring ahead down-stream.
Sitting opposite her, Gerald watched her face with a half smile. Miriam
waited sitting at her side. It was the first moment of silence since she
had come home at midday. From the willow-curtained island against which
they were moored came little crepitations and flittings. Ahead of them
the river blazed gold and blue, hedged by high spacious trees.
“_Come_-to-tea, _come_-to-tea, hurryup-dear,” said a bird suddenly from
the island thicket.
“D’you know what bird that is, Gerald?” asked Miriam.
“Not from Adam,” breathed Gerald, swaying on his seat with a little
laugh. “It’s a bird. That’s all I know.”
“We’d better unmoor, silly,” muttered Harriett briskly, gathering up the
tiller ropes.
“Right, la reine.”
“Look here, let me do something this time, pull or something.”
“You sit still, my dear.”
“But I should simply love to.”
“You shall pull down-stream if you like later on when the bally sun’s
down. My advice to you now is to go and lounge in the bow.”
“Oh yes, Mim, you try it. Lie right down. It’s simply heavenly.”
The boat glided deliciously away up-stream as Miriam, relinquishing her
vision of Harriett sitting very upright in the stern in her white drill
dress, and Gerald’s lawn-shirted back and long lean arms grasping the
sculls, lay back on the bow cushions with her feet comfortably
outstretched under the unoccupied seat in front of her. Six hours ago,
shaking hands with a roomful of noisy home-going girls--and now nothing
to do but float dreamily out through the gateway of her six weeks’
holiday. The dust of the school was still upon her; the skin of her face
felt strained and tired, her hands were tired and hot, her blouse dim
with a week of school wear, and her black skirt oppressed her with its
invisible burden of grime. But she was staring up at a clean blue sky
fringed with tree-tops. She stretched herself out more luxuriously upon
her cushions. The river smoothly moving and lapping underneath the boat
was like a cradle. The soft fingers of the air caressed her temples and
moved along the outlines of her face and neck. Forty-two days ... like
this. To-morrow she would wake up a new person ... sing, and shout with
Harriett. She closed her eyes. The gently lifting water seemed to come
nearer; the invading air closed in on her. She gave herself ecstatically
to its touch; the muscles of her tired face relaxed and she believed
that she could sleep; cry or sleep.
2
It was Gerald who had worked this miraculous first day for her.
“Boating” hitherto had meant large made-up parties of tennis-club
people, a fixed day, uneasy anticipations as to the weather, the
carrying of hampers of provisions and crockery, spirit lamps and
kettles, clumsy hired randans, or little fleets of stupidly competing
canoes, lack of space, heavy loads to pull, the need for ceaseless
chaff, the irritating triumphs of clever “knowing” girls in smart
clothes, the Pooles, or really beautiful people, like Nan Babington and
her cousin. Everything they said sounding wonderful and seeming to
improve the scenery; the jokes of the men, even Ted always joked all the
time, the misery of large noisy picnic teas on the grass, and in the end
great weariness and disappointment, the beauty of the river and the
trees only appearing the next day or perhaps long afterwards.
This boat was Gerald’s own private boat, a double-sculling skiff,
slender and gold-brown, beautifully fitted and with a locker containing
everything that was wanted for picnicking. They had arranged their
expedition at lunch-time, trained to Richmond, bought fruit and cakes
and got the boat’s water-keg filled by one of Redknap’s men. Gerald knew
how to do things properly. He had always been accustomed to things like
this boat. He would not care to have anything just anyhow. “Let’s do the
thing decently, la reine.” He would keep on saying that at intervals
until Harriett had learned too. How he had changed her since Easter when
their engagement had been openly allowed. The clothes he had bought for
her, especially this plain drill dress with its neat little coat. The
long black tie fastened with the plain heavy cable broach pinned in
lengthwise half-way down the ends of the tie, which reached almost to
her black belt. That was Gerald. Her shoes, the number of pairs of
light, expensive, beautifully made shoes. Her bearing, the change in her
voice, a sort of roundness about her old Harryish hardness. But she was
the same Harry, the Harry he had seen for the first time snorting with
anger over Mr. Marth’s sentimental singing at the Assembly Rooms
concert. “My hat, wasn’t la reine fuming!” He would forgive her all her
ignorance. It was her triumph. What an extraordinary time Harry would
have. Gerald was well-off. He had a private income behind his Canadian
Pacific salary. His grandfather had been a diplomatist, living abroad
nearly all the time, and his wealthy father and wealthy mother with a
large fortune of her own had lived in a large house in Chelsea, giving
dinner parties and going to the opera until nearly all the capital had
gone, both dying just in time to leave enough to bring Gerald in a small
income when he left Haileybury. And the wonderful thing was that Gerald
liked mouching about and giggling. He liked looking for hours in shop
windows and strolling on the Heath eating peppermints.
3
Everything had disappeared into a soft blackness; only on the water a
faint light was left. It came and went; sometimes there was nothing but
darkness and the soft air. The small paper lantern swinging at the bow
made a little blot of light that was invisible from the stroke seat. The
boat went swiftly and easily. Miriam felt she could go on pulling for
hours at the top of her strength through the night. Leaning forward,
breasting the featureless darkness, sweeping the sculls back at the full
reach of her arms, leaning back and pressing her whole weight upwards
from the footboard against the pull of the water, her body became an
outstretched elastic system of muscles, rhythmically working against the
smooth dragging resistance of the dark water. Her sleeves were rolled
up, her collar-stud unfastened, her cool drowsy lids drooped over her
cool eyes. Each time she leaned backwards against her stroke, pressing
the footboard, the weight of her body dragged at a line of soreness
where the sculls pressed her hands, and with the final fling of the
water from the sculls a little stinging pain ran along the pads of her
palms. To-morrow there would be a row of happy blisters.
“You needn’t put more beef into it than you like, Mirry.” Gerald’s voice
came so quietly out of the darkness that it scarcely disturbed Miriam’s
ecstacy. She relaxed her swing, and letting the sculls skim and dip in
short easy strokes, sat glowing.
“I’ve never pulled a boat alone before.”
“It shows you can’t be a blue-stocking, thank the Lord,” laughed Gerald.
“Who said I was?”
“I’ve always understood you were a very wise lady, my dear.”
“Nobody told you she was a blue-stocking, silly. You invented the word
yourself.”
“I? I invented blue-stocking?”
“Yes, you, silly. It’s like your saying women never date their letters
just because your cousins don’t.”
“Vive la reine. The Lord deliver me from blue-stockings, anyhow.”
“All _right_, what _about_ it? There aren’t any here!”
“You’re not one, anyhow.”
4
The next day after tea Eve arrived home from Gloucestershire.
Miriam had spent the day with Harriett. After breakfast, bounding
silently up and downstairs, they visited each room in turn, chased each
other about the echoing rooms and passages of the basement and all over
the garden. Miriam listened speechlessly to the sound of Harriett’s
heels soft on the stair carpet, ringing on the stone floors of the
basement, and the swish of her skirts as she flew over the lawn
following surrounding responding to Miriam’s wild tour of the garden.
Miriam listened and watched, her eyes and ears eagerly gathering and
hoarding visions. It could not go on. Presently some claim would be made
on Harriett and she would be alone. But when they had had their fill of
silently rushing about, Harriett piloted her into the drawing-room and
hastily began opening the piano. A pile of duets lay on the lid. She had
evidently gathered them there in readiness. Wandering about the room,
shifting the familiar ornaments, flinging herself into chair after
chair, Miriam watched her and saw that her strange quiet little snub
face was lit and shapely. Harriett, grown-up, serene and well-dressed
and going to be married in the spring, was transported by this new
coming together. When they had played the last of the duets that they
knew well, Harriett fumbled at the pages of a bound volume of operas in
obvious uncertainty. At any moment Miriam might get up and go off and
bring their sitting together on the long cretonne-covered duet stool to
an end. “Come on,” roared Miriam gently, “let’s try this”; and they
attacked the difficult pages. Miriam counted the metre, whispered it
intoned and sang it, carrying Harriett along with shouts “go _on_, go
_on_” when they had lost each other. They smashed their way along by
turns playing only a single note here and there into the framework of
Miriam’s desperate counting, or banging out cheerful masses of
discordant tones, anything to go on driving their way together through
the pages while the sunlight streamed half seen into the conservatory
and the flower-filled garden crowded up against the windows, anything to
come out triumphantly together at the end and to stop satisfied, the
sounds of the house, so long secretly known to them both, low now around
them, heard by them together, punctuating their joy. The gong sounded
for lunch. “Eve,” Miriam remembered suddenly, “Eve’s coming this
afternoon.” The thought set gladness thundering through her as she rose
from the piano. “Let’s go for a walk after lunch,” she muttered.
Harriett blushed.
“Awri,” she responded tenderly.
5
The mile of gently rising roadway leading to the Heath was overarched by
huge trees. Shadowy orchards, and the silent sunlit outlying meadows and
park land of a large estate streamed gently by them beyond the trees as
they strode along through the cool leaf-scented air. They strode
speechlessly ahead as if on a pilgrimage, keeping step. Harriett’s
stylish costume had a strange unreal look in the great lane, under the
towering trees. Miriam wondered if she found it dull and was taking it
so boldly because they were walking along it together. Obviously she did
not want to talk. She walked along swiftly and erect, looking eagerly
ahead as if, when they reached the top and the Heath and the windmill,
they would find something they were both looking for. Miriam felt she
could glance about unnoticed and looked freely, as she had done so many
hundreds of times before, at the light on the distant meadows and lying
along the patches of undergrowth between the trunks of the trees. They
challenged and questioned her silently as they had always done and she
them, in a sort of passionate sulkiness. They gave no answer, but the
scents in the cool tree-filled air went on all the time offering steady
assurance, and presently as walking became an unconscious rhythm and the
question of talk or no talk had definitely decided itself, the challenge
of the light was silenced and the shaded roadway led on to paradise. Was
there anyone anywhere who saw it as she did? Anyone who looking along
the alley of white road would want to sit down in the roadway or kneel
amongst the undergrowth and shout and shout? In the north of London
there were all those harsh street voices infesting the trees and the
parks. No! they did not exist. There was no North London. Let them die.
They did not know the meaning of far-reaching meadows, park-land, deer,
the great silent Heath, the silent shoulders of the windmill against the
far-off softness of the sky. Harsh streetiness ... cunning, knowing ...
do you _blame_ me? ... or charwomanishness, smarmy; churchy or chapelish
sentimentality. Sentimentality. No need to think about them.
“Never the time and the place and the loved one all together.” Who said
that? Was it true? Dreadful. It couldn’t be. So many people had seen
moonlit gardens, together. All the happy people who were sure of each
other. “I say, Harriett,” she said at the top of her voice, bringing
Harriett curvetting in the road just in front of her. “I say, listen.”
Harriett ran up the remaining strips of road and out on to the Heath. It
was ablaze with sunlight--as the river and the trees had been
yesterday--a whole day of light and Eve on her way home, almost home.
Harriett must not know how she was rushing to Eve; with what tingling
fingers. “Oh, what I was going to ask you was whether you can see the
moonlight like it is when you are alone, when Gerald is there.”
“... It isn’t the same as when you are alone,” said Harriett quietly,
arranging the cuff of her glove.
“Do explain what you mean.”
“Well, it’s different.”
“I see. You don’t know how.”
“It’s quite different.”
“Does Gerald like the moonlight?”
“_I_ dunno. I never asked him.”
“Fancy the Roehampton people living up here all the time.”
“There’s their old washing going flip-flap over there.”
Harriett was finding out that she was back in the house with Eve.
“Let’s rush to the windmill. Let’s sing.”
“Come on; only we can’t rush and sing too.”
“Yes we can, come on.” Running up over hillocks and stumbling through
sandy gorse-grown hollows they sang a hunting song, Miriam leading with
the short galloping phrases, Harriett’s thinner voice dropping in,
broken and uncertain, with a strange brave sadness in it that went to
Miriam’s heart.
6
“Eve, you look exactly like Dudley’s gracious lady in these things.
Don’t you feel like it?” Eve stopped near the landing window and stood
in her light green canvas dress with its pale green silk sleeves
shedding herself over Miriam from under her rose-trimmed white chip hat.
Miriam was carrying her light coat and all the small litter of her
journey. “Go on up,” she said, “I want to talk,” and Eve hurried on,
Miriam stumblingly following her, holding herself in, eyes and ears wide
for the sight and sound of the slender figure flitting upstairs through
the twilight. The twilight wavered and seemed to ebb and flow,
suggesting silent dawn and full midday, and the house rang with a
soundless music.
“It was Mrs. Wallace who suggested my _wearing_ all my best things for
the journey,” panted Eve; “they don’t get crushed with packing and they
needn’t get dirty if you’re careful.”
“You look exactly like Dudley’s gracious lady. You know you do. You know
it perfectly well.”
“They do seem jolly now I’m back. They don’t seem anything down there.
Just ordinary with everybody in much grander things.”
“How do you mean, grander? What sort of things?”
“Oh, all sorts of lovely white dresses.”
“It is extraordinary about all those white dresses,” said Miriam
emphatically, pushing her way after Eve into Sarah’s bedroom. “Can I
come in? I’m coming in. Sarah says it’s because men like them and she
gets simply sick of girls in white and cream dresses all over the place
in the summer, and it’s a perfect relief to see anyone in a colour in
the sun. They have red sunshades sometimes, but Sarah says that’s not
enough; you want people in colours. I wonder if there’s anything in it?”
“Of course there is,” said Sarah, releasing the last strap of Eve’s
trunk.
“They’d _all_ put on coloured things if it weren’t for that.”
“Men tell them.”
“Do they?”
“The engaged men tell them--or brothers.”
“I can’t think how you get to know these things, sober Sally.”
“Oh, you can tell.”
“Well, then, _why_ do men like silly white and cream dresses, pasty,
whitewashy clothes altogether?”
“It’s something they want; it looks different to them.”
“Sarah knows all sorts of things,” said Miriam excitedly, watching the
confusion of the room from the windows. “She says she knows why the
Pooles look down and smirk; their dimples and the line of their chins;
that men admire them looking down like that. _Isn’t_ it frightful.
Disgusting. And men don’t seem to see through them.”
“It’s those kind of girls get on best.”
Miriam sighed.
“Oh well, don’t let’s think about them. Not to-night, anyhow,” cooed
Eve.
“Sarah says there are much more awful reasons. I can’t think how she
finds them all out. Sober Sally. I know she’s right. It’s too utterly
sickening somehow, for words.”
“Mim.”
“_Pooh_--barooo, _baroooo_.”
“Mim----”
“Damnation.”
“Mimmy--Jim.”
“I said DAMNATION.”
“Oh, it’s all right. What have we got to do with horrid knowing people.”
“Well, they’re there, all the time. You can’t get away from them.
They’re all over the place. Either the knowing ones or the simpering
ones. It’s all the same in the end.”
Eve quietly began to unpack. “Oh well,” she smiled, “we’re _all_
different when there are men about to when we’re by ourselves. We all
make eyes in a way.”
“Eve! What a perfectly beastly thing to say.”
“It isn’t, my dear,” said Eve pensively. “You should see yourself; you
do.”
“Sally, _do_ I?”
7
“Of course you do,” giggled Eve quietly, “as much as anybody.”
“Then I’m the most crawling thing on the face of the earth,” thought
Miriam, turning silently to the tree-tops looming softly just outside
the window; “and the worst of it is I only know it at moments now and
again.” The tree-tops serene with some happy secret cast her off, and
left her standing with groping crisping fingers unable to lift the
misery that pressed upon her heart. “God, what a filthy world! God what
a filthy world!” she muttered. “Everyone hemmed and hemmed and hemmed
into it.” Harriett came in and stepped up on to the high canopied bed.
“Ullo,” she said in general, sitting herself up tailor-fashion in the
middle of the bed so that the bright twilight fell full upon her head
and the breast and shoulders of her light silk-sleeved dress. Humming
shreds of a violin obligato, Eve rustled out layer after layer of
paper-swathed garments, to be gathered up by Sarah moving solidly about
between the wardrobe and the chest of drawers in her rather heavy boots.
There would not be any talk. But silently the room filled and
overflowed. Turning at last from her window, Miriam glanced at her
sisters and let her thoughts drop into the flowing tide. Harry, sitting
there sharp and upright in the fading light, coming in to them with her
future life streaming out behind her spreading and shining and rippling,
herself the radiant point of that wonderful life, actually there, neatly
enthroned amongst them, one of them, drawing them all with her out
towards its easy security; Eve, happy with her wardrobe of dainty
things, going fearlessly forward to some unseen fate, not troubling
about it. Sarah’s strange clean clear channel of wisdom. Where would it
lead? It would always drive straight through everything.
All these things meant that the mere simple awfulness of things
at home had changed. These three girls she had known so long as
fellow-prisoners, and who still bore at moments in their eyes, their
movements, the marks of the terrors and uncertainties amongst which
they had all grown up, were going on, out into life, scored and
scarred, but alive and changeable, able to become quite new. Memories
of strange crises and the ageing deadening shifts they had invented
to tide them over humiliating situations were here crowded in the
room together with them all. But these memories were no longer as
they had so often been, the principal thing in the room whenever they
were all gathered silently together. If Eve and Harriett had got away
from the past and now had happy eyes and mouths.... Sarah’s solid
quiet cheerfulness, now grown so large and free that it seemed even
when she was stillest to knock your mind about like something in a
harlequinade.... Why had they not all known in the past that they would
change? Why had they been so oppressed whenever they stopped to think?
Those American girls in “Little Women” and “Good Wives” made fun out of
everything. But they had never had to face real horrors and hide them
from everybody, mewed up.
8
When it was nearly dark Sarah lit the gas. Harriett had gone downstairs.
Miriam lowered the Venetian blinds, shutting out the summer. To-morrow
it would be there again, waiting for them when they woke in the morning.
In her own and Harriett’s room the daylight would be streaming in
through the Madras muslin curtains, everything in the room very silent
and distinct; nothing to be heard but the little flutterings of birds
under the eaves. You could listen to it for ever if you kept perfectly
still. When you drew back the curtains the huge day would be standing
outside clear with gold and blue and dense with trees and flowers.
Sarah’s face was uneasy. She seemed to avoid meeting anyone’s eyes.
Presently she faced them, sitting on a low rocking chair with her
tightly clasped hands stretched out beyond her knees. She glanced
fearfully from one to the other and bit her lips. “What now,” thought
Miriam. The anticipated holidays disappeared. Of course. She might have
known they would. For a moment she felt sick, naked and weak. Then she
braced herself to meet the shock. I must sit tight, I must sit tight and
not show anything. Eve’s probably praying. Oh, make haste, Sally, and
get it over.
“What’s the matter, Sally?” said Eve in a low voice.
“Oh, Eve and Mim, I’m awfully sorry.”
“You’d better tell us at once,” said Eve, crimsoning.
“Haven’t you noticed anything?”
Miriam looked at Sarah’s homely prosperous shape. It couldn’t be
anything. It was a nightmare. She waited, pinching her wrist.
“What is it, Sally?” breathed Eve, tapping her green-clad knee. Clothes
and furniture and pictures ... houses full of things and people talking
in the houses and having meals and pretending, talking and smiling and
pretending.
“It’s mother.”
“What on earth do you mean, Sarah?” said Miriam angrily.
“She’s ill. Bennett took her to a specialist. There’s got to be--she’s
got to have an operation.”
Miriam drew up the blind with a noisy rattle, smiling at Eve frowning
impatiently at the noise. Driving the heavy sash up as far as it would
go, she leaned her head against the open frame. The garden did not seem
to be there. The tepid night air was like a wall, a black wall. For a
moment a splintered red light, like the light that comes from a violent
blow on the forehead, flashed along it. Sarah and Eve were talking in
strange voices, interrupting each other. It would be a relief to do
something, faint or something selfish. But she must hear what they were
saying; listen to both the voices cutting through the air of the hot
room. Propped weak-limbed against the window open-mouthed for air she
forced herself to hear, pressing her cold hands closely together. The
gas light that had seemed so bright hardly seemed to light the room at
all. Everything looked small, even Grannie’s old Chippendale bedstead
and the double-fronted wardrobe. The girls were little monkey ghosts
babbling together beside Eve’s open trunk. Did they see that it was
exactly like a grave?
9
The sun shone through the apple trees, making the small half-ripe apples
look as though they were coated with enamel.
It was quite clear that if they did go away together, the four of them,
she, Eve, Gerald and Harriett to Brighton or somewhere, they would be
able to forget. You could tell that from the strange quiet easy tone of
Harriett’s and Gerald’s voices. There would be the aquarium. She
supposed they would go to the aquarium with its strange underground
smell of stagnant sea air and stare into the depths of those strange
green tanks and watch the fish flashing about like shadows or skimming
by near the front of the tank with the light full on their softly tinted
scales. Harriett sat steadily at her side on the overturned seed-box,
middle-aged and responsible, quietly discussing the details of the plan
with Gerald, cross-legged at their feet on the grass plot. They had not
said anything about the reasons for going; but of course Gerald must
know all that. He knew everything now, all about the money troubles, all
the awful things, and it seemed to make no difference to him. He made
light of it. It was humiliating to think that he had come just as things
had reached their worst, the house going to be sold, Pater and mother
and Sarah going into lodgings in September, and the maddening helpless
worry about mother and all the money for that. And yet it was a good
thing he had known them all in the old house and seen them there, even
pretending to be prosperous. And yet the house and garden was nothing to
him. Just a house and garden. Harriett’s house and garden, and he was
going to take Harriett away. The house and garden did not matter.
She glanced at the sunlit fruit trees, the thickets of the familiar
kitchen garden, the rising grass bank at the near end of the distant
lawn, the eloquent back of the large red house. He could not see all the
things there were there, all the long years, or know what it was to have
that cut away and nothing ahead but Brighton aquarium with Harriett and
Eve, and then the school again, and disgraceful lodgings in some strange
place, no friends and everybody looking down on them. She met his eyes
and they both smiled.
“Keep her perfectly quiet for the next few weeks, that’s the idea, and
when it’s all over she’ll be better than she’s ever been in her life.”
“D’you think so?”
“I don’t think, I know she will; people always are. I’ve known scores of
people have operations. It’s nothing nowadays. Ask Bennett.”
“Does he think she’ll be better?”
“Of course.”
“Did he say so?”
“Of _course_ he did.”
“Well, I s’pose we’d really better go.”
“Of course, we’re going.”
“I’m going to look for a place in a family after next term. I shall give
notice when I get back. You get more money in a family Eve says, and
home life, and if you haven’t a home they’re only too glad to have you
there in the holidays too.”
“You take my advice, my dear girl. Don’t go into a family. Eve’ll find
it out before she’s much older.”
“I must have more money.”
“Mirry’s so silly. She insists on paying her share of Brighton. Isn’t
she an owl?”
“Oh well, of course, if she’s going to make a point of spending her cash
when she needn’t she’d better find a more paying job. That’s certain
sure.”