She followed the little servant, who had darted forth to seize her
baggage, into a small lounge whose baking warmth recalled the worst of
the train journey; seeming—though, since still one breathed, air was
there—like an over-heated vacuum.
The brisk little maid, untroubled, was already at the top of a short
flight of wide red-carpeted stairs, and making impatient rallying
sounds—like one recalling a straying dog. Miriam went gladly to the
promise of the upper air. But in going upwards there was no relief.
Glancing, as she passed at the turn of the stairs a figure standing in a
darkness made by the twilight in the angle of the wall, she found the
proprietress receiving her; a thick rigid figure in a clumsy black
dress, silent, and with deep-set glinting eyes hostile and suspicious
stirring a memory of other eyes gazing out like this upon the world, of
peasant women at cottage doors in German villages, peering out with evil
eyes, but from worn and kindly faces. There was nothing kindly about
this woman, and her commonness was almost startling, dreary and meagre
and seeming to be of the spirit.
She blamed for the unmitigated impression the fatigue she was silently
pleading whilst she searched for the mislaid German phrases in which to
explain that she had chosen the cheaper room. She found only the woman’s
name: Knigge. This was Frau Knigge, at once seeming more human, and
obviously waiting for her to speak.
Suddenly, and still unbending from her rigid pose, she made statements
in slow rasping English and a flat voice, that came unwillingly and told
of vanished interest in life. Life, as she spoke, looked terrible that
could make a being so crafty and so cold, that could show to anyone on
earth as it showed to this woman.
Admitting her identity, seeing herself as she was being seen, Miriam
begged for her room, hurrying through her words to hide the thoughts
that still they seemed to reveal, and that were changing, as she heard
the sound of her own voice, dreadfully, not to consideration for one
whose lot had perhaps been too hard to bear, but to a sudden resentment
of parleying, in her character as Roman citizen, with this peasant whose
remoteness of being was so embarrassing her.
The woman’s face lit up with an answering resentment and a mocking
contempt for her fluent German. Too late she realised that Roman
citizens do not speak German. But the details were settled, the
interview was at an end, and the woman’s annoyance due perhaps only to
the choice of the cheaper room. When she turned to shout instructions to
the maid she became humanity, in movement, moving in twilight that for
her too was going on its way towards the light of to-morrow.
When the door was at last blessedly closed upon the narrow room whose
first statements miscarried, lost in the discovery that even up here
there was no change in the baked dry air, she made for the cool light of
the end window but found in its neighbourhood not only no lessening but
an increase of the oppressive warmth.
The window was a door giving on to a little balcony whose wooden paling
hid the floor of the valley and the bases of the great mountains across
the way. The mountains were now bleak white, patched and streaked with
black, and as she stood still gazing at them set there arrested and
motionless and holding before her eyes an unthinkable grey bitterness of
cold, she found a new quality in her fast closed windows and the
exaggerated warmth. Though still oppressive they were triumphant also,
speaking a knowledge and a defiance of the uttermost possibilities of
cold.
Cold was banished, by day and by night. For a fortnight taken from the
rawest depths of the London winter there would be no waste of life in
mere endurance.
She discovered the source of the stable warmth in an unsightly row of
pipes at the side of the large window, bent over like hairpins and
scorching to the touch. The concentrated heat revived her weary nerves.
At the end of the coil there was a regulator. Turning it she found the
heat of the pipes diminish and hurriedly reversed the movement and
glanced out at the frozen world and loved the staunch metallic warmth
and the flavour of timber added to it in this room whose walls and
furniture were all of naked wood.
Turning to it in greeting she found it seem less small. It was small but
made spacious by light. Light came from a second window that was now
calling—a small square beside the bed with the high astonishing smooth
billow of covering oddly encased in thin sprigged cotton—offering
mountains not yet seen.
The way to it was endless across the short room from whose four quarters
there streamed, as she moved, a joy so deep that she brought up opposite
the window as if on another day of life and glanced out carelessly at a
distant group of pinnacles darkening in a twilight that was not grey but
lit wanly in its fading, by snow.
The little servant came in with the promised tea and made, as she set it
upon the little table with the red and white check cover of remembered
German cafés, bent over it in her short-skirted check dress and squab of
sleek flaxen hair, a picture altogether German. She answered questions
gravely, responsibility speaking even in the smile that shone from her
plump toil-sheened young face, telling the story of how she and her
like, permanently toiling, were the price of happiness for visitors. But
this she did not know. She was happy. Liked being busy and smiling and
being smiled at and shutting the door very carefully.
Some movement of hers had set swinging an electric bulb hanging by a
cord above the little table. Over the head of the bed there was another.
Light and warmth in profusion—in a cheap room in a modest hotel.
Switching on the light that concentrated on the table and its loaded
little tray and transformed the room to a sitting-room, “I’m in
Switzerland,” she said aloud to the flowered earthenware and bright
nickel, and sat down to revel in freedom and renewal and at once got up
again realising that hurry had gone from her days and flung off her
blouse and found hot water set waiting on the washstand and was
presently at the table in négligé and again ecstatically telling it her
news.
The familiar sound of tea pouring into a cup heightened the surrounding
strangeness. In the stillness of the room it was like a voice announcing
her installation, and immediately from downstairs there came as if in
answer the sound of a piano, crisply and gently touched, seeming not so
much to break the stillness as to reveal what lay within it.
She set down her teapot and listened and for a moment could have
believed that the theme was playing itself only in her mind, that it had
come back to her because once again she was within the strange happiness
of being abroad. Through all the years she had tried in vain to recall
it, and now it came, to welcome her, piling joy on joy, setting its seal
upon the days ahead and taking her back to her Germany where life had
been lived to music that had flowed over its miseries and made its
happinesses hardly to be borne.
For an instant she was back in it, passing swiftly from scene to scene
of the months in Waldstrasse and coming to rest in a summer’s evening:
warm light upon the garden, twilight in the saal. Leaving it she turned
to the other scenes, freshly revived, faithfully fulfilling their
remembered promise to endure in her forever, but each one as she paused
in it changed to the summer’s evening she had watched from the darkening
saal, the light upon the little high-walled garden, making space and
distance with the different ways it fell on trees and grass and
clustering shrubs, falling full on the hushed group of girls turned
towards it with Fräulein Pfaff in their midst disarmed to equality by
the surrounding beauty, making a little darkness in the summer-house
where Solomon shone in her white dress. And going back to it now it
seemed as though some part of her must have lived continuously there so
that she was everywhere at once, in saal and garden and summer-house and
out, beyond the enclosing walls, in the light along the spacious
forbidden streets.
She relived the first moment of knowing gladly and without feeling of
disloyalty how far a Sommerabend outdoes a summer’s evening, how the
evening beauty was intensified by the deeps of poetry in the Germans all
about her, and remembered her fear lest one of the English should sound
an English voice and break the spell. And how presently Clara Bergmann,
unasked, had retreated into the shadowy saal and played this ballade and
in just this way, the way of slipping it into the stillness.
“_Man soll sich des Lebens freuen, im Berg und Thal. In so was kann sich
ein’ Engländerin nie hineinleben._”
Perhaps not, but in that small group of English there had been two who
would in spite of homesickness have given anything just to go on, on any
terms, existing in Germany.
It is their joy; the joyful rich depth of life in them.
And this ballade was joy. Eternal Sommerabend; and now to-morrow’s Swiss
sunlight. Someone there was downstairs to whom it was a known and
cherished thing, who was perhaps wise about it, wise in music and able
to place it in relation to other compositions.
Its charm she now saw, coming to it afresh and with a deepened
recognition, lay partly in the way it opened: not beginning, but
continuing something gone before. It was a shape of tones caught from a
pattern woven continuously and drawn, with its rhythm ready set,
gleaming into sight. The way of the best nocturnes. But with nothing of
their pensiveness. It danced in the sky and tiptoed back to earth down
the group of little chords that filled the pause, again sprang forth and
up and came wreathing down to touch deep lower tones who flung it to and
fro. Up again until once more upon down-stepping chords it came into the
rhythm of its dance.
It was being played from memory, imperfectly, by someone who had the
whole clear within him and in slowing up for the complicated passages
never stumbled or lost the rhythm or ceased to listen. Someone choosing
just this fragment of all the music in the world to express his state:
joy in being up here in snow and sunlight.
* * * * *
When the gown was on, the creasing was more evident; all but the
enlivening strange harmony of embroidered blues and greens and mauves
was a criss-cross of sharp lines and shadows.
For the second time the long loud buzzing of the downstairs bell
vibrated its summons through the house.
Standing once more before the little mirror that reflected only her head
and shoulders she recreated the gown in its perfection of cut, the soft
depths of its material that hung and took the light so beautifully.
“Your first Switzerland must be good. I want your first Switzerland to
be good.” And then, in place of illuminating hints, that little diagram
on the table: of life as a zig-zag. Saddening. Perhaps he was right.
Then, since the beginning had been so good, all a sharp zig, what now
waited downstairs, heralded by the creased dress, was a zag, equally
sharp.
The dining-room, low ceiled and oblong, was large and seemed almost
empty. Small tables set away towards a window on the right and only one
of them occupied, left clear the large space of floor between the door
at which she had come in and a table, filling the length of the far side
of the room where beside a gap in the row of diners a servant stood
turned towards her with outstretched indicating hand.
No one but the servant had noticed her entry. Voices were sounding,
smooth easy tones leaving the air composed, as she slipped into her
place in a light that beside the unscreened glare upstairs was mellow,
subdued by shades. The voices were a man’s across the way—light and
kindly, ’Varsity, the smiling tone of one who is amiable even in
disagreement—and that of the woman on her left, a subdued deep bass.
Other voices dropped in, as suave and easy, and clipping and slurring
their words in the same way; but rather less poised.
The tone of these people was balm. Sitting with eyes cast down aware
only of the subdued golden light, she recalled her fleeting glimpse of
them as she had crossed the room, English in daily evening dress, and
was carried back to the little world of Newlands where first she had
daily shared the evening festival of diners dressed and suave about a
table free of dishes, set with flowers and elegancies beneath a clear
and softly shaded light: the world she had sworn never to leave. She
remembered a summer morning, the brightness of the light over her
breakfast tray and its unopened letters and her vow to remain always
surrounded by beauty, always with flowers and fine fabrics, and space
and a fresh clean air always close about her, playing their part that
was so powerful.
And this little wooden Swiss hotel with its baked air and philistine
fittings was to provide thrown in with Switzerland, more than a
continuation of Newlands—Newlands seen afresh with experienced eyes.
The clipped, slurred words had no longer the charm of a foreign tongue.
Though still they rang upon the air the preoccupations of the man at the
wheel: the sound of “The Services” adapted. But clustered in this small
space they seemed to be bringing with them another account of their
origin, to be showing how they might come about of themselves and vary
from group to group, from person to person—with one aim: to avoid
disturbing the repose of the features. Expression might be animated or
inanimate, but features must remain undisturbed.
Then there is no place for clearly enunciated speech apart from oratory;
platform and pulpit. Anywhere else it is bad form. Bad fawm.
She felt she knew now why perfect speech, delightful in itself, always
seemed insincere. Why women with clear musical voices undulating, and
clean enunciation, are always cats; and the corresponding men,
ingratiating and charming at first, turn out sooner or later to be
charlatans.
The nicest people have bad handwriting and bad delivery.
But all this applied only to English, to Germanics; that was a queer
exciting thing, that only these languages had the quality of aggressive
disturbance of the speaking face: chin-jerking vowels and aspirates,
throat-swelling gutturals ... force and strength and richness, qualities
innumerable and more various than in any other language.
Quelling an impulse to gaze at the speakers lit by discovery, she gazed
instead at imagined faces, representative Englishmen, with eyes and
brows serene above rapid slipshod speech.
Here too of course was the explanation of the other spontaneous forms of
garbling, the extraordinary pulpit speech of self-conscious and
incompletely believing parsons, and the mincing speech of the genteel.
It explained “nace.” Nice, correctly spoken, is a convulsion of the
lower face—like a dog snapping at a gnat.
She had a sudden vision of the English aspirate, all over the world,
puff-puff-puffing like a steam-engine, and was wondering whether it were
a waste or a source of energy, when she became acutely aware of being
for those about her a fresh item in their grouping.
It was a burden too heavy to be borne. The good Swiss soup had turned
her bright fever of fatigue to a drowsiness that made every effort to
sit decently upright end in a renewed abject drooping that if only she
were alone could be the happy drooping of convalescence from the
journey.
Their talk had gone on. It was certain that always they would talk.
Archipelagoes of talk, avoiding anything that could endanger continuous
urbanity.
In the midst of a stifled yawn the call to a fortnight’s continuous
urbanity fell upon her like a whip. Dodging the blow she lolled
resistant to the sound of bland voices. An onlooker, appreciative but
resistant; that, socially, would be the story of her stay. A docile
excursion, even if they should offer it, into this select little world,
would come between her and her Switzerland. Refusal clamoured within her
and it was only as an after-thought that she realised the impossibility
of remaining for a fortnight without opinions.
The next moment, hearing again the interwoven voices as a far-off unison
of people sailing secure on smooth accustomed waters, she was bleakly
lonely; suppliant. Nothing showed ahead but a return with her fatigue to
sustain the silence and emptiness of a strange room. She was turning to
glance at the woman on her left when the deep bass voice asked her
casually if she had had a good journey. Casual cameraderie, as if
already they had been talking and were now hiding an established
relationship under conventionalities.
The moment she had answered she heard the university voice across the
way remark, in the tone of one exchanging notes with a friend after a
day’s absence, that it was a vile journey, but all right from Berne
onwards, and looked up. There he was, almost opposite, Cambridge, and
either history or classics, the pleasant radiance of _lit. hum._ all
about him, and turned her way bent a little, as if bowing, and as if
waiting for her acknowledgment—with his smile, apology introduction and
greeting beaming together from sea-blue eyes set only ever so little too
closely together in a neatly tanned narrowly oval face—before regaining
the upright.
Her soft reply, lost in other sounds, made a long moment during which,
undisturbed by not hearing, he held his attitude of listening that told
her he was glad of her presence.
The close-set eyes meant neither weakness nor deceit. Sectarian eyes,
emancipated. But his strength was borrowed. His mental strength was not
original. An uninteresting mind; also he was a little selfish, with the
selfishness of the bachelor of thirty—but charming.
The party was smaller than she had thought. The odd way they were all
drawn up at one end of the table made them look numerous. Spread out in
the English way they would have made a solemn dinner-party, with large
cold gaps.
Someone asked whether she had come right through and in a moment they
were all amiably wrangling over the pros and cons of breaking the
journey.
Staring from across the table was a man alone, big oblong foreigner
dwarfing his neighbours, and piteous, not to be looked at as the others
could who fitted the scene; not so much sitting at table with the rest
as set there filling a space. His eyes had turned towards a nasal voice
suddenly prevailing; sombre brown, wistfully sulking below eyebrows
lifted in a wide forehead that stopped unexpectedly soon at a straight
fence of hair. Oblong beard reaching the top of stiff brown coat.
Russian, probably the Chopin player.
“Anyone’s a fool who passes Parrus without stopping off at least a few
hours.”
A small man at the end of the row, opaque blue eyes in a peaky face,
little peaked beard, neat close-fitting dress clothes. Incongruous
far-travelled guest of little Switzerland.
He was next the window, with the nice man on his right. Then came the
big Russian exactly opposite and again naïvely staring across, and
beyond him a tall lady in a home-made silk blouse united by a fichu to
the beginning of a dark skirt; coronet of soft, coiled white hair above
a firmly padded face with polished skin, pink-flushed, glimmering into
the talk, that was now a debate about to-morrow’s chances, into which
sounded women’s voices from the table behind, smooth and clear, but
clipped, free-masonish like the others. To the right of the coronetted
lady an iron-grey man, her husband, gaunt and worn, with peevishly
suffering eyes set towards the door on the far side of the room.
Fastidious eyes, full of knowledge, turned away. He was the last in the
row and beyond him the table stretched away to the end wall through
whose door the servants came and went. His opponents were out of sight
beyond the bass-voiced woman on the left, whose effect was so strangely
large and small: a face horse-like and delicate, and below her length of
face increased by the pyramid of hair above her pointed fringe, a
meeting of old lace and good jewellery.
To her own right the firm insensitive hand, that wore a signet ring and
made pellets of its bread, belonged to just the man she had imagined,
dark and liverish, but with an unexpectedly flattened profile whose
moustache, dropping to sharp points, gave it an expression faintly
Chinese; a man domestic but accustomed to expand in unrestricted
statement, impatiently in leash to the surrounding equality of exchange.
Beyond him his wife, sitting rather eagerly forward, fair and plump,
with features grown expressionless in their long service of holding back
her thoughts, but, betraying their secret in a brow, creased faintly by
straining upwards as if in perpetual incredulity of an ever-present
spectacle, and become now the open page of the story the mouth and eyes
were not allowed to tell.
At her side a further figure and beyond it the head of the table
unoccupied, leaving the party to be its own host.
The atmosphere incommoding the husband, who at a second glance seemed to
call even pathetically for articulate opposition, was that of a
successful house-party, its tone set by the only two in sight who were
through and through of the authentic brand: the deep-voiced woman and
the nice man. The invalid and his wife belonged to that inner circle.
But they were a little shadowed by his malady.
It was an atmosphere in which the American and the Russian were ill at
ease, one an impatient watchfulness for simpler, more lively behaviour
and the other a bored detachment, heavily anchored, not so much by
thoughts as by hard clear images left by things seen according to the
current formula of whatever group of the European intelligentsia he
belonged to.
He was speaking softly through the general conversation to the nice man,
with slight deprecating gestures of eyebrows and shoulders, in his eyes
a qualified gratitude. The nice man spoke carefully with head turned and
bent, seeking his words. French, with English intonation. All these
people, however fluently, would talk like that. All of them came from a
world that counted mastery of a foreign tongue both wonderful and
admirable—but ever so little _infra dig_.
* * * * *
“Won’t you come in heah for a bit?”
Drugged as she felt with weariness she turned joyfully into a room
opening in the background of the hall whence the deep bass voice had
sounded as she passed. A tiny salon, ugly; maroon and buff in a thick
light. Plush sofa, plush cover on the round table in the centre, stiff
buff-seated “drawing-room” chairs; a piano. It was from this dismal
little room the Chopin had sounded out into the twilight.
There she was, alone, standing very thin and tall in a good, rather
drearily elderly black dress beside a cheerless radiator, one elbow
resting on its rim and a slender foot held towards it from beneath the
hem of a slightly hitched skirt: an Englishwoman at a fireside.
“My name’s Harcourt, M’zz Harcourt,” she said at once.
Books were set star-wise in small graded piles about the centre of the
table, the uppermost carrying upon their covers scrolls and garlands of
untarnished gilt. The one she opened revealed short-lined poems set
within yet more garlands, appealing; leaves and buds and birds lively
and sweet about the jingling verse. Swiss joy in deep quiet valleys
guarded by sunlit mountains. Joy of people living in beauty all their
lives; enclosed. Yet making rooms like this.
But it held the woman at the radiator, knowing England and her sea, and
whose smile looking up she met, watching, indulgent of her détour and,
as too eagerly she moved forward, indulgent also of that. Here, if she
would, was a friend, and, although middle-aged, a contemporary
self-confessed by a note in her voice of impatience over waste of time
in preliminaries.
But Mrs. Harcourt did not know how nimbly she could move, might think it
strange when presently her voice must betray that she was already
rejoicing—defying the note of warning that sounded far away within
her—in a well-known presence, singing recklessly to it the song of new
joy and life begun anew that all the way from England had been gathering
within her.
The announcement of her own name made the woman again a stranger, so
much was she a stranger to the life belonging to the name, and brought
into sudden prominence the state of her gown, exposed now in its full
length. She recounted the tragedy and saw Mrs. Harcourt’s smile change
to real concern.
Here they were, alone together, seeming to have leapt rather than passed
through the early stages.
Like love, but unobstructed. A balance of side-by-side, not of
opposition. More open than love, yet as hidden and wonderful; rising
from the same depth.
“Hold it in front of the waydiator. Vat’ll take ’em out a bit. Such a
poo’hy gown.” She moved a little back from the row of pipes.
Going close to the radiator Miriam moved into a fathomless gentleness.
But it was also a demand, so powerful that it was drawing all her being
to a point. All that she had brought with her into the room would be
absorbed and scattered, leaving her robbed of things not yet fully her
own.
The warning voice within was crying aloud now, urging her not only to
escape before the treasures of arrival and of strangeness were lost
beyond recovery, but to save also the past, disappeared round the corner
yet not out of sight but drawn closely together in the distance, a
swiftly moving adventure, lit from point to point by the light in which
to-day she had bathed forgetful.
Even a little talk, a little answering of questions, would falsify the
past. Set in her own and in this woman’s mind in a mould of verbal
summarisings it would hamper and stain the brightness of to-morrow.
She found herself hardening, seeking generalisations that would cool and
alienate, and was besieged by memories of women whom she had thus
escaped. And of their swift revenge. But this woman was not of those who
avenge themselves.
Hesitating before the sound of her own voice, or the other which would
sound if this second’s silence were prolonged, she was seized by revolt:
the determination at all costs to avoid hearing in advance, in idle
words above the ceaseless intercourse of their spirits, about Oberland;
even from one whose seeing might leave her own untouched.
To open the way for flight she remarked that it must be late.
“About nine. You’re dead beat, I can see. Ought to go to bed.”
“Not for worlds,” said Miriam involuntarily.
Mrs. Harcourt’s face, immediately alight for speech, expressed as she
once more took possession of the radiator and looked down at it as into
a fire, willingness to stand indefinitely by.
“Everyone’s gone to bed. Bein’ out all day in vis air makes you sleepy
at night.”
Remembering that of course she would speak without gaps, Miriam glanced
at the possibility of pulling herself together for conversation.
“I been pottering. My ski are at Zurbuchen’s bein’ repaired.”
“But what a _perfect_ Swiss name. Like oak, like well-baked bread.”
To get away now. Sufficient impression of the Alpenstock people
perpetually strenuous, living for sport, and, redeeming its angularity,
the rich Swiss background: Zurbuchen. But Mrs. Harcourt’s glance of
surprised delight—there was amusement too, she didn’t think Swiss names
worth considering—meant that she was entertained, anticipating further
entertainment; to which she would not contribute.
“No. I’m supposed to sit about and rest. Overwork.”
“You won’t. Lots of people come out like vat. You’ll soon find resting a
baw out heah.”
“Should like a little sleep. I’ve had none for two nights.”
“Stop in bed to-morrow. Have your meals up.”
“Mm....”
For a moment Mrs. Harcourt waited, silent, not making the movement of
departure that would presently bring down the shadow of returning
loneliness her words had drawn so near; keeping her leaning pose, her
air of being indefinitely available.
The deep bell of her voice dropped from its soft single note to a murmur
rising and falling, a low narrative tone, hurrying.
Through the sound still coming and going in her mind of the name Mrs.
Harcourt had so casually spoken, bringing with it the sunlit mountains
and the outer air waiting in to-morrow, Miriam heard that the people at
the Alpenstock were all right—with the exception of the two sitting at
dinner on Mrs. Harcourt’s left, “outsiders” of a kind now appearing in
Oberland for the first time. Saddened by their exclusion, embarrassed by
unconscious flattery, Miriam impulsively asked their name and glowed
with a sudden vision of Mrs. Corrie, of how she would have embraced this
opportunity for wicked mondaine wit. Mrs. Harcourt, for a moment
obediently reflecting, said she had forgotten it but that it was
somefing raver fwightful. Everyone else, introduced by name, received a
few words of commendation—excepting the Russian and the American. The
Russian would be just a foreigner, an unfortunate, but the American
surely must be an outsider? Insincerely, as if in agreement with this
division of humanity by exclusion, she put in a question, and while Mrs.
Harcourt pulled up her discourse to say, as if sufficiently, that he was
staying only a couple of days and passed on to summon other hotels to
the tribunal, she was glad that the Russian had been left untouched.
Harry Vereker, fine, a first-class sportsman and altogether nice chap,
was already lessened, domesticated, general property in his niceness;
but the Russian remained, wistfully alone: attractive.
“.... hidjus big hotel only just built; all glass and glare. It’ll be
the ruin of Oberland. No one’ll come here next year.”
Though still immersed in her theme Mrs. Harcourt was aware, when next
she glanced to punctuate a statement, if not exactly that instead of the
object she offered it was herself and her glance that was being seen—the
curious steeliness of its indignation—at least of divided attention, a
sudden breach in their collaboration; and immediately she came to the
surface, passing without pause to her full bell note, with an enquiry.
Hoping to please. But why hoping to please?
This abrupt stowing away of her chosen material might be a simple
following of the rules of her world; it suggested also the humouring of
a patient by a watchful nurse, and since she had the advantage of not
being in the depths of fatigue this perhaps was its explanation; but
much more clearly it spoke her years of marriage, of dealing with
masculine selfishness. And she was so swift, so repentant of her long,
enjoyable excursion, that it was clear she had suffered masculine
selfishness gladly. Neither understanding nor condemning. It had not
damaged her love and she had suffered bitterly when it was removed.
Suffering was pleading now in her eyes off their guard in this
to-and-fro of remarks that was a little shocking: the reverberation of a
disaster.
Now that it was clear that her charming behaviour from the first might
be explained by the attraction there was for her in a mannish mental
hardness, that she sought in its callousness both something it could
never give, as well as entertainment, and rest from perpetual feeling,
she ceased to be interesting. She herself made it so clear that she had
nothing to give. Offering her best help, what in the way of her world
would be most useful to one newly arrived, she was yet suppliant; and
afraid of failure, haunted by the fear of a failure she did not
understand and that was perhaps uniform in her experience.
Miriam found her own voice growing heavy with the embarrassment of her
discoveries and her longing to break this so eagerly woven entanglement.
Trying again for cooling generalities she had the sense of pouring words
into a void. The gentle presence hovered there, played its part,
followed, answered, but without sharing the effort to swim into the
refreshing tide of impersonality; without seeing the independent light
on the scraps of reality she was being offered. No wonder perhaps: they
were a little breathless. She was scenting apology and retreat. And did
not know that it was retreat not at all from herself, but from her
terrible alacrity and transparence: the way the whole of her was at once
visible. All her thoughts, her way of thinking in words, in set phrases
gathered from too enclosed an experience. Enclosed. To be with her was
enclosure. The earlier feeling of being encompassed that was so welcome
because it was so womanly, so exactly what a man needs in its character
of kindly confessor and giver of absolution in advance, had lost value
before the discovery of this absence of vistas, this frightful sense of
being shut in with assumptions about life that admit of no question and
no modification.
Again the dead husband intruded; his years of life at this woman’s side,
his first adoration of her, and then his weariness, fury of weariness
whose beginnings she felt herself already tasting, so that for sheer
pity she was kept in her place, effusive, unable to go.
But at the moment of parting Mrs. Harcourt became again that one who had
waited, impatient of wasting time in formalities. Her smile glanced out
from the past, revealing the light upon her earlier days. It was a
greeting for to-morrow rather than a good-night.
Going up to the little bedroom that was now merely a refuge off-stage,
she found it brightly lit in readiness for her coming, summery bright
all over, the light curtains drawn and joining with the unvarnished wood
to make an enclosure that seemed to emulate the brightness of the Swiss
daylight. The extravagant illumination, the absence of glooms and
shadows, recalled the outdoor scene and something of this afternoon’s
bliss of arrival and the joy that had followed it, when music sounded up
through the house, of home-coming from long exile. Switzerland waited
outside—enriched by her successful début—with its promise that could not
fail. Meanwhile there was the unfamiliar enchantment of moving
comfortably in a warm bedroom, not having the wealth one brought
upstairs instantly dispersed by the attack of cold and gloom. The
temperature was lower than before, pleasant, no longer oppressive; and
more hospitable than a fire whose glow was saddened by the certainty
that in the morning it would be an ashy desolation.
The moment the basket chair received her the downstairs world was about
her again; circling, clamorous with the incidents of her passage from
lonely exposure to the shelter of Mrs. Harcourt’s so swiftly offered
wing, from beneath which, with its owner assured of the hardness of what
it sheltered, she could move freely forth in any direction.
The two Le Mesras—that was her pronunciation of Le Mesurier?—Three
Chators. Mrs. Sneyde and Maud Something at the little table behind ...
Hollebone. Maud Hollebone. The American, leaving. Interest hesitated
between Harry Vereker already a little diminished, and the Russian: the
reincarnated, attractive, ultimately unsatisfactory Tansley Street
foreigner?
Someone was tapping at the door. She opened it upon Mrs. Harcourt
offering a small tray, transformed to motherliness by a voluminous
dressing-gown.
When she had gone she vanished utterly. There she was, actually in the
next room, yet utterly forgettable. And yet she threw across the days
ahead a strange deep light.
The steaming chocolate and the little English biscuits disappeared too
quickly, leaving hunger.
The French window was made fast by a right-angle hand-piece, very stiff,
that gave suddenly with a dreadfully audible clang. The door creaked
open. Racing the advancing air she was beneath the downy billow before
it reached her. It took her fevered face with its batallions of needles,
stole up her nostrils to her brain, bore her down into the uttermost
depths of sleep.