Still talking, Mr. Bowdoin went up the rubbish-strewn steps and opened
the dusty blistered door with his latchkey. Miriam followed him into a
dark bare passage and down carpetless stairs into a large chilly twilit
basement room. Nothing was visible but a long kitchen table lit by a low
barred window at the far end of the room. I will light a lamp for you in
a moment he murmured in his formal cockney monotone; my friends will be
arriving soon and before they come I should like to show you my
sketches. Miriam sat down silently. The feeling of the neighbourhood was
in the room. A heavy blankness lay over everything. She felt nowhere. It
had been difficult to take part in conversation walking along the
Farringdon Road. It was strange enough to know that anyone lived in a
road almost in the city; and paying a visit there was like stepping out
of the world.
With his slow even speech Mr. Bowdoin rebuked her here even more
strongly for her outbreak of excited talk and loud laughter about
Devonshire. He had not felt that they were walking along, outside
London, in blank space, free, and exactly alike in their thoughts. He
had not had that moment when they turned into the strange dead road
_east_ of Bloomsbury, nowhere, and he had seemed like herself at her
side and he ought to have laughed and laughed. His sudden searching
look, are you mad or intoxicated, with your sudden Billingsgate manners,
had said that Farringdon Road was in the world and that he intended to
conduct himself in the usual manner of a gentleman escorting a lady. As
he lit a little lamp on the corner of the table she glanced at the back
of his hair and imagined him sitting at a typewriter with it in
curl-papers, and determined to be at ease. What a jolly room she
exclaimed with strained animation as the lamplight wavered up and then
sat looking at her hands. It would be cruel to look about the room. She
had seen kitchen chairs standing sparsely about in the spaces unoccupied
by the table, a cottage piano standing at right angles with the low
window and one picture over the piano. There was nothing else in the
room. The floor was covered with strips of coarse worn oil-cloth and
there was nothing above the empty mantelpiece. It is quite bohemian
said Mr. Bowdoin lighting the piano candles. Let me take your cloak.
Miriam slipped off her golf-cape and he disappeared between curtains at
the end of the room opposite the window.
This was Bohemia! She glanced about. It was the explanation of the room.
But it was impossible to imagine Trilby's milk-call sounding at the
door.... It was Bohemia; the table and chairs were _bohemian_. Perhaps
a big room like this would be even cheaper than a garret in St. Pancras.
The neighbourhood did not matter. A bohemian room could hold its own
anywhere. No furniture but chairs and a table, saying when you brought
people in I am a Bohemian and having no one but Bohemians for friends.
There must be a special way of behaving in English Bohemia. Perhaps when
the friends came she would find it out. I have the sketches in a drawer
here said Mr. Bowdoin coming back through the curtains and turning up an
end of the table-cloth.... Ah! C'est le pied de Trilby. Wee. D'après
nature? Nong. De mémoire, alors? ... où rien ne troublera, Trilby, qui
dorrr-mira, thought Miriam. She took the little water-colour sketches
one by one and listened carefully to Mr. Bowdoin's descriptions of the
subjects, trying to think of something to say. It was wonderful that he
should take so much trouble on a holiday. The words in his descriptions
brought Devonshire scenes alive into her mind, and she could imagine how
he felt as he looked at them ... _plats d'épinards_ ... it was
like the difference between the French and English Bohemia. But the true
thing in it was that he had wanted to do them. That gave him his right
to call himself a Bohemian. He would have tried to write if he wanted to
and have gone to live in a garret in Fleet Street. Why don't you put
them about the room she asked insincerely. It was false and cruel; a
criticism of the room which was beginning to show its real character;
not interfering; plain and clear for things to happen and shine out in
it in their full strength. And it was a flattery of the pictures which
were nothing. Well, they're just beginnings. Hardly worthy of
exhibition. I hope to attain to something better in the future. Where
did he find all his calm words and self-confidence. Perhaps it was the
result of having a room to invite friends to and talk about things in.
But how could anybody do anything with people coming and going,
confusing everything by perpetually _saying_ things? She stared
obediently at sketch after sketch until her eyes ached. It was going on
too long. Her strength was ebbing out and the evening was still to come.
He liked showing his sketches and thought she was entertained. Even in
Bohemia people thought it was necessary to always be doing some definite
thing. There was a knocking at the front door upstairs. Mr. Bowdoin went
quickly up and came down with a tall lady. He introduced her and she
bowed and at once took off her outdoor things. While he was putting them
away behind the curtains she sat briskly down on a chair at the far end
of the room in a line with Miriam and arranged her hair and her dress
with easy unconcerned movements. She did not look in the least bohemian.
She sat drawn up in her chair very tall and thin in a clumsy dress with
a high stiff collarband. Her head and hair above her thin dingy neck
were--common. Undoubtedly. She looked like a post-office young lady. She
was quite old, twenty-seven or twenty-eight. While the other people came
in she sat very still and self-possessed, as if nothing were happening.
Was that dignity? Not attempting to hide your peculiarities and defects,
but just keeping perfectly still and calm whatever happened? There were
two men and another woman. They stood about in the gloom near the door
while Mr. Bowdoin carried away their things and came back and murmured
Miss Rogers and Miss Henderson, and then sat down in a row on the
kitchen chairs in line near the piano. Their faces were above the reach
of the lamplight. Their bodies had the subdued manner of the less
important sitters in a parish church. Mr. Bowdoin was putting the little
lamp on the top of the piano. The light ran up the wall. The picture was
a large portrait of Paderewski. It was amongst Miriam's records of
Queen's Hall posters, coming and going amongst other posters of
musicians, passed by with a hurried glance, soon obliterated by the
oncoming of the blazing flower-baskets as she hurried down Langham Place
sore with her effort to forget the reminders of music beyond her reach.
Looking at it now she felt as if all she had missed were suddenly
brought to her; her sense of thwarting and loss was swept away. She sat
up relieved, bathed in sunshine. The room was full of life and warmth
and golden light. She eagerly searched the features until Mr. Bowdoin
took the lamp off the piano and sat down murmuring I will give you a
sonata of Bytoven. The outline of the face shone down through the gloom.
She could recall each feature in perfect distinctness. All the soft
weakness of the musical temperament was there, the thing that made
people call musicians a soft weak lot. But there was something else;
perhaps it was in all musicians who were such great executors as to be
almost composers. The curious conscious half-pleading sensitive weakness
of the mouth and chin were dreadful; a sort of nakedness as if a whole
weak nature were escaping there for everyone to see; and then suddenly
reined in; held in and back by the pose of the reined-in head. The great
aureole of fluffy hair was shaped and held in shape by the same power.
The whole head, soft and weak in all its details, was resolute and
strong.... If the face were raised to look outwards it would be weak,
pained and suffering and almost querulously sorrowful; but in its own
right pose it was happy and strong. The pose of the head gave it its
grip on the features and the hair and made _beauty_. The pose of
_listening_. The eyes saw nothing. The reined-in face was listening,
intently, from a burning bush.... There was some reason not yet
understood why musicians and artists wore long hair.
The long sonata came to an end while Miriam was still revolving amongst
her thoughts. When Mr. Bowdoin sat back from the piano she returned to
the point where she had begun and determined to stop her halting
circular progress from group to group of interesting reflections and to
listen to the next thing he might play. She was aware he was playing on
his own piano better than he had done at Tansley Street but also more
carefully and less self-forgetfully. Perhaps that was why she had not
listened. She could not remember ever before having thoughts, about
definite things while music was going on, and felt afraid lest she was
ceasing to care for music. She found it would be quite easy to speak
coolly, with an assumption of great appreciation and ask him to play
some definite thing. Just as she was about to break into the silence
with a remark, one of the big curtains was suddenly drawn aside by a
little old lady bearing a tray of steaming cups. She stood just inside
the curtains, her delicate white-haired lace-capped head bowing from
side to side of the room graciously, a gentle keen smile on her
delicately shrivelled face. My mother, murmured Mr. Bowdoin as he went
down the room for the tray. Slender and short as he was, she was
invisible behind him as he bent for the tray and when he turned with it
to the room she had disappeared. Miriam gazed at the dark curtains
hoping for her return and dreading it. Nothing suitable to an
enthusiastic bohemian evening could be said in a courtly manner.... She
accepted a cup of coffee without a word as if Mr. Bowdoin had been a
waiter, and sat flaring over it. She felt as if nothing could be said
until there had been some reference to the vision. She hoped everyone
had bowed and remembered with shame that she had only stared. Everyone
seemed to be stirring; but the beginnings of speech went forward as if
the little old lady had never appeared. Mr. Bowdoin had sat down with
the men on the other side of the room and the woman had crossed over to
a chair near Miss Rogers and was in eager conversation with her. Miss
Rogers has only lately joined musical circles she heard Mr. Bowdoin say
in an affectionate indulgent tone. That accounted for the way she
deferred to him and sat in a sort of complacent exclusive rapture,
keeping her manner unchanged before the onslaught of the eagerly talking
woman. The woman was in the circle and did not seem to think it strange
that Miss Rogers should be a candidate. She was talking about some
orchestra somewhere ... of something she wanted to play, _he_
conducting, she finished in a tone of worship. Her voice was refined and
she talked easily, but she also had the common uneducated look ... and
she was talking about Camberwell. Mr. Bowdoin was a conductor of an
orchestra. Those people played in orchestras, or wanted to. The three
men were talking in eager happy sentences and laughing happily and not
noisily. There was something here that was lacking in Miss Szigmondy's
prosperous musical people, something that kept them apart from the world
where they made their living.... They worked hard in two worlds ...
when Mr. Bowdoin was at the piano again they all sat easy and at home,
in easy attitudes, affectionately listening. The room seemed somehow
less dark and their forms much more visible and bigger. The empty white
coffee cups standing about on the table caught the light. Miriam's stood
alone at the end of the table. Mr. Bowdoin had taken it from her but
without entering into conversation and she was left with her prepared
remark about the piano and her plea for a performance of the Tannhäuser
overture going unsaid round and round in her mind. She sat ashamed
before the restrained impersonal enthusiasm that filled the room. Even
Miss Rogers was sitting less stiffly. Her own stiffness must make it
obvious that she was not in a musical circle. Musical circles had a
worldly savoir-faire of their own, the thing that was to be found
everywhere in the world. To be in one would mean having to talk like
that eager worshipping woman or to be calm and easily supercilious and
secret like Miss Rogers. Even here the men were apart from the women; to
join the men would be easy enough, to say exactly what one thought and
talk about all sorts of things and laugh. But the women would hate that
and one would have to be intimate with the women, and rave about music
and musicians. Mr. Bowdoin had probably thought she would talk to those
women. But after talking to them how could one listen to music? Their
very presence made it almost impossible. She was unable to lose herself
in the Wagner overture. It sounded out thinly into the room. Paderewski
was looking away to where there was nothing but music sounding in a
wooden room just inside an immense forest somewhere in Europe. She began
thinking secretly of the world waiting for her outside and felt that she
was affronting everyone in the room; treacherously and not visibly as
before. She had got away from them but they did not know it. Mr. Bowdoin
passed from the overture which was vociferously applauded and went on
and on till she ceased altogether to try to listen and he became a
stranger, sitting there playing seriously and laboriously alone at his
piano.... She wished he would play a waltz--and she suddenly blushed to
find herself sitting there at all....
They all seemed to get up to go at the same moment and when they drifted
out into the street seemed all to be going the same way. Miriam found
herself walking along the Farringdon Road between Mr. Bowdoin and the
shorter of the two other men, longing for solitude and to be free to
wander slowly along the new addition to her map of London at night. Even
with Bohemians evenings did not end when they ended, but led to the
forced companionship of walking home. The tall man and the two women
were marching along ahead at a tremendous pace and she was obliged to
hasten her steps to keep up with her companions' evident intention of
keeping them in view. Perhaps at the top of the road they would all
separate. We will escort Miss Henderson to her home and then I'll come
on with you to Highgate. To _High_gate--exclaimed Miriam almost
stopping. Are you going to walk to Highgate _to-night_? They both
laughed. Oh yes said Mr. Bowdoin that's nothing. _Highgate._ The mere
thought of its northern remoteness seemed to be an insult to London. No
wonder she had found herself a stranger with these people. Walking out
to Highgate at night and getting up as usual the next morning.
Magnificent strong hard thing to do. Horrible. Walking out to Highgate,
"talking all the time" ... they could never have a minute to realise
anything at all; rushing along saying things that covered everything and
never stopping to realise, talking _about_ people and things and never
being or knowing anything, and perpetually coming to the blank emptiness
of _Highgate_ ... their unconsciousness of everything made them the
right sort of people to have the trouble of living in Highgate. They
probably walked about with knapsacks on Sunday. But to them even the
real country could not be country. All 'circles' must be like that in
some way; doing things by agreement. The men talking confidently about
them, _completely_ ignorant of any sort of reality.... She came out of
her musings when they turned into the Euston Road and ironically watched
the men keeping up their talk across the continual breaking up of the
group by passing pedestrians. _You'll_ have to walk _back_ she
interrupted, suddenly turning to Mr. Bowdoin; the buses will have
stopped. I never ride in omnibuses frowned Mr. Bowdoin. I shall be back
by two.... Miriam waited a moment inside the door at Tansley Street
listening for silence. The evening fell away from her with the departing
footsteps of the two men. She opened the door upon the high quiet empty
blue-lit street and moved out into a tranquil immensity. It was
everywhere. Into her consciousness of the unpredictable incidents of
to-morrow's Wimpole Street day, over the sure excitement of Eve's
arrival in the evening flowed the light-footed leaping sense of a day
new begun, an inexhaustible blissfulness, everything melted away into
it. It seemed to smite her, calling for some spoken acknowledgment of
its presence, alive and real in the heart of the London darkness. It was
not her fault that Eve was not coming to stay at Tansley Street. It came
out of the way life arranged itself as long as you did not try to
interfere. Roaming along in the twilight she lost consciousness of
everything but the passage of dark silent buildings, the drawing away
under her feet of the varying flags of the pavement, the waxing and
waning along the pavement of the streams of lamplight, the distant
murmuring tide of sound passing through her from wide thoroughfares, the
gradual approach of a thoroughfare, the rising of the murmuring tide to
a happy symphony of recognisable noises, the sudden glare of yellow
shop-light under her feet, the wide black road, the joy of the need for
the understanding sweeping glance from right to left as she moved across
it, the sense of being swept across in an easy curve drawn by the kindly
calculable swing of the traffic, of being a permitted co-operating part
of the traffic, the coming of the friendly curb and the strip of yellow
pavement, carrying her on again into the lamplit greyness leading along
to Donizetti's.