CHAPTER III
Shewas inside the dark little hall, her luggage being set down in the shadows by the brisk silent maid. At the sight of the wide green staircase ascending to the upper world, the incidents of the journey, translated as she drove to the house into material for conversation, fell away and vanished.
The thud of the swing door, the flurry of summer skirts threshed by flying footsteps; Alma hurrying to meet her.... It was folly;madness; to flout the year’s fatigue by coming here to stay, instead of going away with friends also tired and seeking holiday....
With the first step on the yielding pile of the stair-carpet she forgot everything but the escape from noise and gloom and grime. She was going up for four endless weeks into the clean light streaming down from above. This time there should be no brisk beginning. She would act out Alma’s promise to accept her as an invalid deaf mute. There was so much time that fatigue was an asset, the shadow against which all this brightness shone out.
But Alma was not welcoming an invalid. There she stood, at the end of her rush, daintily jigging from foot to foot, in a delicate frilly little dress; heading the perspective of purewhite and green, surfaces and angles sharp in the east light coming through the long casement. She checked the bright perspective with the thought in her dress, the careful arrangement of her softly woven pile of bright hair, the afternoon’s excitement, from which she had rushed forth, shining through her always newly charming little pointed square face.
“Shall I labour up the rest of the stairs, or sit down here and burst into tears?”
“Oh, come up, dear ole fing,” she cried with tender irony; butirony. “Paw fing. Is itverytired?” But her gentle arms and hands were perfectly, wonderfully understanding; though her face withdrawn from her gentle kiss still mocked; always within the limpid brown eyes that belabouring, rallying, mocking spirit. She held her smile radiantly, against a long troubled stare, and then it broke into her abrupt gurgle of laughter.
“Comealong,” she cried and carried a guest at a run along the passage and through the swing door.
It was the downstairs spare room.... Miriam had expected the winding stair, the room upstairs, where all her shorter visits were stored up. She was to be down here at the centre of the house, just behind low casements, right on the garden, touched by the sound of the sea. And within the curtain-shaded sound-bathed green-lit space there was a deeper remoteness than even in the far high room, so weirdly shaped by the burning roof; itsorange light always full of a strange listening silence....
“Alma.Howperfectlyglorious.” She stood still, turned away, as Alma closed the door, contemplating the screened light falling everywhere on spaces of pure fresh colour, against which the deep tones of single objects shone brightly.
Alma neighed gently and with little gurgles of laughter put her hands about her and gently shook her. “Itisrather a duck of a room. Itisrather a duck of a room.” Another little affectionate, clutching shake. Her face was crinkled, her eyes twinkling with mirth; as if she gave the room a little sportive push that left it bashed amusingly sideways. In just this way had she jested when they walked, wearing long pigtails, down the Upper Richmond Road. If she could have echoed the words and joined in Alma’s laughter, she would have been, in Alma’s eyes, suitably launched on her visit. But she couldn’t.Amusedapproval was an outrage on something. Yet the kind of woman who would be gravely pleased and presently depart to her own quarters proud and possessive, would also leave everything unexpressed. But that kind of person would not have achieved this kind of room ... and to Alma the wonder of it was of course inseparable from the adventure of getting it together. It was something in the independent effect of things that was violated by regarding them merely as successful larks.... Yet Alma’s sense of beauty, herrecognition of its unfamiliar forms was keener, more experienced, more highly-wrought than her own.
“I shall spend the whole of my time in here, doing absolutely nothing.”
“You shall! You shall!Dearold Mira.” She was laughing again. “But you’ll come out and have tea. Sometimes. Won’t you, for instance, come out and have teanow? In a few minutes? There’ll be tea; ineversuch a few minutes. Wouldn’t that be a bright idea?” How dainty she was; how pretty. A Dresden china shepherdess, without the simper; a sturdiness behind her sparkling mirth. If only she would stop trying to liven her up. It seemed always when they were alone, as if she were still brightly in the midst of people keeping things going....
“Tea! Bright idea! Tea!” A little parting shake and a brisk whirling turn and she was sitting away on the side of the bed, meditatively, with both hands, using a small filmy handkerchief, having given up hope of galvanising; saying gravely, “Take off your things and tell me really how you are.”
“I’m at my last gasp,” said Miriam sinking into a chair. It was clear now that she would not be alone with the first expressiveness of the room. Returning later on she would find it changed. The first, already fading, wonderful moment would return, painfully, only when she was packing up to go. After all it was Alma’s home. But it was no use trying to fight thismonstrous conviction that the things she liked of other people, were more hers than their own. The door opened again upon a servant with her pilgrim baskets.
“I nearly alwaysamat my last gasp nowadays.” Clean, strong neatly cuffed hands setting the dusty London baskets down to rest in the quiet freshness.
Alma spoke formally; her voice a comment on expressiveness in the presence of the maid; and an obliteration of the expressiveness of the room; making it just a square enclosure set about with independent things, each telling, one against the other, a separate history.... When the maid was gone the air was parched with silence. Miriam felt suspended; impatient; eager to be out in whatever grouping Alma had come from, to recover there in the open the sense of life that had departed from the sheltering room.
“How is Sarah?” Alma felt the strain. But for her it was the difficulty of finding common ground for interchange with anyone whose life was lacking in brilliant features. She was behaving, kindly trying for topics; but also, partly, underlining the featurelessness, as a punishment for bad behaviour.
“Oh—flourishing—I think.” She rose, unpinning her stifling veil. She would have to brace herself to reach out to something with which to break into the questions Alma’s kind patience would one by one produce. A catechism leading her thoughts down into a wildernessof unexamined detail that would unfit her for the coming emergence.
“And Harriett?”
“Harriett’s simplysplendid. You know, if she only had a little capital she could take another house. She’s sending people away all the time.”
“Oh yes?” Alma did not want to spend time over Harriett’s apartment house, unless it was brightly described. It was too soon for bright descriptions. The item had been dragged in and wasted, out of place. A single distasteful fact. The servants, hidden away beyond the velvet staircase, seemed to be hearing the unsuitable disclosure. She sought about in her mind for something that would hold its own; one of the points of conflict that had cleared, since she was last here, to single unanswerable statements. But Alma forestalled her, attacking the silence with her gayest voice. “Oh Miriam, whatdoyou think. I saw a Speck; yesterday; on the Grand Esplanade.Doyou remember the Specks?”
Miriam beamed and agreed, breathing in reminiscences. But they would be endless; and would not satisfy them, or bring them together. She could not, with Alma alone, pretend that those memories were merely amusing. It was a treachery. The mere mention of a name sent her back to the unbearable happiness of that last school summer, a sunlit flower-filled world opening before her, the feeling of being herself a flower, expanding in the sunlight.She could not regard it as a past. All that had happened since was a momentary straying aside, to be forgotten. To that other world she was still going forward. One day she would suddenly come upon it, as she did in her dreams. The flower-scented air of it was in her nostrils as she sat reluctantly rousing herself to take Alma’s cue. “There were millions of them.” It had never occurred to her that they were funny. Alma, even then, outside her set of grave romantic friendships, had seen almost everything as a comic spectacle and had no desire to go back. “Yes,weren’tthey innumerable! And solarge! It was a large one I saw. The very biggest Speck of all I think it must have been.”
“I expect it was Belinda.”
“Oh, mydear!Couldyou tell them apart?”
“Belinda was one of the middle ones. Absolutelysquare. I liked her for that and her deep bass voice and her silence.”
“Oh, but Miriam, such aheavysilence.”
“That waswhy. Perhaps because she made me feel sylph like and elegant. Me, Susan.... Or it might have beenMehetabel; the eldest of the younger ones. I once heard her answer in class....”
“Mydear! Could a Speck really speak?”
“Hetta did. In a boo; like the voice of the wind.”
She contemplated her thoughtless simile. It was exactly true. First a sound, breathy andresonant, and then wordsblownon it.... Alma’s amused laughter was tailing off into little snickers; repeated while she looked for something else. But the revived Specks marshalled themselves more and more clearly, playing their parts in the crowded scene.
“And you know the eldest, Alathea, was quite willowy. Darker than the others. They were all mid-brown.”
“Oh Miriam; doesn’t that express them?”
“I wonder what they are all doing?”
“Nothing, my dear. Ohnothing. Nowcanyou imagine a Speck doing anything whatever?”
“All sitting about in the big house; going mad; on their father’s money.”
“Yes,” said Alma simply, gathering her face into gravity. “It’s rather terrible, you know.” A black shadow bearing slowly down upon the golden picture.... But they were so determined to see women’s lives in that way ... yet there was Miss Lane, and Mildred Gaunt and Eunice Bradley ... three of their own small group; all gone mad.
“Well,” said Alma rising, her hands moving up to her bright hair, adjusting it, with delicate wreathing movements, “I’m so glad you’ve come, old fing.” She hummed herself to the door with a little tune to which Miriam listened standing in the middle of the room in a numb suspension. The door was opened. Alma would be gliding gracefully out. Her song ceased, and she cleared her throat with that little sound thatwas the sound of her voice in quiet comment.
“Wow. Old brown-study.” She turned to look. Alma’s pretty head was thrust back into the room. To shake things off, to make one shake things off.... She smiled, groaning in spirit at her accentuated fatigue. One more little amused gurgle, and Alma was gone.
She went into her own room. Next door. Opposite to it was Hypo’s room. Opposite to her own door, the door of the bathroom, and just beyond, the swing door leading to the landing and the rooms grouped about it. Outside the low curtained windows was the midst of the garden. She was set down at the heart of the house. Sounds circled about her instead of coming faintly up.... She drew back the endmost curtain an inch or two. Bright light fell on her reflection in the long mirror. She was transformed already. It would be impossible to convince anyone that she was a tired Londoner. Here was already the self that no one in London knew. The removal of pressure had relaxed the nerves of her face, restoring its contours. Her mushroom hat had crushed the mass of her hair into a good shape. The sharp light called out its bright golds, deepened the colour of her eyes and the clear tints of her skin. The little old washed out muslin blouse flatly defining her shoulders and arms, pouched softly above the pale grey skirt.... Idounderstand colour ... that tinge of lavender in such a pale, pale grey; just warming it ... and belonging perfectly to Grannie’s spidery old Honiton collar....The whole little toilet was quite good; could be forgotten, and would keep fresh, bleached by the dry bright air to paler grey and whiter white, while the notes of bright living colour in her face and hair intensified from day to day. She hunted out her handglass and consulted her unknown eyes. It was true. They were brown; not grey. In the bright light there was a web, thorny golden brown, round the iris. She gazed into its tangled depths. So strange. So warm and bright; her unknown self. The self she was meant to be, living in that bright, goldy brown filbert tint, irradiating the grey into which it merged. It was a discovery. She was a goldy brown person, not cold grey. With half a chance, goldy brown and rose. And the whites of her eyes were pearly grey-blue. What a number of strange live colours, warmly asserting themselves; independently. But only at close quarters.
She followed Alma back through the swing door. Alma hummed a little song; an overture; its low tones filled the enclosed space, opened all the doors, showed her the whole of the interior in one moment and the coming month in an endless bright panorama passing unbroken from room to room, each scene enriched by those accumulated behind it, and those waiting ahead; the whole, for her, perpetually returning upon its own perfection. Alma paused before a scatter of letters on the table below the long lattice. Links with their other world; withthings she would hear of, stated and shaped in their way, revealing a world to which they alone seemed to have an interpreting key; making it hold together; but inacceptable ... but thestatementwas forever fascinating.... Through the leaded panes she caught a glimpse of the upper slope of the little town. A row of grey seaside boarding-houses slanting up-hill. A ramshackle little omnibus rumbling down the steep road.
“Edna Prout’s with us for the week-end.” Alma’s social tone, deliberately clear and level. It made a little scene, the beginning of a novel, the opening of a play, warning the players to stand off and make a good shape, smoothly moving without pause or hitch, playing and saying their parts, always with an eye to the good shape, conscious of a critical audience. There would be no expansive bright beginning, alone with Alma and Hypo, the centre of their attention.
“Who is Edna Prout?” she demanded jealously.
Alma turned with a little bundle of the letters in her hand, speaking thoughtfully away through the window. “She writes; rather wonderful stuff.”
Away outside the window stood the wonderful stuff, being written, rolled off; the vague figure of a woman, cleverly dressed, rising pen in hand from her work to be socially brilliant. Popular. Divided between mysteriously clever work and successful femineity. Alma glanced, pausing, and looked away again.
“She has a most amazing sense of the past,”she murmured reflectively. As if it had just occurred to her. But it must be the current description. His description.
“The Stone Age?”
“Ohno, my dear!” She shrieked gently; wheeling round to share her mirth. “The Past.’Istry.The Mediterranean past.”
“Her stones are precious stones.” From this beginning, to go on looking only at things, ignoring surroundings....
“That’s it! Come along!” Alma went blithely forward, again humming her tune. But there was a faint change in her confident manner. She too, was conscious of going to meet an ordeal.
Through the still, open-windowed brightness of the brown-green room, out into the naked blaze. Rocky dryness and sea freshness mingled in the huge air. The little baked pathway ribboning the level grass, disappearing round the angle of the enclosing edge, the perfect sharp edge, irises feathering along it, sharp green spikes and deep blue hoods of filmy blossom patterned against the paler misty blueness of the sea. Perfect. Hidden beyond the sharp edge, the pathway winding down the terraced slope of the cliff to the little gate opening from the tangled bottom on to the tamarisk-trimmed sea road. Seats set at the angles of the winding path. The sea glinting at your side between the leaf patterns of the creeper covered pergola. The little roughstone shelter,trapping the sunblaze. The plain bench along the centre of a piece of pathway, looking straight out to the midmost sea; sun-baked gravel under your feet, clumps of flowers in sight. Somewhere the rockery, its face catching the full blaze of the light, green bosses clumped upon it, with small pure-toned flowers, mauvy pink and tender eastern blue. On the level just below it, a sudden little flat of grass, small flowered shrubs at its edge towards the sea.
All waiting for tomorrow, endless tomorrows, in the morning, when the sunlight poured from the other side of the sky and the face of the cliff was cool and coloured. For tonight when the blaze had deepened into sunset and afterglow, making a little Naples of the glimpse of white town, winding street and curve of blue bay visible in the distance beyond the shoulder of the sidemost clump of shrubs along the end of the sunk lawn.
Alma had halted, just behind, letting her gaze her fill. There was no one to be seen. No sound. Nothing to break the perfect expressiveness.
“We’ve taken refuge at the back,” suggested Alma into her arm-stretching groan of contentment. Down across the lawn into the little pathway between the shrubs. There they were, in the cool shadows under the small trees. Large bamboo chairs, a cushioned hammock, tea going on, Hypo rising in the middle of a sentence. Miss Prout sitting opposite, upright,posed, knee over knee, feet shod in peacock blue, one pointing downwards in the air, exactly above the other pointing on to the gravel. A wide silky gown, loose; held flat above the chest by brilliant bold embroidery; a broad dark head; short wide tanned face.
The eyes were not brown but wide starry blue; unseeing;contradicting her matronly shape. Now that the arrival was over and Hypo had begun again, she still had the look of waiting, apart. As if she were sitting alone. Yet her clever clothes and all her outlines diffused companionship.
The lizards must have looked perfect, darting and basking on the rockery. But why have his heart won only by the one that quickly wriggled out of the box?... Paying attention only to the people who were strong enough to fuss all the time. Not seeing that half their animation was assumed.... “Do you still,” the bells of the blue flowers in the deepest shadow were like lanterns hung on little trees crowded upon the brown earth. The sound of grass and flowers in blissful shade poured into the voices, making agreement, giving them all the quality of blossoming in the surrounding coolness, aware of it, aware of the outer huge splintering sunlight that made it perfect, fled away from, left to itself to prepare another perfection ... “divide people into those who like ‘The Reading Girl’ and those who prefer the Dresden teapot?”
“SuddenMiriam. Miriam, Edna, is ...isterrifying....” He turned full round to hand the buns, both firm neatly moulded hands holding the dish ironically-carefully. The wide blue eyes looked across. Where was she all the time; so calm and starry.... “She comes down from London, into our rustic solitude, primed....”
“She’s a fighter,” said Miss Prout roundly, as if she had not spoken.
“Fighting is too mild for Miriam. She crushes. She demolishes. When words fail her,” the lifting, descriptive, outlining laughter coming into the husky voice, filling out its insistence, “she uses her fists. Then she departs; back to London; fires off not so much letters as reinforcements of the prostrating blow.”KindHypo. Doing his best for her. Launching her on her holiday with approval; knowing how little was to be expected of her.... Ages already she had been here blissful. Getting every moment more blissful. And this was only the first tea. The four weeks of long days, each day in four long bright separate pieces, spread out ahead, enclosed; a long unbroken magic. Poor Miss Prout with her short week-end.... But she went from country-house to country-house. Certainly. Her garments, even on this languid afternoon, were electric with social life. Then hostesses were a necessary part of her equipment.... She must fear them, like a man. She herself could not be imagined as a hostess. There was no look of strain about her. Only thatlook of insulated waiting. Boredom if her eyes had been the thing-filled eyes of a man, bored in the intervals between meals and talk and events.
“Yes, butdoyou?” Lame. But Hypo turned, accepting, not departing afresh to tone up the talk. The ringed, lightning-quick grey eyes glanced again, as when she had arrived, taking in the detail and the whole of her effect, but this time directly messaging approval. The luminous clouded grey, clear ringed, the voice husky and clear, the strange repellent mouth below the scraggly moustache, kept from weakness only by the perpetually hovering disclaiming ironic smile ... fascination that could not be defined; that drove its way through all the evidence against it.... Married, yet always seeming nearer and more sympathetic than other men.... Her cup brimmed over. She saw herself as she had been this morning, in dingy black, pallid, tired to death, hurriedly finishing off at Wimpole Street. And now an accepted harmonious part of this so different scene. But this power of blossoming in response to surroundings was misleading. Beneath it she was utterly weary. Tomorrow she would feel wrecked, longing for silence.
“Any more tea, anybody? Moretea, Miriam.” Alma waved the teapot. The little scene gleamed to the sound of her voice, a bright, intense grouping in the green shade, with the earth thrilling beneath and the sky arching down over its completeness.
“Yes,” said Hypo, on his feet. “She’ll have, just one more cup. Let me see,” he went on, from the tea-table, “you liked; the Girl. Yes.... No. The teapot. I accuse you of the teapot.”
“I liked both.” Not true. But the answer to the wrongness of the division.
“Catholic Miriam. That’s quite a feat. Even for you, Miriam, that is, I think ...”
“But she didn’t! She called my teapot messy!”
“It’s true. Idothink Dresden china messy. But I mean that it’s possible——” She spoke her argument through his answer, volleyed over his shoulder as he brought back her cup, to a remark from Miss Prout. The next moment he was away in the hammock near Miss Prout’s low chair, throwing cushions out on to the grass, gathering up a sheaf of printed leaves; leaving her classed with the teapot people....
“Buoyed up bytea, Edna,” he chuckled, flinging away the end of a cigarette; propping the pages against his knee. “By the way who is Olga?”
“The eldest Featherstonhaugh.” She spoke carelessly; sat half turned away from him serenely smoking; a small buff cigarette in a long amber tube; but her voice vibrated.
He wasreading, in her presence, a book she had written.... Those pages wereproofs.... My arrival was an interruption in a companionshipthat made conversation superfluous.... What need for her to talk when she could put into his hands, alive and finished, something that she had made; that could bring into his face that look of attention and curiosity. How not sit suspended, and dreaming, through the small break in her tremendous afternoon? Yet he was getting the characters mixed up....
“And Cyril. Do I know Cyril?”
She had putpeoplein.... People he knew of. They joked about it. Horrible.... She gazed, revolted and fascinated, at the bundle of pages. Someone ought to prevent, destroy.... This peaceful beauty.... Life going so wonderfully on. And people being helplessly picked out and put into books.
“This is the episode of thegreenhouse!” His voice broke on the word into its utmost wail of amusement.
Thatwas ‘writing’; from behind the scenes. People and things from life, a little altered, and described from the author’s point of view. Easy; if your life was amongst a great many people and things and you were hard enough to be sceptical and superior. But an impossibly mean advantage ... a cheap easy way. Cold clever way of making people look seen-through and foolish; to be laughed at, while the authors remained admired, special people, independent, leading easy airy sunlit lives, supposed, by readers who did not know where they got their material, to becreators. He was reading onsteadily now, the look of amused curiosity gone.
Alma came over with a box of cigarettes and a remark; kindly thinking she might be feeling left; offering distraction. Or wishing to make her behave, launch out, with pretended interest upon a separate conversation, instead of hanging upon theirs. Of course she was sitting staring, without knowing it.... And already she had taken a cigarette and murmured an answer obliviously, and Alma had gone, accepting her engrossment, humming herself about amongst the trees, missing his remarks. Deliberately asserting a separate existence? Really loving her garden and enjoying the chance of being alone? Or because she knew all he had to say abouteverything. She came back and subsided in a low chair near Miss Prout just as he dropped his pages and looked out on to the air with a grave unconscious face. Lost in contemplation. This woman, so feminine and crafty, was a great writer. Extraordinary. Impossible. In a second he had turned to her.
“How do you do it, Edna? You do it. It’sshattering, that chapter-end.”
Miss Prout was speechless, not smiling. Crushed with joy.... Alma, at her side, smiled in delight, genuine sympathetic appreciation.
“I’m done in, Edna,” he wailed, taking up the leaves to go on, “shan’t write another line. And the worst of it is I know you’llkeep it up. That I’ve got to make; before dinner; my—myvia dolorosa; through your abominably good penultimate and final chapters.”
“Am I allowed to read?” Miriam said rising and going with hands outstretched for the magic leaves.
“Yes,” he chuckled, gathering up and handing. “Let’s try it on Miriam. I warn you she’s deadly. And of a voracity. She reads at a gulp; spots everything;morethan everything; turns on you and lays you out.”
Miriam stood considering him. Happy. He had really noticed and remembered the things she had said from time to time. But they were expecting a response.
“I shan’t understand. I know I shan’t. May I really take them away?”
“Now don’t, Miriam ...” taking his time, keeping her arrested before them, with his held-up minatory finger and mocking friendly smile, “don’t under-rate your intelligence.”
“May I really take them,” she flounced, ignoring him; holding herself apart with Miss Prout. The air danced between them sunlit from between branches. A fresh perspective opened. She was to meet her. See her unfold before her eyes in the pages of the book.
“Yes,do,” she smiled, a swift nice look, not scrutinising.
“Howalivethey look; much more alive than a book in its suit of neat binding.”
“Are weallliterary?”
“We’re all literary,” joined his quick voice. She blushed with pleasure. Included; with only those ghastly little reviews. Not mocking. Quite gravely. She beamed her gratitude and turned away blissful.
“Is Miriam going?”
“I’ve got to unpack.” He wanted an audience, an outsider, for the scene of the reading. Alma had disappeared.
“Won’ttheydo all that for you?”
“Still I think I’ll go.... Addio.” She backed along the little pathway watching him seek and find his words, crying each one forth in a thoughtful falsetto, while he turned conversationally towards Miss Prout. The scene was cut off by the bushes, but she could still hear his voice, after the break-down of his Italian into an ironic squeal, going on in charge of it. She sped across the lawn and up on to the open above the unexplored terraces. They could wait. For the moment, unpeopled, they were nothing. They would be the background of further scenes, all threaded by the sound of Hypo’s voice, lit by the innumerable things she would hear him say, obliterating the surroundings, making far-off things seem more real.... Mental livelinessdidobliterate surroundings, stop their expressiveness. Already the first expressiveness had gone from the garden. She did not want to create it afresh. There was hurry and pressure now in the glances she threw. A wrongness. Something left out.There was something left out, left behind, in his scheme of things. She wandered as far as the horizon row of irises to look out over the sea, chased and pulled back as she went. Until the distant prospect opened and part of the slope of the garden lay at her feet. The light had ripened. The sun no longer towered, but blazed across at her from above the rightmost edge of the picture. Short shadows jutted from the feet of every standing thing. The light was deepening in perfect stillness. Wind and rain had left the world for good.Thiswas her holiday. Everything behind her broke down into irrelevance.... How go back to it.... How not stay and live through the changing of the light in this perfect stillness....
There was no feeling of Sunday in the house. But when Miriam wandered into her room during the after breakfast lull, she found it waiting for her; pouring into the room from afar, from all over the world, breaking her march, breaking up the lines of the past and of the future, isolating her with itself. The openings of the long lattice framed wide strips of morning brilliance between short close-drawn folds of flowered chintz. Everything outside was sharp and near, but changed since yesterday. The flowers stood vivid in the sunlight; very still. The humming of the bees sounded careful and secret; not wishing to disturb. The sea sparkled to itself, refusing to call theeye. Yet outside there, as in the room, something called. She leaned out. Into the enlarged picture the sky poured down. The pure blue moved within itself as you looked, letting you through and up. An unbroken fabric of light, yet opening all over, taking you up into endless light....
Sunday is in the sky....
Hypo, coming round the corner from the terrace, his arms threshing the air to the beat of his swift walk; knitting up the moment, casting kind radiance as he came. Married, but casting radiance. He was making for the house. Then Miss Prout was somewhere down there alone.... She hurried to be out, seeking her. On the landing she ran into Hypo.
“Hullo, Miriametta. Going out?”
“I think so. Where’s everybody?”
“Everybody, and chairs, is down on the terrace. But you’ll want ahat.”
“I shan’t.” He had often admired her ability to go without. He had been talking to Miss Prout for the last half hour and was now abstractedly making a shapely thing of a chance meeting with a stranger.... His words had carried him to the study door. He began inventing his retort, the unfelt shape of words that would carry him on undisturbed, facing the door with his back to her, hand on the doorknob. The end of it would find him within. She cried out at random into the making of his phrase and escaped into the dining-room tothe sound of his voice. In the empty dining-room she found again the listening presence of Sunday and hurried to be through it and away at whatever centre had formed down there in the open. Going down the steps and along the paths she entered the movement of the day, the beginning of the sense of tomorrow, that would strengthen with the slow shifting of the sabbath light. Miss Prout came into view round the first bend, a sunlit figure in a tub chair on the grassy level at the end of the terrace.Shehad no hat. Her dark head was bent over the peak made in her flowing draperies by her crossed knees. She wassewing. Here. In public, serenely, the first thing in the morning.
Strolling to join her Miriam saw her as she had been last night, set like a flower, unaccented and harmonious, in her pleated gown of old rose silk, towards the oval of dinner-table, an island of softly bright silk-shaded radiance in the midst of the twilit room; under the brightest of the central light, filmy flowers massed low in a wide shallow bowl ... a gentleness about her, touching the easy beginnings of talk, each phrase pearly, catching the light, expanding; expressing a secret joy. Then the gathering and settling of the flow of talk between him and her, lifting, shaking itself out, flashing into sharp clear light; the fabric of words pierced by his wails of amusement as he looked, still talking, at the pictures they drew.... People they knew passing toand fro;alllaughable, all brought to their strange shared judgment. The charm of the scene destroyed by the surrounding vision of a wit-wrecked world.
After dinner that moment when she had drawn herself up before him, suddenly young, with radiant eyes; looking like a flower in her petaled gown. He had responded standing very upright, smiling back at her, admiring her deliberate effect....
The break away across the landing, white and green night brightness under the switched-on lights, into the dusk of the study, ready peopled with its own stillness; the last of the twilight glimmering outside the open windows. Each figure changed by the gloom into an invisible, memorable presence. Hypo moving in and out of the cone of soft light amongst the shadows at the far end.
“We’ll try the contralto laugh on the lady in the window-seat.”
The fear of missing the music in looking for his discovery. And then into the waiting stillnessBach. Of all people. He found a contralto laugh inBach. There were no people, no women, in Bach. Looking for the phrase. Forgetting to look for it. The feeling of the twilight expanding within itself, too small. The on-coming vast of night held back, swirling, swept away by broad bright morning light running through forest tracery. Shining into a house. The clean cool poise of everyday morning. The sounds of work and voices, separate, unitedby surroundings greeted by everyone from within. The secret joy in everyone pouring through the close pattern of life, going on forever, the end in the first small phrase, every phrase a fresh end and a beginning. Going on when the last chord stood still on the air.... And if he liked Bach, how not believe in people? How not be certain of God?... And then remarks, breaking thinly against the vast nearness.
“What does the lady in the window think?”
“She’s asleep.” Miss Prout had really thought that....
“Oh no sheisn’t.”
Miss Prout looked up as she approached but kept on with her sewing and held her easy silence as she dropped into one of the low chairs. She was working a pattern of bright threads on a small strip of saffron-coloured silk ... looking much older in the blaze of hard light. But far-off, not minding, sitting there as if enthroned, for the morning, placid and matronly and indifferent. The heavenly morning freshness was still here. But the remarks about the day had all been made on the lawn after breakfast.... She admired the close bright work. Miss Prout’s voice came at once, a little eagerly, explaining. She was really keen about her lovely work.
She was saying something about Paris. Miriam attended swiftly, not having grasped the beginning, only the fact that she was talkingand the curious dry level of her voice. Beginning on something as everyone did, ignoring the present, leaving herself sitting there outside life.... She made a vague response, hoping to hear about Paris. Only to be startled by the tone and colour of her own voice. Miss Prout would imagine that her life had been full. In any case could not imagine....
“How long are you staying?” The question shot across at her. She did not know as she answered whether she had seen the swift hot glance of the blue eyes, or heard it in the voice. But she had found the woman who wrote the searing scenes, the strange abrupt phrases that lashed out from the page.
“Tomorrow I shall be grilling in my flat,” went on Miss Prout. Alma’s laughter tinkled from above. She was coming this way. Miss Prout’s voice hurried on incisive, splitting the air, ending with a rush of low words as Alma appeared round the corner. Miriam watched their little scene, smooth, unbroken by a single pause or hesitation, saw them go away together, still talking.
“My hat,” she murmured to the thrilled surroundings, and again “Myhat.” She clutched at the fading reverberations, marvelling at her own imperviousness, at the way the drama had turned, even while it touched her, to a painted scene, leaving her unmoved. Miss Prout’s little London eyrie. A distasteful refuge between visits.... Had it been a flattering appeal, or an insult?
She is like the characters in her book, direct, swift, ruthless, using any means.... She saw me as a fool, offered me the rôle of one of the negligible minor characters, there to be used by the successful ones. She is one with her work, with her picture of life.... But it is not a true picture. The glinting sea, all the influences pouring in from the garden denied its existence. It was just a fuss, the biggest drama in the world was a fuss in which people competed, gambling, everyone losing in the end. Dead, empty loss, on the whole, because there was always the commission to be paid. Life in the world is a vice; to which those who take it up gradually became accustomed.... Her eyes clung to the splinters of gold on the rippling blue sea. Dropped them, and she was confined in the hot little rooms of a London flat. If Miss Prout was not enviable, sofearedher lonely independence, then no one was enviable.
“Hullo, Miriametta! All alone?”
“They’ve gone to look at an enormous book; too big to lift.”
“Yes. And what’s Miriam doing?”
“Isn’t it a perfect morning?”
“It’s a good day. It’ll be acorkerlater on. Very pleasant here till about lunch time. You camping here for the morning?” She looked up.
He was standing in profile, listening, with his head inclined; like a person suffering from deafness; and pointing towards her hisupheld questioning finger; a German classmaster.
“I don’t know.”
“Then you will. That’s settled?” She murmured a speculative promise, lazily, a comment on his taut, strung-up bearing. What, to him, if she did or didn’t?
“That’s agreed then. You camp here,” he dropped neatly into the chair between hers and Miss Prout’s, his face hidden behind the frill of its canopy, “for the morning.” He looked out and round at her, flushed and grinning. “I want you to,” he murmured, “now don’t you go and forget.”
“All right,” she beamed ... thehourshe was wasting spinning out his mysterious drama ... “wild horses shan’t move me.” He did not want her society. But it was miles more than wildly interesting enough that he wished to avoid being alone with Miss Prout. But then why not dump her as he always did guests he had run through, on to Alma? He left her a moment for reflections, wound them up with a husky chuckle and began on one of his improvisations; paying her in advance ... putting in time.... She listened withheld, drawing the weft of his words through the surrounding picture, watching it enlivened, with fresher colours and stronger outlines ... a pause, the familiar lifting tone and the drop, into a single italic phrase; one of his destructive conclusions. His voice went on, but she had seized the hard glittering thread, rendingit, and watched the developing bright pattern coldly, her opposition ready phrased for the next break. She could stay forever like this, watching his thought; thrusting in remarks, making him reconsider. But Miss Prout was coming. There would be a morning of improvisations with no chance of arresting him. It was only when they were alone that he would take opposition seriously, not turning it into materials for spirals of wit, where nobody could stand against him. The whole morning, hearing him and Miss Prout chant their duet about people ... helped out no doubt by the presence of an apparently uncritical audience.... I’m hanged if I will....
“I must have a book or something. I’ll get a book,” she said, rising. He peeped out, as if weighing her suggestion.
“All right.... Get a book.... But come back?”
“Eurasiansaredifferent,” she said. “Have you everknownany; reallywell.”
“Never knownanybody, Miriam. Take back everything I ever said. Get your book and come out with it.”
On her way back she heard his voice, high; words broken and carried along by a squeal of laughter. They were at it already, reducing everything to absurdity. Turning the corner she found them engrossed, sitting close at right angles, Miss Prout leaning forward, her embroidery neglected on her knee. It was monstrous to break in.... She wandered up and downthe terrace, staring at the various views, catching his eye upon her as she went to and fro; almost deciding to depart and leave him to his fate. If he was engrossed he was engrossed. If not, he shouldn’t pretend to be. When she was at a distance their voices fell, low short sentences, sounding set and colourless; butintimate.
“Found your book, Miriam?” he cried, as she came near.
“No. I couldn’t see anything. So I shut my eyes and whirled round and pointed.”
“Your shameless superstitions, Miriam.”
“Iam. I’ve got a lovely one I hadn’t seen.”
“A lovely one. A——”
“I’m not going to tell you what it is.”
“You’re just going to sit down and munch it up. Miriam’s a paradox. She’s the omnivorousgourmet.”
“Can I have a cigarette?”
“Her authors—we’llgetyou a cigarette, Miriam, no, alright, here they are—her authors, the only authors she allows, can be counted rather more than twice, on the fingers of one hand.”
She took two cigarettes, lighting one from his neatly struck match and retired to a distant chair.
“You’ll have the sun in your eyes there.”
“I like it.” Their voices began again, his social and expansive, hers clipped and solitary... the bank of blazing snapdragon grew prominent, told of nothing but the passing of time. What was the time? How much of the morning had gone? There was a moment of clear silence....
“Is Miriam there?”
“She is indeed; verymuchthere.” Again silence, filled with the echo of his comprehensive little chuckle. Miss Prout knew now that it was not the stupidity of a fool that had spoiled her morning. But, if she could go so far, why not carry him off to talk unembarrassed, or talk, here, freely, as she wanted to, like those women in her book?
A servant, coming briskly through the sunlight, stopping half way along the terrace.
“Mr. Simpson.”
“Yes. What have you done with him?”
“He’s in the study.”
“Fetch him out of the study. Bring him here. And bring, lemonade and things.” But he rose as the maid wheeled round and departed. “I’d better get him, I think. He’s Nemesis.”
Miriam rose to escape. “Now don’t you go, Miriam. You stay and see it out. You haven’t met Simpson, Edna. I haven’t.Noone has.”
“What is he?”
“He’s—he’s a postscript. The letter came this morning. Now don’t either of you desert.” He disappeared, leaving the terrace stricken. The rest of the morning, lunch, perhaps thewhole day ... Simpson. His voice returned a moment later, encouraging, as if shepherding an invalid, across the garden and round the angle. A very tall young man, in a blue serge suit, apinkcollar and a face sunburnt all over, an even red.
He was sitting upright in a headlong silence, holding on to the thoughts with which he had come. But they were being scattered. He had held them through the introductions and Hypo’s witty distribution of drinks. But now the bright air rang with the rapid questions, volleyed swiftly upon the beginnings of the young man’s meditative answers, and he was sitting alone in the circle in a puzzled embarrassment, listening, but not won by Hypo’s picture of Norwich, not joining in the expansion and the laughter, aware only of the scattering of his precious handful of thoughts. Towards lunch-time Hypo carried him off to the study.
“Exit the postscript,” said Miss Prout. Charmingly ... dropping back into her pose, but talkatively, a kindliness in the blue eyes gazing out to sea. Again she bemoaned her return to London, but added at once a little picture of her old servant; the woman’s gladness at getting her back again.
“Only until the end of the week,” said Miriam seeing the old servant, perpetually left alone, getting older. Sad. Left out. But what an awful way of living in London; alone with one old servant. A brilliant light cameinto Miss Prout’s eyes. She was looking fixedly along the terrace.
“He wouldn’t stay to lunch.” Hypo, alone and gay. “He’sdonewith me. Given me up. Gone away a wise young man.”
“He wasappalling.”
“You didn’t hear him, Miriam.”
“I saw him.”
“You didn’t hear him on the subject of his guild.”
“He’s founded aguild?”
“It’s much worse than that. He’s gone about, poor dear, in sublime, in the mostsublimefaith, collecting all the young men in Norfolk, under my banner. I have heard this morning all I might become if I could contrive to be ... as wooden as he is. Come along. Let’s have lunch. You know, Edna, there’s a great work to be done on you.You’vegot to be turned into a socialist.” He turned as they walked, to watch her face. She was looking down, smiling, withdrawn, revealing nothing. Seething with anticipation. She would be willing. For the sake of the long conversations. They would sit apart talking, for the rest of her time. There would be long argumentative letters. No. She would not argue. She would be another of those women in the Lycurgan, posing and dressing and consciously shining at soirées. Making havoc and complications. Worse than they. How could he imagine her a socialist with her view of humanity and human motives.
“No. Wewon’tmake you a socialist, Edna. You’re too good as you are.” Beautiful, different; too good for socialism? Then he really thought her wonderful. In some way beyond himself....
Turning just in time to be caught by the sun dipping behind the cliff. Perfect sudden moment. No sunset effects. No radiance. Clean dull colours. Mealy grey-blue sky, dull gold ball, half hidden, tilted by the slope of the green cliff. Feeling him arrested, compelled to receptive watching; watching a sunset, like anyone else.... The last third of the disc, going, bent intently, asserting the moment, asserting uniqueness; unanswerable mystery of beauty.
“God, reading a newspaper.”
“The way to see a sunset is to beindoors. Oblivious. Then ... just a ruddy glow, reflected from a bright surface.... The indirect method’s the method. Old Conrad.”
“Madeleine has no use for this storm-rent sky. She wants untroubled blue, one small pink cloud, and presently, a single star.” Then he must have wanted these things himself once. Why did he try to jest young people into his disillusionment?
Yet tonight the sun had set without comment. With his approval. He was openly sharing the unspoken response to the scene of its magnificent departure.
The reproachful, watching eye of Sunday disappeared, drawn down over the horizon with the setting sun. Leaving a blissful refreshment, the strange unearned sense falling always somewhere in the space between Sunday and Monday, of a test survived, leaving one free to go forward to the cheerful cluster of oncoming days.
The afterglow faded to a bright twilight, deepening in the garden to a violet dusk. The sea glimmered in the remaining light that glared along its further rim like a yawn, holding up the lid of the sky. The figures in the chairs had grown dim, each face a pale disc set towards the falling light. The talk died down to small shreds, simple and slow, steeped in the beauty of the evening, deferring to it, as to a host.
They were still the guests of the evening while they sat grouped round the lamplit verandah supper-table that turned the dusk into night. But the end was coming. The voices in the lamplight were growing excited and forgetful. Indoors and separation were close at hand.
He was oblivious. Given up to his jesting ... she watched his jesting face, shiny now and a little loose, the pouching of his lips as he spoke, the animal glimmer of teeth below the scraggy moustache, repellent, yet part of the fascination of his smile, and perpetually redeemed by the charm of his talk, the intense charm of the glancing eyes, seeing and understanding,comforting even when they mistook, and yet all the time withheld, preoccupied behind their clean rings and filmy sightless grey—fixed always on the shifting changing mass of obstructive mannish knowledge, always onscience, the only thing in the world that could get his full attention.... She felt her voice pour out suddenly, violently quenching a flicker of speech. He glanced, attentive, healing her despair with his quick interest. The women awoke from their conspiring trance, alert towards her, watching.
“Yes.” His voice followed hers without a break, cool, a comment on her violence. He turned, looking into the night. His shaggy intelligent gaze, the reflective slight lift of his eyebrows gave him the look of an old man lost. The rosy scene was chilled. Cold light and harsh black shadow, his averted form in profile, helpless, making empty the deeps of the thing that was called a summer night. Her desire beat no longer towards the open scene. She hated it. For its sake she had pulled him up, brought down this desolation.
“It’s a good night. It’s about the human optime in nights. We ought to sleep out.” He turned back to the table, gathering up expressions, radiating his amusement at the disarray caused by his absence.
“Let’s sleep out. Miriam will. Unless we lock her in.” He was on his feet, eagerly halted, gathering opinions. His eyes came to rest on Alma. “Let’s be dogs. Be driven,by Miriam, into fresh fields of experience.”
Would it happen? Would she agree? He was impatient, but deferring. Alma sat considering, in the attitude Mr. Stoner had called a pretty snap, her elbows meeting on the table, her chin on her slender hands; just its point, resting on the bridge they made laid flatly one upon the other. It was natural in her. But by now she knew that men admired natural poses.Hewas admiring, even through his impatience.
“I didn’t suggest it. I’ve never slept out in my life.”
“You suggested it, Miriam. My death, all our little deaths from exposure, will lie at your door.” The swift personal glance he dealt her from the midst of his watching swept round to Miss Prout and flashed into admiration as he turned, still sideways surveying her, to bend his voice on Alma.
“It’s quite manageable, eh, Susan?” Miriam followed his eyes. Miss Prout had risen and was standing away from the table posed like a Gainsborough; challenging head, skirts that draped and spread of themselves, gracefully, from the slenderness of her body. She was waiting, indifferent, interpreting the scene in her way, interpreting the other women for him, united with him in interpreting them....
Alma relaxed and looked up, holding the matter poised, deliberately locating the casting vote before breaking into enthusiasm. He paidtribute, coming round the table companionably to her side, but still looking from face to face, claiming audience.
“We’ll break out. Each bring its little mattress and things. After they’ve retired. Yes, I think,afterthey’ve retired.” Why the conspirator’s smile? The look of daring? What of the servants? They were bound, anyhow, to know in the morning.
It was glorious to rush about in the lit house, shouting unnecessary remarks. People shouting back. Nobody attending. Shouting and laughing for the sake of the jolly noise. Saying more than could be said in talk. Admitting.
And then just to lie extinguished in the darkness wondering what point there was in sleeping out if you went to sleep at once. All that jolly tumult. And he had been so intent on the adventure that he had let Miss Prout change her mind without protest,onlycrying out from the midst of busily arranging his bed on the lawn.... “Have you seen Miriam’s pigtails?”
And suddenly everything was prim; the joy of being out in the night surging in the air, waiting for some form of expression. They didn’tknowhow to be joyful; only how to be clever.... She hummed a little song and stopped. It wreathed about her, telling off the beauties of the night, a song sung by someone else, heard, understood, a perfect agreement.
“What is she doing?”
“She’s sitting up, waving her banana in the air; conducting an orchestra, I think.”
“Tell her toeatthe banana and lie down.” Alma, Rose Gauntlett, Mrs. Perry and me, starting off just after I came, to paddle in the moonlight.... “Don’t,don’tdo anything that would make a cabman laugh.” Why not? Why should he always imagine someone waiting to be shocked? Damn the silly cabman if hedidlaugh. Who need care? As soon as her head was on the pillow, nothing visible but the huge night and the stars, she spoke quietly to herself, flouting them. He should see, hear, that it was wicked to simmer stuffily down as if they were in the house. He didn’t want to. She was making his sounds for him.
“Tell Miriam this is not a conversazione.”
His voice was actually sleepy. Kindly, long-suffering, but simply wanting to go to sleep. There was to be no time of being out in the night with him. He was too far off. She imagined herself at his side, a little space of grass between. Silent communication, understanding and peace. All the things that were lost, obliterated by his swift speech, communicated to him at leisure, clear in the night. Here under the verandah, with its roof cutting off a part of the sky, they were still attached to the house. Alma had been quietly posed for sleep from the first moment. They were all more separated than in their separate rooms indoors.
The lingering faint light reflected the day, the large open space of misunderstandings, held off the cloak of darkness in which things grewclear. She lay watching for the night to turn to night.
But the light seemed to grow clearer as the stillness went on. The surrounding objects lost their night-time mystery. Teased her mind with their names as she looked from point to point. Drove up her eyes to search for night in the sky. But there was no night there. Only a wide high thinness bringing an expansion of sight that could not be recalled; drawing her out, beyond return, into a wakefulness that was more than day-time wakefulness; a breathless feeling of being poised untethered in the thin blue-lit air, without weight of body; going forward, more and more thinly expanded, into the pale wide space....
There is no night.... Compared to this expanse of thin, shadowless, boundless light the sunlit sky is a sort of darkness.... Even in a motionless high midday the sky is small, part of it invisible, obliterated by light. After sunset it is hidden by changing colours....
Thisis the real sky, in full power, stripping away sleep. Time, visible, pouring itself out. Day, not night, is forgetfulness of time. Its movement is a dream. Only in its noise is real silence and peace. This awful stillness is made of sound; the sound of time,pouringitself out; ceaselessly winding off short strips of life, each life a strip of sleepless light, so much, no more, lessening all the time.
What rubbish to talk about the stars. Vast suns, at immense distances, and beyond them,more. What then? If you imagine yourself at any point in space or wafting freely about from star to star you are not changed. Like enlarging the circle of your acquaintance. And finding it, in the end, the same circle, yourself. A difference in degree is also a difference in kind. Yes. But thesamedifference. Relations remain the same however much things are changed. Interest in the stars is like interest in your neighbours before you get to know them. A way of running away from yourself.
What is there to do? How know what is anyone’s best welfare?
To be alive, and to know it, makes a selfless life impossible. Any kind of life accompanied by that stupendous knowledge, is selfish.
Christ? But all the time he was alone with a certainty. Today thou shalt be with me.... He was booked for Paradise from the beginning ... like the man in No. 5 John Street going to live in a slum, imagining he was experiencing a slum, with the latchkey of his west-end house in his pocket.... Now if he had sacrificed Paradise. But he couldn’t. Then where was selflessness?
Yet if Christ had never been, the sky would look different. A Grecian or a Jewish sky. Awful. If the personal delight that the sky showed to be nothing were put away? Nothing held on to but the endless pouring down of time? Till an answer came.... Get up tomorrow showing indifference to everything, refusing to be bewitched. Thereisan answer or therewould be no question. Night is torment. That is why people go to sleep. To avoid clear sight and torment.
Tomorrow, certainly, gloriously, the daytime scenes, undeserved, uncontributed to, would go forward again in the sunlight. Forgetfulness would come of itself. Even the thought of the bright scenes, the scenes that did not matter and were nothing, spread over the sky the sense of the dawn it would be obliged to bring; ... the permitted postponement of the problems set by night. Dawn stole into the heart. With a sudden answer. That had no words. An answer that lost itself again in the day. But there would be no dawn; only the pitiless beginning of a day spoiled by the fever of a sleepless night. Torment, for nothing. The sky gazed down mocking at fruitless folly. She turned away. She must, would, sleep. But her eyes were full of the down-bent stars. Condemnation, and the communication that would not speak; stopping short, poised, probing for a memory that was there....
A harsh hissing sigh, far away; gone. The unconscious sea. Coming back. Bringing the morning tide. The sound would increase. The sky would thicken and come near, fill up with increasing blind light, ignoring unanswered pain.
“You can put tea in the bedrooms.”
Alma, folded in her dressing-gown, disappearing into the house. The tumbled empty bed on the lawn, white in the open stare of the morning....
“Edna wants to know how we’re getting on.” Duplication in light and darkness, of memories of the night.... Their two figures, side by side, silhouetted against dark starry blue. Dismantled voices. Hissimplicity. His sharp turn and toga’d march towards the house. A memory of dawn; a deep of sleep ending in faint light tinting the garden? “Edna wants to know how we’re getting on.”Thenstarlit darkness? Angry sleep leading direct to this open of morning.
Everyone in the house had plunged already into new beginnings. Panoplied in advantages; able to feel in strong refreshed bodies the crystal brightness of the morning; not worn out as if by long illness.
It was Miss Prout, coming from her quiet night indoors, who was reaping the adventure. She had some strange conscious power. She knew that it was she who was the symbol of morning. Her look of age was gone. She had dared to come out in a wrapper of mealy white, folded softly; and with bare feet that gleamed against the green of the flat grass. Consciously using the glow of adventure left over from the night to engrave her triumphant effect upon the adventurers; of marvellous youth that was not hers but belonged to some secret living in her stillness.... It was not an illusion. He saw it too; let her stand for the morning; was crowning her all the time, preoccupied in everything he said with the business of rendering half-amused approval of her miracle. The talk was hampered, as if, bycommon consent, prevented from getting far enough to interfere with the set shape of spectacle and spectators; yet easy, its quality heightened by the common recognition of an indelible impression. For a moment it made her power seem almost innocent of its strange horror.
When she had left the day was stricken. Evil had gone from the air, leaving it empty. Everything that happened seemed to be a conspiracy to display emptiness. The daily life of the house came into view, visible as it was, when no guests were there, going bleakly on its way. Hypo appeared and disappeared. Rapt and absent, though still swiftly observant and between whiles his unchanged talking self; falling back, with his chuckling unspoken commentary, for lack of kindred brilliance; escaping to his study as if to a waiting guest.
Miriam came to dinner silently raging; invisible, yet compelled to be seen. Reduced to nonentity by his wrongly directed awareness, his everlasting demand for bright fussy intelligence. It was her own fault. The result of having been beguiled by joy into a pretence of conformity. For the rest of the visit she would be roughly herself. To shreds she would tear his twofold vision of women as bright intelligent response or complacently smiling audience. Force him to see the evil in women who made terms with men, the poison there was in the trivial gaiety of those who accepted male definitions of life and the world. Somehow make him aware of the realitythat fell, all the time, in the surrounding silence, outside his shapes and classifications.
Sunk away into separation, she found herself gliding into communion with surrounding things, shapes gleaming in the twilight, the intense thrilling beauty of the deep, lessening colours.... She passed into association with them, feeling him fade, annihilated, while her eased breathing released the strain of battle. He was spending the seconds of silence that to him were a void, in observation, misinterpretations. The air was full of his momentary patience. She turned smiling and caught his smile halting between amused contemplation of vacuity and despairing sympathy with boredom. He had not heard the shouts of repudiation with which she had plunged down into her silence. He dropped her and let his testing eye, which he knew she followed, rest on Alma. Two vacuities ... watched by empty primitive eyes, savage eyes, under shaggy brows, staring speculatively out through a forest of eyelash. Having thus made his statement and caught Alma’s attention he made a little drama of childish appeal, with plaintive brows, pleading for rescue.
“Let’s have some light. We’re almost in darkness,” said Alma.
“We are, we are,” he wailed, and Miriam caught his eyes flashed upon her to collect her acceptance of his judgment. The central light Alma had risen to switch on, flashed up over the silk-clad firm little column of her body winged on either side by the falling drapery of herextended arms, and revealed as she sat down the triangle of pendant-weighted necklace on her white throat, the soft squareness of her face, peaked below by the delicate sharp chin and above by her piled gold hair. The day had gone; quenched in the decoration of the night set there by Alma, like the first scene of a play into whose speech and movement she was, with untroubled impersonal bearing, already steadily launched, conscious of the audience, untroubled by their anticipation.
“It’sawful. The evenings are already getting short,” cried Miriam, her voice thrilling in conversation with the outer living spaces beyond the shut-in play. His swiftly flashed glance lingered a moment; incredulous of her mental wandering? In stupefaction that was almost interest, over her persistence, after diagnosis, in anachronism, in utter banality?
Alma’s voice, strangely free, softly lifted a little above its usual note, but happy and full, as it was with outsiders with whom she was at her best, took possession of the set scene. His voice came in answer, deferring, like that of a delighted guest. Presently they were all in an enchantment. From some small point of departure she had carried them off abroad, into an Italian holiday. He urged her on with his voice, his eyes returning perpetually from the business of his meal to rest in admiring delight upon her face. It was lovely, radiant, full of the joy of the theme she had set in the midst and was holding there with bright reflective voice, unattained by the littlebursts of laughter, piling up her monologue, laughing her own laughter in its place, leading on little bridges of gay laughter that did not break her speech, to the points of her stories. All absurd. All making the places she described pathetically absurd, and mysterious strangers, square German housewives and hotel people, whom Miriam knew she would forever remember as they looked in Alma’s tales, and love, absurd. But vivid; each place, the look and the sound and the very savour of it, each person....
By the end of dinner, in the midst of eating a peach, Alma was impersonating a fat shiny Italian opera star, flinging out without losing her dainty charm, a scrap of a rolling cadence, its swift final run up and up in curling trills to leap clear at the end to a single note, terrifically high, just touched and left on the air, the fat singer silent below it, unmoved and more mountainous than before.
Hypo was wholly won by the enchantment she had felt and cast. His face was smooth with the pleasure that wreathed it whenever he passed, listening, from laughter that was not of his own making, to more laughter. He carried Alma off to the study with the bright eagerness he gave to an entertaining guest, but intimately, with his arm through hers.
They sat side by side on the wide settee. There was to be no music. He did not want to go away by himself to the other end of the room and make music. Sitting forward with his handsclasped, towards Alma enthroned, he suddenly improvised a holiday abroad.... “We’ll go mad, stark staring mad. Switzerland. Your ironmongery in myrucksack and off we’ll go.”
To go away, not the wonderful eventful holiday life here; to go away, with Alma, was reward and holiday for him.... This life, with its pattern of guests was the hard work of everyday? These times abroad were the bright points of their long march together? Then if this life and its guests were so little, she was once more near to them. She had shared their times abroad, by first unconsciously kindling them to go. And presently they were deferring to her. It was strange that having preceded them, created, even with them, the sense of advantage persisting so long after they had outdone in such wide sweeps the scope of her small experience.
She had never deliberately “gone abroad.” Following necessity she had found herself in Germany and in Belgium. Pain and joy in equal balance all the time and in memory only joy. So that all going abroad by other people seemed, even while envy rose at the ease and quantity of their expeditions, their rich collection of notorious beauty, somehow slight. Envy was incomplete. She could not by stern reasoning and close effort of imagination persuade herself that they had been so deeply abroad as she. That they had ever utterly lost themselves in foreign things. She forgot perpetually, in this glad moment she again found that she had forgotten, having beenabroad. She forgot it when she read and thought by herself of other parts of the world. Yet when, as now, anyone reminded her, she was at once alight, weighed down by the sense of accomplishment, of rich deeps of experience that would never leave her. Others were bright and gay about their wanderings. But even while pining for their free movement she was beside herself with longing to convey to them the clear deep sense they seemed to lack of what they were doing. The wonder of it. She talked to them about Switzerland, where they had already been. It was for her the unattainable ideal of a holiday. She resented it when he belittled the scenery, gathered it up in a few phrases and offered any good gorge in the Ardennes as an alternative. It was not true. Hewasentranced with Switzerland. It was the protuberance of the back of his head that made him oppose. And his repudiation of any form of expression that did not jest. She sought and found a weapon. To go to Switzerland in the summer was not to go. She had suddenly remembered all she had heard about Swiss winters. Switzerland in the summer was an oleograph. In winter an engraving. That impressed him. And when she had described all she remembered, she had forgotten she had not been. They had forgotten. They had come into her experience as it looked to herself. Their questions went on, turned to her life in London. She was besieged by things to communicate, going on and on, wondering all the time where the interest lay, in remote people, most of themperceived only once and remembered once as speech, yet feeling it, and knowing that they felt it. There was a clue, some clue to some essential thing, in her mood. Suddenly she awoke to see them sitting propped close against each other, his cheek cushioned on her crown of hair, both of them blinking beseechingly towards her.