TOBRYHER.
TOBRYHER.
THE TRAPCHAPTER I
THE TRAP
Ashort by-street paved from side to side. Narrow house-fronts and the endmost houses, hiding the passage that curved round into the further street, high enough to keep out of sight the neighbouring cubes of model dwellings and to leave, as principal feature in the upper air, the spire of St. Pancras Church. An old little street. A scrap of old London standing apart, between the Bloomsbury squares and the maze of streets towards the City. The light gleaming from its rain-washed flagstones gave it a provincial air and a freshness unknown to the main streets, between whose buildings lay modern roadways dulled by mud or harsh with grimy dust.
Whenever during all her London years Miriam had passed the spot where it opened into the thoroughfare, the little by-way had drawn her eyes; always stating its sequestered charm. Entering it now for the first time she had a sense of arriving nowhere.
She found her number to the right, just beyond the opening, on a blistered door, whose knocker, a blurred, weather-worn iron face, gazed sadly downwards. Next the door, within a small window screened from the interior by a frayed serge curtain, were ranged small blocks of stone and marble, polished columns, scraps of moulding; and in the centre upon an oblong mount an alabaster finger. A lady’s forefinger, fastidiously posed—the nail, smooth joints and softly curving flesh most delicately carved. Its white cleanliness seemed to rebuke the dust that lay thick upon the other objects and made their welcome quiet and impersonal. It was personal, emotional. Arrogant, calling the eye from the surrounding dusty peace.
Dust lay even upon the large grey cat compactlycurled amongst the sharp angles and looking forth with a green eye, glass-clear and startlingly bright in contrast to the dried socket from which its fellow should have shone.
She raised the heavy knocker and tapped. The sounds echoed down the empty court and left a stillness into which flowed her own tremulous stillness. Down the street a black cat came towards her, serene and unnoticing, keeping aloof along the centre of the way.
Yet she was an inhabitant of Flaxman’s Court. Up there, on the upper floors of the house that remained so quiet before her claim were rooms as quiet, her own. Soon she would daily be slipping out into this small brightness, daily coming back to it, turning from strident thoroughfares to enter its sudden peace.
She knocked again, more loudly. If Miss Holland were not there, she was shut out. But certainly the door would open. She knew, so careless was her spirit, that she was not shut out. In a moment there came the sound of boots upon uncarpeted stairs. The door opened; but not upon Miss Holland. Therebefore her was the dark passage that skirted the little shop and led to the staircase, the way up to the quiet, eager, empty rooms, obstructed.
Since he stood aside, welcoming, and greeted her by name, the man could be none other than the landlord. An unconsidered item, appearing at the outset. Not only postponing joy, but enhancing it; for if this meeting were its price, how good must be what lay ahead.
She hoped that during the swift moment of confronting once more this long-forgotten way of being, that she had shown no sign of antipathy. She could not be sure, for in that moment she had been back again in bitter conflict. The shape was a duplicate. The same tall, grey-clad form, neither thin nor solid, the same pale eyes, arrogant and embarrassed, the florid skin, the drooping fair moustache half-hiding the fleshy red lips through which had come the voice familiar and shunned from beyond memory.
She went forward followed by the voice into an air dense with shut-in odours driedbrown by stale pipe-smoke. It was as if the door just closed behind her were never set open, and any egress there might be at the back, closely sealed. And here, at the centre of a fog of smells of which the air of the passage was but the fringe, someone was living.
The voice behind her on the stairs rang clear through the murk; a refined voice, musical; they always had good voices.
“I’ve had three buckets of boiling water over the floors, and I’m going to have three more.”
Yet another price to pay. This time not intermittent but permanent. How long did scrubbing last?
Though the air cleared as they mounted the stairs, it had now a new smell, meeting and mingling with the thinned odours coming up from below, the smell of long-lying London dust. A staircase window, fast shut, showed a grimy sky. On the first floor were two rooms standing open, their doorways close together at right angles. The window of the large frontroom gave a blurred view of the house-fronts over the way. The back room was a small square, with a square window. The sky here was fly-blown, but less dim than from the staircase window, and there were trees, black-stemmed, bearing many-shaped masses of drying leaves. A short flight led up to the second floor. Here were the rooms, two; open doors at right angles as on the floor below. Windows wide, smells banished; clear clean height of air. It was the height of the rooms that made these narrow four-story houses look tall.
“Oh, they’renicerooms,” she said.
“They’re nice old houses, they’ve beengoodhouses,” he panted plaintively. “I live next door, with my mother. Comeupstairs, Miss Henderson. I’m at work upthere.”
He went on up the narrow flight leading to the attic. When his long form had disappeared, Miriam turned into the large room; a large oblong, its end wall, opposite the broad high window, broken by a door communicating with the back room. Going through it, she found the smaller room dark. There was a pale washon the walls of the other room, but here a dark old paper absorbed the light without reflection. And the ceiling, of course, would be dark with grime. The ceiling seemed to have looked down at her long ago. Long she had stood, with life gathered richly about her, in the empty window-lit space where she now asked whether really she had seen up there while she welcomed this superfluous second room, the thing that lay reflected in her mind, growing dim, changing to a feeling, a part of the warm sense of life all about her.
“Won’t you come up, Miss Henderson? I’m at work uphere.”
She had forgotten the man and the third room. At this moment, in order not to go up, she would have sacrificed the possession of the third room. On her way out she glanced at the ceiling. Itwaspainted. Floating draped figures, garlanded, in dull crimsons, faded rose and blue and gold, dim with grime, set within a moulding shaped to fill the angles of the square and filmed to a yellowish brown.
“This is a nice room.”
The man, a good deal altered by a large white apron, was standing behind his buckets.
“My name’s Sheffield. ItoldMiss Holland. Perhaps she didn’t tell you?”
The room stated itself, competing with the voice. It was high and airy, its ceiling sloping on all four sides; in the front to a deep lattice, having a wide shelf underneath.
“She’s a very nice lady. Nicequietlady. There’s not so many about nowadays.”
It was all coming back; the attitude towards life that had so tormented her when she listened unaided by thought. She knew now that it was blasphemy. It is blasphemy, she could say, if this man were equally armed, blasphemy to imagine that each next generation is plunging into an abyss.
“People don’t keep themselves to themselves like they did. There’s too much running about. Don’t you think so, Miss Henderson?”
She was looking out upon the rain-washed parapet a yard away from the window. ‘Nice to have a parrypidge in case of fire; plenty of roofs and chimley-pots to walk on.’
“Yes,” she said hastily. “People run about because they wonder who they are.”
“That’s it. Don’t know where they are. That’s the position of the L.C.C. Money to spend and must find something to spend it on. Public money. Pitched away. Not a hayputh o’ good out of it.”
The sudden presence in the room of the L.C.C. made him harmless.
“Officials are strange people. Being officials makes people strange.” She stood seeking something that had passed wordlessly through her mind while she snatched this borrowed thought. Something she ought to say, hidden because she was being insincere. It remained hidden, and she passed towards the door, his inferior, having nothing to offer half so good as his own mistaken convictions.
“You goingdown, Miss Henderson?”
She was at the top of the winding stair before she spoke the leave-taking that left the room empty, as it would be this afternoon.
Very gently she went down her stairs. In this clear upper light, angles and surfaces declaredthemselves intimately. The thing she loved was there. Light falling upon the shapes of things, reflected back, moving through the day, a steadfast friend, silent and understanding. She had loved it wherever she was, even in the midst of miseries; and always it had belonged to others. This time it was her own. The breath she held facing it was a cool stream, bringing strength; joy. Nothing could be better than this. None of the events, none of the passions of life, better than this sense of light quietly falling.
Coming back in the afternoon, she found Miss Holland installed, her half of the larger room fully furnished.
From a low camp-bed with a limply frilled Madras muslin cover, her eyes passed to a wicker washstand-table, decked with a strip of the same muslin and set with chilly, pimpled white crockery. At its side was a dulled old Windsor chair, and underneath it a battered zinc footbath propped against the wall. Abovea small shabby chest of drawers a tiny square of mirror hung by a nail to the strip of wall next the window. No colour anywhere but in the limp muslin, washed almost colourless.
But over the whole of the floor, gleaming, without blemish, was the new linoleum. And soon the dividing curtain would hang between her and Miss Holland’s cheerless things. A length of cord hung ready, suspended in a deep loop from the top of the window frame to a hook in the wall above the connecting door, and on the floor beneath the window lay a pile of material.
She cried out at the sight of it, bringing Miss Holland in from the next room.
“Yes,” she said disdainfully, “that is the curtain.”
Though in the course of two meetings Miriam had grown used to Miss Holland’s way of speaking, it was still fruitful of wonder. She wondered now, hearing it unchanged by the informality of the occasion, how it had first come into being. At Wimpole Street it was a familiar tone, common to upper middle-classdowdies of the better sort. Perhaps Henry James used it? In men, it was apt to be fluty; a contraction of the range of the voice to two or three fluty notes. In women it was almost only one note, a little curved, breaking at some point of its passage into distress; solicitous.
She had already discovered the exact amount of constriction of the throat necessary to its production, and felt it draw the muscles of her nose and mouth into an expression of faintly humorous contempt. Heard now, as it were in its dressing-gown, it gave a clue to the mode of being that would automatically produce it; a disdain of life’s external processes, of everything but high ends, any kind of high end, from the honour of England to the dignity of the speaker, that everything in life must be moulded to serve.
Once accepted, it would ban any kind of passionate feeling, even passionate chirpiness. Even mirth would not be allowed to reach beyond a faint amusement. On the whole, so far, she had decided against it, decided thatit might even be possible to become a sort of châtelaine without the constricted voice.
But on this occasion the voice showed itself in a new light. Subtly attractive. For behind Miss Holland’s tone was a smile that beamed the more warmly for the frost through which it came. It reached and touched like sunlight. Garden sunlight that had been missing through all the wandering years.
Did all these people emanate from high walled gardens, scorning everything that was outside?
In any case, here she was, indefinitely committed to live at close quarters with a scorn she was not sure of being able to share. Must at least beware at the times, this was one of them, when the châtelaine way of taking life went to her head, of treachery to things that stood outside it. Meanwhile the experience would be charming. And to be a little moulded by it would not be atavism. For Miss Holland was more than the châtelaine. She had broken loose, set herself in adventurous circumstances; a châtelaine facing both ways.
“I saw you did not like the idea of sacking, though I think it might have been made quite pretty, painted artistically, as I am sure you could have done it, with a Grecian key pattern or something of the kind, along the border.”
She had spoken standing near the heaped material conciliatingly, and now bent and caught gingerly at an end, as if uncertain of its mood.
“Still, I thought I would get this. It is the new stuff they are calling ‘Casement cloth’ in quality rather like a fine ‘crash.’ Very durable, and not ruinous in price.”
“Perfect. Tones with the floor and my crocks. But you must let me pay. It’s my extravagance.”
“Not at all. I quite like it. I shall certainly contribute my share. Your things are here. They are charming. I perceive that you have excellent taste.”
“Joy, where are they?”
“I had them set down in here. I thought you would prefer to arrange them yourself.”
She threw open the connecting door and stood back, a gracious hostess introducing guests. How tall she was indoors, and big. Heavy in build, yet limber and light-footed; graceful. The grey in the sleek dark mass of hair scarcely showed. Her large eyes, set well apart on either side of her good nose, when there was no street light to show the tired muscles round about them, were really beautiful. Liquid radiant blue, with a darker ring.
“I suddenly,” Miriam said, going into the crowded little room, “remembered crockery and went back to Maple’s. But there’s a tragedy. I forgot an indispensable.”
She was startled by laughter, an abrupt fairy tinkle, affectionate and gay.
“Never mind,” said the voice, unchanged. “I will obtain one for you.”
“How?”
“Oh, quite easily, I assure you.”
“And, oh Lord, a pail! I forgot a pail.”
“There is no need to invoke the Deity. I have several pails.”
Miriam turned and saw happiness shinefrom her. Her presence was balm as she stood so lightly there—a momentary stillness poised for help, ready to welcome any confession, shoulder any burden that might be offered—and then turned on a dancing step towards the big room, thoroughly pleased, deep, quite deep, in delight at the prospect of settling down here in intimacy.
And here they were. And itwaswonderful. Full of a deep refreshment. The experiment was turning to success. But not yet quite fully. Not until the curtain was up and the strips of privacy were secure.
She was not sure that Miss Holland desired a complete privacy. The curtain, for her, was an affair of modesty, a physical not a spiritual covering. Spiritually she had nothing to hide.
She had no back premises. No reservations. And here, at last, no doubt, was the secret of the effortless decorous speech of the “gentlewoman.” And the secret of its tiresomely unvarying form. The quality it expressed went right through. They not only spoke as they thought, but thought as they spoke,guided and fashioned their thought, even to themselves, in forms of decorous speech. Anything that could not so be moulded was banished. Anything “unspeakable”—their strongest term of contempt. Thus they were, even when alone, permanently at attention.
For herself, the coming of the curtain would be the moment of dropping the mask of attention, the moment of soaring freely within this new life. Things were going ahead too fast. Strong impressions succeeding and obliterating each other too swiftly to be absorbed.
“I’ll go round for my things. Must find a greengrocer,” she said, looking in on Miss Holland cutting a slice from a substantial bar of plain soap.
“You prefer a greengrocer? I am employing the Church Army myself. They are most useful. And it is quite the least expensive way of moving. The men should now be on their way with the last of my things. They could then, if you like, fetch yours.”
“Ah! Perfect,” said Miriam, and set forth.
Going westwards she met a sky ablaze withfiery rose thrown up behind clouds that hid the drooping sun, and saw, looking back, the London scene transformed; pink houses, grey roofs tinged with madder. The sun had still a good way to drop. The clouds might shift. Coming back she would walk in brilliance.
The Church Army men arrived as she was putting together the last of her things.
They were oppressive. Met in the freedom of a slum they would have been dreadful enough. But with their prison air of sullen shyness, overlaid by an ill-fitting respectability they were, she felt as she stood telling them what things were to be removed, heart-breaking by reason of their ignorance of the world they now feared. They did not know that the evil that in them had come up and out into action was in everybody.
She wanted to fête them, give them tea, somehow make them cease tiptoeing about the room with that dreadful air of shame.But her voice, which she tried to make casual, sounded rallying, expressive of equality, insulting; she could only wish them to finish and be gone.
Her forgotten book was lying on the table. The book that had suddenly become the centre of her life. Now, with these men here, the very existence of the volume seemed a mockery. She took it in her hands, felt it draw her again with its unique power. The men could, must, manage without supervision. For the second time, during which they stood listening as though she had not spoken before, she pointed out the things which were to be taken, and sat down with the book.
Sitting thus with the book in her hands and her eyes upon the title, set within the golden lines of an upright oblong in letters of gold upon the red cover, she found herself back within the first moment of meeting it. In the little book-shop, a treasure house opened by the so small subscription. Saw again the close-packed ranks of well-known names, names that had until then, whenever she thought of them,stood large along the margin of life, and that seemed now, set minutely down upon neat rows of volumes, suddenly uninteresting, irrelevant to the impulse of her search. And then this book, for all the neutrality of its title and of the author’s name, drawing her hands, bringing as she took it from the shelf and carried it, unexamined, away down the street, the stillness of contentment.
She could, so long as the men remained, get no further. Within the neat red binding lay altogether new happiness. But she was aware only of the sluggishly moving men, of the shelter from whence they had come and whither presently, when she, free and a millionaire, should have been shifted from palace to palace, they would, with their dingy barrow, shamble back.
The men were going downstairs. The last moments in this room that held the whole of her London life were ticking themselves away, appealing in vain for some sadness of farewell. Just round the corner in Flaxman’s Court was Miss Holland, expectantly at work. And hereshe sat with a book open upon her knee, asking only to be left in communion with a style.
She glanced through the pages of its opening chapter, the chapter that was now part of her own experience; set down at last alive, so that the few pages stood in her mind, growing as a single good day will grow, in memory, deep and wide, wider than the year to which it belongs. She was surprised to find, coming back after the interval of disturbed days, how little she had read. Just the opening pages, again and again, not wanting to go forward; wanting the presentation of the two men, talking outside time and space in the hotel bedroom, to go on for ever. And presently fearing to go on, lest the perfection of satisfaction should cease.
Reading a paragraph here and there, looking out once more the two phrases that had thrilled her more intimately than any others, she found a stirring of strange statements in her mind. A strange clarity that was threatening to change the adventure of reading to ashared disaster. For she remembered now, having hung for a while over Waymarsh’s “sombre glow” and “his attitude of prolonged impermanence,” that she had already read on into the next chapter, that something had happened, so bitter as to have been pushed from her mind. And yet her mind had been at work upon it. It had happened with the coming of Maria Gostrey, and had culminated at the dinner-party in her red neck-band. Disappointing. Yes. Here she was again, drawing on her gloves and being elaborately mysterious.
The thought, too, of reading in the new room with Miss Holland on the other side of the curtain, changed the proportions of the adventure. Made it almost improper. She imagined herself trying to explain why the phrases that lit the scene were wonderful. And it seemed, thought of as a public matter, ridiculous to have been so excited by the way he conveyed information without coming forward to announce it. But even more disquieting was Miss Holland’s reinforcement ofthe need to confront the author with his own cynicism, to tell him that in every word he came forward with his views, which were the most hopelessly complacent masculine ignorance.
It was only as private, shared by no one else, that the adventure was glorious. Thought of as carried under the eye of a witness, it seemed criminal—“anti-social.” She now for the first time imagined men reading the magic pages, suffering unconsciously their insidious corruption. This man was a monstrous unilluminated pride. And joy in him was a mark of the same corruption. Pride in discovering the secrets of his technique. Pride in watching it labour with the development of the story. The deep attention demanded by this new way of statement was in itself a self-indulgence. Thought of as enjoyed in a world that held Church Army men it was plain wickedness.
But the cold ignorance of this man was unconscious. And therefore innocent. And it was he after all who had achieved the first completely satisfying way of writing a novel.If this were a novel. Therewassomething holy about it. Something to make, like Conrad, the heavens rejoice. Perhaps at lunch times, or in rare solitudes, she could go on, get at the whole of the light there was in him. Style was something beyond good and evil. Sacred and innocent.
The new furniture peopled the room with clear reflections. The daylight was dimmed by the street, but it came in generously through the wide high window. And upon the polished surfaces of the little bureau, set down with its back to the curtain, and upon its image, filling the lower part of the full-length strip of mirror hung opposite against the wall, were bright plaques of open sky.
The bureau was experience; seen from any angle it was joy complete. Added to life and independent of it. A little thing that would keep its power through all accidents of mood and circumstance. The inlaid design enclosing the lock of the sloping lid formed a trianglewith the small brass candlesticks at either end of the level top, and the brass handles of the three drawers hung below on either side, garlands, completing the decoration.
Pools of light rested on the squat moss-green crockery of the wash-table, set, flanked by clear wall and clear green floor, between the mirror and the end of the small bed which skirted the wall as far as the door opening on to the landing. The unencumbered floor made a green pathway to the window. It was refreshment merely to walk along it, between clean sightly objects. Squalor was banished. No more smell of dust. No more sleepless nights under a roof too hot to grow cool even in the hour before dawn. Here in the mornings there would always be beauty, the profiles of things growing clear on either side of the pathway of morning light, the profiles of flowers, set in a bowl between the sentinel candlesticks.
Miss Holland’s voice came unheralded, startlingly out of the silence. She must have come through from the back room in noiselessslippers. Miriam answered that she had forgotten about clothes, and proposed nails in the attic.
“It will be no trouble at all. I have lengths of bamboo and still some yards of green material. We will regard any provision of French wardrobes down here as franking me to use the attic for my charts and other impedimenta. You, I observe, have no débris.”
“Only a few books.”
“You have a goodly store of books. I shall look forward to a treat.”
“There’s a book I’m reading now—” she began walking up and down the linoleum path in the excitement of wondering whether Miss Holland could be brought to share the adventure.
“It is in a way the most wonderful I have met. The most real.”
“No doubt you are a connoisseur.”
“I’m not. But I’ve never got so much out of a novel before. I say, this stuff shows every mark.”
Miss Holland would get nothing from James. She would read patiently for a while and pronounce him “a little tedious.”
“It will at first. But you need not be concerned about that. I am at home all day, and it will be a very slight matter to keep things more or less in order. Perhaps we can make a little bargain. I for my part will willingly undertake the rooms and the marketing if you will save me from thepalavering.”
“Will there be any?”
“Well, for example, the rent. The landlord is a mostodiousman. I abhor the thought of tackling him. You, I am sure, will manage anything of that sort better than I. Yes. Most certainly. You have an air.”
A few words weekly seemed a small price to pay for freedom from the mysteries of cleaning and catering, and Miriam agreed to pay the rent, to call next door and pay it; keeping Sheffield away from the house.
Miss Holland went on talking as if to herself. Expostulating. It was a mistake, she concluded, to drop domesticity. She preferredto keep her hand in, while safeguarding sufficient leisure for reading and so on.
Miriam saw her keeping house, dressmaking, and yet free to wander abroad in the sunlight, and to come home, full of the life and brightness of London, to rest and read, with her feet up, “to counteract the strain upon the heart, of the upright posture” following the example of “those sensible Americans who discuss business with their feet on the mantelshelf.” She judged unconventionalities according as they did or did not serve the cause of hygiene.
“Much” she finished hurriedly, as if to avoid further postponing anything Miriam might be going to say, “Muchcan be done with a damp duster.”
Miriam wondered whether, after all, housework might not hold some strange charm. Something that was lacking in a life lived altogether in the world of men; altogether on the surface of things. Always, in relation to household women, she felt herself a man. Felt that they included her with a half-contemptuousindulgence, in the world of men. Some of them, those to whom the man’s world was still an exciting mystery, were a little jealous and spiky.
As if encouraged by silence, Miss Holland pursued her theme.
“I have a horror of becoming anofficialwoman. It is, I think, a most obnoxious type. It abounds. In London it is to be met wherever women are in positions of responsibility. Real or fancied. And it is on the increase. There have, of course, always been official women. Even in rural districts, where, most unfortunately, they have but one sphere of activity. We used to call them the curates-in-charge.”
Vicarage humour at first hand. Miriam laughed suitably; ensconced, an eavesdropper.
“Church workers.”
“They are the bane of a parish. Work, yes. That they most certainly do, to the accompaniment of loud complaints on the score of other people’s inactivity. Implying, of course, that they themselves hold a monopoly of intelligenceand efficiency. Whereas the truth is to be found in their inability to attract helpers or to collaborate with those who really desire to take part in the work. These women are actuated solely by personal ambition, the desire to run the parish and to be openly recognised as doing so. Nothing less will content them. Nothing less. It is amostperturbing spectacle. And I, for one, have no hesitation in admitting that I am driven to the conclusion that authority is harmful to women. They grow sohard. Socoldlyself-important and dictatorial.”
Miriam knew she would want to run the parish, choose the music, edit the vicar’s mind, lecture the parishioners.
“In London many of them are social workers. They spend their time on committees. But not in service. They quell.”
She handled her statements as she had handled the pile of green material, pouncing, taking disdainful hold. Her sentences were sallies, each one leaving her voice halted on an interval of deprecating sounds. Her voicecame from a height. She must be standing, poised, in her light way, for movement. Talking as if to herself, assuming a lack of interest. Yet the air was full of her shy desire for response.
“They must be holy terrors.”
“I fear,” chuckled Miss Holland, “that I am not completely convinced of their holiness.”
“I’ve never met any of these women. Avoid women on the whole. But I daresay I should be that type myself if I weren’t too lazy to achieve a position.”
“Believe me, you could never be official. You are much too artistic.”
Miriam was too disappointed to feel flattered. There was no illumination here. Exposing herself before the tribunal, she had been judged in a class of which the judge knew nothing. Compared to Miss Holland, she might perhaps be called artistic. But it was grievous to be supplied already with a false reputation. To be imagined as cultured in a way that was respected in vicarages.
She glanced around upon the poor things that already she loved with an immemorial love whose secret eluded her, whose going forth she knew to be blind and personal. Her eye was at once arrested by a small dark something upon the white coverlet of her bed. A ladybird. Too square. Perfectly square and motionless. Even as she called to Miss Holland to come through and observe, the sight of it thrilled her in every nerve.
A swish of the curtain and Miss Holland was at her side, bent and peering.
“Dear, dear,dear!” she moaned. “I feared, Ifeared. I’ll get the dustpan.”
The floor rocked with her swift departure. Miriam stood fascinated. The unspeakable thing had revealed itself, and she was not only calm but curious. A moment ago it had existed only in her mind, an ultimate she could not imagine herself seeing and surviving. It looked like a fragment of an autumn leaf. Miss Holland’s voice sounded in the further room. Miriam listened to the low tones for entertainment while she kept watch.
“I feared, I feared,” and then a swift ferretting, drowning the anxious monologue.
Weary of the scene that was holding up her installation, she turned away to the window, half expecting to be leapt upon from behind. She was vitalised by the incident; tingling from head to foot. It was strange that one could recognise at sight an unknown thing; but far stranger that within a moment of pure shock there should be life, the keen sense of living that stood away outside the bounds of everyday life.
What a set of circumstances were these that brought only vermin to give her the pang of immortality. Not a thing one could testify at a dinner-table. Why not?
When Miss Holland came back she would remind her that monkeys were timid, and fearful of small creeping things. Being a Protestant she probably revelled in Evolution—wouldn’t see that it left everything more spooky than before.
She was looking straight in at a window of the opposite house. The panes were clean andclear, the curtains on either side a dull dark green, hanging in straight folds. Sombre. Faintly, clearer as she made it out, a thick tall white candle rose in the midst of the gloom, just inside the window, changing the aspect of the curtains, making a picture. Just visible, right and left, were the shoulders of two high-backed chairs. She imagined them occupied, the beam of the thick white candle falling on two forms. But in this street what forms? It was clear that she and Miss Holland were not the only aliens. Perhaps “artistic” bachelor women who made a cult of their diggings, wore sage-green dresses and would emerge to become a spectacle known by heart, now both together, now one alone, crying cultured witticisms from the street to the window. Women standing critically aside from life, hugely amused by it. But would such have achieved that candle, at once a person and a piece of furniture? Lamps they would have, with art shades. Or if candles, still art shades. It might be an anchorite. But the company of such a candle wasnot solitude. Underneath the window was a cobbler’s shop.
“Just look here,” she cried to Miss Holland coming back preceded by her voice. The things in her own room seemed to greet, as she turned, the things in the room across the way. It was a man’s room. It had an air of waiting for an untimed return.
“I hope,” said Miss Holland, through a rapid scrunching of paper. “I trust, it was only those Church Army men.”
Miriam watched her go away, with the dustpan at arm’s length, still gravely expostulating.
“It’s dreadful,” she said to her returning form, “but also fearfully funny, to find the ultimate horror sitting contentedly, poor little thing, on the end of your bed.”
She tinkled and tinkled at that, woefully crying out through her laughter, repudiating and agreeing and contradicting.
“But I admire your spirit,” she wailed finally.
“Do look at this huge candle across the way.”
Miss Holland moved to her side and peered anxiously, frowning in anticipation.
“Very odd,” she said sceptically. “A ship’s candle, something of the kind.”
“Where did they get it? Besides, too tall, it would burn a cabin roof. Perhaps an altar candle.”
“Very eccentric.” She turned away, busily, skittishly. Pleased about something, but not interested in the candle.
Her light busy footfall was audible upstairs as Miriam faced the boxes and parcels waiting, piled amongst the furniture of the little back room, to be unpacked.... With Sunday at hand it would never occur to Miss Holland to leave it all and go out. But she too must be wanting tea. There could be tea, now, amongst the wreckage. Laughter and relaxation.
Yet not to go out now was to miss so much. To go out, leaving behind this treasure of disorder, and sit at leisure in an undisturbed world,would be to reap the full adventure of being installed. Homekeeping people missed that adventure. They slaved on and on, saying how nice it will be when everything isstraight. And then wondered why it was not nice.
Left to herself, she would now go out, not only for tea but for the whole evening, into a world renewed. There would be one of those incidents that punctually present themselves at such moments, a link in the chain of life as it appears only when one is cut off from fixed circumstances. She would come home lost and refreshed. Laze through Sunday morning. Roam about the rooms amongst things askew as though thrown up by an earthquake, their exposed strata storied with memory and promise. There would be indelible hours of reading and dreaming, of harvesting the lively thought that comes when one is neither here nor there, but poised in bright light between a life ended and a life not yet begun. The blissful state would last until dusk deepened towards evening and would leave her filledwith a fresh realisation of the wonder of being alive and in the midst of life, and with strength to welcome the week slowly turning its unknown bright face towards her through the London night. With great speed, at the eleventh hour, she would get everything roughly in order.
Miss Holland appeared at the sitting-room door, eyeing the disorder.
Miriam groaned her fatigue aloud.
“Let’s leave it,” said Miss Holland, contemptuously. “Oh, let’sleaveit,” she wailed in a protesting falsetto, with averted face and outstretched fingers disgustedly flipping.
“Let’s drop everything and go out for tea,” she went on, relaxing, looking into space, while with eyebrows raised disdainfully she stood halted for response.
“Oh, agreed,” said Miriam. “I’m expiring.”
“We willnotexpire. We will seek teaimmediately.”
She swung round on one heel and bounded lightly back into the bedroom with her tinklinglaugh. The little scene remained in Miriam’s eyes, somewhere within it the exchanged glance of delighted understanding that had driven them both to cover which was not cover, for they were immediately together again, and the dividing curtain could not mask the results of their encounter, the quick movements, the duet of cheerful hummings.
Miriam went back into the little room to collect her outdoor things; checking an impulse to eager snatching, steadying herself against the sudden arrival of the personal note.
Under her hat was the red book. Thepersonal noterepeated itself before her mind’s eye, in print. And as she searched for her gloves the note described itself as it were aloud, in a voice speaking urbanely from the surrounding air. Its indubitable descent; its perhaps too great and withal so manifestly, so well-nigh woefully irretrievable precipitancy. Its socharming and for all she could at the moment and within the straitly beleaguering the so eminently onerous and exciting circumstances assemble of disturbing uncertainty, so brilliantly, so almostdazzlinglysunlit height. In simpler words, things were going too fast and too far. An exact and dramatic landscape of thought. Things seen as going too fast and too far, distilled into refinement. Cuyp.
She tried to imagine herself producing phrases for the landlord from a mental landscape of what would be occurring between them in terms of thought. It would certainly make her dignified, and to the landlord, mysterious. It might daunt, reduce him, keep him at a distance. But it was difficult to weave in the word “rent” the so simple, the so potently humiliating monosyllable that was the immediate, the actual, the dreadfully unavoidable ... ornate alias. Ah. Clifford Allbutt. James was the art of beautifully elaborating the ornate alias?
Her eyes roamed as she moved about putting on her things. Seeking up and down the strip of bedroom for a centre, some running together of effects where her spirit could settle and find its known world about it. There seemed to be none, though the light was fading and the aspect of the room as it had been when her things were first set down was already in the past. Each glance produced the same picture; a picture seen and judged long ago and with which her eyes could do nothing. She took refuge with single objects, finding each satisfactory, but nowhere reaching home. Swimming in transparent shallows, unable to touch bottom, stand steady, and see forth. Her life had somehow ceased. Behind her back unawares, while she had flown from newness to newness, its thread had been snapped. The small frayed end remaining in her hand was drawing herahead across a level that showed no coverts; no deep places to be invaded by unsummoned dreams and their good end in the recreation of familiar things.
Though it was late when they arrived, the club was just as she had seen it on her first solitary visit. The same hush in the large drawing-room, the same low murmuring of conversation between women half hidden in the depths of easy-chairs.
Seated in two little high-backed chairs by the central window, they found themselves looking down on the square, a small forest dim in the twilight, asheen where the light poured in from the street lamps. A twilit loveliness at rest. Walked through, the squares were always a new loveliness, but even at a stroll they passed too quickly. There, at last, was one of the best of them arrested for contemplation.
Away behind was a roomful of independent strangers, also aware of the square set ever before their eyes. This was freedom, in company, enriched. The sense of imprisonment she had felt on coming down the street with Miss Holland, the tangible confirmationwhen Miss Holland, laughter sounding in the tones of her confidently talking voice, suddenly took her arm, of the note struck too soon, and too high, vanished altogether in the freedom of this neutral territory.
Miss Holland was responding formally, in low tones, to her comments on the aspect of the square. Spontaneity it was evident was to be shelved just where it might be safely indulged; just where one attained an impersonality as wide as the wide world.
Suddenly she found herself wanting to say outrageous things. The decorous voices sounding all about her seemed to call for violence. With difficulty she kept her tone subdued. Level it refused to be. The gift of the square imparted to every word the sound of exciting news. News upon which the dear, the for-the-first-time-so-comfortably, so-opulently-visible London twilight closed gently in.
It was to a morning and not to Miss Holland she was speaking. The wide deep spaces of a London Sunday morning that showed invariably within the witnessed falling of a Saturdaytwilight. Miss Holland’s responses showed her struggling between charmed appreciation and a sense that audible comments were not quite within the boundaries of club etiquette. Silence fell, and within it Miriam saw the scales of judgment descend equally balanced. She had, it was true, given no thought to her neighbours and only now in retrospect heard her lively tones penetrate the murmurings of the gathered ladies. But—she was wearing her lavender-grey, her mushroom hat of silky straw, both still quite able to hold their own, and still conquering fatigue whenever she put them on. While Miss Holland, though clothed in awareness of her surroundings, was not even stylishly dowdy. Piled upon her head was a mass of blue crinoline, not only faded, but dulled with inextricable dust. Beneath its shapelessness wisps of lank hair made fun of her dignified bearing. A black tie, running from neck to waist of the skimped blouse uniting her coat and skirt, fought with the millinery hat. Only her eyes took the light, and they were at a loss, turned unseeing, underfaintly frowning brows, upon the prospect beyond the window.
She was uneasy, disapproving equally of silence and of speech that was not smoothly decorous.
Tea came. Lights went up all over the room; brilliant light shone down upon the stately Queen Anne service, shone through the thinness of the shallow flowered cups.
“Tea,” cried Miriam, through the shifting of chairs that followed the coming of the light, “should never be drunk from cold white cups.”
Miss Holland laughed her laugh, and began with large, composed movements to pour out. At once her appearance was redeemed. For a moment Miriam sat basking in her manner. Then her eyes were drawn to two tall figures risen together from deep chairs far away.
“One ought,” she went on to lend a casual air to her first inspection of fellow-members, “to drink down to a pattern.” They were without hats and therefore residents. And unexpectedly impressive.
“Good faience,” Miss Holland was saying, “is certainly a great enhancement of the charm of the tea-table.”
They were most strange. They radiated a definitely familiar quality as they stood there gazing down the room. At nothing. There was no trace of the awareness of exposure that set the faces of the women sitting about within view, large-hatted in deep chairs; awareness or careful unawareness. Yet as they moved, now, slowly along the clear spaces of the room, they were visibly the figures of an ordeal. Stately in their white-robed splendour, they were still piteous. Something was dispelling the conventional charm usually inseparable from the spectacle of beauty, tall and well-clothed, moving slowly through a room.
The depth of her interest inspired Miriam to feed her conversation with Miss Holland and remain at the same time free to watch. The mystery cleared as the figures drew near. They were sisters, the one quite ordinary, fully aware and fitted out with the regulation feminine charm of bearing. Conscious of piledbrown hair, of brilliant oval cheeks, of dark and lively eyes. The upturning bow of her mouth was set in a smile. So it would be set, thought Miriam, years ahead, when the nose and the chin began to approach each other. She was the elder. But her few extra years, the ardour of her head and her splendid form, were in leash to the being of the other. She it was who came unseeing and produced the strange effect. Slender, in childish muslin beside her sister’s opulent sophisticated lace, she was formidable. Below her dark hair, drawn flat to the shape of her head, yet set round it like a mist, was the strong calm face of a healthy child, a mask clear of expression and colourless but for the eyes that were startling. Life flowed from her eyes as if it would wither the air before them. Where was she? Whence, round-faced child, had she gathered her wealth of suffering? Her beauty was the beauty of a transfiguration. Here, on this plain afternoon, at the Belmont, amongst friends.
Reluctantly, as they came quite near, Miriamaverted her screened gaze and met the eyes of the other. Here was conciliation, a deprecating fearfulness changing suddenly as she came in view of Miss Holland.
“My,” she vowed, wide-mouthed for the leisurely vowel, “it’s Miss Halland.”
Americans! Then perhaps the other girl merely had neuralgia. Miss Holland had turned, and Miriam saw her swift disclaiming glance and its change into the shy but brightly charmed and charming smile, accompanying the greeting that was yet so formal and in its apologetic disdainfulness so like her voice. She was hidden now behind the tall white figures. Their voices, playing about her and expanding into the room, killed Miriam’s interest. There was, for her, something in the American voice that robbed its communications of any depth of meaning. The very ease of their talk, its expressiveness, the direct swift way they handled their stores of information and communicated their thoughts, made even the most fascinating topics fall dead, rifled of essential significance.
Her stranded attention was caught by the sound of blended voices approaching from the door. Voices in the midst of talk, having come into the room talking, but not in the least in the English way of making conversation to cover an entry. They were in full swing, their sentences overlapping. Obviously noticing nothing and no one. They were using the club as a place to talk in, and were one voice. Sisters or cousins. Yet they had arranged themselves in chairs without breaking their talk, which went forward so eagerly that they seemed to be exchanging opinions for the first time. Now where had she heard, between sisters, exactly that effect? Somewhere between members of a large family that formed a society in itself?
No, the three Bannerman girls, just three, no more, living in seclusion with their parents, marching about all over Barnes for years, in perpetual conversation in high, rapid voices....
They had suddenly appeared at the church decorations, keeping it up even there, amongst themselves. Speaking to no one else. Being really interested, but somehow conveying their conviction that the people all around them were too stupid even to be noticed. They had accepted work politely, making clever comments without looking at those who instructed them, and then sat there with quickly moving fingers and a ceaseless fretting of voices. Always one shape of tone: beginning on a refined argumentative switchback of sound. Harriett had caught it, taking them off, for days.
“Isn’t it verray remarkable, my dear Miriam, that such a singularly tall man as Mr. Spiffkins should be a radical?”
“Don’t you, my dear Miriam, consider it highly alarming that rain fallsdowninstead of up?”
She listened. Here, perhaps, as the Bannermans now appeared in her mind for the first time since she left home, would be light upon that long-forgotten mystery. But a questionintruded. Why, since their voices followed the same pattern of sound and bore the same suggestion of being at loggerheads with the social order, why had not the Lycurgans recalled the Bannerman girls? Certainly if they were alive and in London, all three were now active members of the Lycurgan society; the amused superiority in their voices added to the Lycurgan tide of amused superiority to everything on earth.
Yet these women who had brought them back, though they had the Lycurgan voice, had nothing of the crisp cocksureness of the socialist intelligentsia. They were unanimously belabouring someone, hitting out right and left, but within their expressive voices, moulding their lively scorn, animating the unvarying tone-shape of the intelligentsia-in-argument, wassorrow.
The coming of their tea brought a pause. With the ceasing of their voices warmth withdrew from the sound of the room, and returned at the first phrase sounding together with the cheerful gush of tea hurriedly poured.
“Well, I think it’s just simply incomprehensible.”
Miriam knew it was not. She half turned, strangely sure that they would welcome her and quite simply state a case. They were not a clique. Something in their voices related them to everybody in the world. They had the selflessness of those who keep an eye everywhere, without discrimination of persons. They would be at once interested, even in herself, and quite blind. She turned and found a group of three, three small women with one face; a face she knew well at Lycurgan meetings and liked, but always with a queer thrill of uncertainty. It was vital, intimately intelligent, and yet alien, seeming at once to light up and to darken its surroundings.
The club, she thought as she turned gladly back to the loneliness created by Miss Holland’s surrounded state, was going to get hold of her in a way of which she had never dreamed, since at the outset it had brought her to the edge of the whirlpool of people with whom this dark face was in her mind so richly associated.Set in a row of Lycurgan faces, all screened, more or less, in the English way and not different, in silence, from a row of Primrose League faces, this one face would stand out, a pale, bony oval set with crisp hair; and eyes, under dark brows, richly despairingly intent. The moment the lecture was over it would be visible, now here now there, and always in eager speech.
Small wonder, since it turned out to be three, that she was always seeing it.
“Now Mrs. Wilsonischarming,” said one. “A far more charming personality than he.”
However indiscreet, the remark was illuminating. Set up thus on a placard she need have no hesitation in carrying it away, for Hypo. But she must acknowledge the receipt of it. Turning full round, she met a vivid face that boldly smiled, and, smiling, was drowned in a vivid flush. Miriam smiled too, basking for a moment in the charm, glowing so brightly in its rôle of a prolonged haunting impression come suddenly to life at her elbow. But so formidably. In place of one figure awhole group, a multiplicity of attraction. She turned away to find the white figures had disappeared.
Miss Holland sat, flushed with talk, quietly but quite evidently summoning composure; as nearly flustered as it was possible for her to be.
“How tall those women are,” said Miriam, still intent on the group behind.
“I did not introduce them,” replied Miss Holland, busying herself, with downcast eyes, amongst the flowered tea-cups. “I—well—I thought——” her deprecating tone collapsed into a murmur and rose again, recovering. “Yes, they are tall, both mother and daughter.”
“Astounding. I thought they were sisters.”
“Their name is Wheeler. It is a most interesting story.”
Nothing about Americans could be really interesting. But Miss Holland, without looking up, was launched upon her narrative.
“They are from San Antonio in Texas. The child Estella is just fifteen years of age. Yes, it is remarkable. A warmer clime, I suppose. Still it is very remarkable. Her grandmother was Spanish. And that perhaps may account for her exceptional temperament. She is a musician. The ’cello. They have travelled to London for her training. It seems that her teachers at home were obliged to confess they could do nothing further for her.”
“Why not Germany?”
“Well, that is just it. The reason for their coming to London is the strangest part of the story. It seems that there is a Pole, a celebrated ’cellist. The child heard him once, years ago, in New York, and has been saying ever since that he is the only man in the world who can teach her. He, it appears, is giving performances in London this winter. So they have come. The child thinks of nothing else. For the moment she is at the Philharmonic Academy. She dislikes it. I am sincerely sorry for her mother. She is most courageous; andso wise. Insists on physical culture. Very wise. Skipping and so on. At a gymnasium. The great trouble at the moment is that it now appears that the Pole takes no pupils. Also that they are not too well off. Estella, however, is determined to see him.”
“Has she given concerts?”
“Not so far. But the Academy wishes to bring her out. At the Queen’s Hall.”
“Wicked!”
“Certainly she is young.”
Miss Holland hesitated. She was evidently still full of communications about the Wheelers, but suddenly unwilling to continue. She was guarding them. Miriam saw plainly that her interest was not to go too far. That, she felt, was all to the good. Here was the beginning of an understanding that their interests were to be independent. But the possessiveness and the mystery was making her dislike these Wheelers. They had Miss Holland’s interest in a way she was sure she would never do, and Miss Holland was admitting it and saying too, with her honest embarrassment, that she believedthese wonderful people would not be interested in her fellow-lodger.
She was her fellow-lodger. Now that personal depths had been revealed, that strange fact remained; an achievement.