CHAPTER IX
Theroom is still in midnight darkness and full of the feeling of midnight. There must have been a sudden sound—perhaps a wild squealing of cats, too soon after I fell asleep. In a minute it will begin again; a low yowling, just beneath the window, growing louder. Then a scuffle and piercing shrieks. Silence; and more shrieks, at a comfortable distance.
Savage night-life of cats. Welcome, heard far off making shrill streaks of light in the darkness and suggesting daytime; all the friendly little cats of London.
There is no sound. Not a breath. In spite of the wide open window the air is stifling. And though there is no breeze, the reek of cats comes up and in. All the summer it has come in. It is part of the air of the room.
Yet the nights in here have been paradise. Cool sleep. Escape from the night-sounds of the court. Escape from Miss Holland’s obliviousness of the sounds of the court.
She is dull not to hear. Or strong? Dull strength in not hearing.
Noisy home-comings in the spring. Strident, hideous voices in a reeling procession along the court and dying away in the distance. Drunken monologues. Every sound echoing near and clear in the narrow court. And she heardnothing. The cobbler, noisily taking down his shutters in the early light had called her from sleep, not from feverish dreams. And when the summer came and sounds filled the court till dawn, still she heard nothing.
Why is all this saying itself over so freshly? At some moment every night before I go down into sleep, it says itself. And now I have come back from half-way to sleep it is all there is in my mind. Because I am always trying to ignore it. Never thinking of it by day. And here it is, belonging to me. Closer than anything that happened yesterday.
Hoarse-voiced lovers lingering on after the roystering has died down. Men and women coming in quarrelling from the main street. Voices that had been gentle for each other madly seeking lost gentleness in curses. Curses and blows dying down to a panting stillness; out there, in the dismal court.
Night-long, through open windows, thick, distorted voices in strife. Shut in, maddened. Maddened confined man. Women despairingly mocking. Worst of all, children’s voices sane and sweet in protest, shrilling up, driven by fear, beyond the constriction of malformed throats, into sweetness.
And she had heardnothing.
But this same thickness or dullness had kept her unaware of what it was that in the end had turned this stuffy little back room into a refuge.
She did not know that there were sounds more intolerable than those coming in from the street. The street sounds varied. Were sometimes obliterated by wind and rain, and were at their worst only at the height of thesummer. And even at their worst they were life, fierce and coarse, driving off sleep; but real, exciting. Only unendurable because there was no hope during their lifetimes of any alteration in the circumstances within which all these people were confined.
But those other sounds never varied. And spoke of death. That was the worst, that they filled the room with the sense of death and the end.
They cast a long shadow backwards over the whole of life, mocking it.
Night after night they had to be anticipated and then lived through. One by one. To come home late was not to escape them. They were all there collected in the quiet room. Centring in the imagined spectacle of the teeth waiting in their saucer for the morning.
To sleep early was to wake to the splutter of a match and see the glare of candlelight come through the porous curtain. To hear with senses sharpened by sleep, the leisurely preparations, the slow careful sipping, the wearysighing, muttered prayers, the slow removal of the many unlovely garments, the prolonged swishing and dripping of the dismal sponge. All heralding and leading at last to the dreadful numb rattle of vulcanite in the basin.
Yet the worst to bear was the discovery of the hatred these innocent sounds could inspire. Still there unchanged, pure helpless hatred, rising up as it had risen in childhood, against forced association with unalterable personal habits....
But the shock of discovering that hatred anew, finding I have not moved on, only been lulled into good humour by solitude, did not lessen the first joy of the little back room. For a while, in spite of the ugly things in it, and the never-ending reek streaming in through the window, the joy remained. There was that night when I sat writing until morning. Once more able to expand and think. And the air seemed as pure as if it had come in over the country-side....
And something of the first joy has remained. A lower tone. But still here. In the quietude.In the certainty of deep sleep and a happy mood in the morning.
To-night, with Miss Holland away, there is a double stillness. Perhaps I woke because she is away? For somereason, I woke. Something to say itself. And all these thoughts, bringing back the joy of the little room anew, are getting in the way. Idling along, going round and round. Me, gossiping with myself.
And all the time something is waiting. Just at hand. Behind the things in my mind. And now, with me more awake here came the remains of yesterday. Crowding in to be looked at. Taking me back to stand and look again to find out what remains; what really meant something to me, if I could find out what it meant....
Strangeness of London on Bank Holiday. Its underside turned uppermost and spread over the whole surface. Daily London grown invisible, incredible. Never to come back.
I’m glad I’ve spent one Bank Holiday in London. Seen and heard its reality. I’m glad it’s over. It’s like being separated from a lover. The blank feeling, at the end of the afternoon, that it is forever.
The certainty that this wild tumult of people is the reality and the rest a sham. I almost feared to look at them lest they should see me wonderingwhythey all go back. Why they don’t know their power and end the system that holds them. I fear them. And to-morrow, with my lover back again, I shall feel more glad of that than sorry at the thought of all these people who keep London what it is to me, gagged again, and chained. Taken out of my sight. Toiling, out of my sight.
Mean. Fear of losing small comforts and accustomed dreams. Like a timid elderly man of fixed habits settling comfortably in the autumn into his usual chair at the club. The peacefully noisy streets. Kept clean. Unconsciousness in the lulling song of the traffic.
Why should I wander in bliss while they toil in grime and darkness?
In the eveningSayce. Far away from the tumult; hidden, untroubled in his green room. Sitting in the window-space, not giving a thought to the rampant multitudes. Not minding, not giving a thought to them. Yet they threatened him as he sat there. Made his joy small and absurd. Even while it was balm to see his unconsidered detachment. To see him, poor and outcast, a king for the evening, throned in his shadowy little kingdom in the security of the London night. If he had given a thought to the unleashed thousands, or to anyone watching, in some way his face would have changed. But he was aware only of his poetry and the sounding-board, the green-robed woman sitting low in the opposite chair. Radiant and composed. But not only listening, not as he thought, just listening. She, likehim, was special, lived in his world, as an appreciator. But besides hearing, seeing what he saw, feeling as he felt, she saw him. Saw, far away withinthe form turned towards her alone—declaiming from the book held sideways so that he could see her face and make towards her delighted hand-swayings for the passages that pleased him most—the halting, half man’s half woman’s adoration he gave to the world he saw, his only reality....
And while she admired, she pitied.
And fifty yards away the toilers raged. The sound of them made the two engrossed figures, softly lit by the high presiding candle, a little absurd. Irrelevant and insecure. As if they might topple. Ought to topple. Ought to listen and topple down....
Gerald and Harriett. Drawn, driven, washed about by tides they do not see. Flung on rocks, washed off and flung forward. Their unaware faces. Strength of unawareness; pushing on. That was my comfort—that they did not know. And because they did not know, I would not. Clung only to the things they saw and got away without realisation. Yet I realised it all. Here it is, tormenting me.
There is no choice of what one shall see on waking by accident. Things are there, set out clearly, stating their essence. What they meant when I passed through them feeling only the movement, from behind closed doors ofle sort. Not thinking, because they were long prepared and there was nothing to be done. But there is always whenle sortmoves, a sense of guilt. Of having brought things about; let things happen that need not have happened. That is why, when they happen, one does not think. The fear of being crippled by condemnation. Yet it is all written in the book of consciousness.
Written indelibly. Because one can look to and fro, from one thing to another and each remains in place, presenting always one face, like a photograph.
Gerald and Harriett and Elspeth starting for Canada. Without good-bye. None of us dared to say good-bye. Outside the gaslit compartment seemed nothing but whirling darkness and cruel laughter. We jested without a gap. Annoying Elspeth, wholonged only for the train to start and the relations who kept attention from centring on herself, to be gone. The sound of her childish complaints was one with the laughter of the outer darkness. She stood on the seat, a shining little figure in the harsh gaslight, clutching the doll Sarah had found time, on that awful last day, to dress. Beneath her unconscious feet was the machinery that would carry her into exile.
There they were in the imprisoning carriage. And then gone. It was a death. Something buried alive. I dared not feel. There was relief afterwards in walking down the platform with Gerald’s sister, a stranger just met, in knowing by the hard clutch of her hand that she, too, was not daring to feel. We both knew we had witnessed a crime.
“Can you get home?”
“Yes.” Our voices were rough and shuddering.
“We’ll meet again.”
We unclasped our hands and parted abruptly, our faces distorted with not weeping.
I came home and read thePunchGerald had left behind.
Michael’s telegram. Once more the presence of him in the early morning, plunging along across the wide shadow of St. Pancras Church, his voice at my side and again the discomfort of hearing unknown people lightly and swiftly described as they appeared to him: delocalised, people in a void. The things he said about her told me nothing but that she was courting him and he had no idea of it. And I let him go in ignorance. Pushed him into the arms of a stranger.
“Take flowers. One always takes flowers to people when they are ill. And stay long enough to tell her all she wants to know about the congress.”
And I knew when he told me of the engagement that he was uneasy, neither happy nor confident. And it was broken. Broken by him. And no one will ever know why, and the obstinate little gentleman can’t see that it casts a greater shadow on her than if he spoke outand that if he can’t speak out he should invent. There she goes, back into her life with a shadow, cast by Michael.
“Methodical culture, my dear young lady, yes. But with plenty of revolution.”
Raymond wanted me to look at the programme and I told him crossly that I wanted the music first and didn’t believe in methodical culture. That was before I noticed the man in the cloak on my right.
“And now it’s over, by way of methodical culture, I’ll look.”
Raymond was genuine and the strange man was genuine. I was more pleased by his manner than by the truth in either of them. I held both their views. But wanted to impress both of them. Partly for the sake of the truth. Men are either-or, all the time. But what I liked best was peacocking out of the hall with both of them talking, one in each ear.
Strangeness of the seaside at Christmas time. Sunlit frost on the morning grass.Green garden in full sunlight. Blaze of blue sea and blue transparent sky. Blue and green and gold of summer, and warmth in the tingling air.
All the things of an old-fashioned Christmas except religion. Deliberate Christmassing without belief.
And she came to midday dinner in an old woollen tam held in place by a grubby motor-veil tied under her chin.
“She getsonegood, annihilating dress. Devastates about in it. On occasions. For the rest of the time she allows her things ... to accumulate atmosphere.”
He thought her a bit of a charlatan. “No end of a rogue really. But when she smiles thatbrownsmile—she’s a gipsy you know, a certain amount of grime sets her off—one would doanythingfor her.”
He’s always complaining that women don’t do anything, and when they do, and make others do, he’s at once ready with some belittling explanation.
And I hated them both. Was surly behindpoliteness till she had gone. When at once I forgot she was still in the world.There’sstupidity. Enough to exclude from the élite of all worlds.
Yet Selina Holland is afraid of losing me.
Selina Holland has no doubt that death will transfer her into the presence of God. Yet she wants, for the time that remains to her, wide circumstances, ease. Is willing, for the sake of the ease and space she sees so clearly, to go to the ends of the earth. “Widesky; unstinted air;roomto move” exactly in the voice she uses for “GoodBermaline.”
A religious woman, living on prayer; blossoming, in middle age, into splendid health on the power of prayer and teaspoonsful of Listerine. Ready to give up her work amongst the poor and systematically seek wealth and comfort.
Perhaps in the end she will actually go; to California. Make her way. Master hotel-keeping as she has mastered hygiene and midwifery, and confectionery. Leave London as coolly as years ago she came. And contriveher transference just as she had contrived this holiday to Edinburgh. Ingeniously. Horrible ingenuity of genteel poverty: Two coats and skirts, one on the top of the other, and a little handbag. By the midnight train.
She despises the world, yet uses it. Is using it now to accumulate money. The being here with me is now altogether an affair of economy. But if I were religious, it would not be. I should be the centre of her personal life. She would try to get me to California. “Would you like to come?” and then answering herself before I had time to speak: “No; you are too cultured.” But that was long ago. Whilst there was still the sense of being her great adventure. Before the trouble about the letter. Before Miss Trevelyan came to tea. Badly dressed, with a cold in her head. Tall, like Miss Holland. Two tall figures sitting upright in front of the little fire, not lounging, sitting as if they were just going to move. Both looking into the fire, Miss Holland with a pleased smile, Miss Trevelyan stolidly, as she told without a break and almost withoutquestions from Miss Holland everything that had happened to her family and friends during the year. She had Miss Holland’s indifference to surroundings and her obliviousness of differences in the quality of experience. Assumed that everything affected everyone in the same way.
“Miss Brown has married and gone to live in Birmingham.”
To hear them talk was to feel that one person was making remarks aloud; talking to herself of shadows in a dream. I began to understand why Miss Holland found me lively and charming.
And then, when they had formally said good-bye and Miss Trevelyan had gone out into the rain in her cloak: “A perfectly happy year together. We would both gladly repeat it.” I can see their year. A peaceful association of two workers. Both disciplined and incessantly active. Sharing disapprovals. Living as if in a siege; enclosed and conspiratorial and happy. Prayers and puns and loyally exchanged services. A life of perfect agreementuntroubled by thought. And I am jealous. Perhaps it was then, knowing that if she still desired a renewal of life with Trevelyan, I was only second-best, that I really moved away from her. Feeling inferior as well as superior to Miss Trevelyan. Feeling hidden in them both something I cannot reach. That I shall reach one day and meet them suddenly, when they have both passed out of my life. Something they have given without knowing it.
It is since then that she has more and more effaced herself and no longer courted every opportunity of standing, if only for a moment and deprecatingly, at fresh angles of vision. Miss Trevelyan reinforced her. But she still thinks there ought to be personal affection between us. Doesn’t notice that I can’t call her Selina.
Failing with her leaves other successes shadowed.
To and fro, linked by their common quality of condemnation, went small forgotten incidentsof the year, covering it. There was nothing else. The central things standing so brightly in her daytime consciousness were nothing. Unfounded. Mirage of youth. Sunlit reflections on the sea within whose depths she would presently be lost. Life was being spent in watching the glint of sunlight upon waves, believing it her own sunlight and permanent, while all the time it was light created by others, by millions of lives in the past, by all the labour that now kept the world going. And while she had watched the penalty had been piling up.
“I am left in a corner with death.” But it is I who am left, and not dead. Only out of my own element in which, if I were alone, even death would look quite different.
And far away below evidence and the clear speech of events, even now something was answering. Suddenly like a blow bringing her sharply awake, it came: refusal. Surging up and out over everything, clearing the air, bringing a touch of coolness in the stifling air.
“Profanity. My everlasting profanity.”
She listened guiltily, glad of its imperiousness. Everything had been thought out. There was nothing appearing behind it. There was in the depths of her nothing but this single knowledge that she was going away from this corner where she had been dying by inches. No consideration of right or wrong. No feeling for persons; either Miss Holland or those people downstairs, or those of her own she had been able to help by this cheaper way of living.
She sighed in pure sadness as she faced this deeper self. For it was clear now forever that to be good was not all in all to her. To endure, suffer long, and be kind was not her aim. She had never been quite sure whether it was not the hidden secret of all her decisions, born in her, independent of thought. Now and then hearing commendation of endurances that did not bring bitterness, she had been tempted to feel that there must be, since she had endured much and not become bitter, in her own character the things called sweetness and fortitude.
It had always been a strange moment. Two impressions side by side. The certainty that conscious fortitude and sweetness could not persist in their own right, and the uncertainty of approving of these things in their unconscious simplicity; a dislike of being discovered in a state of helpless merit.
Greater than the sadness of not being good, more thrilling, was the joy of feeling ready to take responsibility for oneself.
I must create my life. Life is creation. Self and circumstances the raw material. But so many lives I can’t create. And in going off to create my own I must leave behind uncreated lives. Lives set in motionless circumstances.
A voice sounded in the hot darkness. Just outside the window. Almost in the room.
“I’ll do youin. If I get you I’ll do you in.” Sound of furniture violently collided with. Perrance. Mrs. Perrance.
And I’m sitting up trembling. This, the beginning of this, was what woke me a few moments ago. The end of their Bank Holiday.
Again a crash.
I’m full of horror. Too full of horror for pity. It ismyvoice this time that must sound that awful cry from a window.
With her feet on the floor and her hands feeling for garments, she listened. Perrance was in monologue. Perhaps he was helpless. Probably more drunk than Mrs. Perrance. Perhaps he would talk himself out. Poor man. Poor woman.
This is life. However far I go away, this will go on. To go away is only to get mental oblivion of it. Yet that is just what I am planning. Here in the midst of it is the hope that my lucky star, the star that keeps even my sympathies clear of being actively involved, will carry me through this, too, without bringing it into my hands.
The voice of Perrance was growing high and thin. Lying down once more in the darkness she could hear each word wailing out into the night. He was chanting his loathing of the mystery of womanhood, cursing it, its physical manifestations, cursing them to heaven in thevile den created by his ignorance and helpless poverty. The den where lived the despair of his isolated mind. Miriam felt its dailyness. Seemed to be within it and to breathe its thick odours as she listened. And to rebel and curse with him. In his soul was light. Something he felt his wife fought against with her dark, silent ways. Why did he not murder her?
And the woman was there with her youth. Before her eyes, pictures of Devonshire. In her mind wonder at the way things had slipped down and down, to this; and fear, of this maddened stranger who desired only her death.
Well, they adore each other, they adore each other, muttered Miriam as quietness fell. It is terrifying to me because I’m not accustomed.
A shriek brought her to the middle of the floor feeling cool and strong. “Stop! stop!” she shouted down out of the window. “I’m coming.” But her voice was drowned in the tumult below. A blazing lamp crashed out into the garden and then came the man’s voice feeble and sane:
“We mighta been killed. We mighta been before our maker, Maria.” And a sobbing. Mrs. Perrance sobbing in serene despair. Without fear.
Away. Away....