CHAPTER VI
Themorning lays cool fingers on my heart and stands there an intensity of light all about me and there is no weight or tiredness. When I open my eyes there is a certain amount of light—much less than I felt before I opened them—and things that make, before I see them clearly, an interesting pattern of dark shapes; holding worlds and worlds, all the many lives ahead. And I lie wandering within them, a different person every moment. Until some small thing seen very clearly brings back the present life and I find a head too heavy to lift from the pillow and weariness in all my frame, that is unwilling to endure the burden of work to be done before the evening can come again bringing strength.
Yet what ease of mind I have now. What riches and criminal ease, exemptions and riches.Everything is done for me and I am petted and screened from details. Secretly she plans my comfort, saying nothing.
And at Wimpole Street it is the same. And there also it is the work of a woman. The fiancée, who has alteredso many tiresome things, lifted off so many burdens.
“You ought not to carry those heavy ledgers up and down stairs. You are killing yourself.” Perhaps it was the heavy ledgers. Anyhow there is now always this fearful weariness side by side with the happiness.
Life flowed in a new way. Many of the old shadows were gone; apprehensions about the future had disappeared. Side by side with the weariness, and with nothing to explain its confidence, was the apprehension of joy.
Wearily she tumbled her happy self out of bed feeling as her feet touched the floor the thrill of the coming day send a small current of strength through her nerves. If only she could preserve it. But everything nowadays came headlong and smiling, everything and everybody. No enemies, no difficulties. Withevery hour glad tidings calling. Calling from yesterday. Crowding to-day so closely that much must be missed, joy scamped and missed and waiting and pouring over into to-morrow that would bring yet more things.
Why me? What have I done? Why is it that something seems to be looking after me?
One can’t change one’s nature, which is one’s fate. Yet there is a sense of guilt in finding everything so easy.
Perhaps I shall have an awful old age? No, from forty to sixty is the best of life. I shall go on getting happier and happier. Because it takes almost nothing to make me as happy as I can bear.
But there is this terrible tiredness. Densley may be right. But one can’t marry just to escape fatigue. “Have you noticed, dear girl, that we have spent a whole evening together without argument?”
“I never argue, bless you.”
“You give me your blessing?”
“What need have you?”
“My dear girl.”
“I’m neither dear nor in the least girlish.”
“You’re a girl, my dear, unspoiled by worldly women, the dearest I know—with a man’s mind.”
“It’s your fashionable patients, parasites, helpless parasites, I’m not blaming them, who make you think women are all cats.”
“My dear golden girl, all grace and charm if only she chose, when do I see you again?”
The milk boiled over and Miss Holland laughed from her bed. Again it had made a frightful mess on the oil-stove. Nearly every day Miss Holland had somehow to make that mess disappear. Yet she always laughed. Was now gaily getting up to the accompaniment of her usual jests on the catastrophe.
It seemed enough for her that she lived in a glow of another life. For that she seemed willing to pay any price in unseen labour.
“Did you speak to your friend about writing to the musician?”
“No.”
“Indeed?” What a strange, sharp note....
“Not last night. I shall see him to-day probably, or to-morrow.”
Miriam could feel wrath coming through the curtain.
Miss Holland was speechless, her large frame, moving now impatiently about, a boiling wrath. Evidently she had undertaken; would now have to explain to these cherished friends. But what a turmoil! How easy to find words for them and carry them along a little. Was the whole world to be stopped for their letter?
She was glad she had spoken with serene indifference. Evidently her evening, the shape of her evening entertaining friends, was nothing. Her usefulness, to these wonderful acquaintances, all she was worth. It was careless, of course, to have forgotten. But she was glad now that she had forgotten. Glad to see for how little Miss Holland could adopt a tone of frigid annoyance. Damn, she thought, I’ve undertaken it. I’ll do it in my own time.
Almost immediately on the heels of her ownwords and preceded by little sounds expressing the depth of impatient scorn, came Miss Holland’s most fastidious voice:
“Had it been made to aman, your promise would at once have been carried out.”
Miriam forgot her anger in amazement at the spectacle of a châtelaine with a volcanic temper and a spiteful tongue. She searched her memory in vain for anything to equal the venom of this attack.
“After that, you count upon my asking him?” she said, feeling herself adream, lost in pity before the revelation of the importance to Miss Holland of these club acquaintances.
For herself, the little idyll in the rooms was at an end. That could be marked off at once, at the cost of a small pang that turned, even as she wondered in what form short of an instant withdrawal of herself and her belongings the insult could be wiped out, to an indrawn breath of freedom. But side by side with the thought of vengeance, came forgiveness. It was all simply pitiful....
The answer to her quiet question, reachingher as she passed into the next room, was a burst of weeping. She paused for a moment to be sure of the astonishing sound and fled from it, closing the connecting door. This, she felt, was the last depth of shame, to be involved, to have been subject to this meanest of all abandonments....
She and Miss Holland were separated now, utterly. The principle at stake was before her like a sanction, holding her at peace. She dressed serenely, her thoughts browsing far away. The milk, boiled afresh, made a tea more excellent than usual. The two biscuits were a pleasant feast. The dreadful little room seemed for the first time to establish a direct relationship with herself.
With never a backward thought, she went out into the spring sunshine, five letters found waiting in the box, rich in her hand. One from him. There might be another on her table at Wimpole Street. But the letters, even for to-day, his letter, stood away, waiting friends around her spellbound calm. It was not, she told herself, the calm of mere indifference.It was the calm of perfect opposition to a certain form of baseness. It brought peace and strength.
In beatific mood she sat down at her table and wrote to Miss Holland that on the terms set by her this morning she must decline to discuss anything whatever. The moment her letter was dispatched, anger seized her. She hoped Miss Holland would suffer all she could in anxiety over the success of her project.
Miss Holland, it was clear, despised her and wished, had found, in wishing to make her look small in her own eyes, crushing eloquence. And what she had said was true, in a general way. Often and often, memory told her, she had sacrificed women for men, baldly, visibly. But then there had always seemed to be something at stake. Now there seemed to be nothing at stake. She wanted nothing so much as to be charmed and charming. And that she was so, or her thoughtless happiness mysteriously made her so, things multiplied perpetually around her to declare. Apart from the menace of devastating fatigue, she swam injoy, felt even dark things turn to joy within her mind.
The old life and death struggle between conflicting ideas had died down. She could see the self who had lived so long upon that battle ground, far-off; annoying, when thought of as suffered by others. But it was not without a pang that she looked back at that retiring figure. It had been, at least, with all its blindness, desperately sincere. She was growing worldly now, capable of concealments in the interest of social joys, worse, capable of assumed cynicism for the sake of advertising her readiness for larks she was not quite sure of wishing to share. And thought was still there, a guilty secret, quiet as a rule. Sometimes inconveniently obtrusive at moments when she wished most to approximate to the approved pattern of charming femininity.
Fearful of really forgetting her commission she wrote at once to Michael and floated off into her day, her mind away in the bright pattern of life, the scenes of the many dramas being played out all round her, of the newworlds into which unawares her obscure career had led her, secure in the knowledge that while she lived thus sunnily, all difficulties in the daily routine would solve themselves under her hand.
A charm, the charm that came over the leads where the birds hopped, and into the conservatory-office in the spring sunshine, lay over everything. Shadows were there. The shadow of Nietzsche, the problem of free-love, the challenge of Weiniger, the triple tangle of art, sex and religion. Poverty and Henry George. But she was out in the dance of youth, within hearing of all that was happening along the rim of life as it pressed forward into a future that was to be free of much that had darkened the being of those who went before, and had freed her already from the fear of isolation and resourcelessness. She was ready now to drop all props and wander forth.
Lo here, lo there. But the Kingdom of Heaven is within. Communist colonies were not a solution of anything.
Yet the kingdom within is a little greyand lonely. Marriage is no solution, only a postponement. A part solution for some people.
I am a greedy butterfly flitting in sunlight. Enviable, despicable. But approval of my way of being speaks in me, a secret voice that knows no tribunals. The joy and ease of this evening-lit life is a presage because it is a fulfilment. Man never is, but always to be blest. But Iamblest.Alles ist relativ.I am blessed beyond anything I ever dreamed of, within these inexorable circumstances.
The happiness that came when they were even bleaker was a presage. Of what? Someone says there is nothing meaner than making the best of things. But happiness is incurable. A thing you can’t help. Perhaps it is the result of being a woman. One of Wells’ crawling cabs waiting to be hailed? Bosh. If I wait for anyone it is for one who will show himself to have been hailed by the same kind of happiness.
Mrs. Cameron running singing up the stairs, pushed open the door and stood tall, a bright questing figure; determinedly bright, a deliberately cheerful blue overall covering all but the sleeves of her multi-coloured gown; hanging from her arm a great basket of primroses.
“Good morning,” she laughed. “How ist with thee?”
Miriam delighted in the gaiety of colour she made standing there in the flood of top-light; in the heroic tilt of her head, in everything but the deliberately rousing, deliberately gloom-flouting ring of her laugh, which yet so frequently breaking forth, was the thing that compelled her tired eyes, tired bright hair and thin face into harmony with the gay colours of her house and clothing.
She smiled from her place at the table, made room for Mrs. Cameron in her mind and prepared to squander, in seeing life with her, a bit more of the morning hour. Mrs. Cameroncame in pleased, and began at once with her legends. Miriam read off in her own thoughts legends to match. It was a clear shape, deliberate. A way of ignoring all but the shining surfaces. Of setting everything, even the old woman dying penniless in the Mews, in a light that made surfaces shine.
But her way of denying gloom brought gloom in the end. Spread it everywhere. Miriam felt herself drooping, was glad when she rose spindling up to her full gay height and settling herself on her feet with a little spring that made the primrose bunches jostle each other in the basket.
“I’m off to kirk with Donald. A special service. There’s a call,” for the first time her face clouded, “a need abroad in the air for intercession, Mr. Groat says, awonderfulturning for help and guidance.Sucha hopeful sign.”
“Yes,” said Miriam sympathetically, “certainly it is.” But her mind was arguing that there is nothing in the world that is not a hopeful sign.
“The state ofsociety,” breathed Mrs. Cameron, eagerly dropping her voice. But Miriam had left her. The whole day would not be long enough for the enterprise of getting Mrs. Cameron down to underlying things. She wanted the bright figure to stay, gathering the beams of the spring sunlight before her eyes, but Mrs. Cameron had read the opposition in her face.
“Fare thee well, lassie,” she chanted in hillside voice and flung, as she went, a bunch of primroses on to the table. Miriam pursued her for a word of thanks. From half-way down the stairs she turned with a piercing smile, and sang out:
“It’s yourlifeyou are living here, lassie, and flowers are for all.”
Miriam turned back. The small bunch lying upon the scatter of charts and letters was there to brighten her life that was spending itself, had spent itself for the ten years since she left home, the years that are called “the best.” So Mrs. Cameron saw it. So perhaps everyone would see it. She herself the only blindspectator. It was true. This scene that she persisted in seeing as a background, stationary, not moving on,washer life, was counting off years. The unlimited future she meted out for the life she was one day to lead appeared to Mrs. Cameron defined, a short span.
A tap at the door and Eve coming in with the mid-morning soup and her look of adoring care. She moved in the room with a restrained eagerness. Taking her time. Never still, yet waiting, savouring as Miriam was savouring, their perfect interchange, the sudden lift into happiness that came to them in each other’s presence. Miriam stood motionless, suddenly conscious of herself as standing considering Mrs. Cameron’s judgment with bent head, and then as utterly relieved of it by Eve who passed to and fro close by her as if she were not there, and was gone with a light click of the gently closing door. And there had been an endless moment of communion, a moment for both of them, of oblivion and renewal in the presence of a lover.
It was part of Eve’s wonderfulness that sheshould have come in just then, to answer Mrs. Cameron. Miriam held the image of her in her mind, her gently rounded, ever so little stocky and stumpy figure; the deep rose flush on her cheeks over which the cloudy black hair cast a margin of shadow; the pure serenity that radiated from her, that was independent and ultimate. Past accounting for, and independent of knowledge. That was itself knowledge.
And ever since, a year ago, she had first appeared in the house, she had come punctually at bad moments, into the room. And had grown shyly and quite silently to know how near she was and how precious. She had come so unobtrusively, replacing the jaunty careless Ellen gone away with the Orlys. It was strange, one of those strange hints life brought that she should have appeared at the very time of the other Eve’s unbearable death, bearing not only her name, but her gentle certainties. And her way of gathering all spears to her own breast.
Miss Holland’s reply came by hand at teatime. Victorian hand-writing, with a difference. Something of rounded warmth in the longish uprights. She strongly deprecated the unfriendly tone of Miriam’s note. In after teatime mood, her mind flooded with the bright light of the evening ahead, Miriam faced the distasteful problem. Clearly Miss Holland wanted her to admit that they had both been foolish and to suggest that the incident should be forgotten and a fresh beginning made. But the balance was not equal between a deadly insult and an unfriendly tone. Or was it?
Was passionate anger better than cool reason? Perhaps Miss Holland was right all through. Be that as it might, it was impossible to countenance emotional scenes or run any risk of a touching reconciliation. Still less any bright amiable forgiveness with its wicked life-insulting suggestion of “fresh beginnings.”
To-morrow, perhaps, in faraway mood afterthe evening’s revels, something would come in words that would straighten things out without offence. There is a straightening-out process going on in life itself, if left alone. Already it was possible to smile at the whole occurrence, at both parties.
“I can’t,” she wrote at top speed, “be a party to the way of settling differences that is known as feminine. Can’t play any part in scenes. Can’t face explanations, apologise or be apologised to. So there we are. My friend has been written to and will probably act without delay. There for me the matter ends. Any further consideration of it would induce a regrettable attack of profanity.”