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Title: Dawn's Left Hand: Pilgrimage, Volume 10
Date of first publication: 1931
Author: Dorothy M. Richardson (1873-1957)
Date first posted: June 24, 2018
Date last updated: Nov. 20, 2022
Faded Page eBook #20180644

This eBook was produced by: Jens Sadowski
& the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net




                            DAWN'S LEFT HAND


                                   BY
                         DOROTHY M. RICHARDSON


                                 VIRAGO


                            Published 1931.
              This edition published by Virago Press 2002.




                            DAWN'S LEFT HAND


                                   TO
                                 VIOLET




                               CHAPTER I


He had said _the_ train, as if there were no other. It must be the one
great train of the night, the Paris train, that was to be an hour late.

'Confound it!' she said fervently into the darkness in the manner of a
travelling Englishman faced with delay that to her was nothing but
reprieve; a whole extra hour in Oberland. Of which a fraction must be
spent in carrying the news to the group still standing in the lamplight
at the far end of the platform; meekly.

She sped along, feeling the sharp air expand once more limitlessly
across the snows to which she had said farewell, and began speaking, as
soon as they were near enough to hear, in the freemasonish Oberland way
of addressing strangers as if they were old friends. They turned their
three heads as she reached them on the end of her communication; but
absently, as if being interrupted, and showing that they had heard only
by turning again towards each other, and that they were not of the
Oberland world by consulting in murmurs.

Two small women, shapeless with wraps, and a man rather tall and with a
customary importance in his bearing, but standing with the women in an
equality of sincere attention towards the discussion.

She waited a moment, not to miss the chance of a belated response, yet
when she turned away was glad of their negligence that set her free to
attend only to the mountain air.

But her spirit turned out to be already in London, refusing to come back
to the enchantment of which it had taken leave and watching, as she
went, for the lit opening of the waiting-room, and presently welcoming
the sound of following footsteps.

They sat down on the far side of the room, a party of conspirators.
Speculating towards her, towards the fact, pathetic or improper, of her
sitting there alone at midnight. Probably, since she attacked strangers
so freely, improper.

She felt them pitiful, living suspiciously outside the world of
universal urbanity, and turned to the nearer wall-posters, glaring in
the half-light, for response to the jovial remarks that rose in her
mind: their imagined cheerful sound making perfect the spectacle of the
cautiously murmuring group.

The man was crossing the room. Aloof and graceless in a stout top-coat,
he demanded whether she were going through to London, and at once went
away with her answer, and the murmuring began again.

Contemplating without looking at them and yet unable to escape the
spectacle without either closing her eyes or gazing at the floor or
ceiling, it seemed to be in the very person of Mr Orly, seated at the
lunch-table in the bare-walled basement room at Wimpole Street where the
confronted lunchers were, beyond the dishes on the table and the
unvarying lights and shadows made by the electric light, the only
external refuge for unpreoccupied eyes, that she gazed upwards and
mentally emitted his humorously despairing sigh, glancing at the same
time sideways-down at herself seated at his right hand and just growing
aware of the meaning, for him and from his point of view, of one of his
kindly sarcasms, and yet obstinately set against admitting any
justification for it, desperately refusing to show any sign of awareness
and choosing rather to appear idiotic, and justify his sigh, than to
give him the satisfaction of seeing her look 'rather sick.'

She remembered saying to Michael in a voice almost trembling with
indignation: 'One _moment_ of my consciousness is wider and deeper than
his has been in the whole of his life.' And the grave conviction of
Michael's 'most-certainly,' made all the more comforting by the way the
note of shocked amusement in his voice had suggested that the warmth of
her statement was waste of emotion.

And now the statement itself seemed meaningless. Monstrous. It was not
true that Mr Orly's consciousness was less deep and wide than hers but
simply that like all true Oberlanders he was unconscious of his
consciousness. Had been trained away from it. A kind of salvation. But
what is the use of an unconscious salvation? Insecure. Depending upon
being always surrounded by an unvarying world....

When at last the sounds outside announced the train that would set going
again the unsuspicious movement of life, the little group of
conspirators followed her on to the platform and she found, turning
round from hoisting her things into the rack of her chosen compartment,
the smaller woman within the carriage and her friends, taking leave from
the platform, audible as New Englanders with quiet, unsmiling voices.

The train started, carrying her and the small woman off together into
the long night. In spite of the meagre promise, she found herself back
within the warmth of shared life. Flowing through her, it gave eagerness
to her hands as they attacked the fastenings of her coat whose removal
was part of the prelude to a social evening.

Perhaps the woman did not mean to talk. But even if she were silent, her
presence would keep the whole world in the carriage.

She had turned away from the window and its view of the departing
platform and now, with head bent to unfasten her neat veil, fell into
speech as if her farewells had interrupted a conversation already set
going. Miriam hurried her preparations to be seated and at leisure,
hearing for the present little more than the quality of the woman's
speech, the wide New England vowels that always reminded her of sounds
heard long ago, she could not tell where; and being confirmed in her
first impression of the group on the platform by the way the inflections
of her voice had been subdued, by the life she had led, almost to a
monotone. It came forth, without emphasis and without colour, from the
world in which she lived, a world that had never been made strange to
her by any sort of astonishment over the fact of its being there at all.
The very way she took off her wrappings seemed to say that every one had
the same clothes, and the same way with their clothes.

She came to the middle of the carriage and sat down under the central
light to attack her boots, a small, shrivelled woman all grey; grey
cardigan and neat grey skirt, grey hair, sallow thin face and faded
eyes, expressionless. A fading life. As she moved about the carriage
making her preparations for the night, her movements were lissome but
had exactly the same expression as her speech. Wonderful to watch. But
she would have laughed, if she could laugh, at the idea of their being
wonderful to watch. She was following the set shape of her life with a
sort of uninspired gusto that had nothing to do with the unique quality
of the passing moment. Did not seem to know that moments were passing
and her life passing: her uniformly unsolitary life of the transatlantic
spinster, enclosed in uniformity even when she was travelling in Europe.

She finished her discourse with her preparations, and neatly composed
herself for sleep on her side of the carriage without good night. The
world, hidden under a neat grey rug.

Miriam's attention dropped backwards away from her across the brief
conversation to which she now heard her own voice contributing warm
eagerness that of course the little grey woman had not found attractive
because it was centred, not upon the items, but upon the prospect of
getting away behind items. She took refuge with the two left behind at
Berne to go on with their enchanting task. Why did not English teachers
have a sabbatical year, go abroad and lose themselves in strangeness and
come back renewed? Why not every one?

Already the little woman was asleep. She slept through the night and
until the early grey began, announcing Paris at hand, and when Miriam
moved to raise herself through the worst of her fatigue before the voice
should begin, it sounded at once. Easy words speaking her way of being,
describing her way of coming from the depths of sleep full-grown at once
into her level way of life. Driving away, in advance, the sound of the
stillness and the light, the richness of the gold that would follow the
morning grey, and all the beauty of remembered Paris. To this woman,
Paris would be only Paris, in whatever way she had of perceiving it, not
a part of something hidden within herself and suddenly revealed.

She talked undaunted by groans and irrelevant statements, as if
reciting: a fluent stream of well-worn words dying unconsidered into
each other. Miriam's own voice breaking forth, as movement restored her
strength, in staccato English, sounded, in comparison, like song.
Urbanity was failing at its first test. She wanted to silence this woman
and attend to all that was being driven away. Yet each time she spoke,
she knew she was carolling her own advantage of youth and high spirits
over one not yet alive, and already too far down life's hill really to
live.

They were ready to leave the train now slowly moving through Paris grey
in mist. The little spinster was unmoved in becoming surrounded by
Paris. Yet only a few months ago she had seen Paris and London for the
first time.

'Didn't you find London very small and flat?'

'_Mercy_, no.'

She had spoken almost warmly, and went on to explain that this time she
meant to see all over England before going home for her marriage in
June. The train stopped. But neither that nor her astounding
announcement made any break in her discourse.

Meekly Miriam followed the bride-to-be out into the morning twilight of
the great station, where she looked smaller, older. But over herself and
her neat belongings played a golden radiance from her far-off destiny.

Paris was breakfast in the station hotel, and a drive to another station
and the finding of another train. But again, prevailing over the
ceaselessly talking little woman, the charm of it, lying all about her
in the busy daylight, challenged the mountains, as it had challenged
before she had seen them, and won. And the little woman at her side,
intent on her uniform world, was part of the prevailing.

And when they parted in the blackness of Newhaven, she felt bereft. For
a moment she stood still in nothingness beneath the sky so strangely
large and empty. Just behind it the mountains were hidden. They filled
her eyes, but only for an instant, leaving her alone upon the airless
lowlands.




                               CHAPTER II


For these three, the time she had spent living out in Oberland a golden
life within her life, had been just a fortnight of dark London days
leading towards spring. Each morning they had come unenviously
downstairs to find again, behind the small disturbances and adjustments
that disturbed them so little, their sense of untroubled
everlastingness. Helped by the warmth of their clear fire that always
looked wide, in spite of the narrow, villa grate.

Its glow brightened the frosty sunlight coming in above the little
hedges of dense snowy-white lace set along the lower halves of the
windows and giving the heavy curtains each side the small bay their rich
warmth.

They were all eager to go on with their experiences, backwards, from
last night's story of the return journey, into the life preceding it. At
leisure. There it all lay, represented by her presence. Awaiting the
time when every one should have been carefully provided. Meantime, the
to and fro of needful words, the sight of their morning eyes, fresh and
dark in their familiar faces, the long, good moments into which flowed
the refreshment of their rich serenity, deepened this morning by their
sense of entertainment ahead.

They were eager, not through insufficiency but because of their
sufficiency that survived Florrie's hopeless engagement, Grace's wrecked
romance and Mrs Philps's large experience of 'trouble,' unchanged.

And yet, she reflected, taking in the new, plain wall-paper upon which
their heavily gilt-framed, old-fashioned pictures stuck out with an
uneasy prominence, with its narrow, gay frieze of sunlit landscape, they
particularly liked 'to march with the times.' But only because within
all times, however new, they found what already they possessed, over
which time had no power. Yet this morning they were a fortnight older
than when she had seen them last, a fortnight nearer death, of which
they always spoke with grave horror and dilated eyes.

But she could imagine each one of them recovering at the end, with a
secret, unseen smile of surprise, behind the externals that in the
deaths of others so horrified them, this unassailable happy serenity of
being of which they were so unaware and that made the background of life
in their company a single continuous moment troubled only now and again
by the remembrance of their unconsciousness of its perfection.

Her experience was passing over to them. They were up amidst the sunlit
snows, meeting her friends, realizing them in their direct, changeless
way; making allowances for her enthusiasm, yet loving it, welcoming each
word and seeming to be waiting for her at every point of her journey
through her so different life. As if prepared for each experience in
advance, and yet seeming not to see, as they accompanied her into a life
that for them was new and strange, how very strange was any life at all.

Perhaps it was just their unquestioning acceptance that made life flow
from them so strongly that most of her friends seemed, by comparison,
uncreated. In some essential way. In the way the innocent Croydon family
and the innocent people at the Alpenstock had made them seem uncreated.
And yet these uncreated friends would dispose of these three and of the
Croydoners and Alpenstockers in a single generalization....

Wandered too far into the contemplation of incompatibles that was the
everlastingly disturbing background of social life, she felt the threads
of her discourse slipping away and looked across at the row of little
villas on the other side of the road, the unchanging outposts of her
life in this secluded room, and found them _changed_. And turned back to
the table to finish the picture of the ski-contest with the magical
strangeness of the villas before her eyes within the background of the
scene she was contemplating. Behind the black-clothed figure of the
bird-man, poised, with out-flung arms moulded by close-clinging, soft
black sleeves from shoulder to glove, for a second against the sky's
brilliant blue above the glistening snow-slope, was the vision of these
little houses, that once had seemed so sharp in outline, blurred to
softness by the English air so that their edges seemed actually to
_waver_ upon it.

The excitement of the discovery of their new individuality broke into
her voice, enlivening it as she finished her sketch, so that the three
listeners were the more moved by what they were seeing; sharing her
emotion, without knowing that it arose from the recognition of the
gentle mistiness, even in bright sunlight, of English outlines.

Strange and delightful that this simple discovery should be so moving as
to seem in itself enough as a result of foreign travel and should go on,
while the general to and fro of remarks was assailing her attention,
wrapping her in a happiness that thrilled through her voice which was
now claiming her attention for its own quality grown strange: sounding
the gentle south of England, the west country, too, perhaps, of her
family's origin, and the large-gardened, uncrowded south-western
suburbs--as so often, before, she had heard it sound here in the alien
north, where voices grated even at their gentlest and bore, for all
occasions, a bared and cutting edge; but without recognition of its
essentials beyond the flattering assurance that she herself belonged to
a superior, more cultivated way of being; the way of being that amongst
the Oberlanders had been all about her and of which at this moment she
was being aware as clearly as of the misty English villas as it made, on
her behalf, within the inflections of her voice, statements clearer than
any spoken words, enchanting and delighting her as she was delighted and
enchanted by the people she loved, giving her a thrilling certainty as
to the unseen future, shaming her into the knowledge that in her case
they were unjustifiable, that she had grown level with almost none of
them, and yet lending their quality to every word she spoke.

Returning, she looked forth at strangers still radiating delight, still
sounding their alien voices and making hers sound in response and again
proclaim itself a barrier and yet the vehicle of her everlasting
communion with them; of her prevailing with them by virtue of the echo
within it of the way of being from which it had come forth.

They were hovering now between their desire for more talk and the pull
of the shape of their day. The freshness of the breakfast hour was over,
the scene drawing to its end, each member of the party moving away into
the depths of her secret, separate existence. Her own claimed her, to
the new gay undertone that presently in the open she would hear more
clearly.

                   *       *       *       *       *

And going down into town for her delayed luggage she heard it
everywhere. In every one about her was hilarity, deep-seated; in every
one moving in the open, though not on holiday. It was there even in the
worried and the sorrowful, the creator of their worry and their sorrow.

Inside the clangorous great station the secret joy palpitated in the
exciting, metal-smelling air like the beating of wings. It emanated even
from those who were setting out, deedily, only for suburbs, and reached
and transformed every hideous object within their sight.

Joy is eternity. Eternity is joy. In railway stations and in trains
people enter perforce their own eternity. So that men, even when faced
with disaster, so long as they can move from place to place and get away
into eternity, are commonly more cheery than women, though unaware of
what it is that makes them so.

In Oberland the eternal being of woman is an escorted procession. Its
men are trained to pay homage to the giver of life and the pain-bearer.
They seek eternity in the Services, in hobbies, in art or science,
games. And never consciously find it. Their bondage to the womanly woman
is a life-bondage, to eternity personified.

The jingling hansom was carrying her back to her London, filled with
people to whom the golden eternity had been just fourteen 'ordinary'
days and who, knowing nothing of the change in her that at present
seemed to be everlasting, would endanger and perhaps destroy it. She
wished she could hand them, like a certificate, at least her record of
social success. They would misinterpret. Amongst them all only Hypo
would understand. He would say, to demonstrate his insight, 'You've been
flattered, my dear, by kindly people at loose ends, to the top of your
bent. You're a little drunk with it all. I'm not objecting to that. Good
for you, good for everybody, once in a way,' and, having protested,
begin his own subtle, but still quite obvious flattery, for his own
ends. But he would understand that discovery about oneself is
impersonal, as well as personal, like a discovery in chemistry.

Piecemeal, everything piecemeal. What Oberland had been, apart from
people, no one would ever know. Yet its beauty had entered into her for
ever; its golden glow must surely somehow reveal itself. It lay even
over the nauseating, forgotten detail of Flaxman's now rapidly
approaching.

The cab drew up at the mouth of the court. At number two, Perrance
filled the doorway, one of the wings of his grime-stiffened cape
brushing the jamb as he slouched through on his way to his basement. The
unchanged sights of the court seemed, as she entered it, to re-open the
door just slammed by Perrance, to deny her absence and promise speedy
obliteration of her memories and destruction of her renewed strength.

Together with the reek pouring from the opened door, came the rebuff of
the narrow staircase up which the weedy cabman might refuse to carry her
luggage. Her mind turned away from this difficulty. Beyond it, waiting
for her upstairs, was not the Flaxman life grown unendurable, but
renewal and continuation of the golden glow.

Turning from the door to the empty court, she met the blue-eyed friendly
glance of a neat working-man, not a Flaxmanite, seeming, as he responded
without a word to her confident question and went about her business
serenely, as if it were his own, the first of a procession of friends
emerging from the future.

Selina was out. But the rooms were filled with the dry, sweet fragrance
of mimosa. Once, only once, she had told Selina that the scent of mimosa
in a wintry room said, each year, that life is summers. Selina had
missed her; was offering from her side of the curtain that for so long
had seemed the embodiment of their incompatibility, this tribute to
their early days.

A pile of letters. Tributes to Oberland, to Oberland past and her return
to London accomplished. But alone up here she had no sense of return.
The memories accumulated since she landed were like a transparent film
through which clearly she saw all she had left behind; and felt the
spirit of it waiting within her to project itself upon things just
ahead, things waiting in this room as she came up the stairs. To open
all these letters and drop into communication with the lives they
represented would be to divert its course.

Graceless she felt, ungrateful, and could not care. Even Hypo's thin
grey envelope failed to bring the usual electric shock. It stood out
from the others only because her detailed response to it preceded
perusal. With planned cunning, he had chosen this moment for one of his
concentrated attacks; the obvious moment; the wrong moment; showing him
as he was alone in himself, far-off, irrelevant to personal life. And,
except for her annoyance with his planned persistence, she felt him
stand, compared with the vast strange promise within, in an equality of
indifference with all these others. It was only, she thought, as she sat
down to open his letter, with the unlocated being of these people that
she desired communication and not at all with the sight and sound of
their busy momentary selves.

   'Welcome to your London, my dear. I'm more in love with you
   than ever.'

When she reached the small interwoven capitals forming the signature she
felt herself returned from flight, unawares, towards a far distance and
felt the strong beating of her heart quieten before a vision of this
shapely device, so deftly continuing and completing the design of the
written lines, set down, in a kind of sincerity, beneath innumerable
documents such as this.

He was 'in love' in his way; once again. But behind the magic words was
nothing for her individually, for any one individually. And his
brilliance, the mental qualities she had hitherto found so full of
charm, had somehow, unaccountably, become overshadowed. She no longer
felt the importance of trying to find forms of expression for
alternative interpretations of his overpowering collection of facts. She
felt at this moment that any interpretation was preferable to his and no
plan at all better than even the most workable of plans born of the
assumptions science was helplessly forced to make. He was offering a
stone, a precious stone; but there might be bread waiting hidden in the
world whose approaching distances seemed no longer filled only with
queer irregular people who held most others in scorn.

She flicked the card, whose wording he had already forgotten, between
thoughtful fingers: momentary purpose and plan, converging upon what she
had seemed to be a fortnight ago. Supposing a kindly Philistine, with a
fixed world and almost no imagination, were in his place? Impossible.
Breathlessly impossible. Philistines or intellectuals ... is there no
alternative? Nobody, nobody. She wanted nobody she already knew. But did
she wish him away? Or even averted? Only for a while forgotten. And that
he could be, since he was fixed, in his place, far away.

Sure of possessing the immediate future, clear of obstacles and with the
golden glow undimmed above it, she turned to the other letters and found
amongst them one from Alma which somehow she had passed over. The sight
of it drew all the rest together, making them seem like the various
flowers of a single bunch and rebuking, as if it were a living presence,
her desire to escape from their friendly challenges. She hesitated
before submitting herself to the always strange, strong spell of Alma's
written words, that already in advance were charming and rousing her
with their veiled appeal from someone who was neither quite the Alma she
had known in girlhood, nor the Alma who humorously fitted herself into
an adopted summary of human existence.

When the torn flap of the envelope revealed the graceful hurrying
script, she felt herself set down beyond release within the pattern of
the life she had left behind on the far side of eternity. Gay,
affectionate greetings sailed, bearing down her protests, across the
page....

   'And, my very dear, tremendous doings. We're invading your
   London; next week. We'll do a Wagner, you and me and Hypo.'

Not from the past and representing it, but from the golden future and
heightening its glow they came to her as she imagined the impersonal
sitting down together, before a large stage made vast by outpouring
music, of the three equally reduced to silence and committed to
experience whose quality could not be stated in advance.




                              CHAPTER III


Above the shoulder of the parlourmaid announcing her from the doorway,
she saw Densley standing at his table reading a letter, preoccupied,
making use of spare seconds. And though not a patient, she felt again,
as she had always felt on first entering the subdued light of this quiet
room, a weakening of her scepticism before his specialized knowledge,
and an uncomfortable sense of the ceaseless procession of stricken men
and women, trustfully, one by one, crossing this space of floor between
door and chair to learn the worst or, at the best, to be reminded that
death is waiting and their span of years at the longest only a small
number.

But as the maid withdrew and she came forward, the room whose door
closed softly behind her was just the room that held his intimate lonely
life. And he was once more only his friendship, an everlasting friend
standing there in silhouette against the long window-blind yellowed by
the sunlight it was keeping out.

At his best, tall and slender, in profile, with head bent so that the
whole of its beautiful line, starting from the base of the neck and
abruptly disappearing beneath the rounded edge of vigorously sprouting
curls to appear again in the curve of the venerable small bald patch,
was clearly visible, embellished by the outstanding close-cropped curls
breaking into its shape. Newly cropped, and gleaming in the dim light.
Very fresh and neat he looked, furbished up for the spring, very serré
in the new grey frock-coat whose tails in an instant would perform their
dervish-whirl as he swung round and came with outstretched arms to take
her by the shoulders and get in the first words, and smother her
response with his avalanche of laughter.

But he remained motionless, though now she had nearly reached the
victims' chair. If he were really absorbed, she had read into the
carefully casual wording of his summons an eagerness he did not feel.
She recalled him hunched over his table, throwing down his pen and
coming to meet her half-way across the room; talking into the telephone
and murmuring a greeting for her the moment it became his turn to
listen. This deliberate postponement of his welcome was new. Pretending
to be engrossed in his letter, he was reminding her that her life was
but one amongst the many he scanned day by day. And whilst this silent
statement checked her eagerness to be congratulated and rejoiced over,
he was accumulating advantage that would make his pounce the more
effective when it came.

But if he were going to refuse to be a flattering mirror for her joy,
this visit would turn into a continuation of a conflict of which she had
grown weary. This should be the last time. Never again would she waste
her golden leisure in fruitless discussion. This progress across the
well-known room was the prelude to farewell. Glancing away from him
towards its further space, she became aware of a deep peace and her eyes
returned to him. Still holding, as if he were alone, his tranquil pose,
he was waiting for her to recognize this peace as the reality beneath
their differences.

With a pang of guilt she remembered her impulsive, too-affectionate
letter from the Alpenstock promontory. It was on the strength of that
letter that he was daring this test. The living peace in the room was
like a light that seemed to flow towards them both from the corner that
formed a triangle with him where he stood and herself where she stood;
or to flow from each of them and meet exactly in the corner towards
which at their different angles they both faced.

But there was nothing surprising in that. Any two souls could meet if
only sometimes they would be silent together and wait. She ought to have
known that his Celtic soul would be aware of this. But it would be
unfair to let him travel too far in imagining an atonement that did not
exist. Yet even as these thoughts flashed through her mind she was
regretting the passing of the strange experience of sharing with him an
instant of eternity and, in order ever so little to recall it, she
banished thought and resisted the further movement that would bring her
too near to be ignored and saw, with her eyes on his quietude, the
perspective of their friendship open, claiming its place amongst the
memories laid up in this room of the years of her London life.

Saw him again as the unknown Great Man serenely produced by Eleanor Dear
from her diminishing stock of 'influenchoo peopoo' ... summoned and
coming, a tall handsome saviour in dress-clothes, to her sick-room at
midnight, tired and harassed, gently talking and questioning and
writing; ignoring the friend in the corner until suddenly he insulted
her and her beloved London night-streets by asking, without troubling to
look at her, whether she were equal to going out and ringing up a
chemist. And her first visit, as Eleanor's agent, to sound him before
she cast her desperate net over Taunton. And, as a single occasion, all
the sittings, in this room, over Eleanor's difficulties and the business
of rescuing Taunton, secretly, under the shadow of Harley Street, under
the threat of death, not lifting until Eleanor was provided for away
from the brightness of lives still unthreatened.

And all their meetings and conflicts all over London, since the day she
had lectured him, with Veresaief's _Confessions of a Doctor_ as text, on
the inevitable ignorance of the high priests of Medicine; and all his
kindly human sympathy with her Socialists and Anarchists and Suffragists
... and his belief that their hold on her was only a makeshift....

'Glad to be back, dear-girl?' he murmured thoughtfully.

'I'm not back yet; still much more there than here,' she said, smiting
at his preparedness to sit down and state her experience in what he
believed to be its right proportions; drawing her out with questions and
greeting her answers with head thrown back and mouth wide for his
indrawn laughter--its final gasp bringing him forward to smite her knee
and make his comments and wait, eyes still filled with laughter, for her
to share his mirth at her expense. Not one word of enthusiasm should he
have, nor anything that might give him food for amusement.

Still remaining ambushed behind his letter, he flung out, as she
advanced, an arm that found and gently shoved her into the confessional
chair whence nothing was visible but the tall screen hiding the place of
anxious disrobings, his littered table and himself, in profile against
the high oblong of screened sunlight ... swinging round with a single
swift movement to face her, seated; long grey-trousered legs elegantly
crossed, crease going to the devil ... spats ... a _pink_ moss-rosebud,
a grave, tired face surveying her as though she were a patient, a new
patient.

He was quite innocent, tired and London-worn, emerging with grave
simplicity from preoccupations that made havoc of his grandeur,
accentuated the dreadful rosebud more completely than would the debonair
manner that perhaps he had worn an hour ago.

'Whose wedding have you been to?' she asked cruelly, through her pity
that condemned as monstrous the demand that he should turn aside from
his exacting affairs to pay tribute to her festivity.

Mentally she added silk hat and light gloves and set him amongst guests
thronging to the reception, saw him play his part, a lightly, musically
moving figure of benevolence; radiating, as she had seen him at
Socialist gatherings they had visited together, the kindly humanity most
of the Lycurgans possessed only as a dogma with which to bludgeon their
opponents.

True democracy, the ruling of everybody by their best selves, was more
readily to be found amongst the Oberlanders than amongst professed
Socialists? And here, to her hand, was a topic that would represent her
experiences, give him the key to them in a way that would rob him, if by
chance this present gravity were assumed, of what he was secretly
chuckling over in advance, and startle him by putting his own case
better than he had done in their many battles, and also, by making it
one with hers, demonstrate the truth in both and his own one-sidedness.

'I've been to no wedding, my dear.'

This was the low, pitying tone he used when she failed to be moved by
some specially 'moving' human drama selected from his day's experiences.

He looked away, towards the writing-table, took up a paper-knife and
thoughtfully tapped the table's polished edge.

'Then why so glorious?'

She smiled, to cover her failure to approve, but with averted eyes, so
that she might no longer see the pink rosebud soften his good looks with
its dreadful prettiness. Perhaps it didn't. Perhaps the intolerable
effect was produced by apathy, by the weariness he was not trying to
conceal; spring weariness after his too arduous winter.

Their voices sounded together and she threw away the beginning of her
hopeful topic to attend to his meditative voice--the Celtic shape of its
tone, the first two words on one middle note, then one two notes higher
with a curve in its course that brought it two notes lower than the
opening words, then ding-dong up and down, the last drop curving up at
its end as if to redeem statement by giving it the form of courteous
question; but to-day the persuasiveness, that always made his words seem
spoken from the sure ground of belief, was not there, the end of his
sentence fell sadly amongst the bright echoes their many meetings had
left in this corner of the room. She heard the slithering discouraged
soft fall of the paper-knife upon the table and looked up and found him
sitting, with lightly clasped hands, forward in his chair regarding her:
calm brow, steady searching eyes, the look of weariness vanished, the
rosebud serenely saying that physicians have their lighter moments.

'Ye had a brave time, dear-girl?'

He spoke with grave warmth, inviting confidence. Watching his eyes while
she banished from her mind all she had brought with her into the room,
she could not find the shadow of a smile; but, even while she refused to
afford him material, there he sat, entrenched, solidly representing
dispersive generalizations. And to-day he was not waiting for her to
withhold or give him his chance to pounce. Turning away his eyes he went
on: 'I saw Campbell this morning; he told me ye were back and that he'd
never seen ye look so well.'

Professional interest; but she was not going to be drawn into discussing
her health that was restored for evermore since she had seen the light
on the mountains.

'Of course,' she said judicially, conveniently recalling an overheard
phrase: 'the Swiss winter is marvellous. You go out unable to grasp the
meaning of a newspaper column'--she felt her stored wealth shift away,
as if assailed, as if threatening to depart--'and after twenty-four
hours you can read a stiff treatise and remember each point.'

'Did ye read stiff treatises?'

'No; but I could remember anything I wanted to, and see _into_ things.'
She threw her raised voice after him as he got up and moved
away--feeling herself forgiven, having testified, attempted to testify
an incommunicable experience--to the blinded window through whose open
upper half now came the sound of a car drawing up at the door:
interruption punctually at hand, just as she was back again in that
moment on the promontory that had filled everything with light, just as
she could, she felt, have answered, even though irrelevantly, all the
questions on earth.

With a click the blind had shot up, letting in the yellow London
sunlight, and in its dense blaze she stood up to depart, for now the
thudding of the engine filled the room, voices shouting it down sounded
from the pavement and the steps, and the door-bell buzzed through the
hall.

'You are fortunate,' she sang out into the blinding light, into the
indifferent ears preoccupied already with the communications of the
arriving patient, 'to have a corner house!' and saw the several
corridors of gold that broke across the long grey street and felt
herself already escaped into its echoey stillness, going, as she had
come, unspent, to meet the green mists of the park and find its new
crocuses; find the close ranks of mauve and white hiding the grass of
that little alley again, stand and look and again feel that cool English
freshness as if touching her all over, as if she were unclothed.

'Campbell was right,' he said gently into the stillness restored by the
stopping of the engine; 'it's made ye like a red, red rose.'

Her happy blush revealed to her the shape of her body--as if for her own
contemplation, as if her attention were being called to an unknown
possession that yet was neither hers nor quite herself--glowing with a
radiance that was different from the radiance of the surrounding
sunlight; and turning to bend and gather up the gloves on which she had
been sitting she seemed to journey far away from him and from herself
into the depths of her being and mingle there with an unknown creature
rising to meet and take her nature and transform it to the semblance of
his ideal. And in this semblance, a stranger to herself and nameless,
she came upright with the retrieved gloves in her hand and turned to
face him in the room's sunlight that now seemed the light of open
spaces.

'Your patient,' she had said before she was aware, towards him still
standing leisurely in his window-space ... approaching, saying, swiftly
he passed her: 'He's early; he can wait. Sit down again'--and
disappearing into the background whence he asked, as the everyday door
of his bookcase came open with an insouciant squeak, whether she had
ever been to Italy.

'No,' she said and paused, remembering Guerini and his revelation of an
Italy that was not the Italy of her dreams. And his dogmas, and his
amazement in hearing them questioned, and his anger, dull brown like his
clothes, and hers that had cured her, and his sorrow and belated
willingness to look at alternative interpretations, and his obliteration
by Eaden in whom the same dogmas, being held thoughtlessly, had seemed
so much more monstrous and implacable. And seemed at this moment not to
matter so very much. Neither Guerini's nor Eaden's nor Densley's nor any
man's to matter perhaps at all, except to themselves. Thought of all
together, reverberating over the world in all its languages, they seemed
just an unpleasant noise; like the chattering of those born deaf. Yet
she felt that even now, hearing them, it would be impossible to content
herself, as she had observed so many women do, with a wise smile. Even
now.

But this was flying off, running off with what might be an illusion. She
wished the window-blind back in place that she might see more clearly,
see his face when he left his books and returned; discover whether his
general strangeness to-day meant that on the strength of her absurd
letter he was again minded to risk, was not expecting, a rebuff, and was
yet, because he once had had one, proudly nervous and uncertain--and
meanwhile she must remain here, balanced between return to her customary
life and the way of being she had entered a moment ago and that could
be, she now realized with sober astonishment, her chosen way till
death--or whether he were simply engrossed in some sad case whose story
she would presently hear told in his way of telling: pausing at every
turn for signs of sympathy, and yet ready to laugh over her harsh
comments. And again she was reminded of Eleanor. And this time the
thought of her brought within the sun's streaming light a darkness that
centred in herself who a moment ago had felt transparent to endless
light. A forgotten, deliberately forgotten darkness disqualifying her to
be anything to anybody....

'What has become of Eleanor Dear?'

'When did ye last heere of her, lassie?' The sparing, softly treading
tone of his stories of his most dreadful cases: gentle judgment, without
reproach.

'Oh, I don't know--ages ago'--her voice was hard, frostily selfish,
something for a man to fly from--'when that heroic little Jew took her
to Egypt.'

'Then ye've not heard of her death?'

It was not shock or sadness that kept her silent. Immense, horrible
relief in being certain that now the burden of Eleanor would never again
return upon her hands. And great wonder, that Eleanor had done her
dying. Somewhere, in some unknown room, she had accomplished that
tremendous deed. Alone.

'Rodkin took her to Egypt'--he was bringing the comfort of his voice
across the room--'first consulting me'--but remained out of sight behind
her chair with a book, slowly turning its leaves that went over with a
crumpling sound, large, glazed clay-paper leaves; heavy--'and kept her
there for something over eighteen months. She got no better. When they
returned, she was beyond human aid. His resources were exhausted. We got
her into St Aloysius's. The sisters were kind and grew fond of her. My
mother visited her daily and was with her when she passed away. I think
she was happy at the end.'

Eleanor, forced to cease fighting and accept, lying there hollow-eyed
and emaciated, growing weaker and weaker, but still charming; free,
while she waited for those halls of Zion all jubilant with song, to
charm these new friends....

'The little atheist Russian Jew was a better Christian than the English
curate.'

'He married her; in Egypt. The bairns have father and name.'

'Lancelot and Lobelia ... _Rodkin_.' Her voice trembled with laughter.
In which he joined, and Eleanor, driving away her fierce authoritative
little frown, and with rose-blush and arch affectionate smile, seemed,
from heaven, to be joining too. She would. She would accept anything but
reproach. Ease had come, though the picture of herself indignantly
preaching at Eleanor for wasting Rodkin's substance remained an
immovable torment and disgrace. He had laughed his lightly gasping
extremity of laughter and yet did not come round to face and share her
mirth. But she felt absolved. He knew, better perhaps than any one, he
had seen again and again, the worst that was in her--intolerance,
hatred, malice ... no, not malice, something worse, uncharitableness,
the things he most deplored--without condemnation. He knew perfectly,
from first to last, all of Eleanor's manoeuvrings; without condemning
them. Small wonder he was the beloved physician.

Her sense of her own being, with its good and bad carelessly unmasked,
more at ease in this room than in any other but her own, was expanding
beyond this corner she knew so well, taking possession of the unvisited
parts of the room brought near by his perambulating voice; feeling its
way into the wider spaces within the air that filled its visible limits.
But imperfectly, hindered by the direct glare of the sun and the
presence of the patient waiting in the next room.

'I asked ye about Italy, because I rather think of going there.' This
time his voice, coming from the farthest end of the room, as if he were
in that deep recess and looking out of its tall, narrow window, was like
the voice of someone giving a cheery morning greeting to someone else
suddenly and gladly seen from the midst of busy preoccupation: confident
of response, not needing to wait and take note of it. It came nearer
than if he were sitting at her side.

'People were going down,' she said, and the distance they had to travel
made her words songful--they were meeting across the length of the sad
room; he and she, from the far distances of their separate beings,
obliterating, with the sounds of their common to-day, the melancholy
echoes left within it--'from Oberland. They go, in one day, from the
Swiss winter into the Italian spring.'

'I'll go,' he chanted back through the clatter of a dray turning into a
neighbouring mews, 'if I go, from Paris, where I'll be attending the
Medical Congress the first week in May.'

The dray thundered swiftly over the cobble-stones, spreading a clamour
that consumed every other sound.

'Don't ye think,' said his gentlest voice just above her head, 'I'll
have earned a holiday?' His arms, linked by the large book, came over
and round her, and the book came down opened upon her knees: a
double-page picture of Venice, Grand Canal edged by stately buildings,
gondolieri gracefully driving swift gondolas along the flat water;
moonlight and song. He was crouching at her side, his face out of sight,
just level with her own, one arm along the back of the low chair, the
other tilting the book inwards from the blinding light.

'Isn't that where people go for their honeymoon?' he murmured
thoughtfully, as if considering the picture.

She felt him watching while she waited, gazing through the outspread
scene, for words more in harmony than was this arch jocularity with the
steady return of the strange new light within her that now streamed
forth to join the blinding sunlight, so that she was isolated in a mist
of light, far away from him and waiting for the sound of her name.

'Ye still scorn honeymoons.'

He was gone. The light flowed back into herself as she turned and saw
him standing tall and upright, elbow on mantelpiece, several feet away,
saw his face, sad above the pink rosebud and as nearly stern as in its
changeless kindliness it could ever be.

What had he seen while he watched? Her perfect stillness while she
contemplated a proposition? And perhaps he was right. The strange vision
of the future expanding endlessly in light had held as she gazed into it
no personal thought of him and prompted no response.

Gently she approached him, trying in the way she again pleaded for his
wretched patient to convey the change produced in her regard by this
discovery of him as a source of marvels. But he held her off with casual
talk. He now believed, and she grew scarlet and took hasty leave as the
thought came, that he had completely surprised her, and that this
belated response was a clutching at an opportunity whose quality had
been realized while she sat silent. And perhaps he was right in that
too. Perhaps the strange glory to which she had responded was born of a
selfish rejoicing. Perhaps, watching her, he had read only the signs of
a secret, selfish triumph. Missed some essential, unmistakable sign.

Yet gravely and with a meditative enviousness he had said more than once
that a husband opens for his wife the gate of a temple into which he may
not follow her. And still in that moment of being wrapped in light that
could have come only through the opened gate, he had expected her to
respond in kind to his sly jocularity? Had closed the gate and left her
outcast because she was kept silent and entranced, forgetting his
personal presence, seeing only the newness of life into which she was
about to stop.

Walking on down the street, she turned again towards that strange
moment, trying to recall the experience. But it was the visible pageant
of marriage that rose before her eyes; so suitably, she felt now, a
floral pageant. Wistfully, with new knowledge and interest, she watched
the form of the satin-clad bride adream in a vast loneliness of time
that was moving with the swiftness of the retreating movement of the
years that were leaving her for ever, amidst a bevy of wide-awake,
hopeful bridesmaids, vanish into the dark porch of the church whose
clamour of bell-notes, falling in cascades into the sunlit air,
brightened the light upon the grey buildings; saw the led bride, a
lonely representative of humanity, measuring off the last moments of her
singleness, reluctantly until the other equally lonely representative
came in sight, waiting for her at the altar, and the footsteps of her
spirit hurried to be with him.

She heard the two voices sound out from time into eternity, amidst a
stillness of flowers; and the triumphant crashing of the Mendelssohn
March as the two figures came forth from the vestry door and came down
the aisle towards the light falling upon them from the high west window.

It was because life with Densley would hold the light of an in-pouring
eternity that she had found herself willing to throw in her lot with
his. In Hypo there was no sense of eternity; nor in Michael, except for
the race, an endless succession of people made in God's image, all dead
or dying.

Yet she was approving the rescue of Densley. Vibrating within her, side
by side with resentment, was relief. And as she surveyed the little back
street, where now she found herself, in search of food to be consumed in
the ten minutes left of her lunch-hour, she felt, with a comfortingly
small pang of wistfulness, the decisive hour that had just gone by slide
into its place in the past and leave her happily glancing along the
shop-fronts of this mean little back street.

Teetgen's Teas, she noted, in grimed, gilt lettering above a dark and
dingy little shop....

_Teetgen's Teas._ And behind, two turnings back, was a main
thoroughfare. And just ahead was another. And the streets of this
particular district arranged themselves in her mind, each stating its
name, making a neat map.

And _this_ street, still foul and dust-filled, but full now also of the
light flooding down upon and the air flowing through the larger streets
with which in her mind it was clearly linked, was the place where in the
early years she would suddenly find herself lost and helplessly aware of
what was waiting for her eyes the moment before it appeared: the grimed
gilt lettering that _forced me to gaze into the darkest moment of my
life and to remember that I had forfeited my share in humanity for ever
and must go quietly and alone until the end_.

_And now their power has gone. They can bring back only the memory of a
darkness and horror, to which, then, something has happened, begun to
happen?_

She glanced back over her shoulder at the letters now away behind her
and rejoiced in freedom that allowed her to note their peculiarities of
size and shape.

From round the next corner came a distant, high, protesting, nasal yell
dropping into a long shuddering gurgle: _Punch_. She turned the corner.
There they were at the end of the street.

In front of a greengrocer's a few slum children standing in the muddy
street, more numerous elders, amongst them a busy doctor, paused for a
moment, a teacher, excusing her delight with a sceptical smile, two rapt
hospital nurses.

Munching one of the greengrocer's foreign apples, tasting like
pineapple, she held up her face towards the mimic theatre high in air,
from which joy flowed down upon this little crowd eagerly and
voluntarily gathered together.




                               CHAPTER IV


Oberland again; its golden light, and its way of making its outer world
conform to its inner. Something of heaven, precarious, but temporarily
closing the doors of hell. Shedding its light upon the young man swiftly
crossing the lounge alone, a little shifty, burdened with some threat,
uneasy in hurrying alone from point to point in the world-wide
enclosure.

'Here she is!' Alma's voice, and Alma appearing from along a corridor of
greenery, in a filmy West End gown. Arrived, with power and freedom to
move and choose and be at ease in the manner of a native, in the world
whose outermost fringes she had touched in girlhood. (Coming up, on
great occasions, in a hired omnibus, with a party of excited people, all
being excessively sociable and slaying, without knowing it, the very
occasion as it passed--to the Gaiety.)

And now both of them, two little figures side by side, two little
Oberlanders, conforming, dressed in defiance of Lycurgan tweeds and
_djibbêhs_.

Their voices, amongst those of the birthright members of the world-wide
Oberland sounding from all over the quietly-lit restaurant, were alien.
In pitch and intonation. But their minds gave to the corner where they
sat the character of a small preserve: of originality within the wide
spread of innocent conventionality. Yet they were both under the spell
of the innocent conventionality; a little eager in their conformity,
rather too consciously at home and at ease.

Giving her time, being so far too busy with correct by-play to notice
her silence, to delight in their surprising tribute to Oberland. She had
expected them to stand out from this world, unmoved by it and revealing
their differently directed vitality. They were quenched. By their own
correct clothes and the further garment of their surroundings.

Toned up, in the midst of the fatigue left by the day, by the interest
of meeting them for the first time in the open, she glanced at Hypo
sitting at her side in uniform, cut off from his moorings and launched
in the sea of London life, and observed how his dress clothes, while
accentuating his commonplace type, deepened the quality of the blue-grey
eyes that was himself visible. Grey of high-power intelligence turned
outwards, twinkling blue of sanguine nature at home in delights,
hampering the austere grey.

There was no seaward window through which his gaze could escape across
the world, and the clear light, replacing the upper twilight created by
the Bonnycliff lamp-shades, showed the blue and the grey beams together
in full power, dammed up and, so carefully was he not looking about,
short-circuiting; embarrassing his mind as the rather small sofa upon
which the three of them sat side by side was embarrassing his movements.
Embarrassment from which, in Oberland, she, as his feminine guest,
should be helping him to escape.

And again, as in early days at the Alpenstock, while bathing in the
light created by the men and women about her, she was in conflict with
the convention that kept urbane women alert at the front gates of
consciousness to guard the ease of men waiting to be set going on their
topics.

Reminded by the suave voices sounding from the level near at hand and,
in distant parts of the room, from the upper air into which they
rose--assailing her with memories of their rivals, the sounds echoing in
the open amongst the Oberland mountains--of the instantaneous flow of
words in just this pitch of voice and shape of tone the moment two or
more Alpenstockers were gathered together, she cried within herself that
it was indecent, and could have sat back and laughed aloud over the tide
of masquerading sound, only that the ugly poor word worried her with its
negative, insufficient expression of the destructive power of incessant
speech.

'Outrageous,' she murmured.

'Right.' Hypo's voice at her side, clear and mirthful within its
huskiness like the blue within the misty grey. 'Caviare's outrageous. No
caviare.'

The waiter was there, the evening begun, its events counting themselves
off; only this small half-hour available for being together, with the
tension of expectation making its moments shallow.

As if he feared the man might run away, as if to register his awareness,
and disapproval, of the way waiters are apt to make off before their
'_beneficent_ and _necessary_,' but '_tiresome_,' business is properly
concluded, and to give warning that on this occasion patience was needed
but would be rewarded by entertainment, Hypo kept a hand upheld in the
direction of the waiter and crooked towards him a detaining, instructive
finger while slowly he deciphered, French syllable by syllable, in the
manner of a child learning to read--each syllable equally accented, but
offered as if in itself it were someone's most priceless unconscious
jest--the items of their feast; half raising his head, after each
quotation, in the direction of the waiter for confirmation and
permission to bend once more, first drawing breath for the renewed
effort, over his '_arduous_,' but '_diverting_,' task. When this small
exhibition was over he would drop into talk, but only after a swift
collecting glance, achieved in the course of turning in speech towards
Alma or herself, at the immediately surrounding and possibly
appreciatively witnessing neighbours.

Outrageous, she resumed within, while there was yet time, but found in
her mind only a vision of Alma gracefully set towards the little drama,
the smile produced for it left forgotten on her face while away within
her hidden world she mused alone.

The dismissed waiter passed by, gliding headlong, pushed open a near
door that let in a wave of heat, the glare of unscreened light, the
sounds of foreign voices shouting orders against the kitchen-clatter, in
high-pitched nasal monotone: the world beneath this festive scene,
supporting it.

Unconscious Oberlanders, complacently accepting. And all over the world
a growing strength, with revengeful eyes set only upon the defects of
the qualities that had built the high-walled Lhassa now preserving a
perilous mental oblivion.

She listened to their sounds. Subdued buzzing, barking and fluting of
English voices; laughter: women's laughter springing delicately,
consciously beautiful, from note to note upwards or downwards in the
scale, spontaneous croakings of elderly women, graduates in life; men's
laughter whuffing out on single notes that seemed to resound from
distant places where life is risked and won.

'All these manicured voices,' she said quietly, leaning outwards to
catch also Alma's ear, and collided with Hypo's voice and saw him drop
his remark half-finished and swiftly turn a hopeful, investigating eye.
Alma's laugh tinkled, abruptly accentuated; mirthless. An extinguisher.
And whilst Hypo, accepting it, passed it on warmed and disarmed by a
flattering, appreciative grin, Miriam saw, deep-drawn for her benefit on
Alma's brow--as she turned to select her hors d'oeuvre, repeating her
sound in order to assert her stewardship of the conversation and keep
silent during the instant required for improvising a fresh departure,
the initiator of so unsuitable a topic--a pucker of disgust.

'Ears,' said Hypo in his low-comedian manner, eyebrows up in hopeless
reflectiveness, hands thrown out in a small gesture of mock despair,
'voices and _ears_.'

'I know. Don't be afraid.'

Sitting back to talk for him alone, she said, as the little dishes came
her way and she was obliged to come again into the open, in tones
modulated to exclude Alma from all but the sound of their cool
engrossment: 'There's something a fortnight old you must hear at once,
before it loses its first charm,' and helped herself at random and sat
back, unwilling to feast and forget or endanger the bright landscape of
thought that here, on neutral territory, she could so much more easily
induce him to contemplate than if she were facing him, entrenched and
defensive, upon his accustomed background.

'You shall tell me,' he said in the restrained, self-amused manner that
would show, at short range, as the prelude to a witticism, 'anything you
like,' glowing voice for herself, glance at the waiter to share and
steer his awareness in the way it should go: nice gentleman humouring
wilful young lady; 'if,' finger up to announce arrival of epigram,
'you'll take an anchovy and an olive.' He was unattained, perhaps
unattainable, intent only on keeping the balance between his sense of
the occasion as public and at the same time a meeting of lovers.

'You'll have to _listen_.' Alma's lovely eye, as gracefully she bent to
the morsel on her fork, came round surveying. 'Anchovy,' said Hypo
firmly; 'we're here to consume, each other's minds if we've time before
they're dissolved in Wagner, but also olives and things.'

'I want you to repeat something for me.' She turned to her food as the
patient waiter passed on and Alma's eye, coming round once more,
reassured, took another direction; a happy sense of security closed
about her, the certainty that neither his adroitness nor Alma's
permanent readiness to create diversions would prevent the launching of
her discovery upon its beneficent career.

'Say, being careful to speak slowly, "Too many irons in the fire."'

'Is this a parlour game? You _are_ a dear, Miriam.'

'It's the time and the place and the topic, all together. Speak.'

'There's nothing in reason I wouldn't do for you, Miretta, even to
saying too many irons in the fire.'

'Too fast. I wanted to beat time to the convulsions.'

'As a prelude to _Wagner_ ...' he began, speaking slowly while he felt
for a witticism she intended not to hear.

The people at the near table, centring on the man with pebble-eyes,
grey-agate, full of unconscious spiritual awareness, and an innocent
wide brow--just left off telling a tale in his cheerful-apologetic voice
that could press on through anything and leave no one hurt, though some
self-judged and perhaps to see him again in memory as he was at this
moment, at future moments of being brought face to face with
themselves--were now all babbling at once, like those who having heard
music must shield themselves from its influence or hide their inability
to enter it, by discussion.

'Every one,' she said, free to speak at ease, 'excepting most of the
people here and their like, suffer, when they say those words, seven
separate, face-distorting convulsions.'

He was attending. Alma, deafened by the clamour to the right and aware
only of her quietly conversational bearing and, glancing at Hypo, of his
attention absented inwards in contemplation of something just offered to
his thought, let her eyes rest on Miriam's and sent forth, through the
dreamy mildness shining from them because her lips were curved in a
smile, the deep magnetic radiance Miriam had found in one of her
photographs, a radiation of her inner being he must have known while
still they were lovers and it was turned only upon himself who had
called it forth, and now saw only when by chance he witnessed the
turning of it upon others, in payment for help given in the labours
exacted by her perpetual stewardship of his well-being.

Receiving this radiance fully for the first time, Miriam felt she could
kneel, with the world's manhood, in homage to the spirit of the womanly
woman, yet shared, as the radiance passed, their cramped uneasiness, the
fear that makes them flee, once they are committed to the companionship
of these women, from the threat of being surrounded and engulfed in
insufficiency.

She leaned forward seeking for something to sing out by way of greeting,
but Alma met and held her up and sent her back with the intense,
crinkled, quizzical little smile that was her rallying-call for
attention to immediate things. Her sudden immortal beauty had vanished
and in its place was one of the many facets of that part of her being
that was turned towards outside things: the bright brisk active little
person, selfless and strong in endurance behind her fragile austere
daintiness, willing to help every one on his way. Approved by both,
Miriam sat back, licensed to be happy; and within the enclosed air there
came a freshness from the wide spaces through which together they were
travelling as they sat.

'Tooo, _men-ny, eye-erns, in_, the _fy-er_. Incessant chin-wagging. Jaws
moving round like grindstones. Toom-ny ahns in'th'fah. Just two small
snaps.'

'Labour-saving. I see your point. But it costs beauty.'

'English vowels are ugly to begin with. "I" deserves all its sufferings.
The people I am talking about, whose speech--at least the men's
speech--has been shaped at public school and college, turn it into a
German "o" modified. And they do the same with the equally ugly English
"a." "All that has made England great" becomes with them "öl thöt hös
möd England gröht." And they do so not because they recognize that the
sound of the vowels is ugly, but for a _much_ more fascinating reason.
And the genteel _middle_ classes turn the ugly "i" into "e" or "a":
"refined" becomes "refaned" or "refeened." Also for a fascinating reason
which is not the same as the reason of those socially above them. And
they, too, jib at "a." "Diana, where is your black hat?" becomes
"Di-enna, where is your bleck het?"

'Below these, and for still another fascinating reason, you get "a"
turned into "oy" or "ah," "refoined" or "refahnd." The only people who
preserve the native hideousness of the English "i" and "a" are the
cultured middle classes, academics, and all those who don't care what
happens to their faces while they speak so long as their speech is what
they imagine to be correct. Respect for beauty is not the cause either
of correct English speech or its various manglings, nor of the way
English words are accented, nor of the way the English _walk_. Look at
the swing of a Highland regiment. Swirling pipes and swaying kilts, and
swinging tread that keeps the body always balanced in movement and never
with dead flat foot upon the ground. English march music _pounds_ its
beats like someone hitting out, and if you put Englishmen into kilts the
kilts would not swing to the march.'

'Get back to your theme, Miriam. If labour-saving isn't the point, what
_is_?'

'There are, of course, people with no ear, or with badly developed
speech-organs, speaking horribly, in all classes; but they are not the
originators of any of the jargons. And the jargon we are specially
considering, the one that is most hated, by those not born to it,
because it is upper class and seems supercilious as well as affected, is
honest and innocent.'

'Origin, origin.'

'Innocent and most desperately interesting. The other jargons, the
middle- and lower-class, are innocent too, but less interesting. The
middle-class jargon is _mincing_: originates in a genteel aspiration, a
desire to keep the mouth closed. Hence _refaned_, and _nace_, and
_nane_. Or, in people with very long noses, _refeened_, and _neece_, and
_neene_. The lower-class variations, like the provincial, originate in a
hearty revelling in sound, especially in open-mouthed vowels. And when
people discuss the possibility of English becoming a world speech, I
always wonder which English they have in mind. Speech is the
Englishman's only gesture. Hence its heavy accentuation. All the jargons
have that. An undergraduate accents his speech exactly as he accents his
walk, in jerks.'

'Point, Miriam. What is the origin of the speech you, a professed
Socialist, are now found treacherously adoring?'

'I'm not taking _sides_ any more. You can't have a middle without edges,
right and left. Or edges without a middle.'

'Nonsense. I'm interested in your thread, and have a sneaking sympathy
with the way you festoon and tie it in knots. But if you have a point to
make, make it. In the straight and narrow way.'

'Narrow; exactly. That's for action. In speech the straight and narrow
way is always either a _lie_ or an _exhibition_. That is the curse of
speech: its inability to express several things simultaneously. All the
unexpressed things come round and grin at everything that is said. One
day I shall become a Trappist.'

'Wait; a few years. Meanwhile make your point.'

'The point is a technique, born of a spiritual condition. A state of
mind, if you prefer. But the condition and the technique are so closely
akin that you can actually make discoveries about the state of mind by
experimentally adopting the technique. It is, up to a point, of course
only up to a point, true, that if you speak in a certain way you will
feel correspondingly. Anyhow you can know that the technique was
honestly born. And is so born again and again, although it now appears
to go ahead in its own right as the manner of a single class, and those
who grow up in it, or acquire it at school or college, use it quite
naturally.'

'Spiritual condition, state of mind. _Point_, Miriam.'

'Concentration. Imagine yourself in a position of responsibility, a
prefect in a public school ...'

'Heaven forbid.'

'A prefect, obliged to canalize all your forces and have all your wits
about you, in order to remain the composed and authoritative
representative of a code. You won't spend your strength on elocution,
unless you are an aesthete, which is unlikely, since, if you were, you
would not also be a prefect. Being a prefect, you will instinctively
avoid all sounds that tend to discompose your authoritative and
dignified mug. Hence _Ieee left myeee bag at the staytion_ becomes _öh
löft m'bög at th'stöshn_, and all the rest of it. Ineffable, of course,
in a sixth-form boy. But it begins there, and then goes through the
services, all over the dominions and colonies, and for a reason probably
quite easy to find, is rampant in the Indian Civil. Surroundings
perhaps. And in the diplomatic, where graciousness and bonhomie are as
important as dignified composure, and authority is not specially called
for, I will wager that there is less jargon and more face-convulsion.
Humbug, in fact: facial animation, to disarm. People who speak
_beautifully_, like those who have beautiful handwriting, are _usually_
either humbugs or charlatans. Not that a touch of these is necessarily
bad. Or they are Scotch or Irish. Shaw speaks beautifully. But he's
never been an English prefect or commanded a battleship, or stood on the
terrace of an ancestral home gazing out across an empire. So he can
afford to let himself go on musical sounds. And be witty in and out of
season. That's all, I think. Just that the apparently deliberate
_jargon_ of these Romans is, in its origin, both innocent and
inevitable. But there is one frightful exception: the way some, only
some, of them elaborate one of the a's. When they say, for example,
"South Ayahfrica," and call a man a "mayan," they are quite deliberately
_drawling_. But perhaps, all things considered, it is pardonable, only,
being so noticeable, it is the one fragment of their technique that is
usually imitated by outsiders and, in them, can be simply intolerable.
For all the rest it is surely better to force speech to pass through
your composure and take its chance of damage, rather than to be
obediently correct and let it throw you into convulsions. At any rate
for men, who can so rarely speak quite spontaneously and beautifully.
Flowingly, un-selfconsciously, without any definite tone-shape or
technique, ugly and beautiful, of accentuation. That seems to be for
women. But that is another whole big question. I only wish to show how
unjustly the convention of these Romans is condemned.'

'You've done it, I think, Miretta, quite triumphantly. But don't waste
yourself, your curious perceptiveness and your sensitively
discriminating ear, on these clan dialects. Learn languages.'

'But isn't it worth while to realize that these people are darlings and
not _poseurs_? ... _What's this?_' The savoury-smelling dish had
appeared at her elbow slyly, as if it were a trap prepared to take her
by surprise while her attention was far away. She stared at the raised
roof of sheeny golden-brown crust, fascinated, wondering at her strange
sudden apprehensiveness.

'Lark pie, madame.'

Brought back by the sound of her soft, sharp cry from the instant's loss
of herself in horrified vision, she found the party broken up; herself
set apart struggling with the remains of the emotion that had innocently
rebuked their insensibility. Sideways, while she sat controlling her
risen tears, she saw Hypo motion the waiter away with what was perhaps
the main item of his ordering--she tried in vain to recall what had been
served--and keep going, with the manner and gestures of conversational
engrossment, the appearance of unbroken continuity; ready to include her
as soon as she should have recovered. But for her there was no rescue.
She was alone, with them and her Romans to whom they conformed without
approval, and the innocent pie that had so horribly reminded her she was
off the line of her march.

The _What am I doing here?_ that had sounded from time to time during
their past association came back on this evening created by that past
and yet fitting so perfectly into the present that had seemed to exclude
them, and indeed was admitting them only as participators, more
favourably circumstanced than herself, in the Oberland life.

But though it sounded insistently, it held now a promise, as if of an
appointment made towards which, though all her ways seemed blocked, she
was invisibly moving. Always had been moving, driven on in the end,
whenever she had for a moment thought herself arrived at her
destination, by its warning cry. It had sounded everywhere, almost
daily, at Banbury Park, at Wimpole Street, at Flaxman's, in the houses
of all her friends; everywhere. Except for a while amidst the loveliness
of Newlands and, earlier, of Germany, where in the midst of suffering
there had been that deep depth of happiness for whose sake she would
have gone on enduring for ever.

'Foreign countries,' she said, and felt them both turn a little eagerly,
and felt this moment in the restaurant become one with their past
together. They were held waiting, attentive to her engrossment in the
reality she wanted them to share: the way one's own deep sense of being,
so vibrant and so still, is never stronger or more curiously alarming
than when it is confirmed by being found existing in foreign, unknown
ways of being. The same way set in a different form. A form that in
Germany had its voice in music that drew even Fräulein into the magic
circle and disarmed her. But they would not share it. There was no way
of proving the importance of the individual deep sense of being that for
them meant little or nothing. And no means of making them stop their
keyed-up mental processes. Shaped by _fashion_ ... well, by _making_, by
_men_.

'Of course,' she said, breaking her train of thought and coming into the
surface moment, but still so full of widely dispersed feeling that she
had no idea what she might be going to say. 'Of course there is actually
no such thing as travel. So they say. There is nothing but a _Voyage
autour de ma Chambre_, meaning _de tout ce que je suis_, even in a _tour
du monde_.'

'We are going to travel, Miriam, _everywhere_. This small planet is a
misfit....'

He glanced at her and checked himself, ironically, smiling round over
the table where now sweets and coffee and dessert, assembled together,
announced the hurried end. He was reminding himself that didactic
speculations were the wrong note.

'There's more space within than without,' she said. And he had heard,
the first clear statement she had found to assert her world against his
own, and refrained and winked at her affectionately from the midst of
beginning to be amusing over the hasty winding up of their feast, and
presently glanced swiftly again, for his own purpose, genuinely
incredulous over her persistent earnestness.

In the dark interior of the cab, part of London's Oberland, linking its
sacred spaces, Hypo and Alma became once more fellow-adventurers,
reduced to simplicity by the prospect of being submissive items in the
community of a London audience. She warmed towards them both, glad of
their ignorance of the great moment last week when she had included them
in a past that was finished, glad of that common past from which they
had reappeared in the guise of fellow-members, more practised than
herself but still aspirant, of the world-wide house-party.

Embodying the whole history of her London life, they gave a measure to
the occasion that was now falling happily into its place as the first
event of the new life begun amongst the sunlit mountains.

For though the being with them emphasized her imprisoning circumstances,
it was also strengthening her inward certainty by revealing that the
fact-facing and circumstance-facing mood they induced had no longer any
power at all over the light shining from the future over her earliest
memories: revived in Oberland and now leaping forward regardless of the
intervening years.

In the midst of Hypo's talk, she smiled towards the visible radiance
that was drawing her forward and felt that within some as yet unknown
life her being had set in that moment a small deep root.

A passing light flashed on her face and then on his, opposite: far away,
the face of a stranger caught approvingly regarding her through the eyes
of an old friend. Audibly, through her smile, she sighed her joy in the
compact just made with the in-flowing future that already was driving
this short evening into the past.

'Miriam in her London is somehow different,' he said, feeling for a
compliment. 'She's ... pervasively at _home_. You are a Londoner, you
know, Miriam, in your _bones_.'

'_Neapolitan_ ices,' she said hurriedly, to shake off the discomfort of
contemplating his preoccupation with surface environment, 'but it's
Covent Garden we're going to. How can I get to Covent Garden when I'm
sitting, _avec mes parents_, aged eight, in the front row of the Lyceum
dress-circle waiting for the statue of Hermione to come to life, and
about to be moved, very deeply, by the sight of a striped Neapolitan
ice?'

'Bless'er,' said Alma, converting the dismal interior of the growler
into another of the many rooms in which together they had sat and
talked.

They were being taken an immense distance along the main gallery, a
hopeless distance, nearer and nearer to stage and music. A _box_. Of
course.

Who first took the very worst part of the house for seeing and hearing
and, by making it the costliest, made it also the most exclusive? The
convention arose when theatres were ill-lit and only those near the
stage could see the spectacle? And continued now that it was worse than
useless? And he was docile to it. 'A box at the opera,' suitable only
for those who regarded opera as a social occasion, an after-dinner
entertainment of which they were a prominent part, splendid, correct,
bored, within the sanctuaries they had hired for the season because it
was part of the season's routine.

The first glimpse of the house and curtained stage seemed to prove to
her that boxes are not in the theatre at all, but 'in Society.'

And when Alma had been persuaded into the corner commanding the least
unfavourable view and she was ensconced in the relative darkness of the
opposite corner, her spirit sought in vain for the familiar full power
of the play-house, the power that exerted itself independently of what
might be presented on the stage. It could be felt in perfection only by
those seated centrally, in stalls, not too near; in dress-circle, not
too far back; in pit, almost anywhere in the pit; and in gallery so long
as the stage was just visible.

Hypo came forward from hanging up his coat in the hinder darkness, and
took his seat between them and the light fell upon the three of them
perched side by side upon the face of a cliff, facing the world, facing
other cliff-dwellers whose world they had reached. She felt excitedly
composed, ensconced and supported, journeying along a wide, easy pathway
of life from which there need be no return. This going with them from
point to point of a London evening was a sharing of life in a way not
possible in their own house, a sharing of experience that committed them
to each other for good.

'A box, of course, is marvellous. A lodge in the wilderness. Which is
why the French call them _loges_. In their _domestic_ way. A temporary
_chez-soi_. The English, delighting in separation, call them _boxes_;
things shut-in.'

'Privacy, and freedom to come and go without assault and battery.'

'True. But when you visit a picture gallery do you prefer to look at the
pictures from one side? Not that one wants to _see_ opera. I shall
imagine the stage. Sit with my back to it.'

'Don't. The point about this chap's music dramas is that they are music
dramas. That is why they are such an admirable solvent. Be advised.'

'There is no possible representation that can compete with the vast
scenes his music brings to your mind. I shall see, with the lit stage
behind me instead of the Queen's Hall orchestra in front, much bigger
scenes than the stage could hold. No one can see and hear to perfection
at the same moment. And the wonder of Wagner is that through your ears
he makes you see so hugely. All humanity pouring itself into space. A
huge, exciting world-party. _Your_ musician, by the way. Beethoven and
Bach are experiences and adventures of the solitary human soul. In all
its moods. Wagner is everybody speaking at once.'

'He's a great chap. He's devised unprecedentedly splendid noises. His
fault is a Germanic fault: a weakness for the redemption idea.'

The lights went down as if shocked, blotting out the crowded stalls with
a uniform covering of luminous, bluish patches.

'They look like snow under moon-shadows.'

'I _won't_ have you away in Switzerland, Miriam,' he murmured while she
listened to the magic tinkling of rings and swishing of draperies as the
curtains drew apart, and saw the light, from the stage she did not mean
to face, fall upon the audience massed below.

But immediately she was aware that she would hamper him by having his
face in sight as he leaned forward to look. Having had the last word,
without which he could not rest, having fed his indispensable certainty
of steering the situation, and having reached both ends by means of an
adroit flattery, he was now free to descend into simplicity, impossible,
for him, in presence of a witness.

He sat there with his mind on holiday. He had wanted an evening in town,
a break with his long, enforced seclusion. Also to catch her in the full
after-glow of her successful holiday, and submit her, in the best
possible circumstances, to the emotional solvent of music. It had all
fitted most admirably and here he was, gladly back in London after his
years of seclusion, in correct London clothes, complete with gibus,
seated in a box at the opera, between wife and lover elect, with Wagner
expressing the world in sound, restoring his confidence in the
proportions of the human spirit, rousing and blessing his emotions and
the emotions of the young lady at his side. It was all very good, and
all well in hand. But he must not be watched, obstructively.

So she turned a little sideways and saw, over her right shoulder, the
glow of the stage.

The music swept by on its way to those who were in the direct line of
its attack, and left her incompletely attained. Free to think and to be
consciously aware of the emotional tinge given to her thoughts by the
mere presence of the tide of sound. A solvent, as he had said. But
though now she knew why after standing, weary to begin with, for a whole
evening listening to orchestral music, she could walk home singing and
full of happiness and strength, she could feel no sympathy with the
planful tinkering with the hidden shape of things implied in his
conscious, deliberate submitting of himself and her to a bath of music.
A man's job perhaps. Yet to have a distinct end in view endangers both
end and means. To know beforehand where you are going is to be going
nowhere. Because it means you are nowhere to begin with. If you know
where you are you can go anywhere, and it will be the same place, and
good.

Still, his plan was working. But the emotions rising in her as she heard
the massed music roll by and saw in her mind's eye the little figures on
the stage whose voices boomed or yelled against the orchestral din, now
reaching through, now lost in it altogether, were not those he intended.
The tremendous ado, by its sheer size and strength, and because through
his mistaken technique of sitting in a box it was not having its full
chance, was emphasizing for her, in her detached coolness, all that it
left unsaid, all that is said by the music of Bach--which would have
been quite unsuited to his purpose: stillness, dailiness, the quiet,
blissful insight whose price is composure. The deep, quiet sense of
_being_--what he called 'turnip-emotion'--was more, even to these
protesting people, than all of which they were raving and shrieking.
Perfect in itself. Every sound in the world, every protest and cry of
agony, every relieving shriek of hysteria, is tribute to the sure
knowledge of life's perfection. Otherwise, why _anything_?

Senta's little spinning-song, heard in its setting, flowed forth from
this knowledge. It prevailed against the earlier roaring of sea-music
and would prevail against the din and fury of life in which she was to
be caught. Singing to herself over her wheel, she was truth.

'Is there a good _German_ effect?' she asked in his ear.

'Lots of little Miriams in pigtails; _look_,' he answered, and she saw
him off guard, simplified, too long ensconced in reactions to capture
his usual form at a moment's notice.

Turning to the stage, she saw golden light, the warm gold of stage
sunlight, long-haired maidens in full, bright skirts and dark velvet
bodices laced across brief triangles of white muslin, Senta at her wheel
in the midst: long-haired, a thicker rope of plaited golden hair
distinguishing her as the chosen representative of girlish felicity.
Singing to herself over her wheel. Singing her sunlight and her being
and her happiness. 'Tragically brief.' ... Indestructible.

Back again with Hypo and Alma in their hotel lounge, she found that the
music heard and the few scenes, seen so unsatisfactorily sideways, had
yet reached to the depths of her being and seemed now to assail her, as
she sat relaxed and strong, from the whole of surrounding space.

The cool lager poured down her throat in a single living stream.

'Bravo, Miriam! Ain't she splendid, Alma? Tossing off her beer like a
man and smoking _con amore_.'

Alma raised a hand to smooth her hair, and dropped the pearls she had
been fingering with the other, to stifle a yawn.

Here, with the many palms giving green light and life to the little
lounge, the evening seemed to begin. It was time to go, to drop away and
face the walk home, alone, through the chilly midnight streets ... that
began to cast, as soon as a space of lamplit stillness lay between her
and the scene she had left, their old, unfailing spell. Unsharable.
Although, to-night, the mellow, golden light, falling upon deserted
roadway and silent grey stone building, was deepened by the glow of the
hours from which she had come forth.




                               CHAPTER V


The sudden lull seemed to call the attention of these separated groups
to something they were missing. Two voices, one at either end of the
long room, caught in mid-sentence, combined for a moment their
conspicuous sounds, and then fell into silence.

Talkers, frozen in the attitude of conversation, listeners surprised at
their task of keeping talkers going, relaxed in relief at the cessation,
or, remaining tense, unconsciously revealing their various motives,
glanced about the room as if looking for the cause of the interruption.

The gap was filled by the sound of the traffic pouring along the side of
the square that was open to the main road. And now into the silence came
the deep boom of a distant church clock, expending its warmth through
the chilly outer twilight and pervading the room as though the silence
were a space prepared for it. As the sixth stroke faded, the sound of
the traffic emerged gay and headlong. Evening traffic, heralding the
coming of darkness and the bright lights of the London streets.

A few voices had resumed, trying to prolong. But the quality of time had
changed. It was no longer afternoon. The evenings of all the people in
the room were flowing into their minds. Groups broke up and mingled in
the to and fro of departure.

On her way to the door, Miriam was pulled up by the voice of a woman who
had turned from a small group standing close at hand, hatless:
residents. The voice had an eager, anxious, apologetic sound and gave
her exit the air of royalty in procession, graciously halted to accept a
petition.

Turning, in the gloom hardly lessened at this end of the long room by
the switching on of a distant, shaded light, she saw only a dim outline,
a pale oval of face saluting her, obliquely down-tilted above a gown
glowing silky rose-red through the dusk in which the forms of the other
women showed no colour. Here was 'charm,' some strange grace and charm
that was defying the warning voice within. The figure, assuming as she
confronted it a fresh attitude of graceful pleading, had now a level
face whose eyes were smiling recognition, patiently-reproachfully, a
much-tried adorer, who yet was making allowances, for too long an
instant being forced to prompt and wait for an answering recognition.
Inwardly protesting her extreme unrelatedness to this person moving so
elegantly from pose to pose, yet attracted by the unaccountable glow, as
if the rose-red gown shone for her in the gloom by its own light, and
held by a curious intensity of being in the alien figure, Miriam waited
unresponsive.

'You were talking of socialisme,' said the girl, motionless in a final
pose which she seemed to offer as part of her plea, head sideways
down-bent as if listening, arms held close to her silken form as if to
subdue it to a touch of severity. 'I would like, so much, to hear more
of theece.' Very young, but mannered and mature. An intelligent young
French girl who would produce very 'rational' criticisms.

Intent on escape, vaguely undertaking to be at the club again quite
soon, Miriam received a gracefully-sweeping movement of thanks and
withdrawal during which the girl's eyes still held her own, but with the
recognizing look withdrawn, as if now she were covering a secret compact
with a witness-disarming formality. With the corner of her eye, as she
turned away to the open door, Miriam saw her, in the full light now
switched on from the hall, move back to the styleless English group from
which she had emerged, arms down, white hands a little extended as if to
balance the slight swaying movement propelling her, and which the
invisible feet followed rather than led.

Down in the street, where immediately the long continuous distances of
past and future opened within the air, the little scene slipped into
line with the series of momentary encounters staged by the club. The
quality of that moment's exchange was complete in itself. Followed up by
a definite appointment, it would have robbed this evening light and the
evening streets of their power to evoke the continuous moment that was
always and everywhere the same. Moving away from it unhampered, she was
already losing its features, seeing it as a confirmation of the quality
of the long afternoon: the talk with those three implacable women who
had responded with such blessed restorative flexible-mindedness while
she talked, with the eloquence of the despair that began now to fill her
whenever she thought of people in large masses, against the theory of
the permanent necessity for a more or less enslaved majority, to which
their overheard conversation had made them seem so thoughtlessly docile;
the common adventure of the deepening twilight, the sudden silence, the
deep-toned bell, the instant of seeing, from within its far sound, the
strangeness of human life and its incompleteness.

As she broke in at Flaxman's to dress for Mrs Redfern's evening, the
memory of the girl returned as a teasing reminder, in a foreign voice,
of a set of ideas that had ceased to move her unless they were attacked
by someone holding another set. Waking next morning she found within the
air the new spring, the inmost breath of the country springtime of which
in her memory there was no trace. It was strange to have no childhood
memory of spring: nothing in memory but summer in full blaze, so that
even the remembered sight of anemones in woods and of cowslip balls
tossed from sister to sister, crushed, giving out their small warm
scent, were surrounded not by a spring scene but by summer in full
bloom.

Soft deep freshness of spring stirring within the dry, inorganic,
beloved London air. This moment will be the best of this year's London
spring, unless I manage at last to keep my appointment with primroses.
Each spring passes without sight of them, except for that one glimpse
which was nothing but a reminder and a promise. All of us going along at
sixes and sevens in the east wind. A skimpy cluster of trees at the
wayside in the distance. Offering some kind of rescue when it should
come near. Coming near enough to be one of the party and to bring a
slight change in every one's feelings. Coming alongside. Three women
adoring the small clumps pressed flatly against the earth amongst the
short grass; sunlit primroses. And those few in the midst, deeper and
brighter for being in shadow. While we stood near the trees, the sky was
radiant and the cruel wind doomed by the promise of summer. Even the
men, who only stood by, were caught and changed, lost for the instant
during which they were as nothing to the three women, their hold on
their great selves. Afterwards, going on, there were genial voices,
relieved, gay voices of women prevailing, keeping warmth in the air.

And here, again, was the air of spring coming in at the thrown-up window
with the light. But Sunday light. It was Sunday. Bringing a morning
without pressure or hurry. Quietly. Setting all nature's allurements,
all allurements, in a beautiful distance. Sunday morning, sweet and
still and windless. Bringing its own quality that was independent of all
others.

But the scent in the air that had brought memories of flowers was
turning out to be the faint scent of soap. Assurance, through the
distinctness with which it came from the far side of the room, of having
waked from the deepest of deep sleep. From such distant deeps that now,
with cool heart and eyes kept closed, and mind recoiled from knowing
that the air coming in through the rotten window-frame had passed over
the cat-and-garbage-haunted waste between the farther slum and the
warren of Flaxman's, every outer thing was distinct, in a life that from
the earliest point of memory was the same.

This person who had stood for the first time alone upon the sunlit
garden-path between the banks of flowers and watched them, through the
pattern made by the bees sailing heavily across from bank to bank at the
level of her face, and wondered at them all, flowers and bees and
sunlight, at their all being there when nobody was about, and had looked
for so long at the bright masses, and now could re-see them with
knowledge of their names and ways and of the dark earth underneath, and,
still, just as they were in that moment that had neither beginning nor
end, this same person was now going, deceitfully, to local, social
Lycurgan meetings, frequenting them, since Oberland, only for small
delights that were the prelude, the practice-ground for more and more
and more. This person, who was about to take a lover, presently, in
time, at the right time, was the one who had gazed for ever at the
flower-banks, unchanged.

Amongst the joys near at hand, merging into them, was the fun of
dressing for these gatherings as for parties in the old days at home,
going forth to meet not ideas, but people: to see who was there. To like
Mrs Redfern's radiant hostess face, ruddy face, radiant last night above
her evening gown, a glinting panoply about her well-built figure
advancing across the room to say to a comparative stranger: 'Good girl.'
Coming, at the moment of her firm hand-clasp, out of her preoccupations,
revealing her desire for more than the distant acquaintance of secretary
and group-member. And then, with eyes filming over as though she were
going into a trance, announcing, as consciousness forsook her, and as if
by way of apology for those so far gathered at her weekly meetings, in
the manner of one heralding a Messiah, 'He is _coming_,' and a sigh
expressing the end for ever of effort and responsibility, eyes still
closed and lips ecstatically smiling. And, moving away with brightly
opened eye amongst the increasing guests, her sturdy figure, animated by
the twin currents of her emotions as Lycurgan and as hostess, seeming
almost willowy as she glided about with her message and presently
carried it through the open folding doors to where the earlier arrivals
were standing with their coffee-cups, making prevail, over the confused
sound of their talking, her blissful voice.

Piteous, harassed hostess, mistress of revels that had seemed all too
tame to her burning fancy, blinded now by relief, unaware that she was
insulting her guests in making such a to-do over the interloper for whom
they were to be merely an admiring congregation. Or perhaps actually, as
she had always seemed, delighted with each evening in turn, and now
driven to an extremity of delight. But in so ecstatically describing the
coming splendour she wrecked it by spreading, amongst the innocent, the
wrong kind of anticipation, and by putting the others on their guard.

Going through the little crowd to the far end of the second room--where
the usual gossipings and controversies were in full swing, with the
difference that every one was now on the alert, turned towards the
coming magnificence that for some was a challenge to their own and for
others something to wait for with half-concealed impatience--there came
that moment, turning round from securing a coffee at the end table, of
being face to face with the tall old woman, flatly serge-clad and
lace-collared as she had been on the platform of the Women's Group,
stately and venerable, ripe with experience and yet young, still living
towards the future; the strange moment of being the short-range object
of eyes that always looked at far distances, of feeling isolated with a
challenge to accept or find reasons for refusing to interpret life
according to whatever principles had given to her tall, upright form the
bearing of a prophetess.

As she said: 'Who are you?' in the dry sad voice so different from the
one that had rung from the platform, the look of contemplation of wide
distances moved from the eyes through which for a moment peeped forth a
self-conscious schoolgirl. But that was because I was caught by my awful
trick of suddenly being engrossed in a small object--a chain, a belt, or
the way, flat affectionate way, a collar lies upon a dress: the
individual power of these things and the strange, deceptive way they
have of seeming to bestow their own soundness and well-being, even upon
a person sick to death. But when I looked away, feeling ashamed and that
everything between us was spoiled, the sense of her distance from myself
and her attention to some large selfless plan came back.

'You are of the young who call themselves Socialists. But your feet are
on the path. Go steadily.'

'I'm a Tory-Anarchist.'

Her eyes looked maternally, bringing a glow of childish satisfaction, a
moment's sense of being free from the burden of independence, and
immediately of feeling independence robbed of its rigidity, of being an
independent person loaded with the jewels of youth and health, walking
in the green valley of life far away below this old woman whose tall
figure had grown broad and strong in climbing the steep middle years in
midday sunlight, till now she had reached to where perhaps feeling fades
into thought. And then finding the charm of the party renewed by the
brief absence. And gratefully, with the manner of a daughter, taking
leave and moving away, just as Englehart came in at the main door.
Flaming hair, pale eyes, glinting with resolution. His whole being a
torch, peevishly seeking inflammable material, and held up by Mrs
Redfern in the empty middle of the room. Looking down on her from his
height as upon something too tiresome even to be disposed of, and she
sustaining the blaze with a brave dawning of her most roguish smile,
kept back from attaining its fullness by the words with which she told
her great news and by her eagerness for his pleased response.

'Is Goldstein here?' Nose-high air of a supercilious camel and, before
she could answer, striding departure towards the densest group.

Englehart and Goldstein and Maynard intensively wrangling in the midst
of an audience. Rachel, in deep, blended colours and low-falling, heavy
beads; looking like a rich and fragile trinket, perpetually breaking in
with passionately scornful exclamations.

Mrs Redfern again, saying, just as I had caught Englehart's eye and said
'Tandem's worse than cart-before-horse' and seen his fury: 'My cousin
has fallen in love with you. Quite _demented_.' And off she went,
without indicating the cousin, to chant the praises of the Messiah to
new arrivals: 'And not only _men_tally grand. So _beau_tiful. The most
_beau_tiful creature in London.'

Miscarried inspirations of a prospective audience too long kept waiting.
Rachel's group, the lively group indifferent to the Messiah, broken up
and Rachel disappeared. And suddenly restored, close at hand. Eager to
talk to one who had no single idea she could recognize as belonging to
an intelligible system.

'Hallo, M. H.! How are you? How _nice_ you look! You always do. But
specially nice in that gown. Very, _very_ nice. Don't you think so?
Don't you like yourself in it very much? Are you alone, or with Michael?
_Isn't_ it a queer gathering? What are you doing so meekly in a corner?'
Pause. Glowering glance round room, and deep flush.

'Really people are incredible. I've just been telling that little skunk,
Mason, he is a liar.'

'Which is Mrs Redfern's cousin?'

'The Octopus? Don't you _know_ her? Not a bit like Bertha Redfern. There
she is, just beyond the fascinating Lena, with St Vincent.'

'St Vincent and St Vitus. Why doesn't she keep still?'

'That intense creature?'

'She's in love with me.'

'The Octopus? And you've never spoken to her? She's not a lady to adore
in silence.'

'She's an aunt. Flirting with new ideas.'

'An _aunt_? That violent being?'

'Short-circuiting in a frivolous world.'

'Short-circuiting! _She?_'

'Who is the old woman in a lace collar and serge dress? Sitting in the
human landscape like a dark rock in a green meadow. Not blending.'

'Mrs McCrosson. _Strange_ being. A _much_-experienced lady.'

'Not strange at all. She comes up from a deep dive unruffled, and with
open eyes. She reminds me, perhaps because of her age and calm wisdom,
of an old woman who cruises about Bloomsbury looking qualified for a
vast abdominal operation. But her steady, clear eyes keep it all in
order. I go out of my way to pass her and meet them. She knows me, now,
by sight. The odd thing is that she invariably appears when I am too
miserable to go on living. She comes rolling by, and I am restored.'

Rachel made her usual scientific objections. But listened. Eyebrows a
little up, firm mouth and chin neglected by her will and slightly
drooping together with her whole slender figure crouched in thought,
while I tried to make her admit that _punctuality_ in the coming through
of the hidden shape of things is scientific evidence.

Why _mystical_? Why do these scientific people suppose that something
supplying hints, when you are not looking for them, hints that overpower
the voices of reason and common sense, is more strange and mysterious
than anything else? And a little dangerous and apt to be pathological?
One might perhaps die of wonder if one could think hard enough over the
fact of there being anything anywhere. And why not? If one could hold on
when there comes the feeling that in a moment one will disappear into
space ... But the moment of astonishment passes with the pang it gives
and everything for a while is new and strange, as if one had been away
on a long visit.

Presently she said that both ways of approach, the inner and the outer,
should exist together in the ideal human being. She had a sort of
nostalgia. Perhaps scientific people are intellectual saints and
martyrs, sacrificed to usefulness.

'Who is Mrs Redfern's latest Messiah?'

'You mean Kingfisher, Arnold Kingfisher? Oh, a _most_ brilliant creature
and most _incredibly_ beautiful.'

And I waited for his arrival, eager to know which kind of adored male he
was and forgot him, sitting in that corner of Mrs Redfern's that became
nowhere--except at that moment of seeing Redfern cross a clear space of
the room driven by a superior force, arms bent, mind in abeyance, head
sideways up like a man in a football-scrum--while Rachel, listening,
gave added warmth to all I told her of my guilty life; innocently, with
her way of finding all well, if life goes pleasantly.

'I knew I should get away from Flaxman's and from Selina. According to
you, having decided I must go, I ought to have made a _plan_. I didn't.
Feeling myself gone, I began to like the place, and to find Selina less
overpowering. It was _she_ who made a plan. Suddenly told me she must
get nearer her work, and asked me if I'd like to move.'

'You think that was a feeler?'

'Don't know. It's easier to read Selina's thoughts than her feelings.
But in the end she betrayed feeling. Suddenly appeared, in the middle of
the morning, at Wimpole Street. I sailed into the waiting-room, sailed,
so deep was my astonishment, through all the memories laid up for me in
the house, things I had ceased attending to and that would most strongly
have aroused Selina's interest and envy.'

'Beast!'

'... envy if she were in the habit of encouraging envy and were not a
Christian stoic--but I've seen envy touch her, just prod at her from
within and be crushed back by her strong, Christian-stoical lips and
turned into a momentary and perhaps fortifying sharing of a life that to
her has been a gay panorama available for her contemplation for nearly
eighteen months. You see? Something she can't mould or change, something
independent of her and secretive, of which she does not quite approve
and yet, as you will see, has grown to have an acquired taste for.
Something authentic in a way that does not fit her scheme of
authenticities and therefore attracts her. Appeals to her charitable
broad-mindedness. She is fed and starved by turns.'

'Vain creature.'

'Not a bit. It has nothing to do with me, and is as much of a mystery to
me as to her.'

'Proceed with your story.'

'Well, here it grows pathetic. At the end of my glorious promenade from
my room to the waiting-room door, I realized that it had been so
glorious because Selina had come uncalled into the midst of one of my
worlds and brought it all clearly round me from its beginnings, made it
magic and new in all its distances, as it had been at the first and
shall be for ever amen when I get away and it seems to fold up like a
scroll.'

'_Are_ you going away from that, too?'

'Of course, presently. It is finished, has been finished for some time,
though there's a large homesick half of me that wants it to go for ever;
as, of course, everything _does_.'

'Nonsense. Proceed.'

'Of course everything is eternal, or it is nothing.'

'Suffering, for instance, oppression, cruelty, lives that are crushed,
ruined, hideous.'

'All that is part of something else. Vicarious suffering is the only
kind that instructs.'

'A _most_ convenient theory.'

'You and I are vicarious sufferers, gutter-snipes, poor-law children,
underpaid wage-slaves without security or prospects, dancing at the edge
of an abyss.'

'True, but you seem to enjoy it. Go back to your story.'

'The prices of security, especially for women, are a damned sight too
tall. Monstrous. Unthinkable. Who wouldn't sooner die than suffocate,
even on an altar with incense perpetually rising?'

'Plenty of people, millions, my dear, would choose suffocation, if it is
suffocation. I'm not sure.'

'I am. All the homes I know are asphyxiating.'

'Cease these wanderings. Tell me of your Selina.'

'Well, yes. In that moment outside the door she _was_ my Selina, it was
as if quite suddenly a large long _life_ stood accomplished behind us
and there we were, meeting, each with a solid piece of eternity in hand.
Now isn't that sort of thing wonderful, untouchable, whatever may happen
afterwards? And all the time I was wondering what could have happened in
the hour or so since I left her at Flaxman's. And knowing it was good.
All of which, stated simply, in a brief poetic lie, would run: "I was
pleased to see Selina." That's somehow plain and powerful. A man's
statement, carrying one sanguinely along the surface of life that is so
plain and simple-oh. "Tell me, my dear, exactly what you mean, in a few
words." My God! Ain't they the ultimate limit? The mere thought of all
those men torturing, with their thin logic, the inarticulate women whose
deep feelings _must_ throw up cascades of words or slay them.... Well,
with great embarrassment, she told me she wished to stay at Flaxman's
and keep on our life together.'

'So you stay?'

'I thought so; I was _thrilled_. But I heard myself saying, explaining,
that I had arranged to join a friend at Tansley Street. Not a word of
truth in it.'

'False creature.'

She meant it, and yet robbed the flight from Selina of its feeling of
guilt. And then she must have sat silent, contemplating beyond my
knowledge, according to some chosen system of psychology, for I thought,
helped by her presence, her self concentrated on me, of next week, of
returning to Mrs Bailey to the old untouched freedom with clear
knowledge of what to do with it. Undisturbed space, high above the quiet
street, and safely below the old attic with its cruel cold and its
sultry stifling heat.

And then Mrs Redfern's party was there again suddenly, a bright scene in
a world freshly created, people moving in a room of long ago, recognized
one by one, and Rachel, reduced to the scale of the evening, was saying:

'This man's not coming.'

Every one, during the time of waiting, had plunged more or less into
far-off spaces from which they had returned refreshed, seeing anew, in
the perspectives lit by the promise of the great arrival, the group and
its aims. Only those who must always batten externally, on what is going
on around them, were weary because nothing seemed to be happening.

And Kingfisher never came. And there was no prize-fight between the
purveyors of wit and wisdom, no struggle between opposing counsels of
perfection, no dynamic leadership towards a distant aim, but presently a
friendly deep sense of life, a sense of current being, shared. A deep
power, against which no single assertive individual could prevail,
something like a Quaker meeting, after Englehart and his party, already
thrown out of their usual form by enforced abdication in favour of the
promised Kingfisher, had gone impatiently away. Only Rachel was left to
represent the hard edge and she, in the end, admitted the vitalizing
quality of the hour.

To-day, being Sunday, will keep intact for several hours this morning
sense of spring. Sunday morning stands in eternity and gathers all its
fellows from the past. Now that it is here, it is no longer the last
Sunday with Selina but an extension of all our Sundays together. Until
the late afternoon, when to-morrow will pour in over the surface of the
hours.

Across the featureless, blissful moment came a vision of the girl posed,
her red gown glowing through the dark, clear for a second and then gone,
but in the far distances of the afternoon the thought of her made a
barrier beyond which nothing could be seen. Even this last day had
already passed out of Selina's hands.




                               CHAPTER VI


Of course there was no one at the club at this unlikely hour, not even a
resident sitting about with an air of being in possession. The well-fed
members were resting in their rooms. In this long, empty drawing-room,
with morning gone and the afternoon not yet begun, was the end of the
world. Life far away, past and done with. The atmosphere of the room,
coldly neutral, engulfed feelings and opinions and mocked at the
illusions created by mere coming and going. It mocked and weighed and
judged. And there was nothing to oppose to it. Nothing to do but stand
alone, judged and condemned, here in this corner by the window, giving
on to the square whose garden must be yielding a deep sense of spring.
Spring going its independent way.

Turning from the window, she faced the open piano, contemplating the
alien keys she had never touched and that held the secrets of those who
had played upon them and had thwarted the aspirations of those who had
strummed. And held the living sound of the music that was now tingling
to her finger-tips. In a moment she was back within the strange centre
of being she had left on a vain quest, ensconced behind its endless
refusal to accept evidence. She stood very still within the stillness it
made beneath the glad tumult awakened in her by the returning tide.
There was no direct answer to the emptiness about her that still made
its assertions. But there was statement. Just sanity reasserting itself
after a mild shock? More than that. Her external being, standing here
with finger-tips responsive to the challenge of the exposed keys, in no
way represented the essential opposition. Yet it was with that
consciously reflecting being that she felt the unchanging presence that
now joined her in the world it had restored. Everything in the room had
a quiet reality, and glancing through the window she saw how the budding
trees thrilled in the sunlight.

Through the sound of her soft playing she heard the click of the door.
Seemed herself to be outside that door, opening it upon music barely
heard from another room and that now, subdued though it was, seemed by
comparison with that distant sound to peal out in honour of someone
entering in triumph. Holding to her theme, she planned to pass from its
nearing end without a break to another that would hold her within this
secret world that had opened so unusually from out the lowest point in
the afternoon. But the intention gave emphasis to the movements of her
hands and presently she was just carefully playing, sharing her music
with someone crept cautiously into the room; one or other of the
residents now probably hidden in a deep chair and presently to sound its
thanks and say it loved music.

It was only because it could be no one else that she recognized this
girl crouched on the floor at her side--looking as if she had blossomed
from the air--as yesterday's figure in the rose-red gown, again
producing the effect of being aware of the impression she made, and
contemplating it in the person of the one upon whom it was being
directed and also, to-day, offering it as something to be judged, like a
'work of art,' detachedly, upon its merits.

The mealy, turquoise blue of the delicately figured kimono was deep
satisfaction, so also were the heavy beads, of curiously blended, opaque
deep colours, hanging in a loop whose base, against the girl's knees,
was clasped by twining fingers. Smoothly draped sheeny dark hair framed
the flower-fresh oval face and heightened the 'jasmine' white of the
column of neck. And this unknown loveliness was already radiating
affection, patiently awaiting the fruit of a wondering stare;
wordlessly, for fear of risking by sound or movement its own full
effect.

When Miriam smiled, the girl dropped her beads and reasserted herself
with an emphatic movement, defying or insisting or imploring, that left
her face upturned as if for easier reading. And then her hands came
forward, one ahead of the other, smallish womanish hands, not very
expressive, and dropped again to her knees. She was on her feet, had
become a figure, fleeing, on soundless feet, down the long room whose
social life, flowing back to it as she plunged lightly on slippered
feet, with the wings of her kimono fluttering to the swiftness of her
movement, through its lights and shadows, was turned to nothing, as if
its being as a club-room had waited all along for this transfiguring
moment.

Ensconced in a corner of the low settee, she was so retreated into
dimness that her mocking little laugh made Miriam, following her down
the room, half expect to find her transformed. The eager, coquettish
little trill suggested endless tiresomeness. But the girl, somehow aware
of the false sound, quenched it with another, a cooing, consoling,
deprecating laugh-sound that made together with the first a single
communication: in spite of her brave, amazing silence she found it
necessary somehow to fill with her image the interval during which she
was invisible.

'I'm not sure I should have recognized you,' said Miriam. At the sound
of her own familiar voice a gulf seemed leapt. But of the one who spoke,
come from afar to meet this strange girl, she knew nothing. Serenely she
took the other corner of the settee, feeling as she sat down that she
had embarked in sunlight upon an unknown quest.

With another of her swift movements the girl was on her knees, upright,
her face held motionless towards the full light. Again Miriam surveyed.
Something had gone. There was thought behind the lovely silent mask, and
speech on the way.

'It's like a peach. Say it, say it.'

'It is,' said Miriam, admiring the girl's open appreciation of her own
beauty, at this moment newly created for her in eyes into which she
gazed as into a mirror.

'But not so _much_, since Basil.' She waited, eyebrows up and painfully
drawn together. Communication was severed. Miriam realized, by its
sudden withdrawal, that a moment ago the room had seemed filled with
golden light giving an ethereal quality to all its contents. Now they
stood distinct in a light that was dark and bitter and cold. Yet this
girl was different from the women who at once begin to talk of their
personal relationships, and though she felt her face grow weary in
anticipation of moving away from their two selves into the story of a
life the girl shared with another, which, if it greatly mattered to her,
robbed this strange meeting of its chief value, she felt her interest
awake behind her suffering.

'It spoils thee corners of thee mouth,' she whispered sadly. 'They are
never again so cleare and firm.'

Another sadness, a revelation spreading itself abroad over all humanity,
added its bitterness to the surrounding air, but before thought could
beat back and find words, the girl said wistfully:

'This makes a difference? You are repelled?'

'No,' she said eagerly. 'It makes no difference,' and within the glow of
her admiration for sincerity she felt the lie turn to truth, and added:
'with you.'

'But yes,' she insisted, 'it must make some difference. With all these
women here, it would. It divides me from them. They are pewre. I feel a
barrier.'

Miriam thought of the residents she knew by sight. The pretty,
sour-mouthed one who spent all her leisure at St Alban's, and was always
quoting Father Stanton, the too-motherly widow and her hysterical
daughter, the small dark woman who darted about and sang snatches of
song in a way seeming to express nothing but impatience with every one
within sight, the various 'workers' who were either too chatty and
cheerful, stoically cheerful, a little mannish, or official and
supercilious and thoroughly discontented.

'Without telling them, I cannot get near them. And to Englishwomen one
cannot tell these things.'

'But you've told me.'

A sudden inner laughter glowed from the girl's face, compressing her
lips and narrowing her eyes that for a second turned away in
contemplation of a private source of amusement, as if some memory or
knowledge of hers were being confirmed, and from which she returned
fully aware that she held a soaring advantage, but not knowing the depth
of repudiation she had aroused, to rival her strange spell, repudiation
of the foreign quality of her intelligence, French intelligence with
fixed wisdoms and generalizations.

'Yes, you are English, that is the strange thing,' she remarked in a
polite, judicial tone, 'and so _different_,' she added, head sideways,
with an adoring smile and a low voice thrilling with emotion. Her hands
came forward, one before the other, outstretched, very gently
approaching, and while Miriam read in the girl's eyes the reflection of
her own motionless yielding, the hands moved apart and it was the lovely
face that touched her first, suddenly and softly dropped upon her knees
that now were gently clasped on either side by the small hands.

Alone with the strange burden, confronting empty space, Miriam supposed
she ought to stroke the hair, but was withheld, held, unbreathing, in a
quietude of well-being that was careless of her own demand for some
outward response. She felt complete as she was, brooding apart in an
intensity of being that flowed refreshingly through all her limbs and
went from her in a radiance that seemed to exist for herself alone and
could not be apparent to the hidden girl.

Who now lifted her face and said, smiling a younger, simpler smile,
relieved, gay, with a little flash of the teeth before the lips spoke,
like a child who has dared and triumphed: 'I _knew_. You are _more_ what
I thought, than I thought you were,' and gazed, head thrown back, hands
clasped firmly on the deserted knees, and laughed her early, cooing
laugh and leapt lightly to her feet and was ensconced once more upon the
deep settee.

'Are you living in London or just staying?'

'I do not know if I will stay. There are so many things here that make
me not as I would be. After Paris.'

'For example?'

'I could give so many examples. Chiefly it is the way of living, the
little things of every day. And there is your Eenglish foode.' She
shrugged her shoulders and draped her kimono more closely as if
withdrawing from the chill discomforts of life in England; that yet she
was living so easily in this quite well-run little club. The shadow her
critical tone cast over the background of their meeting, over her London
as she knew it, in makeshift poverty of which this girl had no
experience, saddened Miriam, forcing her to realize that the wide
separation of their circumstances would play its obstructive part as
soon as they reached personal details. She herself, her way of living,
the lack in it of anything that could charm a fastidious little _grande
dame_ in the making, would presently be identified with the uncongenial
London about to be left to its fate. But 'Basil' was an Englishman?

Yet, though so bravely determined to reveal herself at once and keep
nothing back, she clearly disliked direct questions. Or, if not actually
disliking them, received them with a ceremonial that made them seem
crude, and therefore certainly offensive, to her. First silence and a
fresh pose of her whole person, a plastic pose, studied and graceful,
and a careful, conscious management of the accompanying facial effects
that preceded her answer: a statement, seeming at first irrelevant and
presently revealing consistency--so that her talk bore no resemblance,
never would bear any resemblance, to the Englishwoman's well-bred
incoherence--and contributing to her effect of being critically aloof
from everything but her own power to charm.

Just as Miriam began clearly to realize both how very weary she could
grow of the plastic poses and that she herself was not playing the part
expected of her, the girl broke off and sank in a graceful heap on the
floor, where she sat crouched and once more silently adoring.

Towards tea-time, it was only with an effort that she could remember
whither she was bound. Her current life had grown remote and unreal. As
empty and turned away and indifferent as the far corners of this
club-room, so strangely free, as if deliberately kept free of intruders,
for the hour during which she had sat enthroned and talking: being
'drawn out' and set and kept upon a pinnacle and worshipped for wisdom
and purity. Seeing herself reflected in the perceptions of this girl,
she was unable to deny, in the raw material of her disposition, an
unconscious quality of the kind that was being so rapturously ascribed
to her. But it was not herself, her whole current self. It belonged to
her family and her type, and for this inalienable substratum of her
being she could claim no credit. Yet in being apparently all that was
visible, and attractive, to this socially experienced and disillusioned
and clear-eyed young woman, it seemed to threaten her. She could feel,
almost watch it coming forth in response to the demand, thoughtlessly
and effortlessly, feel how it kept her sitting perfectly still and yet
vibrant and alight from head to feet, patiently representing, authentic.
And a patient sadness filled her. For if indeed, as her own ears and the
confident rejoicing that greeted every word she spoke seemed to prove,
this emerging quality were the very root of her being, then she was
committed for life to the role allotted to her by the kneeling girl.

In the end, supplied bit by bit, by hints and responses, sometimes mere
exclamations illuminating, by their ecstatic suddenness that which
called them forth, with a portrait of herself in all its limitations, as
she existed in the mind of the girl, it seemed almost as if this girl
had come at just this moment to warn her, to give her the courage of
herself as she was, isolated and virginal. Yet, as she stood at last
taking leave of her in the centre of the twilit room, facing again her
strange beauty gleaming in the space it illuminated, she was glad to be
escaping back into the company of people who moved mostly along the
surface levels and left her to herself.




                              CHAPTER VII


With so many small movables gone on, the strip of room looked exactly as
it had done when the furniture was first brought in, and again, as she
went candle in hand down the pathway of green linoleum, she felt with
all its first freshness, as in the sacred days before the surrounding
neighbourhood stated its misery, the deep, early morning charm radiating
from the little polished bureau and its slender brass candlesticks, the
long mirror in its dark frame and the moss-green enamel of the toilet
set with its pools of light. And especially the long lasting of the
early morning charm on that first Sunday morning, before the
thunderstorm had brought the poet to his window with waving arms.

She would remember these rooms as early morning light pouring from the
high window along the green pathway and reflected, in their different
ways, by the bureau, the mirror, and the crockery: the quiet deep bliss
of it. Bliss that would remain unchanged and gradually spread its
quality even over the shallow months since she had moved her bed away
from the night-sounds of the court into the little back room, amongst
Selina's battered sitting-room furniture from which there was no escape
in looking up at the ancient painted ceiling or out through the small
window whose dim, shabby curtains, faded and dusty, seemed to match the
dismal waste between it and the opposite slum; and over all the memories
of Flaxman's, crowding together, each in turn coming forward with its
teasing question and merging again into the crowd with its question
unanswered.

And they were going with her into the new, old life, the bureau and the
moss-green crockery and the black-framed mirror. Somewhere in her vast
house Mrs Bailey would find room for the things they would displace? She
had not thought of that, nor of any tiresome detail, either at Wimpole
Street when Selina made her belated plea and she had improvised her plan
and based it on a lie, or in going round to tell the delighted Mrs
Bailey. Had thought of nothing but going home to Tansley Street.

She set her candle on the bureau and sat down to find her list of bills.
This was the end of bills and items. In future there would be nothing
but the weekly sum for Mrs Bailey, passing almost furtively from hand to
hand, with a genuine pretence on both sides that there was between them
no relationship of payer and paid. To-morrow, she would be at home.

In place of this large room, divided by the crash curtain--Selina should
have curtain and linoleum and everything else they held in common--and
the small sitting-room and huge attic, there would be one small, narrow
room.

But all round it, in place of the cooping and perpetual confrontations
of Flaxman life, the high, spacious house whose every staircase she knew
and loved in each of its minutest differences from its fellows, of shape
and colour and texture and lighting, of everything that makes up the
adventure of ascending and descending flights of stairs--absent in
Flaxman's from all but the remote little top flight beyond the reach of
the reek and murk coming up from the basement, absent because of the
close pressure of the lives in the house and in the surrounding slum;
lives she was powerless to change or to endure--and every room, where,
extending even into those she had never entered, richly her own life was
stored up.

And the doors with their different voices in shutting or being
slammed-to by the wind. Would she remember Flaxman door-sounds after she
had left? Glancing at the door which ended the long strip of her half of
the room she tried in vain to remember its sound. Yet, when she first
settled in, it must have impressed itself and played its intimate part
in the symphony of sounds belonging to her life with Selina. She tried
for the attic door upstairs and even that refused to return. No indoor
sounds would stay on with her from this house: because after the first
few weeks her senses had never been at home, had always been a little on
the alert, uneasy, half-consciously watchful for assaults from
downstairs and from outside, pressing too closely and difficult to
resist.

But the sound of each of the Tansley Street doors came back at once, and
some stood out clearly from the others. The dining-room door, quiet,
slowly-moving because of its size and weight, closing solidly with a
deep wooden sound, slamming, very rarely, with a detonation that went up
through the house. The state bedroom behind it, whose door moved
discreetly on its hinges over a fairly thickish carpet and shut with a
light, wooden sound. The door of the little draughty room at the end of
the passage, clapping abruptly to over its thin linoleum with a
comfortless metallic rattle of its loose fastening. The upstairs
drawing-room's softly, silkily closing door, a well-mannered, muffled
sound, as if it were intent on doing its duty in such a way as not to
interrupt the social life going on within. And, higher up, the heavy
brown doors of the second-floor bedrooms, still with wooden knobs like
those below, closing leisurely and importantly, seeming to demand the
respect due to the prices of the rooms they guarded; and the rooms
above, whose yellow, varnished doors shut lightly and quickly, one with
a soft brassy click, very neat and final, one with a sharp rattle of its
loose metal knob echoing over the linoleum-covered stairs and landings
of the upper floors.

All beloved. For a moment she listened to the prolonged squeak, running
cheerfully up the scale and ceasing suddenly as the door stood wide,
that was the voice of her old garret. But the breathless midsummer heat
and the cruel, hampering cold she had endured there in fireless winters
and condoned and explained away and somehow exorcized, so long as they
had been the inevitable prices of survival, came forward now to condemn
the room that was no longer hers and she turned with joy and gratitude
to hear the light, high sound, shut away, scarcely audible, of the
remote door of the small strip of room beyond the turn of the stairs as
they wound up to the attics. Heard it close, unbelievably, behind her
and leave her ensconced, high above the quiet street. In the house, but
not, too much, of it. Supported and screened by the presence of the many
rooms that made the large house; each one occupied by strangers who
soon, just because she need establish with them no exacting personal
relationship, would be richly and deeply her housemates, sharing the
independent life of this particular house, its situation within London's
magic circle, its early mornings, its evenings and nights, all bathed in
the quietude of the comely street and blessed by the neighbourhood of
the green squares at its either end.

Freedom.

Freedom for thought, when it made its sudden visits, to expand
unhampered by the awful suggestions coming from the Flaxman
surroundings. To sit down unobserved, and endlessly free from
interruption, at this little bureau that now could fulfil the promise
for which it was bought.

She became aware of her framed mirror on the wall behind her,
reflecting, in its narrow length, her form seated in the shadowy
candle-light she was so soon to leave for the cheerful blaze of gas, or
the steady companionship of the reading-lamp that at Flaxmans' she had
hardly used at all, and half turned to look into it and exchange over
her shoulder a smile of congratulation with her reflected image.

The glass was not clear. Across her face, that should have shown in the
reflected candle-light, was some kind of cloudy blur. Holding up the
candle she found lettering, large and twirly, thickly outlined as if
made with chalk or moist putty, moving with a downward slope across the
centre of the strip of glass. Mystified--for who in the wide world could
have had access to her room, or, achieving it, should be moved to deface
her mirror in a manner suggesting it was for sale?--and disturbed by the
unaccountable presence that had been silently witnessing, unpardonably
mocking, it seemed to her as she pushed away the chair and stood aside
to let the candle-light fall upon the strange apparition, her private
rejoicings.

'_I love you_,' it said.

With the feeling of coming down and down from a far-away upper distance,
a physical sensation of rhythmic descent down and down, her
consciousness arrived in the moment and paused, looking out through the
eyes of her body at the shadowy semblance left in the room: the figure
of the girl secretly and swiftly coming and going, in outdoor garb,
cloak or loose coat, something swaying and flowing with her movements,
un-Englishly.

She must have discovered the address at the club, come round here on an
impulse, and immediately encountered Selina. Selina, in her old
dressing-gown and with a candle guttering in her battered candlestick,
peering out into the darkness, a little suspicious of the foreign voice
and the poses and the extraordinary request that must have followed
their brief conversation. Or perhaps already dressed for her evening
lecture, and therefore feeling relatively sporting and dare-devil and,
at once won over, preceding her upstairs and admitting her for a moment
to this room, alone, probably lighting for her this very candle, and
coming in to blow it out again after she had shown her downstairs.

With a swift blush, while she assured herself that in the dim light she
would not have observed it, she wondered whether Selina had seen the
writing on the mirror.




                              CHAPTER VIII


Sparrows were tweeting on the leads outside the office, and the servants
had carried all the house-plants out into the lightly pittering rain.
There was gold on the rain-wet leads and then grey for a while as again
the rain fell, until once more its lessening drops were sunned to gold
and ceased. The fresh smell of damp earth came in at the open door.

_To-morrow morning, at dawn, if I happen_--The bell of the
wall-telephone sounded from its corner to which she went, away from her
table within the freshness of the outer air and the radiance of morning
light streaming in through the open door, across the short diagonal into
the room's outer world, into the lesser light warmed by the yellow-gold
wall-paper, into the flavourless, dry, house-air, and into sight,
through the glass of the opposite door, of the stately perspective of
staircase and high, shadowy hall and high archway nowadays austere,
clear of Mrs Orly's striped oriental curtains with their unspeakable,
pathetic, unforgettable tie-backs of transverse stripes, and the
forehall leading along past the seated manservant to the dark wings of
the closed door gloomily asheen beneath its clouded fanlight--with only
the beginning of a friendly movement of her mind towards patients in
their wealthy homes, and to this useful link between them and the house
extending above and below her perched room, and lately more than ever
beloved because with no release in sight she yet seemed already to be
living in it in retrospect.

So that it was herself and not quite herself who lifted the receiver and
looked down the long staircase up and down which she had run so many
thousands of times, each time, even when fatigue or summer heat retarded
her steps, with an emotion independent of that aroused by whatever made
the journey necessary, sometimes so strong as temporarily to make her
forget her errand, sometimes reduced by a particular urgency almost to
nothing, but always arriving the moment she started and
continuing--making the experience of being on the stairs with the wide
eloquent spaces above and below and all about her set in motion by
movement, and the beings of the many inmates, and even her own being,
momentarily further than usual from her mind and therefore in clearer
focus, something distinct from the rest of her life in the house--until
she arrived at her destination with a sense of return to a world from
which she seemed to have been absent for much longer than the time
required for the journey.

Pretty Mrs Ffoljambe on a visit ... the year Persimmon won the Derby ...
held up, by a patient being interviewed in the hall, and dancing with
impatience on this landing that to her was nothing but a stage on the
journey from her bedroom down through the professional part of the house
to the cheerful den far away beyond the back of the hall through which
her arrived, gay friends had just charged in a silence as unnatural as
her own.

Glad to escape from her, and her universe where women were judged by
their looks and men by their incomes, I whispered, with simulated
gallantry, I'll hurl myself downstairs and find out for you. Thanks
hawfully, she said, but don't break a limb.

Into the receiver came the voice of Mrs Orly. Her telephone voice: thin
and hurried, its usual note of anxious solicitude increased by her
incurable impatience with the mechanism, and whispering, as if still she
were living here in the house and conveying, through the hall
speaking-tube, some urgent message to her husband in his surgery. Her
whole self came through, the image of her in hurried speech, the sallow
little face worried and frowning, the sweet, radiant eyes a little
clouded.

Intent upon the little figure on tiptoe at the wall-telephone fixed in
the roomy hall at a level arranged for the convenience of her tall,
unreflecting menfolk, Miriam had missed the meaning of the first words,
but the anxious voice went on and she felt all the warmth of her being
gather itself to sound in her reply to the flustered little phrases.

And when she returned to her table, the vision of the evening, glowing
so pleasantly from the midst of next week, owed the whole of its charm
to the certainty of the pervasive little presence and the perfect
incoherence that so often in the past had provoked her to be unkind.

Whilst going on with her work she saw the vast ex-studio in the Orlys'
Hampstead retreat approached, after dinner (during which hearing 'all
about Oberland' would have been a few questions colliding with each
other across the table and answered at cross-purposes to the
accompaniment of family wrangling that held no core of bitterness, and
then a little of Mr and Mrs Orly's reminiscences and, filling the spaces
between the different consciousnesses moving towards each other and
failing to meet, the beauty of Switzerland, lingering in the mind of
each one), through the fern-lined, high glass corridor, looking at first
gloomy because of its size and the way, above the shaded, standard
lamps, the darkness went up towards the cold sheen of the glass roof,
and presently becoming a continuation of the old den, though here the
Orly voices caught up and echoing in the enormous room sounded less
assured, and all they stood for much more remote, than on the old
background.

And some time during the evening, since the scholarly aunt is to be
there and will want to hear about Reich's last lecture, ideas will creep
in:

'The great unassailed inland empires slumbering in superstition,
producing grotesque art and no thought. The Aegean islanders, always on
the _qui vive_, fighting for their lives, producing Homer. Spreading
westwards: Greece. The little Hebrews on their strip of coast, living
dramatically, producing a great literature. The Romans a military camp,
spreading and conquering, making Empire and Law. Their spiritual
descendants the island English, sailors, soldiers, merchants, and,
presently, the world's greatest poet. And now asleep in prosperity while
in the midst of Europe rises a brutal menace.'

His last words: 'Ladies and gentlemen, I am a Hungarian patriot. Germany
prepares for war. Europe knows it. Before this century is ten years old,
England will know it. Perchance too late. If I can open your eyes, I
shall not have lived in vain. You, and you alone, can save Europe, can
save my native land who will receive, on the morning war is declared, a
post card bidding it cease to exist.'

If I can put all that _clearly_ before their eyes, there will be silence
for a moment and Mrs Orly's voice will sound into the midst of the
workings of their various minds, asking a question about Reich,
compelling even a European situation to behave, to serve the purposes of
kindly living.

Mr Orly will quote _Anglo-Saxon Supremacy_, and sigh gustily and look
about for his African tobacco-pouch, to carry off his embarrassment over
his own emotion. And Mr Leyton will intone 'My house and thy house are
half the world's goods' and will remark that if the old boy turns out to
be right, the Boer War has taught us we're a C3 nation just about in
time; and cross his legs and look stern and capable.

And the walls will have grown transparent to gloomy threats and the high
roof ceased to be a shelter. Until Mr Orly sings _Gunga Din_ and _My
Snowy-breasted Pearl_ and their house becomes itself again.

But long before that, _to-morrow morning, at dawn, if I happen to wake,
I shall breathe the freshness of morning from a Tansley Street window_.

From within the deep distances enclosed by the railings of the squares,
the life-breath of the trees would steal towards her from either end of
the street.

Here, going on with her work in the sane morning light, with rain-damp
earthy scents streaming in from the potted mould of the house-plants,
she felt the heart's ease of going home with a deeper rapture than in
yesterday's excited twilight; felt an actual melting and streaming away
from below her heart of the oppression that must have been gathering
there through all the time at Flaxman's.

Whatever else awaited her at Tansley Street, these moments waited there.
And daily moments of return to a solitude that whenever she crossed the
threshold of her empty room ceased to be solitude.

The gentle burr of Mr Hancock's summoning bell took her eyes to the
clock as she rose to answer it. Mr Cleeke, narrow head, narrow, cold
voice, narrowly specialized mind, must still be here. Going upstairs she
heard in her mind the refined, undulating, deliberately challenging
voice of Mrs Cleeke. Like so many of the wives of professional husbands,
she seemed to be both her husband's guardian and a masked being who
betrayed, by the emphasis of her statements, how little of her inward
self was behind what she said. An eager, busy, well-dressed ghost,
fearful of anything that seemed to threaten the ideas he represented.
Wearing her husband's attainments as a personal decoration, she was
really indifferent to the system within which she spent her outward
life, aware of a world where it had no importance, perhaps taking refuge
in it when she was alone. She might say briskly: 'One must be alone at
times' ... or, 'I'm quite _fond_ of my own society, occasionally.' But
the solitude this kind of woman suggested would be populous with
humorous, common-sense reflections on life and humanity. Never quite at
home in solitude, she and her kind missed the essential both in society
and in solitude: the coming to life of the surrounding air, the
awareness that within it is a life-breath; in-pouring. Not one of these
women would be passionately shocked by the intruder who comes in
vocally, assuming there is no one in the room but its visible occupant,
or by the person who looks anxiously from one to another of a
momentarily silent gathering, in wait for the next move.

Crossing the room to reach her corner, she felt the glow of agreement
coming from the window-space where Mr Hancock stood beside his cabinet
mixing amalgam with the remains of his most delighted smile wavering
below the calm, obstinate brow and Mr Threele at ease in the chair
facing the stained glass window's flitting brown butterflies with the
remains of his _quod erat_ half-smile still creasing his clever face.

'And the sooner the general public can be made to realize it the
better,' said Mr Hancock gravely, with a final forceful sweep of the
spatula, and turned to pack the patient's mouth with absorbents.

_Dreadnoughts._

_Can it be true that my assignation with to-morrow's dawn owes its
security to Dreadnoughts?_

After the dawn, if Mag and Jan were still at Kenneth Street, the first
Sunday morning in the old house, the part beginning just after breakfast
and probably finding her feeling she had never gone away ...

The Flaxman time would roll up and vanish, for there would be nothing to
recall it. She and Selina had left no mark on each other, exchanged no
thoughts, no confidences, not even small gifts ...

_Perrance._ Perrance's alabaster finger, packed in her luggage,
impossible to abandon or give away, a reminding, undesired tribute to
what in his mistaken eyes she stood for, something bred in her,
remaining, friend and enemy by turns. Selina had seen and been won by it
at first and then lost sight of it because she called out the self that
was opposed to all its standards.

The strange girl had seen it and nothing else at all. Had insisted on
it. And left it a message ... at _Flaxman's_. Am-a-bel, calling herself
by her own name, as if at once insisting on her smallness and pathos, in
a great world, and her equality to all its forces, had triumphed,
without knowing what she was doing, over the impossibility of breaking
in at Flaxman's and, unless she should suddenly disappear, would for
ever represent it, the whole of it complete in all its details, lying
behind the small glimpse she was now carrying about as part of her
knowledge of her new friend.

Perhaps she would disappear. Go back to Paris as she had hinted. There
was no link between her and Tansley Street. And need be none for many
days....

'The fact is, we've been asleep.'

'The British bull-dog, eh, snoring in his comfy kennel?'

'Exactly. A little wider, please.'

After to-night, after more or less publicly settling in, it would be as
though she had never been away and to-morrow morning--thanks to
Dreadnoughts?--she would hear the familiar house-sounds and, although
the toneless echo of St Pancras bells would no longer thud in her
chimney--drawing her seeking glance, when she was too preoccupied to
remember she could not _see_ the sounds, towards its small black
aperture that after each thump held a fumbling rumour as if something
were moving visibly in the sooty cavity--in that fourth-floor room she
would hear them as clearly as before: those first, new, clear, morning
notes swinging one by one steadily down the scale and again and again
and again until presently she forgot them, ceased to pay attention to
the single sounds while still aware of their presence in the increased
quality of the light in the room, and presently was reminded that the
bells were still at their task by the sudden dead stop, announcing the
hymn-tune that broke into the stillness with such appealing lack of
confidence, tapping out its bell-notes slowly and carefully, like an
untrained musician picking out a tune with one finger; each note
sweetly, gently, touching the Sunday morning air, and at the end of the
last line the uncertain upward dab at a top note never fully reached,
left standing high in the air, perfectly, satisfyingly flat, for too
brief a second, so that all one's being, in order not to miss its
perfection, in order just to accompany and catch it before its profane
comment was covered by the urgent crashing of the final cascades, had to
become an attentive ear.

And all the other street-sounds. The pealing voice of the newspaper boy
would still come up from far enough below to describe to her mind's eye
the height of the confronting rows of quiet grey balconied houses and,
with the briefness of its stay, accompanied by the painty crackling open
of large front doors, low-toned words clearly audible, calling up a
picture of boy and buyer pleasantly in league, and the quiet satisfied
wooden flump of each leisurely closed door, to tell of its perfect
length between tree-filled square and tree-filled square.

Revelling in every single, blessed sound indoors and out and then, for a
moment, undecided between one and another of the many ways of spending
the vast morning. No need to unpack. Mrs Bailey would only smile,
indulgently, if her luggage hung about for weeks, for ever. Oh, _home_.

If Mag and Jan were still at Kenneth Street, whatever she should decide
to do would be done in an interval that would owe part of its secure
endlessness to the state of mind brought about by the forgettable
certainty of going to them in the afternoon, without going outside the
surrounding presence of Central London. That was the change, the only
change there would be, that Mag and Jan had gone away outside. And it
was not essential. Perhaps it was good.

For those old Sundays with them were left perfect, an everlasting
possession. In spite of the curious occasional flaw: the way the girls
agreed, amidst all their complete differences, in a half-mocking,
_humorous_ indulgence for all she tried to express to them. Intolerable,
sometimes terrifying: the presence of a secret, magnanimous mockery,
that included themselves, included everything and everybody, and was
sustained by a sort of taunting attitude towards life that was perfectly
inexplicable. But on the whole those Sundays were perfection. Perfect at
their time, so that often she and they, though Jan not so much, being
older, and more lugubrious about the future and old age, had wished and
said they wished, and without damaging the moment, that for ever they
could go on living the lives they then were living.

Certain days stood warmly in her heart, gathering about them all the
others that would need a special effort to call up, and all of one
quality that amid innumerable variations had _never_ varied: the three
of them, their clearly defined differences, origins, characters,
beliefs, and a fourth, something that was there in the room and that
depended upon their being together, and being together at the heart of
London and immensely at leisure, without past or future. So that
anecdotes, stories of the past, and speculations as to what might lie
ahead--happening only when, for some reason, one or other of them was
not quite there, or was withdrawn into some private preoccupation--drove
it away.

Some of these Sundays, some of the best, had been bought at shameful
prices: lies that had yet brought no punishment, but the reward of
increased eagerness on the part of the friends she had ruthlessly failed
at the last moment.

One stood out from the rest with the guiltiest prelude: the going to
look in on them on that grilling August Saturday, leaving her bag ready
packed for the long-promised week-end with the Pernes at Banbury Park
that had been an enchanting prospect ever since the arrival of Miss
Deborah's unexpected affectionate letter breaking the years of silence
since Miss Haddie's death. And all the more charming because Miss Haddie
would not be there deliberately representing Church Christianity and
doing her reproachful best so openly to be a good influence, and failing
because of her sad, soured immaturity, her _fear_, and cold dark
jealousy. Only sunny Miss Deborah and frivolous Miss Jenny and
Wordsworth House empty of north London girls. And Miss Haddie's death
far enough away for them to be their gay, profane little off-duty
selves: little Christian gentlewomen of the last century, mighty without
knowing it, and heavenly company.

And as the visit approached, it had become not only their charming idea
but also escape for two nights from the stifling attic, and all through
the morning languor after a sleepless night she had had before her eyes
their cool suburban sitting-room, its open windows letting in the
jingle-jingle, plock-plock, of the soulless north London trams that
would sound, as she sat with them about the little tea-table and its old
silver and fragile porcelain, the Gobelin screen somewhere near, and
listened to their delicate chirrupings and chucklings, somehow less
incongruous than on that first afternoon so many years ago.

It was midday. The girls both just back from their respective offices,
blissful, amidst the disorder of settling down for the week-end. Jan
cooking, in a crape dressing-gown, her head contradicting her body,
boyishly intellectual with its short sculptured hair. Mag in knickers
and camisole, her west-country, Celtic hair a cloud about her face and
neck, cleaning all her shoes set in a row. Chanting voices that did not
cease when she came in. And both faces flushed and perspiring in the
fearful London heat and the extra heat, the savoury heat of their
cooking. And a sudden home-sickness for them and for their sweltering
little rooms seeming, at that moment, more attractive, and, because of
the deep release they brought to her spirit, _cooler_, than any garden
could be. There seemed a special importance, that had grown stronger,
turned into something that could not be missed, when Mag began laying
her spells:

'Trains, week-ends, what _are_ they? I _ask_ you, _what_?' Yet
preoccupied, utterly, blissfully preoccupied. Wanting not so much that I
should stay, as that by not going away I should preserve a familiar
pattern.

'Having shown yourself, you _can't_ leave us. Jan! Can she leave us?
_Est-ce qu'elle peut uns verlassen?_'

'_Nein! Bestimmt! In Gottes Rath._'

'_Ewigkeit, Amen._' And then, the shoes finished, as she went busily
from room to room so that her voice sounded from various distances, its
chanting carelessness proclaiming her indifference, but with such
intoxicating _attractiveness_, because it revealed her soul's eye set
upon her week-end, its succession of moments and events as they
appeared, secretly, to her alone and sent their joy into her voice as
she moved about in their setting, sharing it with Jan, who saw it with
the eye of one born and bred in another country, always to some extent
as foreign, as something she had achieved, but that yet remained outside
herself:

'We insist, child, on you, or your hat. Go, if you must. But your hat.
Stays here. We will suspend it. By its velvet strings. To the
mantelpiece. In front of the archdeacon. We will regard'--and here she
had stood near at hand, exultantly radiating her charm, through warm
west-country eyes and smiling lips, and her easily flowing affection, so
sunny, having for its nearest objects her army of sisters and brothers,
all safely at a distance and yet securely to be met on holidays she
could, without discomfort, just manage to afford; and the half-critical
indulgence that was beginning to be her settled attitude, in agreement
with Jan, some kind of formula that fitted their scheme of things--'its
transparent, silky crinoline. Its roses. With their help. And _torrents_
of trrr-anspiration. We'll enduah.'

Jan, having come in from the kitchen to stand at her side, with her so
different, German smile, blondly radiant, denied by the little twist of
her closely held lips expressing her bitter comment on life, held always
in reserve and implacable:

'_I._ Shall _wear_ the hat.'

And they had stood like a tribunal. And reluctantly, taking leave not so
much of them personally as of the condensation of their common London
life in all its retrospects and perspectives, specially, it seemed at
that moment, represented by this torrid week-end she might have shared
with them, she had privately decided, while mentally they left her and
again took possession of their goods, the security of their isolation
together for the immense interval between one week's work and another,
that she must hold to her going. But in moving out to the landing and
the sight of the descending stairs, the banishment from this innermost
depth of the rich deeps of London seemed not only unendurable, but
foolish and needless. As if to go, however morally and stoically, was to
commit an outrage she would regret to the end of her days. Her thoughts,
for a moment, had touched the waiting Pernes and brought a pang of guilt
that was nothing beside the deep, everyday joy that poured back when
Mag, coming from her room, said quietly, simply, with a touch of anxious
pleading making her voice undulate:

'You're _not_ going, Miriam? _Don't_ go.'

'Of _course_ I'm not going.'

'She's not going, Jan.' Mag had turned her head towards the kitchen
without removing her gaze, but in her level tone was triumph and
malicious amusement, tempting me to say it was not entirely on their
account I was staying, and in her smile a delighted anticipation of
Jan's horrified amazement. Jan had almost tiptoed out from the kitchen
and murmured, when she arrived, with her crooked smile reduced to its
least shadow:

'Not? _Really_ not?' And their sense of the enormity had come from them
in waves.

'No. I don't want to go away. I don't want to wander out into bleak
black blank north London. You can't imagine, even on a tropical day, how
_cold_ it is.' She had carried their thoughts away, driven them away,
from the personal aspects: made them enthusiastically see the necessity,
and it was Jan who suggested the telegram. And there was an interval,
before it was sent, every one separate again, and chanting, and
blissful. And over that afternoon and evening had lain the deepest spell
they had known together, for her and for Mag at any rate, and their
happiness and the presence of the exaggerated weather had distracted
Jan, insulated her for a while somewhere quite near the unchanging
present.

The twilight had come to them all, coming home from Slater's, a shared,
oh, surely that must have been a fully shared event and marvel; immense
summer twilight, heavenly refreshment, sky swept clear of its blaze of
light and heat, grown high and visible and kind; buildings and people
larger and more kindly than by day. Such an immense turning of day,
personal, making to everybody a vast communication, deepening into dusk
as we walked abreast, three little figures with dusk-white faces and
dusk-dark garments, causelessly exulting, towards the morning which came
at once, for I slept a rich sweet sleep that paid no heed to the sultry
oven atmosphere of my room.

And that Sunday morning for the first time I went round to them before
breakfast out into the early summer morning, into all my summer mornings
right back to that morning when I first noticed a shadow lying on the
_wrong side_ of a gable. Across the silent early freshness of the
square, feeling the remains of night and dawn in the deep scent and
colour of its leaves, drinking its strange rich lonely air that seemed
in the heart of London to come from a paradise as deep as any to be
found in distant country lanes and woods. It sent a breath of its pure
freshness down the little asleep brown street and on to their doorstep,
till I forgot it and thought only of them, and in a moment, having found
them and yesterday still going on and holding us together, I was out
again; and now, the longest part of that day that seems so vast a
stretch is the moment of being out again on those steps, going down
them, with all the oncoming hours in my heart and their little milk-jug
in my hand for ever; for the whole of that summer that seemed then to
approach from earth and sky and, as if it were a conscious being, to
greet me coming down the steps in my rose-hat with loosely tied strings,
and, as I paused in delight, to claim me as part of its pageant; so that
in that moment my sense of summer was perfect and I knew it was what I
had stayed in London to meet.

The saliva-tube ceased its busy gurgling. Gave out its little click of
glass on glass as Mr Hancock bent across and hitched it over the rim of
the spittoon. 'Now rinse, please.' He was at the far side of the chair
filling the tumbler as the patient came upright mopping his lips,
returning to his cold world and his cold use of its words. An emotional
groan, facetious tribute to his gagged endurance; a reflective sniff:
prelude to speech; but already Mr Hancock, appointment-book in hand, had
begun the dismissal. In a moment she would be alone with him in that
world of silent or speechful communion that was so powerful still to set
her other worlds at a distance. His least word, and Mr Threele had left
his thoughts flowing and himself conversational, would evoke the whole
of it and break the current of her thoughts.

The speaking-tube clicked, and he came quickly back from his
leave-taking across the room to answer it and would perhaps have the
next patient sent up at once ...?

'Yes?' he inquired, abstractedly listening into the tube and, in reply
to the answer, 'Yes,' again, informatively. It was not the patient; a
partner with a question, perhaps wanting him for a consultation, or one
of the mechanics needing instructions or wanting him in the workshop.
The second question was lighting his face with the glimmer of a smile,
and she slowed her gathering-up of instruments to make a silence for
talk that might last long enough to see the bracket cleared and herself
escaped until the patient should be in the chair.

'Thank you.' He turned to face her with his full, delighted beam: 'Lord
Wilderham to see you,' he said and paused for a moment, enjoying his
role, and moved away to his writing-table with a deliberate air of
abdication and withdrawal, enjoying the little comedy.

She had smiled her response to it while their eyes had met and she had
taken the unexpected Lord Wilderham and his unknown needs under her
wing, and was free now to go at once for her excursion into the far-off
world represented by his name. So far off and unrelated to her own and
yet so deeply loved for its floods of golden light, the various rich
beauty of its backgrounds and the fresh deeps of high surrounding air
that blessed its innocent inhabitants unnoticed, that she seemed to hold
a place in it by natural right, and to touch it for a moment just now
was an extension rather than a disturbance of her blissful state. She
went down to the waiting-room, feeling her spirit's joy the fuller for
her errand, flowing more freely through her limbs and to the tips of her
toes that scarcely felt the ground beneath them as they skimmed along
the hall.

Lord Wilderham rose from a chair in the window-space beyond the table
where held-up patients sat trying to read. In a moment she was at his
side and as sharply aware, while they exchanged greetings, of his
agitation and distress as if they had been her own, and stood poised,
accepting and receiving and longing to remove them, glad to radiate the
deep peace that to-day was so fully at her command; till the pleasant,
woeful, bloodshot blue eyes moved from hers to glance towards the room's
silent occupants.

The opening of the door, upon a released patient greeting, and
immediately greeted by, someone risen from the table, made a solitude
for them in the retreat where they were sharing his eloquent misery.

Through his staccato incoherencies--as he stood shamed and suppliant,
and sociable down to the very movement of his eyelashes, and looking so
much as if he had come straight from a racecourse that her mind's eye
saw the diagonal from shoulder to hip of the strap of his binoculars and
upon his head the grey topper that would complete his dress, and the gay
rose in his buttonhole--she saw his pleasant life, saw its coming weeks,
the best and brightest of the spring season, broken up by appointments
to sit every few days for an indefinite time enduring discomfort and
sometimes acute pain, and facing the intimate reminder that the body
doesn't last, facing and feeling the certainty of death.

This man would risk his life in the hunting field, in wild and lonely
distant parts of the earth, but the slow elaborate torments of modern
dental surgery had broken his spirit. But not his courtesy. Half of his
distress was over the enormity of breaking appointments. His decision to
endure for the present no more root-dressings and preparations for
crowns, no more long, long, tap-tap-tapping in of gold fillings, was
desperate and bought at the price of genuine moral discomfort.

'What _are_ we to say to Hancock?'

She sent him away reassured, with all his appointments safely cancelled
and perfect understanding and forgiveness faithfully promised; but as
through the open front door she saw him spring into his jaunty,
holland-blinded private hansom--and in spirit felt his relief as it
bowled gaily off down the street through the spring sunlight towards the
world of flowered balconies and high grey houses beautiful within: all
at their best moment, the spring flowers in house-rooms and club-rooms
giving out, with their scents, the essence in advance of the weeks to
come right down to Ascot and Goodwood and Cowes, seen in perspective by
all the genuinely participant _habitués_, and of these he certainly was
one, as a single continuous collaborated jollification, the annual
festival, centring in London and London's summer robbed by wealth of its
discomforts, of the entire Oberland house-party--he was no longer just
one of the social elect, but also a pathetic fugitive. Behind the
merrily jingling hansom ran the shadow of death. Easily forgotten in the
midst of the secure profane gaiety of wealthy social life, where it is
possible even for weaklings and the timid to lose and identify
themselves with the group and draw from it daily a dose of vicarious
strength; but always there.

He had fled from cessation, and the sense, brought by those moments in
the chair when publicly, in one's own hearing and that of another, one's
hardest tissues, mysteriously stricken, are ground away, of bodily
failure and ultimate dissolution. From the witnessed, audible
destruction that brings it so closely home. Neglected teeth may be
uncomfortable, sometimes agonizing. But they are a personal secret,
easily forgotten in the long intervals.

Everybody, nearly every single person in the western world, except some
of the middle European rye-bread-eating peasantries, ravaged to some
extent by dental caries. And still doctors scarcely ever looked at
patients' mouths. And even dentists seemed to feel that all would be
well if only the public and the medical profession could be awakened to
the necessity for wholesale, regular dental treatment for everybody ...
school clinics. Enlightened practical common-sense people, hygienists,
and public health enthusiasts, pioneers, talking glibly and calmly about
the great future, once they were set going, of school dental clinics,
never hearing in the very word the cold metallic click of instruments,
never imagining the second-rate men who would accept these poorly paid
jobs and handle the scared children. And even if they were all the
equals of Mr Hancock and everybody were skilfully and gently treated.
What then? It would make no difference to the truth: death attacking
western civilization by the teeth.

Civilization, she told herself going slowly upstairs, and the helpless,
wild, unconscious shriek of a patient coming round from nitrous oxide in
a downstairs surgery seemed to her the voice of the western world in its
death-throes, depends upon the stability of molars. No longer stable.
That is why dentistry, the despised and rejected amongst the healing
arts, is a revelation where medicine is a blind. Medicine chases
symptoms, checks one disease and sees another increase. Total result:
nil. Dental surgery treats symptoms that remain in place and do not
change their form. Is therefore in a position to recognize that
treatment _does not cure_. Civilization. Disease. And treatment growing
all the time more and more elaborate. Nightmare: increasing armies of
doctors trained, and in honour bound, even if they themselves, to say
nothing of the helplessly onlooking relatives, are revolted by the
processes, to 'keep life going to the last possible moment by every
available means,' and the fearful array, for ever increasing, of drugs
and appliances that can drag the dying back to consciousness and
torment.

The ancient crack, where London grime had collected, in the jamb of the
glass door of her room confirmed her gloomy reflections and challenged
the skylit brightness upon which the door opened. But in vain, in vain.
The sweet fresh air from the opposite open door flowed into her
nostrils. Her being went forth to meet it. Here, within the air, far
within this breath of life with the sun on its spring moisture, was
rescue from all the gloom in the world. Flight, like Lord Wilderham's?
He to his daily Oberland, she to her morning air? No. There was an
answer, a personal answer and assurance somewhere within the deeps of
this living air: not all the black evidence of human history could
prevail against it. In light and darkness it was there. It was a touch.
It conveyed the touch of a living, conscious being.

The silent light, sharply signalling amongst the mountains, had been a
message; but this low, sweet English air was an embrace.

The coming end of to-day's morning tapped stealthily on her mind and
began to spread its influence. Just enough time in hand for all that
remained to be done. With a deep sigh that brought to her eyes a smile
of salutation, she sat down at her table and gathered together the
scattered letters and cheques and felt time at once resume its deep,
morning quality, and turned to greet Hawkins come quietly in from the
basement workshop for the mechanics' wages with the morning in his eyes.
The sunlight would now be striking in through the barred basement
skylight. Above the horrid gold coins, they met in silent agreement and
exchanged their differently worded tributes, and parted with the cunning
smiles of conspirators enriching their secret by leaving it unspoken.

A glance at her clock showed its hands met on noon and, propped against
its side, a letter come by the mid-morning post and placed carefully
there, clear of the table's litter, by Eve, addressed to herself. In a
strange hand. Queer staccato pen-strokes, sloping at various angles,
with disjointed curves set between: _Amabel_.

A mass of small sheets, covered, without margins. Strange pattern of
curves and straight strokes rapidly set down. Each separately. Gaps not
only between each letter but also between the straight and the curved
part of a single letter. Letters and words to be put together by the eye
as it went along.

She reckoned the cost of reading the whole: the sacrifice of part of a
Saturday afternoon to work that after this invasion of her unprepared
consciousness might go at a dragging pace. Glancing through the pages
she found some, in a larger and still more hurried hand, where no single
word showed its meaning directly. Between each letter of each word was
as much space as between the words they were supposed to compose. Yet
each was expressive, before its meaning appeared. Each letter,
carelessly dashed down, under pressure of feeling, was a picture, framed
in the surrounding space.

When meanings were discovered, they sounded; as if spoken.

It was this strange, direct, as if spoken communication, punctuated only
by dashes sloped at various angles like the sharp, forcible uprights of
the script, and seeming to be the pauses of a voice in speech, that was
making the reading of this letter so new an experience. From its
enchantment part of her mind was still held aloof by its strangeness,
inquiring, considering. Her eye, not yet accustomed, kept pausing over
the expressiveness of the new words attaching themselves to those
already read, moving as well as sounding while they came, set together
by her eye, to their proper meaning.

Alive. These written words were alive in a way no others she had met had
been alive. Instead of calling her attention to the way the pen was
held, to the many expressivenesses of a given handwriting, apart from
what it was being used to express, instead of bringing as did the
majority of letters, especially those written by men, a picture of the
writer seated and thoughtfully using a medium of communication,
recognizing its limitations and remaining docile within them so that the
letter itself seemed quite as much to express the impossibility as the
possibility of exchange by means of the written word, it called her
directly to the girl herself, making her, and not the letter, the medium
of expression. Each word, each letter, was Amabel, was one of the many
poses of her body, upright as a plant is upright, elegant as a
decorative plant, supporting its embellishing curves just as the clean
uprights of the letters supported the curves that belonged to them.

And these word-making letters so swiftly flung on to the marginless
page, substituting their individual shape for the letter-shape that she
now realized had a limiting effect upon what was expressed therein, were
seeming to explain and justify the poses: to show them for so long
already habitual in this girl's young life that although they pleased
her and were to her the movements of a dance, they expressed her without
hindrance. She admired as she took them, called attention to them.
Impersonally, as she called herself by name.

'Isn't--E-g-y-p-t--a beautiful word?'

_Beautiful?_ If it were, she was tried in the balance and found wanting.
Amabel stood turned away from her, posed in contemplation of something
she could not see, so that for her own contemplation only the pose
remained.

French. The Frenchwoman, judging, selecting for approval and, by her
pose, holding both herself and any one contemplating her in reverence
before what she perceived: person, thing, idea. According to some
standard that for her was infallible, Amabel collected, as she went
along through life.

But this letter, moving breathlessly, staccato, was more English than
French. Without her spoken accent, now that she was turned away and her
voice no longer heard, it was English altogether.

Egypt. Neither the sound nor the sight of the word was lovely. Written,
with its three differently tailed letters properly joined, it was
unmanageable: the tails competed. In the whole written language surely
no word was more difficult to beautify. The opening sound uglier even
than 'cheese,' the pouting spit of the conclusion: hopeless.

Yet she singled it out, pausing before it, offering it. Mystery.

Returning, from scribbling in various styles of handwriting the
difficult combination, she gazed once more at the word on the page and
saw that as written by the girl it was not a word at all. It was a
picture, a hieroglyph, each letter lovely in itself. Beautiful, yes, and
suggesting all its associations more powerfully than did the sight of
the word written closely.

Written as she wrote it, it was expressive exactly as her script was
expressive: a balance of angles and curves. Like the words traced on the
mirror. It was their expression, which was Amabel's, as much as what
they had said, that had so moved her.

'Forgive--I watched you--in your little English clothes--go across the
square--oh, my lady--my little--you terrified my heart--I hold it out to
you--my terrified heart--in my two hands----'

Real. Reality vibrating behind this effort to drive feeling through
words. The girl's reality appealing to her own, seeing and feeling it
ahead of her own seeings or feelings that yet responded, acknowledged as
she emerged from her reading, in herself and the girl, with them when
they were together, somehow between them in the mysterious interplay of
their two beings, the reality she had known for so long alone, brought
out into life.

The phrase scrawled beneath the signature gradually grew clear: 'I
wrote, with your _soap_!'

Alarmed by this almost terrifying resourcefulness, Miriam put the letter
aside and turned to her work.

_To-morrow morning, if I happen to wake ..._

But now to-morrow morning and all the visible circumstances of her life
had retreated to inaccessible distance, leaving her isolated with this
girl.

Suddenly, punctually isolated, as once she had been with Eleanor, and,
again this time, just as everything about her had become a continuous
blossoming.




                               CHAPTER IX


Again the side-door of a small restaurant in a narrow street. Again a
dingy waiter leading the way up an ill-lit staircase. Again the conflict
between her desire to be a sympathetic presence and her resentment of
his ignorance of her perfect awareness of the conflict in him, between
his bourgeois scruples and his secret, newcomer's delight in what he had
called his 'slum.' Again a distracting preoccupation with the world-wide
vision of harpy disreputability offering facilities to the well-to-do.
And again, more clearly than all, her whole being set against the plan
that last week had perfectly foiled itself without instructing him ...

_Coercion._ The unpardonable crime.

Unless he should realize that, and make a convincing recantation, he
would wreck this occasion as he had wrecked all the others.

It was his worst fault?

The thought occurred to her, coming as if from outside her mind and
gleaming for an instant in the murky darkness, that presently she might
discreetly discuss this subject with him. He might listen in the way he
sometimes had done when suddenly and irrelevantly she said something
with all the force of her nature. And this particular certainty was
perhaps her strongest social certainty.

Philosophizing: Well, it was what she most wanted, to remove a barrier
of which he was aware without understanding its nature. It would be
difficult, almost impossible, in a half-lit, shamefaced room. Perhaps
the same room. Whose features, in memory, had already attained a kind of
beauty.

But to-night the journey ended in a brightly lit sitting-room with table
laid. And instantly the evening was endless. They were alone, in endless
time.

Piling her outdoor things upon a sheeny shamefaced armchair in a dark
corner near a window through the slats of whose dilapidated Venetian
blinds came the bluish light of a street lamp, she felt the remains of
the day's preoccupations fall away and strength return, flowing in from
the promise of leisure, making her hope she was less tired than she
felt. Far away from him and from her surroundings her spirit seemed to
flee, demanding peace, and to-night, at no matter what cost in apparent
idiocy or ill-humour, she _would_ reach that central peace; go farther
and farther into the heart of her being and be there, as if alone,
tranquilly, until fully possessed by that something within her that was
more than herself. If not, if she remained outside it, if he succeeded
in making her pretend, though he never knew she was pretending, to be an
inhabitant of his world, then again they would squabble and part.

As they both came forward into the central light and he rounded off the
tuneless humming that had accompanied his disrobing and had been meant
to signal self-possession, with a cheerful cadenza on a tone increased
in fullness like that of an opera orchestra while the hero enters, and
still said no word, she felt time and space open out between them,
infinitely available: the gift of last week's evening, of their first
evening of being alone and inaccessible.

And paused in deep gratitude to life and to him, just short of the lit
table, and turned away to the mirror with her hands to her hair as
though arranging it. Immediately his humming broke forth anew; this time
to answer her silent abstraction, to tell her they were _both_
tranquilly at home and at leisure.

Gazing into the depths of the mirror's fly-blown damp-mottled reflection
of a dark curtain screening a door in the opposite wall, she was aware
of herself there in the picture, lit from behind, obstructing the light
that presently again would lie across the mirror when she turned to join
the party: him, and herself representing to him a set of memories
amongst other sets of memories. A set covering about ten years of his
life, covering the period that had seen him emerge from obscurity to
celebrity in his world that was so alien to her own.

In and out of every year of his ascent her life had been woven. She had
been a witness, and was now a kind of compendium for him of it all, one
of his supports, one of those who through having known the beginnings,
through representing them every time she appeared, brought to him a
realization of his achievements.

He was two people. A man achieving, becoming, driving forward to
unpredictable becomings, delighting in the process, devoting himself,
compelling himself, whom so frankly he criticized and so genuinely
deplored, to a ceaseless becoming, ceaseless assimilating of anything
that promised to serve the interests of a ceaseless becoming for life as
he saw it. And also a man seeming uncreated, without any existence worth
the name.

If presently he should ask, really wishing, impersonally, to hear of
movements, of any kind of accomplishment: 'Well, what have you been up
to since last week?' and she should answer, as a hundred times she had
answered: 'Living,' he would emit the little chuckle, half amusement at
what he considered an evasion and half disapproval of the spectacle of a
life spent, as lately he had so often said, 'in agreeable loafing that
leads nowhere.'

But then he would say also, in moods of reflective impersonal
contemplation: 'You've taken your freedom, Miriam, won it in the teeth
of difficulties in a way that compels my admiration. You've lived, you
still live, you know, only just above the poverty line, and it hasn't
bashed you.' And so many other descriptive commentaries, recognizable,
impersonal classifications of all sorts. And yet she remained, felt,
unknown to him. And whatever selves he might reveal to her, selves he
hinted at, none of which she had any desire to become, she must remain
unknown. For so dismally, in every one, he saw only what they were
becoming or might become, and of the essential individual knew, and
wanted to know, nothing at all.

The dreary young waiter came in with the soup and once more the room
asserted its character and Hypo, sharply aware of him, began at once to
edit his ideas of the occasion by his manner of supervising his
arrangements with a half-friendly, half-patronizing approval, and
succeeded only in making the mournful young man strain yet higher the
eyebrows permanently a little lifted by the disappointing difference
between the realities of his life in London and his dreams thereof in
his far-away continental home.

He shuffled away and the room recovered: the fly-blown mirror, the faded
artificial flowers, the obtrusive sofa, were redeemed by the table's
circle of golden light, now populous and become one with all the circles
of golden light within which she had sat down to feast.

Taking her place, she felt more than the usual familiar sense of
everlastingness that came forward in her at the moment of sitting down
to table with beloved people, and stayed until the breaking forth of
conversation drove it into the background. Here it was, blissfully
beating its wings in the disgraceful room and coming this time not only
from the past but from past and future alike; for ever.

She held to it, savouring its strange new quality, its power of so
intensifying the radiance in which they sat, that everything beyond it
was a darkness obliterating the walls of the room, extending back and
back, right along the receding years of their intermittent friendship.

Called by his unusual silence to glance across the separating inches,
she saw that he was being grave, apparently quietly abstracted.
Honestly, quite honestly and sincerely he was playing up to her,
venturing unarmed into the desert shared life became for him whenever
deliberate, incessant gaiety was in abeyance, whose destructive power he
yet knew as well as he knew its joys.

Robbed of the subtle curves drawn about them by his watchful readiness
for witty improvisation or facetious retort, robbed of the authoritative
complacency they wore during his ceaseless social occupation of
definition and commentary at every turn of every occasion, his features
were homely, reverted to his very homely type, the raw material of his
personal appearance. Only his brow, the side of it left free from limply
forward falling wisps of hair, asserted independence, above his
momentarily invisible eyes; thought-moulded, moulded by the theories and
thoughts that built up his mental life.

She was at once charmed and touched by this surely painful experiment,
the result of his willingness to try to meet her on her own ground, or
at any rate her own terms; for the ground she lived on he believed to be
merely a mistaken self-importance.

Turning away her eyes from the strange spectacle of him abdicated and
docile, she became aware of the thoughts behind his experiment. He was
curious as to what use she would make of the offered leadership, and at
the same time sceptical, willing to give her time, at any rate time
enough to prove to herself as well as to him that her silence was what
he believed all feminine silence to be: a vacuous waiting.

His patience, unless she could almost hypnotize him by the intensity of
her concentration, would give out. Long before she could attain. Well,
let it give out.

Scarcely breathing, she dropped, aware at once by the way the now
familiar objects of the room fused to a unity, as if seen from a
distance, that she would remember them for ever, down and down, sure
now, if she could hold out, of attaining at last in his presence for the
first time, save now and again by accident, to possession of that self
within herself who was more than her momentary self, and again and
again, intermittently and unreliably, had charmed them both.

Almost arrived, almost down in the innermost sphere of happy solitude,
drawing the first deep breath of its fresher air that was like air
coming across the sea at night, air breathed above the waters of a
bubbling spring, she was halted by the watchfulness of a swift glance, a
ray immediately withdrawn.

In answer to her awareness, having first made sure of it, made sure her
eyes would turn his way, he raised his spoon and flourished it in a neat
little spiral above his plate, with eyes downcast, lips pouched, and
eyebrows pathetically up in would-be childish appeal: a small pantomime
suggesting that they should get on with their soup.

He was confessing his vow of silence, making game of it, revealing above
his half-mocking, half-interested, sceptical submissiveness, his
ceaseless mind presiding, its wide shallow definitions and
interpretations all neatly in place.

With a flash of insight that freed her for ever, she felt, of jealousy
of his relationships past, present, and future, she saw how very slight,
how restricted and perpetually baffled must always be the communication
between him and anything that bore the name of woman. Saw the price each
one had paid with whom he had been intimate either in love or
friendship, in being obliged to shut off, in order to meet him in his
world, his shaped world, rationalized according to whatever scheme of
thought was appealing to him at the moment, three-fourths of their
being.

What could any one of them be for him beyond the fact that they were
providers of what he regarded as vitalizing physical contacts, but
sounding-boards for his ideas; admirers, supporters? Either they were
disciples, holding on to and living in the light of one or other of the
mutually contradictory interpretations of life perpetually evolved by
men, all of them right and all wrong, and were therefore not women at
all, but the 'intelligent emancipated creatures' for whom he expressed
so much admiration while fighting shy of them in his leisure hours
because of their awful consistency and conscientiousness or because, as
Jan said, 'a rush of brains to the head usually made them rather plain
in the face,' or they played up whenever they were with him, trotted
briskly about on his maps and diagrams, and lived for the rest of their
time in their own deep world.

All this she felt to-night with the strength of two. Amabel was with
her, young Amabel, with her mature experience of men, who had confirmed
what hitherto she had thought might be inexperience, or a personal
peculiarity: her certainty that between men and women there can be no
direct communication.

There was no place in his universe for women who did not either
sincerely, blindly, follow, or play up and make him believe they were
following. All the others were merely pleasant or unpleasant biological
material. Those who opposed: misguided creatures who must not be allowed
to obstruct. The majority played up: for the sake of his society, his
charm, the charm of enjoying and watching him enjoy the pranks of his
lightning-swift intelligence. The temptation was great.

She knew she had not always resisted it.

Poor little man. Isolated without knowing the cause of his isolation.
Representing, as he sat there, all his isolated fellow-men.

No, there was no room for jealousy of the association of any woman with
any man; only perhaps of their privileges and some of their experiences.

People can meet only in God? The shape--she took her spoon and began on
her soup, swiftly, rhythmically, seeing upon the tablecloth in front of
her the shape--a triangle. Woman and man at either end of the base, the
apex: God.

'Grace,' she said, feeling now quite free, as if in solitude, to
entertain herself with her own thoughts. 'That is why people say Grace.
At least, one of the reasons.'

'Grace ...' he began, provisionally, in the rather high-pitched tone
that meant he was focusing something for which he had no prepared
formula; but very gently so that he might, if she wished, be considered
not to have spoken.

'Grace,' she breathed, as if speaking to herself: 'Grace, even if
followed by _Snooks_ ... any one bearing such a name, called by it every
day, must be influenced.'

With 'Gracie' and 'Grice' sounding hideously in her ears as she
reflected that the name, as spoken in English, was a bad example of what
she might have wanted to express if her new interest in words as a
factor in environment had really been brought into play, she felt his
eyes turned upon her and away again as he bent, believing her engrossed,
to his filled spoon, without attempting to interpose, by means of some
characteristic sally, his bugle-call to some recognizable form of mental
activity.

This was marvellous. As now and again in the past, but then only in the
midst of distracting conflict, she felt her spirit expand freely in the
room and gather to itself, in the immensity of leisure provided by each
succeeding second, all that belonged to the occasion.

So prominent in the backward vista that it seemed now to be offering
itself as a substitute for the one now surrounding them, the scene of
their early conflicts and of the beginning of the false-true
relationship now established between them came clearly before her inward
eye: the room shaped like a one-armed signpost, the long, cushioned seat
in the window looking out to sea, every detail of the room's contents
that had flouted her in moments of despair over the absence of words to
frame the truths that balanced his and refused to fit into his patterns.

She felt again the delight of the moment of facing silently, alone with
him, the sea's distant misty blue behind the nearer blue brilliance of
delphiniums and saw again the window-framed loveliness deepen as quite
gravely and simply he implored her to remain, for the whole morning
dependably there, supporting. Again felt that morning immediately become
endless. It did not matter that his consciousness had forgotten all
this. Actually, it was the moment preceding this present one.
Interruption had fallen upon it. Upon all the opportunities he had made,
it had punctually fallen.

But now interruption was banished.

'This is very nice and domestic. You are having your first share of
domesticity, Miretta.'

She looked across the few inches of space that separated them as across
a gulf on the hither side of which he sat awaiting response to his
adroit attempt to steer her thoughts, and met his eyes and saw
re-enthroned in them the comedic sprite that gave him ceaseless
entertainment and would not let him live.

Having given her the chance of steering the conversation and waited,
according to his own reckoning, for dark ages, in vain, he now resumed
his usual role in any shared experience: conductor, perpetually
defining.

It was true. This _was_ perhaps her share of domestic life. Perhaps all
she had felt on sitting down to table was the result of a plunge into
that zone of experience, now irrevocable and to be bearing fruit for
ever.

'Been flying, almost desperately, from domesticity, all m'life.'

'Yes.... _Yes._ Lucky Miriam. Sailing free. You _are_ lucky, you know.
Not domesticity, then. Isolation; in space. But that unfortunate young
man'll be coming in again. Don't go too far into space before we've done
with him.'

'Women carry all the domesticity they need about with them. That is why
they can get along alone so much better than men.'

That had launched him; and to the now quite strange sound of his voice,
as new and strange as it had been the first time she heard it, she
comfortably went on thinking; reminding herself of the many wives in
whose eyes she had surprised private meditation going its way behind an
appearance of close attention to a familiar voice.

Half turned towards his talk, eating her soup as though her listening
supplied her present animation, she considered the strangeness, the
perversity of his perpetual denial of the being far away within himself
who believed all she wanted him to believe and knew all she wanted him
to know. The one who had written the phrase of which his words had just
reminded her.

No cunning, no kind of clever calculation could have worked the miracle
of that letter. So complete that she had forgotten it, although without
it she would not have been here to-night. But it was not until now that
she saw it as proof of all he denied.

It was scientific evidence, surely more interesting and valuable, if
less directly profitable, than the kind of evidence by which he set such
store, and to this, the fact that it was _scientific_ evidence she held
eagerly, the whole of her mind seeming to be vocal at once above the
sounds made by the waiter returned and who now was a friend, one of the
strange human family, being and knowing, behind all the surface
appearances and comings and goings. Ignoring them both, she prepared to
communicate, with all these voices that were speaking at once within
her, each presenting a different aspect of what she wanted to say and
leaving her to choose the one that would best secure his attention.

But when they were once more alone she felt careless, defiant of any
careful presentation. To whatever she might say, he would give an
attention that for this evening at least was centred on herself. The
beating within her of what seemed at once life and light, was making her
breath come unsteadily and her voice shook a little as she said:

'It was in the middle of the morning,' and then steadied, for its sound,
so personal and yet so strange, the thin small thread of sound, however
smooth and pleasant and musical, going out into space to represent--in a
manner that left with every word so much denied and so little so
partially stated--one person to another, was warning her that the
evidence, if it were to convince, must be given in his language of
'honest fact.'

'There had been,' she went on, looking straight ahead and filling out
her tone to carry herself past any obstructive witticism of word or
manner he might find necessary for the decoration of his retirement from
discourse, 'a letter from a friend by the first post. Various letters,
of course, from various friends. But just that one letter standing out
from the rest. It doesn't matter why it stood out. The reasons may be
good, bad, indifferent, anything you like.' His eyes moved from her
face; his thoughts, while the point of her discourse remained uncertain,
had touched the subject's possibilities and his set of generalizations
about it--including the one, a little hampering her discourse, about the
feminine habit of writing long, personal letters that so easily
degenerated into a pleasant waste of time--and, with these ready to
hand, had dropped away.

'The point is that there could not possibly be another of these very
special letters, which in any case always came by the first post, until
the next day. Came a rat-tat. I _do_ dislike that form, don't you?
_Came_ this and that; even in poetry. Perhaps because "came" is such a
poor sound. Won't bear the weight of suspense.... Now _kahm_----'
Reverie advanced upon her, suggesting the interest to be found in
considering the relative powers of English and German words. He
cherished Saxon English for its sanguine force and rich earthiness, but
did not know how continuously vivid was German, with its unaltered,
ancient pictoriality, every other word describing an action or an object
so as to bring it before the eyes; even the terminology of philosophy
being directly descriptive.

'Proceed, Miriam.'

'_Kahm_, then, the eleven o'clock rat-tat, which I hear every day
unmoved and which, as I have explained, on this particular day could not
be bringing me anything, brought me to my feet in a way that no other
rat-tat has ever done in the whole of my life. With my heart beating,
and telling me much more plainly than speech could do that there was,
down there in the letter-box, only one letter, instead of the usual
posse of business letters and circulars, and that it was for _me_.'

'Yes. One has these curious premonitions, in certain moods. Certain
states of heightened perception. One is exalted and luminous.'

He knew, then, and accepted this kind of experience, had perhaps gone
through it himself, and yet remained incurious. She could tell him no
more. Even if he were different, believing in an unseen world and an
unseen power in communication with every single soul, even if he could
suddenly be turned into a believer and her own man and partner, she
could not tell, in words, what had happened in the moment of reading. He
was in the midst of truth, surrounded by it as she knew it to be, but
not willing to attend to its intimations. So the sacred moment was apart
in her own personal and private life, though it was he who had found the
words to describe its cause.

'Art, sex, and religion; one and the same,' she said briskly, 'but that
doesn't matter. What matters----'

'Tell me, was that letter from me? Nice Miriam; _your_ letters are
exactly like yourself. Was it?'

'That doesn't matter. The shock, coming from outside, inside,
life-as-it-seems-to-be was in having, as it were, read the letter before
it came and reacted to it when my rational mind _knew_ it couldn't be
there.'

And the letter was _not_, in a sense, from him.

'There's no outside that is not----'

'Yes. There _is_. We can move, see, hear, feel somehow beyond our
immediate selves. We can. We do.'

And now again the waiter came in, creating diversions with his presence
and more food and again departed, leaving Hypo talking of discoveries
that would supply scientific explanations for a set of phenomena not at
present understood.

She smiled and stretched cool limbs full of strength that an hour ago
were so fevered with weariness and, in the deep silence flowing in from
the past over the sound of his words and all the words that ever would
be used to convey thoughts about life, she demanded of herself whether
she cared for him in the smallest degree or for any one or anything so
much as the certainty of being in communion with something always there,
something in which and through which people could meet and whose
absence, felt with people who did not acknowledge it, made life at once
impossible, made it a death worse than any dying.

'Religious people in general are in some way unsatisfactory. Not fully
alive. Exclusive. Irreligious people are unsatisfactory in another way.
Defiant.'

A violin, squeaking and scraping in the street below, making his answer
inaudible because it was taking all her attention. Its halting sounds,
the uncertain notes scraped out into the air of the gloomy street, were
addressing themselves to what was always waiting, just within reach,
just beyond the always breaking, always disappearing fragments of every
kind of life ... _Eve's little aria_. Playing itself, appealingly, into
her heart. Hearing it now, not in Eve's rendering, nor in that of the
decrepit musician down there, but in its own perfection, which now she
was realizing for the first time, she was smitten by its meditative
beauty and by the power with which it called her to herself. It was his
enemy. It asserted, quietly, confidently, and, in coming to her at this
moment out of the far past and showing it remaining in herself more
deeply than the raw new years that had succeeded it and were still
formless and void, as if gently chiding her while it overwhelmed her
with its tenderness, all that he denied.

'Gluck,' she breathed, bending her head to listen.

'Glook, dear Miriam,' he said swiftly, and raised his glass.

And she remembered how years ago, when first hovering between relief and
admiration for the mental freedom of the Wilson atmosphere, and
uncertainty as to the liberties Hypo had taken with the shape of social
life, she had told Eve, in a letter written from the Brooms' villa, from
the midst of all the old beliefs, that she felt, in not renouncing the
friendship of a divorced, remarried man, she was selling her soul to the
devil. And how Eve had written imploring her to give him up.

And now she was surrounded by people all of whom Eve would see as
'living in sin.' And was about to join their ranks.

Raising her hand to keep him from further speech, she listened with all
her strength and moved as she listened away and away, not back into the
past, but forward, it seemed, into a future that belonged to it and drew
her to itself, to where by nature she belonged.

Crashing across what now seemed to be Eve's own voice and brought a
picture of her as she used to stand, gently waiting, without words, when
her feelings had been hurt, came the sound of a heavy vehicle along the
narrow street.

'You _are_ a dear, Miriam,' he said in his most delighted voice. 'I wish
I had your power of complete enthusiasm at a moment's notice. You _do_
enjoy life, you know.'

'That is one of the loveliest little shapes of music, of its kind, there
can be.'

                   *       *       *       *       *

There ought to be homage. There was a woman, not this thinking self who
talked with men in their own language, but one whose words could be
spoken only from the heart's knowledge, waiting to be born in her.

Now here, really, was a point for him: men want recognition of their
work, to help them to believe in themselves. They want limelight and
approval, even if they are only hanging a picture, crookedly, in order
to bring them confirmation of the worth of what they do. Unless in some
form they get it, all but the very few--the stoic philosophical ones who
are apt to have a crooked smile, and a pipe in one corner of it, and not
much of an opinion of humanity, but a sort of blasphemous, unconsciously
destructive, blind, kindly _tolerance_--are miserable. Women, then, want
recognition of themselves, of what they are and represent, before they
can come fully to birth. Homage for what they are and represent.

He was incapable of homage. Or had given all he had and grown sceptical
and dead about it. Left it somewhere. But without a touch of it she
could not come fully to birth for him. In that sense all women _are_
Undine. Only through a man's recognition can they come to their full
stature. But so are men, in their different way. It was his constricted,
biological way of seeing sex that kept him blind. Beauty, even, was to
him beauty by contrast with Neanderthal man ...

'The trouble with Miretta is that one can't take liberties with a
philosopher.'

She smiled from far away, from where if only he knew and could have
patience just to look at what she saw and fully submit himself to its
truth, see and feel its truth, she could travel towards him. But at
least this evening he was serene, not annoyed both with himself and with
her as in last week's dimly lit room where yet in memory he seemed so
much nearer to her than in this golden light. This evening he knew that
the barrier was not of her own deliberate placing.

'Now with others than Miretta'--flattery--'one just takes them in one's
arms and immediately there is no barrier.'

'Not because I am different. Because there is a psychological barrier.
We've not talked enough.'

'Talking comes afterwards, believe me.'

He dropped a kiss on her shoulder.

'You _are_ a pretty creature, Miriam. I wish you could see yourself.'

With the eyes of Amabel, and with her own eyes opened by Amabel, she saw
the long honey-coloured ropes of hair framing the face that Amabel found
beautiful in its 'Flemish Madonna' type, falling across her shoulders
and along her body where the last foot of their length, red-gold,
gleamed marvellously against the rose-tinted velvety gleaming of her
flesh. Saw the lines and curves of her limbs, their balance and harmony.
Impersonally beautiful and inspiring. To him each detail was 'pretty,'
and the whole an object of desire.

With an impersonal sacredness they appeared before her, less imaginable
as objects of desire than when swathed, as in public they had been all
her life.

This mutual nakedness was appeasing rather than stimulating. And
austere, as if it were a first step in some arduous discipline.

His body was not beautiful. She could find nothing to adore, no ground
for response to his lightly spoken tribute. The manly structure, the
smooth, satiny sheen in place of her own velvety glow was interesting as
partner and foil, but not desirable. It had no power to stir her as
often she had been stirred by the sudden sight of him walking down a
garden or entering a room. With the familiar clothes, something of his
essential self seemed to have departed.

Leaving him pathetic.

The impulse seemed reckless. But when she had leaned forward and clasped
him, the warm contact drove away the idea that she might be both
humiliating and annoying him and brought a flood of solicitude and
suggested a strange action. And as gently she rocked him to and fro the
words that came to her lips were so unsuitable that even while she
murmured 'My little babe, just born,' she blushed for them, and steeled
herself for his comment.

Letting him go, she found his arms about her in their turn and herself,
surprised and not able with sufficient swiftness to contract her
expanded being that still seemed to encompass him, rocked
unsatisfactorily to and fro while his voice, low and shy and with the
inappropriate unwelcome charm in it of the ineffectual gestures of a
child learning a game, echoed the unsuitable words.

She leaned back surveying him with downcast eyes, dismayed to feel in
him the single, simple, lonely helplessness of the human soul from which
his certainties, though they seemed blind, had made her imagine him
exempt, and wanting now only to restore him as swiftly as possible to
his own world, even at the price of pretending she believed in it. With
this determination came a sudden easy certainty of being able to rescue
his evening from any sense of failure and disappointment.

Looking up at him with a plan in her mind that in his present state of
simplicity did not seem impossible, she met his voice:

'Lost lady. Your reputation's in shreds, Miriam, virginal though you
be.'

'Yes. Come and have coffee at my Donizetti's. Open till midnight. One of
those little Italian-Swiss places where everything is fried in the same
fat.'

She had risked the chances of the suggestion by apologizing for it. With
an ingenious piece of flattery he would bring the occasion to an end and
get away to his own world, with a formula for his evening that would
satisfy every test he was likely to apply to it.

'We'll have a hansom,' he said, making for his piled clothes, with the
little creak in his voice that was there only when he was on the way to
something that promised entertainment. 'A hansom,' he repeated with
comforting ineptitude, 'evade the east wind.'

Reflected in the mirror she saw as if it were elsewhere and invisible,
save by an effort of imagination she did not wish to make, the spectacle
of him in conflict with garments and drew her eyes back to her own image
just in time to see before it was shadowed by the influence of the haste
that was needed if she were to be ready in time to escape the
embarrassment of his misguided observation, how radiant it was in the
promise of side-by-side companionship.

'We always have an east wind. It's a portent.'

'We'll elude it. I deplore your superstitions, Miriam, and adore your
shamelessness in adhering to them. If I don't look out I shall end by
adoring the superstitions.'

As they took their places in a vacant corner, without losing any of the
joy that had possessed her when the absurd plan suggested itself, she
saw the miserable little interior through his eyes. But the sight of his
face wearing the curves it had only when everything was going very well,
made her carelessly happy and sent her mind on a private tour all round
the well-known space, reviving the memories stored up in it. Her early
solitude. Eleanor, blissful here in brief immeasurable intervals between
difficulty and difficulty. Michael, in conflict and in truce. Selina,
courteously enduring a unique experience, restraining her withering
disapproval until the moment before they left. She lost without regret
the meaning of the words coming from his side of the table and was
prevented from turning to inquire by the sight of little Donizetti
bringing his plump, short person as quickly as possible down the narrow
gangway, turning sideways where projecting chairs impeded his advance,
with china-blue eyes coldly inspecting Hypo from a distance and
remaining keen and stern when he arrived and turned them upon herself,
and only sending forth the kindly ray of the smile that smoothed away
the lines drawn by disapproval on his well-padded brow when she gave her
order, in a voice expressing for him and for herself so much more than
her delight in this single occasion that when she turned back to Hypo
she knew that already he must have come into possession of some of the
wealth accumulated here.

But though for the moment he was incredibly sitting at ease and happy
here in her world and her life, he would presently need distractions.
Forcing herself to ignore the fact that she had on her hands a man
accustomed to be 'animated' and to meet 'animation,' she at once
recovered the depth of her surroundings, from which she found herself
glancing at the picture that was the result of trying on Amabel the
effect of her own belief in the impossibility of association between men
and women: Amabel at breakfast with Basil in his shooting-box, sitting
there in morning light, lovely in her blue kimono, fresh and amusing and
delightful and apparently amused and delighted, and Basil, opposite,
believing that the behaviour and the talk with which she was filling the
gap, to him the enchanting behaviour and the delightful talk and
laughter of an amazingly intelligent child-woman, was spontaneous and as
pleasing to herself as to him; having no idea of the difficulty, the
sheer hard work of holding herself in his world and keeping him at his
ease even for an hour.

She stole yet another flash of time to contemplate the alternatives that
would confront her in looking across at him as if about to speak:
'pally' conversational remarks, the small talk, in their own coinage,
for men only, of the woman who has abdicated, fancies she has become a
friend and not only is, but looks, a satellite; the sprightly, amusing,
half-cynical, social-revelation kind of talk, adapted to male blindness
in social life and vastly entertaining them in their unoccupied moments,
and giving women the reputation for scandal-mongering from which most
men are free only by reason of their social blindness and incapacity;
the man-to-man, generalized talk that must go forward in a language each
of whose terms leaps a gap and goes confidently forward and finally
leaves both them, and the women who contrive without reservations to
adopt their mentality and their methods, in a desert of agnosticism.

In conning over his experience of these varieties of interchange, she
grew self-conscious, aware of having slipped too far away, and sadly
anticipated that in the second about to follow the one that was flashing
by, he would, assuming the blankness of her mind, be amiably embarking
upon one of his entertaining, life-darkening improvisations.

'The padrone,' she said dryly, despairingly, 'is always suspicious of my
men friends,' and looked up. He was preparing for nothing. For several
seconds he had sat contented, apparently thoughtless. With a face a
little fuller than when they had come in, he looked at her
encouragingly.

'He slew Michael one night with a look. I had been here alone, writing a
letter in pencil, and Donizetti most charmingly brought me a stamp. When
Michael came in, I told him about the stamp and, horribly, when we were
paying our bill, he growled, "And thee _stahmp_?" Donizetti, the Swiss
part of him, grew scarlet, and the Italian part sent a stiletto through
Michael's heart, but I had gasped "Oh, _no_," just in time, and he
turned his back on Michael and smiled his dimpled smile and took leave.
He escorts me to tables and to the door in the most courtly fashion. And
never talks. That is the comfort of him. I've never heard him speak.
Except to give orders down the lift, in Italian.'

While she went on to tell him the story of her first breaking in at
Donizetti's, swiftly because other communications were crowding that
would interest him, being impersonal, less and more than this one she
was being able to tell so vividly because she had never told it before
and felt now so full of life, he listened without any of his usual
critical detachment.

'You've got to switch over into journalism, Miriam. You're wasting
yourself. It's risky, but you're a courageous creature. You've thrown up
jobs and taken your chance. Achieved freedom. Most women would have been
unthinkably battered by the life you've led.'

'Oh, no. You don't know Mag and Jan. You _want_ to think women are being
bashed in industry. And there's no _courage_ in the way I have thrown up
jobs. Evasion--your favourite word--of responsibility. I don't want to
go on earning my living as I do at Wimpole Street. The personal interest
has gone out of it----'

'Hancock's married.'

'Just so. But I like his wife when her particular brand of trained
intelligence, so much more painful in a woman than in a man, your kind,
the kind that is unquestioningly obedient to the latest dicta of
science, is in abeyance. But she is open-minded, much more open-minded
than you are.' The smile was for her bad taste in abusing a pleasant
occasion with unpleasant lies. 'She has no respect for, or at least is
very wary of, the high priests of Harley Street. She would like to build
the same kind of world as you would like to build. Run by electricity.
But she would build it on dancing as much as on science. And by the way,
here's an example, perfect, of the kind of blindness a thoroughly
trained, scientific mind falls into. There are, you know, "mews" in
Wimpole Street, mostly let to poor people because few of the doctors
have carriages and some, of course, now, have cars. Well, when first she
dawned as a Wimpole Street wife, she visited the mews belonging to the
house. Wasn't that nice of her? And called on me in the office to tell
me about it. Sat down and began, and went off into one of the queer
little attacks of laughter with which she prefaces an amusing
communication and that screw up her face as if she were in acute pain.
Mental, critical laughter. So I knew I was not going to be able to
agree. Because her kind of criticism and your kind of criticism of
people who live in a different world is bound to be negligible. So I was
free to be tormented by the spectacle of two worlds in collision.
Dreadful, she found these poor people, and repeated _Dreadful_, screwing
up her face like someone who is being agonized by a discordant sound,
but really thoroughly enjoying herself. What she found dreadful was that
in their awful, hopeless circumstances they were _trusting in
Providence_. "Sitting still and trusting in _Providence_," she wailed,
and again had an enjoyable agony. She has helped them without seeing
that their trust was thereby justified.'

She had looked away, feeling that she would be beyond her depth if he
objected with one of his witty sarcasms, and feeling at the same time a
most desperate, unaccountable need to flout all evidence in this
particular direction. But her mind whisked off and listened again to
Amabel glowingly speaking of asking God to tea, not to consult Him but
to share with Him her joy that could be expressed only in radiance and
song ... and came back just in time to break across whatever it was he
was saying--with the manner he used when responding, resignedly, to
obstinate blindness, eyes fixed on a distant object at which he was not
looking, lips compressed, narrowing his voice--with a remark that seemed
to come to her out of the surrounding air:

'I know what you mean. Earthquakes. Famine. Hideous wholesale accidents.
And what Englehart calls with such gusto "Industrial Maladjustments,"
all those things that make humanity look so helpless and make all you
people call for a combined effort of human intelligence. Which may be
all right. But death doesn't matter. And what I mean about these perhaps
not highly intelligent people who trust in Providence is that they would
go under still trusting: "Though Thou slay me" ...'

'The personal interest,' she pursued hurriedly, reflecting that she
could not tell what she really believed beyond the deep necessity for
flouting evidence, 'is largely gone and the life does not use me. But
every other way of living I can think of takes away something essential.
Any kind of responsible work would. It may be wrong to evade
responsibility. But I must. That's why I can't write for the _New
Universe_. Even if, as you say, I could, and they would have me. It
would mean taking sides.'

'You'll have to, in the end. Even Miretta can't browse all over the
field for ever. It's committing yourself you're afraid of. Taking
definite steps. You'll miss things. And live to regret it.'

'How can one miss things?'

'Mere existence isn't life.'

'Why _mere_? Most people have too much life and too little realization.
Realization takes time and solitude. They have neither.'

'You can't go through life feeling your pulse.'

'I'm not one of those people who boast that outsiders see most of the
game. I hate that. And it isn't true. What is true is that certain
outsiders, I don't say I'm one of them, see _all_ the game. I believe
that. People who have never, in your sense, plunged into life.'

'Ee-yes. Books. Almost everything can be got from books. Plus
imagination. I believe it's true of lots of women, it may be true of
you, that homoeopathic doses of life are enough. But have at least your
homoeopathic dose. You've had London. Enormously. But it'll end by
wearing you down. You want a _green solitude_. An infant. Then you'd be
able to write a book.'

Tree-trunks, in woodland variety, standing in light dimmed by their
full-leaved branches, came before her inward eye, and the London fever
in her blood longed for the touch of the moist, deep air called up by
his words. And even as she thought of a little house whose little garden
should lead down into a wood, she fled from it, finding it so full of
his influence that there was no space wherein her own spirit could make
its home. But the words settled in her mind, the promise of a bourne to
which she could see no possible path.

'No economics,' she said in answer to the secondary threat embodied in
his offer. 'Whatever I do, no economics. They shut things off.'

'Right. No economics. Unless temporarily.' His smile, infected with
amusement and with triumph, was directed down the length of the
restaurant as if addressed confidentially to a humanity wiser and more
experienced than herself.

And still the words, put together with his genius for putting the right
words together, went on drawing into her mind remembered moments in cool
gardens and shadowy woods that were all of one quality, so that many
backgrounds were competing to represent it.

'... flat in town ... leisure to write ... country-house visits for
holidays ...' passed unsuccessfully across her preoccupation, each in
turn emptied of reality by the overshadowing influence that had driven
her from the green solitude.

'Middles. You've masses of material for Middles. Criticism. You could do
that on your head. Presently _novel_.'

The writing of a novel suggested only a pleasant, exciting, flattering
way of filling a period of leisure and thereby creating more leisure.
That was what it had seemed to be to all the writers she had met at the
Wilsons'; and Michael had cried out against the modern way of regarding
letters as a source of wealth.

And Hypo's emphasis suggested that the hideous, irritating, meaningless
word _novvle_ represented the end and aim of a writer's existence. Yet
about them all, even those who left her stupefied with admiring joy, was
a dreadful enclosure.

She saw Raskolnikov on the stone staircase of the tenement house being
more than he knew himself to be and somehow redeemed _before_ the awful
deed one shared without wanting to prevent, in contrast to all the
people in James who knew so much and yet did not know.

'Even as you read about Waymarsh and his "sombre glow" and his "attitude
of prolonged impermanence" as he sits on the edge of the bed talking to
Strether, and revel in all the ways James uses to reveal the process of
civilizing Chad, you are distracted from your utter joy by fury over all
he is unaware of. And even Conrad. The self-satisfied, complacent,
know-all condescendingness of their handling of their material. Wells
seems to have more awareness. But all his books are witty exploitations
of ideas. The torment of _all_ novels is what is left out. The moment
you are aware of it, there is torment in them. Bang, bang, bang, on they
go, these men's books, like an L.C.C. tram, yet unable to make you
forget them, the authors, for a moment. It worries me to think of
novels. And yet I'm thrilled to the marrow when I hear of a new
novelist. _Clayhanger_, though I've not read it.'

'He's a realist. Documenting. You'd like Bennett. Perhaps the novel's
not your form. Women ought to be good novelists. But they write best
about their own experiences. Love-affairs and so forth. They lack
creative imagination.'

'Ah, imagination. Lies.'

'Try a novel of ideas. Philosophical. There's George Eliot.'

'Writes like a man.'

'Just so. Lewes. Be a feminine George Eliot. Try your hand.'

He was setting out the contents of the cruet as if they were pieces in a
game--a lifetime might be well spent in annotating the male novelists,
filling out the vast oblivions in them, especially in the painfully
comic or the painfully tragic and in the satirists--and now moved them
towards her with the air of a demonstrator intent on directing a blank
and wavering feminine consciousness:

'_Middles._ _Criticism_, which you'd do as other women do fancy-work.
_Infant._ NOVEL.'

His voice was dropped to the very low tone it took when he discussed
what he liked to believe were improprieties.

But her interest had disappeared so completely that she went off in
search of it. And at once found Amabel, sitting in judgment on her
evening, horrified, laughing till her eyes were filled with tears.

'I'm preoccupied,' she said. 'Perpetually, just now, with one person.'

'Unfortunate for me,' he said, unmoved. 'Is this Amabel?'

'It's treasure, beyond your power of diagnosis. Beyond any one's power.'

She looked at Amabel through his eyes. And saw almost everything in her
escape them. Her poses and mannerisms, that were second nature, he would
amusedly accept as so many biological contrivances. And if he thought
her 'pretty'--sacrilege, even in thought, to apply to Amabel this
belittling expression that at this moment I see as part of his
deliberate refusal to take any kind of womanhood seriously, and is not
condoned by his protesting that neither does he take himself
seriously--would play up to her as he does, as I have seen him do, with
women who 'exploit' themselves; subtly conveying at the same time, to
the simple female he saw behind the manoeuvres, that he knew what she
was about and that she was doing it rather well. But perhaps he would
not even think her pretty.

'Do you understand those people, I suppose there are thousands, to whom
country life without a carriage is misery? For me, the country is woods
and certain kinds of fields. In light. A memory, for nearly all my
holidays have been at the sea. But woods, like the German woods, and the
Lake District, and the Yorkshire moors, and all the country I've seen,
always in company of people, mostly of people who pull up, wistfully,
before a "fine view," have given me a home-sickness. It may be that the
person who insists on carriages, sees country life as country houses,
wants me to feel that no country life could come up to the life we are
having together in London.'

'Amabel?'

'On one side it is, I've just realized, a sort of continuation of
Oberland. She belongs to those people. Has a host of brothers in the
Services. Titled relatives. All that sort of thing. But she's broken
away. Couldn't endure the life. Imagine a girl who used to climb down
out of her bedroom window to go and swim in the lake by moonlight....'

'Alone?'

'Of course alone. Imagine her flying downstairs in the morning, so
headlong that she couldn't stop, and crashed through the glass door of
the vestibule. In the afternoon the door was mended. The next morning
she crashed through again.'

'Excessive.'

'When she was sixteen, there is a demure photograph. She was engaged for
a while; to a curate. She won't wait to speak of him. And I'm not
curious, only desperately interested, always, in her view of people, and
I think I can see him and the way he grew smaller and smaller, until she
could scarcely see him. Anyhow she made her people--all of whom she
describes, by means of anecdotes, as if they were her contemporaries, so
that you see them as they are, devoid of the wrappings of age and
dignity; you see all round them and know exactly how they think and why
they act as they do. It's rather terrible--made them send her to Paris,
to study art. In speaking of Frenchwomen her voice grows devout and,
because she is more Celtic than English, being partly Irish and partly
Welsh, and has no sense of nationality, she became French. In manner and
bearing. Her disapproval of English people is both Irish and French. In
any social difficulty the Frenchwoman comes to the front. But
intimately, she is Irish. Yet her brogue is as inaccurate as her French.
No ear. But a strong sense of rhythm.'

'What is she doing now?'

Life with Amabel, in which she was more deeply immersed than in any
shared living that had fallen to her lot, passed before her inward eye
defying her to select any feature that more than any other would convey
to him a sense of the quality pervading every moment of it.

Even the desire to convey seemed a kind of treachery to Amabel. Yet over
everything that might pass between them the spirit of Amabel would
hover, distracting, demanding statement. There was in the whole of her
previous experience, that with all its restrictions of poverty and
circumstance had seemed to him so rich and varied and in many respects
so enviable, nothing that could compare with what Amabel had brought.
Nothing could be better. No sharing, not even the shared being of a man
and a woman, which she sometimes envied and sometimes deplored, could be
deeper or more wonderful than this being together, alternating between
intense awareness of the beloved person and delight in every aspect,
every word and movement, and a solitude distinguishable from the
deepest, coolest, most renewing moments of lonely solitude only in the
enhancement it reaped by being shared.

If by some wordless magic she could convey to him the quality of that
moment, coming in the midst of a conversation lasting for the whole of a
Sunday morning from the time of wakening and seeing with the same eyes
at the same moment, through the large uncurtained window, the wet grey
roofs across the way--the Sunday following the evening at Mrs Bellamy's
gathering, where we were separated and mingling in various groups and
observing the drama as one person after another 'took the floor' and
expressed views, and suddenly met and were both filled with the same
longing, to get away and lie side by side in the darkness describing and
talking it all over until sleep should come without any interval of
going off into the seclusion of our separate minds--and had been broken
into by the shared events of our picnic lunch on the floor, and
afterwards had gone on further and further from its origin until Amabel
had sought out, to illustrate the world as it had shown itself to her in
childhood, that little book of verses with coloured prints, lovely, deep
in colour and simple in design, and as I looked at it, while she hunted
for another, I leaned my head back and for a few seconds was asleep for
the first time in broad daylight, and woke so utterly refreshed that I
said without thinking: 'This is the birthday of the world,' and, while
she flew to fling herself down at my knees, I was back in the moment of
seeing for the first time those flowerbeds and banks of flowers blazing
in the morning sunlight, that smelt of the flowers and was one with them
and me and the big bees crossing the path, low, on a level with my face.
And I told her of it and that it must have been somewhere near my third
birthday, and her falling tears of joy and sympathy promised that never
again should there be in my blood an unconquerable fever.

'She's very wary and a little scornful of all my people. Of all those I
hand out. Wary of souls. Thinks the soul secondary. Coloured. Almost
visible. Almost _fat_. The spirit is form. Original form. God. But
really I think it's respectable, middle-class people she finds so
laughable and intolerable. I think it must be. When I talk to her about
my friends and my sisters and their husbands, though she was thrilled by
Harriett's Canadian life, taking in "roomers," and her life in Cuba,
riding about and growing pineapples, she is at once on the defensive. It
may be that when I am trying to _describe_ anything in return for all
she has told me, she is bored by my _style_, because it becomes an
imitation of hers--which I admire but which is a method of expression
that does not belong to what I want to convey and so conveys nothing at
all. You see she has been talking all her life and has all her formulas
ready-made at the tip of her tongue, and I've been silent nearly all my
life, and when she looks at me as if she wanted to say "What are all
those people to me?" pats her hair and hides her eyes with her lashes as
if to conceal, or reveal, her lack of interest, and tightly folds her
lips together as if keeping back something she won't let herself say,
she is really suffering from my insincerity.'

'What is her way of describing people?'

'But now and again I can strike her note by what at the time seems a
kind of inspiration, but really is the result of being with her. For
instance, it occurred to me to convey the idea of somebody by saying on
the spur of the moment that the story of David and Bathsheba was the
only scandal he knew. She loved that. We both did. Had to stifle the
yells objected to by the woman in the room above mine, who finds it
trying enough that we talk from after dinner until the small hours.'

'That was bright of you, Miriam.'

'Not at all. He is that kind of man, and I saw him, for a moment, in her
terms. I can't see my bourgeoisie, from whom I have fled and fly, in any
terms. But don't imagine she is merely witty. She can be, if she wishes
to. But has several ways of repenting it. And buffoonery, which I love
and excel in, shocks her beyond words. So I usually refrain. When I
break out because I must, she watches me with affectionate indulgence.
She is witty with her man. Because it is the only way of amusing him and
filling the intervals. Tells him tales, amusing tales throwing light on
people, enlarging his sense of people.'

'Scheherazade.'

'Incongruities amuse her. She can make them amuse me, but has to wait
for me to see the point and I can't, yet, for long, or with any real
satisfaction, keep my eye on that way of looking at things. I am
distracted by attending to her technique, and by the sense that there is
something about all these people that is independent of her and outside
her knowledge, something they can't express either to her or to
themselves and that I share and yet, when I am with her, I feel it is
something we ought to shake off and I know that for them as well as for
me the memory of her will be a challenge they can never get behind.'

'Is she pretty?'

'She denies it. It's useless to ask me. Her sense of incongruity is well
fed because every one in the house loves her and confides in her. She
brings it all to me. Without any sense of betraying them, and simply
because she loves to watch people living and to share the spectacle. But
it's only incidentally that they and their affairs entertain us. She
will come in hysterical over some incident or other and presently
describe, giving every one the same voice. She can't imitate. But
usually ...'

He had made a remark seeming to come from far away, and inaudible
because she was deafened by the shame of the realization that in a
moment she would have been telling him of their silences, trying to tell
him of those moments when they were suddenly intensely aware of each
other and the flow of their wordless communion, making the smallest
possible movements of the head now this way now that, holding each pose
with their eyes wide on each other, expressionless, like birds in a
thicket intently watching and listening; but without bird-anxiety.

'It has just occurred to me that birds, sitting side by side with their
sideways eyes, are _seeing_ each other. Er--well ... she describes her
own people racily, in a rather nice class-dialect. Not either of those
that keep the muscles of the face almost unmoved. The one that turns
"er" into "ah": matah, patah, Africah, opening the mouth. Not
_A_ya-fr'ca, with the teeth closed.'

'How does she make all these boarding-house people love her?'

'By loving them. She has the most real rare love for the essential human
being. Even for the people she sees through. And a deep, unusual respect
and solicitude. For what to you is nothing or next to nothing: the
personal life in everybody. She must already have more individuals, more
personal lives, clear and vivid in her consciousness, than most people
have muddled and dull in their consciousness in a whole lifetime. Like a
confessor. She, too, confesses everything, the most impossible things.
That's why I love her; for her courage.'

'You make me jealous. You've never been moved about me.'

'Oh, I have. But it is so utterly different. There's a barrier. Less
with some men than with most. But always there. Amabel agrees. Is always
uneasy, even when blissfully happy, with her man.'

'Men and women are incompatible. It's one of life's little difficulties.
How does she account for her uneasiness?'

'She has a kind of affection for it. Regards the colossal unawareness of
a man as an amiable defect. But she agrees, although she finds it also
screamingly funny, that the way all down the ages men have labelled
their sexual impulses "woman" is quite monstrous. We spent an evening
and half a night thinking out a world in which men should be properly
educated. Very stern, detached priestesses for youth. Stern artists.'

'No priests?'

'They were a difficulty. Which in the end we left. The dedicated
priestesses would, of course, have to acquire their own education and
experience. They would have to be specialists and not specialists,
something more easy of achievement for women than for men.'

'Have you told her about me?'

'I've hinted at you. She demurs. Hesitates. Not through jealousy. But
although she has a horror of _les pieds jaunes des vieilles filles_ she
won't admit that I'm qualifying to join that army. Thinks I don't need
experience and should make a good thing of being an invalid on a sofa
for the rest of my life, talking and being talked to.'

'That's great nonsense. She's surrounding you too much. What you want is
to take hold of life as she has done. Things won't _come_ to you.'

'But they do. Over and over again, just as I've learned to be happy with
nothing, they have come. Given me something I wanted and disappeared.'

'You have shoved them away.'

'To get back.'

                   *       *       *       *       *

Approaching the house that now was nothing but a casket for Amabel, her
thoughts returned to him gone away with a shadowy idea of Amabel's
quality and a definite picture of two young women engrossed in one of
those mysterious sudden intimacies that precede the serious affairs of
life and end, 'at the touch of reality,' as swiftly as they had begun.
She had told him nothing of Amabel seriously investigating Socialism,
taking it in her stride, approving, accepting. Going to suffrage
meetings, being converted by the lacy, delicate old-fashioned ladyhood
of Mrs Despard to militancy, writing at once to her people, of their
immediate stoppage of her allowance and her weeks of work as Mrs
Bailey's drudge, from six in the morning to nine at night, of the
rescuing brother, and the way she now lived in her room with her books
and her Empire china on almost nothing but bread and milk.

The story would have fired him. But it seemed secondary to what she had
tried to tell.




                               CHAPTER X


'We don't want you to go, dearest. We'll be dwedfully lonely when you're
gone.'

The golden evening had not lasted long enough to attain the distances of
the room that came in sight as she rose unsteadily from her chair by the
fireside. They looked cold and morning-like, left with this morning's
influence upon them, away in the time before her arrival; waiting for
to-morrow.

Hypo got up with the light little hoisting movement that landed him
poised in readiness to turn in any direction.

'Yes,' he said, belatedly extending a judicial finger: 'Susan's right.
Wisdom's the only way with colds, Miretta. You've been no end good. And
if we're not firm _now_, you'll go on outdoing yourself until the
smaller hours, and wake shattered. We don't want you to wake shattered.'

Moving backwards towards the door with her eyes on the two who together
made all she was leaving, she saw rising in her mind's eye behind them
and this room they had made, their other rooms, their earlier selves,
back and back, a single clear pattern of endeavour and achievement.
Never before in their close presence had their past presented itself for
contemplation. It was bringing sadness into this small farewell, giving
it a kind of finality. She had rounded the angle and reached the door
and they had come forward from the room's centre that now was out of
sight, and were leaning side by side over the back of the settee, seeing
her off, turned towards her with their mystery, a circle drawn about
them and their life of linked experience that none could enter.

'Good night then, darlings,' she said lightly. Sleep thickened her
voice. Solitude, pouncing upon her from the empty lounge, brought
to-night no promise of to-morrow.

'That's the right sound for to-night, Miriam. It's that wise whisky.
You'll be snoring in a trice.'

And to-night the bright fire warming the fresh air of her room was not a
mere afterthought of the one downstairs. Its sprouting flames claimed
attention like a host welcoming a guest arrived for the evening. And the
familiar room seemed strange, newly seen, refusing to be focused without
inspection. She moved from part to part, half expecting a hitherto
unnoticed door that would open upon an unknown scene. Foremost in her
mind was the shapely little blaze to which in a moment she turned back.
The many-clawed flames dancing upon the black upper surfaces of the
lumps whose undersides were mingled in the fiery central mass, jigging,
shuddering, as if trying to wrench themselves free and escape up the
chimney, were like _holly leaves_.

Within the small pang of delight in the recognition of the nature of a
superficial resemblance she had noted a thousand times without finding a
name for it, was disquietude. In some subtle way, whose fruits were
uncertain, she was different from the one who in the past had ignored
the flames escaping upwards to concentrate upon the glowing interior:
its caverns and its molten distances.

But since the early days there had not been many open fires burning
freely, offering themselves in quietude, for contemplation. In Hanover,
the porcelain stoves. At Banbury Park, slow fires carefully banked. At
Newlands, and in the houses of friends, large fires that were an
inseparable part of the ceaseless magic behind the coming and going of
events and moods. At Wimpole Street, no coal fires save the one in Mr
Hancock's room whose genial glow seemed to emanate from and call
attention to his kindly presence....

The thought of fires at home recalled little but the remembered comfort
of winter warmth.

Alone in the doorway of a downstairs room, with the dark hall and the
endless staircase behind her, she stood looking into heaven. On the
hearth, within the glow of a wide flameless fire whose radiance came out
into the twilight unhampered by the high guard standing like a fence all
round the nursery fire and keeping it far away, stood a copper kettle,
quiet and bright and beautiful, telling, more plainly than a voice could
speak, of the world surrounding the uncertainties of nursery life, kind
and careful and peaceful and full of love and forgiveness, now, when no
one was there, and making her know that this was what it really was when
every one was there.

Farther on, again from the doorway of an empty room, but from the known
midst of the heaven of downstairs life, from the midst of joyous
confident possession of the beloved house and garden, one other fire:
wide and clear behind polished brass bars, radiant rose and gold against
the pure cream and turquoise of the tiles, whereon, just inside the
marble rim of the hearth, in the combined rapturous light thrown back by
the high walls with their pale delicately blended ivory and blue, of
fire and the chandelier's bright blaze softened by globes of patterned
amber and rose and primrose, and the festal beams of the candles shining
down from the high, mirrored girandoles, the square-shouldered bottle of
chartreuse stood warming its green mystery.

Only these two; glowing eternally.

From the undesired effort of recalling more than these spontaneous
offerings of memory, that promised if she lingered with them to recall
in perfect fullness the years lying beyond the barrier raised by the
horror that had wrenched her life in twain, her mind slipped back to the
holly leaves, remarking that unawares, in the recent past, she had
rounded an unseen corner, grown observant and therefore detached. Even
here, in this house. To-night, for the first time, her separate
existence was consciously prevailing against its glamour, reaching
forward away from it to something that would set it in the past.

The gift of the third reprieve that for this evening at least had
restored to her the self that since his near approach had almost slept
in his presence. A self unhappy, yet full of a strange inexhaustible joy
that at this moment was celebrating the foiling of her enterprise.

Yet who could know, who could say? These foilings might be challenges to
determination, perversity of fate to be overcome. _No._

_Who could know, who could say?_

To regard them as the work of 'chance' would be to ignore their strange
punctuality, seeming like blessed evidence of purpose at work. But to
follow these hints at all costs, would be to become definitely
religious. And to what system of religion could she definitely belong?
Everywhere was darkness and challenge. Right and wrong, pointing now
this way and now that, offered no help.

The brush, rhythmically moving through the length of her hair from the
warm roots to where the ends spread outwards away from it and crackled
in the air, worked on in the void that already had driven the evening
far away. Glancing for reassurance into the mirror lit softly from above
by a frosted bulb, she met eyes that were not those she knew when,
coming suddenly upon them in solitude, she caught, just before
recognition and the direct gaze, a distant, serene preoccupation like
that of a stranger passing in the street. These eyes were caught still
glowing with the radiance of social happiness that in a moment vanished
to give place to the troubled gaze of one considering a single thought
now beating up from the fullness of these recent years that had seemed
to bury all that went before: what would life amount to if these links
were severed?

Amabel. But Amabel will move on. And remain with me for ever, a test,
presiding over my life with others. She stands permanently in my view of
life, embodying the changes she has made, the doors she has opened, the
vitality she has added to my imagination of every kind of person on
earth. And stands, too, insisting on marking the boundary, where she
falls short and is in awe of me: of my 'wisdom' and, strangely, the
strangest of all her ascriptions, of my 'gift of speech.'

She adores people. Turns them inside out, changes them and moves on, to
other people. Basil's friend, already, having seen some of her letters
to Basil, is at her feet. An old, distinguished man, running all his
life in a single, distinguished groove. And now, at the end of it,
confiding, confessing, facing judgment on his lifelong unconscious
mental and moral blindness, judgment that emanated from her of itself.

Above her affectations and poses. Above her lies which she admits, and
yet claims truthfulness. And is truthful.

Truthful English people are untruthful because they don't know
themselves, self-conscious because they don't know themselves. And don't
love as Amabel loves. Yet there is something they know and share all the
time even in their most formal relationships. A deep, common
understanding existing at the heart of English hypocrisy that makes it a
relief to turn from her to people who fall so far below her native
standards. A deep quality that comforts.

It had been present at home, a tolerant, liberal atmosphere in a
conservative home, unrecognized until it was left behind. In the English
girls in Hanover, in the Pernes, unconsciously prevailing over the horde
of raw girls from 'Olloway, 'Ighbury, 'Ackney, 'Arringay and 'Ornsey,
English too, but seeming of a different race from those who lived on the
southern side, with its soft-sounding names ... Sydenham ... Wimbledon
... Richmond ...

In the Corries. In the Orlys and Mr Hancock and the majority of their
patients. In all kinds of Oberlanders ... of all classes?

And all the others, the German girls and the north-country Brooms, Irish
Julia Doyle, the Tansley Street people and Michael and radical Mag and
cynical Jan, had been adventures outside the world where that deep
quality persisted.

But the old-world people, newly-dear since Oberland, can be lived with
only at the cost of pretending to think as they do. Not to think, but to
live entirely in reference to tradition and code. Sooner or later, they
discover that you belong mentally elsewhere as well as to them, and you
become an object of suspicion.

And the anarchists and Lycurgans bring sooner or later the feeling of
living in a void.

Yet if the links with them were cut, there was no life ahead.

Only the lonely joy that comes and goes.

The air was growing still. The fire had died down. Marking an end.
Taking the evening away while still it stood on the horizon.

The little bed was chill, and when the light went out the darkness
glowed a feverish red.

All my life, since the beginning, I've left things standing on the
horizon.

The two big Eckersleys, Selwyn and Mark, great big men out in life--yet
they must have been in their early twenties, not much older than Sarah
and Eve--big and kind, going gently about and talking in deep voices,
gently, surrounded by the darkness of their unknown lives, playing
card-games with Sarah and Eve in the drawing-room on Boxing Day. Trying
to think of things to say to the children, Miriam and Harriett. When
Selwyn asked me if I'd taken part in the church decorations, it was
because I felt while I stared at him that his idea of church had nothing
to do with my experiences of All Saints', that nobody who had not been
to All Saints' and heard Harry Dancey play the organ, knew anything
about church; that I saw, for ever, Harriett and me, the year before,
pushing the wheelbarrow to the church-room full of sooty,
bitter-smelling evergreens, and said 'I'm going to,' and realized, as
soon as I'd spoken, that Christmas was over, and glared at him and saw
him blush and wonder if the child was an idiot, and went on speaking to
him, in my mind, to get past the awful shame, telling him he shouldn't
suddenly speak because he thought he ought to say something to his
host's smaller daughters, and that the time he thought it might please
me to be asked about was _still there_. But it wasn't and, when I
realized that, I felt hopelessly guilty and sad. And yet comforted by
_knowing_ that I rejoiced in things, even when I took no part, more
deeply than the others. So much, that though I missed them when they
came I still rejoiced and imagined I hadn't missed them.

Mother would give me the invitations to children's parties to answer and
tell me to answer them and I would read 'requests the pleasure of the
company of' beautifully printed on a glazed card, and 'Dancing 8-12'
again and again and go off into dreams, and only remember to answer when
the day before the party suddenly arrived; and all the while the party
itself stood in my mind, left there, in exactly the same place on the
horizon as when I had first contemplated it. I put things on the horizon
and leave them there.

'Quite so, Miriam,' he would say, and ultimately turn away. But he
doesn't yet know, to the full, all the discrepancies. I do. I am the
guilty party, because I know them and keep them from him. Let him think
I fully believe in his and Alma's new social order. Does Alma fully
believe it? Did she license us against her personal beliefs? On
principle?

Warmth crept into her limbs. Through the darkness that now was cool and
black she watched again the strangeness of this afternoon's sea-shallows
encroaching upon lying snow. The sight of it had stemmed his discourse
and, in that moment of side-by-side pause and observation, there had
seemed to be a future of side-by-side. It was only in being physically
or mentally confronted that the barriers rose. Agreement of mind or body
would be treachery and disaster. Not to any person, but to something of
which he was unaware. To join forces with him and appear fully to accept
his point of view for the sake of the experience and the enhancement of
personal life it would bring, would be treachery ... to him and to life?

I'm a free-lover. Of course I'm a free-lover. But not his. On the
horizon.

Yet in that moment by the sea, after his voice had sounded his
affectionate delight and approval of the unusual spectacle, there had
been a feeling of innocence that could face the spheres. For a long
moment they had stood, watching the way each fan-shaped shallow spread
slowly forward and ate with its bubbled edge a little farther into the
snow than the last.

There had been something else. The sudden thought, during that moment
when he had forgotten both himself and her, of Alma, of the innumerable
sharings they must have had of things come upon suddenly, in walks, in
travelling together. Of Alma's capacity for pulling up, silently, and
going forth in adoration and presently, very gently, paying just the
right tribute.

Perhaps long-married people, in the midst of their course, cannot see
things together.... Was that what he meant when he said Alma's no good
for a walk?

Married people cannot walk together. Or only very few. The man always
seems to be straining away. Sideways-alittle-ahead. So that he can see
his surroundings and escape into them from the ceaseless reminder of his
mirror?

She called up married faces seen when a party of walkers were arrested
and silenced for a moment by a beautiful spectacle. The sounding of the
voice of either of the pair would bring to the face of the other, who
for a moment had escaped into the joy given by beauty, the expression of
one suddenly jerked back into himself.

But he and Alma are not deeply domesticated. They deliberately set
themselves to live independently as well as together.

In a moment he was talking again, pleased and enlivened. Listening to
the happiness in his voice, catching at his jests, ignoring what they
held of misrepresentation and unfairness, I experienced him as so often
I have seen him experienced by passing guests too much under the spell
to be aware, until afterwards, of their own repudiations, or dissembling
them in order to go on being amused, and I wondered, alone for a second
with my sea and my sky limitless, as they were before I had heard them
scientifically defined, whether, if the future should bring times of
unbroken association, I could sustain, as all those about him now
invariably appear to do, the only role that would ensure the
persistence, in his voice, of self-confident happiness.

                   *       *       *       *       *

... _Rievaulx._ The roadway gone. Green turf and trees and space and the
party scattering. Drawn forward and separated, gladly escaping from each
other yet more together than when they had been walking along the road.
Rounding the bend above the valley, expectant. Rievaulx suddenly there
below us, on the floor of the green valley. Heart-melting love and
gratitude, even before I had walked on alone along the level made in the
rising ground round about it, like a promenade, at just the right
distance for seeing this left message, and seeing at different angles
the oblong of crumbling stone, arch beside arch, in each of its
different perfections, towards those who long ago had expressed in this
perfection their own perfect certainties and their enduring joy, and to
those, in whom deep down these certainties and this joy were still
persisting, who had brought me to see it and, though they lingered at
the far end, instead of rambling worshipfully round, and saw it only in
one perspective, as if the first shock of its silent beauty were enough,
had for ever seen it and would testify, if only in the tones of their
voices when they spoke its name, to what they had seen.

After the too-long walk, grey sky, heavy August trees, deepening
indifference to an abbey that must be visited and would be exhibited by
Edmund, offered with an air of proprietorship. Extremity of endurance.
At last the turning away from the dusty road, the end in sight, late
afternoon stealing upon us, bringing back the sense of an abiding
presence in people and in things, bringing the promised wealth of
to-morrow to support to-day's returning wealth, and setting, with the
coming of the grass and the end of the sound of trudging footsteps,
every one deep in holiday. Voices, linking the party come to life in the
remote stillness that made each familiar figure again miraculous;
attractive, going softly forward over the grass.

Rievaulx brought forgetfulness and a harvest of happiness. So that the
party who had seen, and then wandered away to seek a farmhouse tea, was
not the party setting out from the inn to see Rievaulx.

... Sound of the edge of a dream crashing in the night-dark curtained
room.

At whose farther end a pale glimmer came in from the little top window
with its curtain drawn back. Blotted out, as she watched it, by a
darkness, a figure close at hand.

'I'm not here,' she said, searching the dreamy void for something beyond
mere indignation over this adroit arrival.

'It's a wicked night. I perish with cold. You've a window wide open.'

The dark obstruction became a moving shape. With a soft flop the
flourished toga reached the floor.

Alienated by exasperation with the deliberate trickery, drawn by
solicitude for his exposure to the cruelty of the night, she held out
draperies.

It was uncanny, but more absorbing than the unwelcome adventure of her
body, to be thus hovering outside and above it in a darkness that
obliterated the room and was too vast to be contained by it. An immense,
fathomless black darkness through which, after an instant's sudden
descent into her clenched and rigid form, she was now travelling alone
on and on, without thought or memory or any emotion save the strangeness
of this journeying.

Whose end came in a light that seemed the pale light of dawn. She was up
at the high, glimmering window, saw clearly its painted woodwork and the
small blemishes upon the pane against which she was pressed; through
which, had it been open, she felt she could have escaped into the light
that had called her thither.

His relaxed form was nothing to her. A mass of obstructive clay from
which the spirit had departed on its way to its own bourne. Its journey,
foolishly undertaken through her fault in hiding, failing to communicate
their essential unrelatedness, had been through a familiar pleasure into
restful nothingness that presumably would bear the fruit he sought
therefrom.

The robed figure stood over her like a short doctor: flattering,
warning, trying to edit her mind. His words brought into the room the
feeling of broad daylight and if now she could leap back into life, get
a dressing-gown, revive the fire and play his game by launching into a
discussion of possible features for _The Cosmic Rushlight_, he would be
launched at once in his lately chosen role of emotional detachment and
free of the uncertainty that was dictating his series of tests.

For a moment, unable to determine whether her impulse was heroic
saintliness or base betrayal and self-interest, she hung over the
possibility. But anything that conversation might produce would be less
interesting than that strange journeying whose memory clamoured to have
him gone.

He was going, gathering up his toga with the movement of departure.
Impossible that he would go, taking away with him, without even being
aware of its presence, the soft light surrounding them by which she
could see the outlines of his movements.

'I'm not here,' she said abruptly as he bent towards her, and the sound
of her voice went past him out into the dark spaces and left her more
separated from him than in the unshared journeying.

'You'll come back,' he said, standing upright. 'Don't, Miretta'--the
word-seeking tone of every day, with its note of protesting
exposition--'_don't_ attach importance to these inevitable
preliminaries.'

She listened for the closing of the door. It made no sound. Yet his
silent coming had wakened her like the crash of thunder.

And the return of solitude and dense night darkness within which the
glimmer from the far-off high window was no longer visible, banished her
preoccupation with the interior reality of her adventure and left her at
the mercy of the judgment on her behaviour since like thunder his coming
had awakened her, now being flung at her by consciousness. Scornful,
reasonable, unanswerable.

Fully consenting to the judgment, and the acid commentaries, turning
back to the betrayed and banished past and forward to a horizon swept
blank and featureless, she awaited the welling of appropriate emotion.
But the power she felt the presented facts ought to wield, and might
possibly yet attain, failed to emerge from them. Within her was
something that stood apart, unpossessed. From far away below the
colloquy, from where still it sheltered in the void to which it had
withdrawn and whence it had set forth alone upon its strange journeying,
her spirit was making its own statement, profanely asserting the
unattained being that was promising, however, faintly, to be presently
the surer for this survival. Joining forces with it, using her will to
banish the lingering images, she felt herself sink towards sleep.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Drawing back the curtain from the open lattice, she found in the outside
scene no escape from the lifelessness of the room. The garden, sunlit
beyond the shadow of the house, the blue sea behind the daffodils
screening the edge of the downward slope; expressionless.

The world was changed. And perhaps this repellent bleakness was the
truth lying beneath the bright surface she had mistaken for reality.

Seeking refuge in imagined, distant scenes, she found their faces wan,
and glanced with dismay along the endless years to be lived out in a
dead world. But even dismay failed her, remained cold and lifeless, like
the features of the room.

At the edge of her circle of vision as she stood before the mirror with
arms raised to her head and eyes intent upon the shaping of her hair,
birds appeared, three moving specks far off in the farther corner of the
scene framed by the open window. Without shifting her gaze she saw them
as they came forward downwards towards the centre of the sky. In the
form of an elongated triangle they flashed by near at hand and
disappeared beyond the window's nearer rim. And the sight of them as
they passed had smitten through her as though she were transparent and
left her thrilled from head to foot with the sense of having shared
their swift and silent flight.

And as surprising and as new as this vivid experience was the way she
had taken it: noting it in passing and, while exultantly her
consciousness declared that last night's lonely journey through
uninhabited darkness had carried her into a way of being that would find
its own responses in this dead-seeming world, going on doing her hair.

                   *       *       *       *       *

As breakfast proceeded, it seemed certain his preoccupation was not
assumed. In his eyes, directly facing the morning light pouring in
through the wide windows, was meditation, fusing the grey and the blue
and giving them the characteristic blind gaze, caught by Ritch in the
portrait, showing only a single luminously gleaming point focused upon
the invisible distance wherein his thoughts were at work.

In a way that kept him all the more sharply aware of his immediate
surroundings: of Alma intent on preserving the occasion from complete
silence by intermittent gay monologue to which he responded, without
drawing in his distant gaze more often than was made necessary by
attention to his breakfast, with brief appreciative flippancy, just
enough to keep things going short of launching into table-talk; and of
herself who could not be counted upon to follow even the most
unmistakable clue, and had the socially inconvenient habit of going off
on long journeys and leaving her thoughts in her face.

She stood at the window regarding the expressionless sea, listening to
the after-breakfast sounds: the whoof of the swing-door off the lounge,
the banging of distant doors as the maids swiftly accomplished their
upstairs work in the brief interval allowed for disturbances.

Alma came in and, as they talked, she heard his voice go cheerfully
humming through the lounge, and the closing of the study door.

It was now or never for the cheery greeting he did not deserve.
Departing to his morning without even the usual inquiry as to how hers
was to be spent, he deserved, on emerging later, to find her meanwhile
returned to town. But this morning's strange, rich harvest belonged in a
sense to him, and demanded some kind of expressiveness. A handshake, a
small solo dance in the window-space before the morning's separation.

Alma was going, obstructive, down the room ... through the lounge ...
into the study....

With her eyes on the inaccessible interior whence he might yet come
forth before settling down for the morning, or which yet, if Alma did
not stay too long, might be the scene of the dance now urgent in all her
limbs and whose moment was already passing, she ran up the short flight
of stairs and halted to look out through its landing window upon the
neglected backward view: houses, grey seaside villas climbing the hill,
a small, ancient omnibus ascending so slowly that it scarcely seemed to
move; but moving, alive.

In a moment she heard rising towards her, its repellent message a little
muted by the closed door, the sound heard rapturously on so many summer
mornings: music ... a Beethoven allegro being wound off clear and
note-perfect. The prelude to work.

Coming downstairs, she saw Alma emerge from the study and make for the
servants' quarters, radiant with the certainty of a good day launched.

Aware of the futility of her action, she pulled up at a bookshelf and
stood surveying the tightly packed volumes. More than ever remote and
unreal were the suggestions emanating from the titles of the unread
books, and for the hundredth time she wondered what it was that made so
many people appear to cherish them more than anything on earth and to be
unaware as they sat outside life, reading them, of the revealing aura
about their persons.

Choosing a volume whose fine binding and clear letterpress set well
within the wide margins of its almost square pages gave it a comforting
companionable air, she carried it off and sat down with it in a
window-seat and at once became aware of herself sitting there, prominent
in a room she had no desire to occupy; putting in time. She could
scarcely believe it was herself who this morning, ages ago, had been up
with the birds in their sky.

The memory brought her to her feet. The decorative book, abandoned in
the corner, because there was no time to restore it to its place, would
be a lying testimony to an interest that had never existed.

But out in the lounge she was again held up by the barriers standing
right and left within this haunted house.

On her way upstairs she breathed wider air, felt in advance the
influence coming from her room of things stored there that knew her in
another life. With the touch of the doorknob upon her hand came a vision
of garments whose fabric and tone and make would utterly transform her
and that somehow before the spring had fully come and gone she would
acquire. One gown, at least, would be possible, the room announced now
that she was within it: a _Viola_ gown, with a yet more strange and
subtle combination of colours in its embroideries than the Persian blue
and green and mauve....

_Viola_, Miss Green and Miss Jones, would let her have it, only too
gladly, for gradual payments.... _Afraid to wake in the night because at
once their hearts were beating with anxiety._

All over England there must be people living like that. Working
anxiously all day and afraid to wake at night. To be happy in the
clothes they made, and not to share their perpetual anxiety, is
unfair....

At lunch, Alma was still radiant. Her thrilled and smiling voice, the
glow that made her carefully chosen clothes seem to have assembled upon
her by happy chance, her talk, leaping deftly from point to point--all
these were sure testimonies to the goodness of his day.

He sat at case, a neatly plump Silenus with intelligent brow, played
upon by Alma's happy radiance. Basking, jesting to laugh and produce
laughter. And, all the time, blissfully preoccupied with the sense of
work well and easily done, with work ahead?

                   *       *       *       *       *

The sound of the opening door.

Through the window, she watched the old, lost enchantment flow back into
sea and sky and garden.

'Dearest'--it was Alma, advancing swiftly down the room--'the
dressmaker's arrived with her bag of tools. You'll be happy, playing
alone, until tea-time?'

Alma knew where he was, what he was doing, was quite innocently playing
the part of kind hostess providing alternatives for the central
entertainment.

'I'm going out,' she said, thankful, as the beating of her heart shook
her voice, for Alma's experience of her varying moods, and adding--for
after all it might be she who was about to play truant and he might
presently be searching the house for her, cheerfully expecting the usual
walk--'if Hypo won't think me unsociable.'

Alma halted, as if at a loss, as if puzzled. After _years_ of visits and
afternoon walks ...

'_Oh_,' she said, almost fiercely, in a tone lower and deeper than that
of her daily voice and coming from the depths of a self persisting from
early days but taught by life to keep out of sight, '_he_ won't notice.'
And turned away. A gust of bitterness, sadness ... and she was gone, as
if herself fleeing before it, without another word.

He was not at work. Ostentatiously, he was making this gesture of
withdrawal. Had not even given Alma a cue for one of her tactful
misrepresentations.

Methodically, deliberately, he was leaving her to herself. To
demonstrate a principle: elimination of the personal. She might consider
herself either the victim or the honoured partner in this demonstration
for whose sake he was leaving her equally cut off from the resources of
her far-away London life and from the life down here that he well knew
was centred, throughout its brevity, upon himself.

Her anger ranged out over the world which was too small to contain it,
out into space, vainly seeking relief.

To let it wear itself out unexpressed would be humiliation, in her
person, not of herself alone, but also of something quite impersonal,
sternly and indignantly demanding vengeance.

But the desire for vengeance was not in full possession, or she would
now be facing him.... He would go on playing his part: would rise, with
a cheerful impersonal greeting, describe his employment, inquire her
plans. She would confront his pose until it passed from simulated
concentration to simulated protest against her failure to recognize the
compliment he was paying. And would presently embark on his theme: the
right, intelligent way of managing life's incompatibilities. He would
become affectionate, with reservations. Repulsed, he would really wish
her away, would yearn for Alma and his screened inaccessibility. And
would not be capable of knowing that it was something far beyond
sympathetic affection that she was desiring. Something as detached and
impersonal as even he could wish: a sharing. But a sharing of
intimations he refused to recognize.

He was an alien. To Alma, to any woman ever born he was an alien.

That was why last night she had voyaged away alone through the living
darkness, and why at this moment her desire to face him with judgment
that knew itself to come from life's infallible centre, was imperfectly
possessing her, half-heartedly struggling with her sense of being
already far away out there in the landscape.

Yet when she shut behind her the garden door and greeted in spite of
herself the air coming from over the sea, her wrath turned upon the
craven feet retreating from its object.

Out of sight, wandering down the terraces, she felt anger loosen its
hold. It was not anger that was noting the pitiful heads of the ranged
spring flowers, swaying in the wind.

In dismay she gazed at their brief moment, their nothingness.... The
old, immeasurable depth of the seasons had departed from her being. She
could see now, in one glance, the whole year, years, circling. And the
house, invisible away behind her, meeting her imagination as it recoiled
from the revelation of the flowers, had lost its solidity, become a
frail and porous structure crumbling upon the plot of earth it mapped
into rooms to shelter a few briefly living people.

Half-way through the jungle leading to the fence and its gate, with the
sea vanished but audibly approaching, she found her thoughts turning
backward with a relieving gentleness.... He is a sensual doctrinaire.
Torn between his senses and his ideas. _Really_ trying to make his
liveliest senses serve his doctrines. People are nothing to him but the
foolish hope of an impossible unanimity at the service of his plan.
Therefore he demands stoical disregard of the personal. All his women
play up to this.... Pretend to accept his idea of them as subsidiary.
Prevent his recognition of them as a different order of consciousness.
He is as fatal to the feminine consciousness as it would be, if it were
articulate, to his plan. To the element in his plan which regards what
is as worthless, in comparison with the future as he imagines it, not
seeing that in its turn it will come under the same ban for those who
care for nothing but 'progress.'

Here was the roadway. For the first time she was walking along it alone,
disguised as a Bonnycliffer out for a constitutional, unsupported,
unable at a moment's notice, to take root in this world that she knew by
everlasting experience was supplying, even in a single afternoon,
accommodation for roots.

The bay opened with sound: the invisible edge of the sea beating upon
the beach, trying in its remembered way to bring summer to her mind;
bringing only the sense of the to and fro of its tides from coast to
coast.

Into the sea's sound came another, rapidly approaching: the jingle of
the coast-tram. Tinkling local sound, a reminder, coming faintly from
the distance through the windows of the house on the cliff, of
villa-life going on down below. But this afternoon, heard in solitude at
close quarters, it hailed her from Hanover, from north London, from
within the self that was unknown to those in the house on the cliff, and
to whom it offered the blessed refuge of its universal hospitality.

Through the sliding door she escaped into the welcome of reflected
light, into an inner world that changed the aspect of everything about
her. When the tram moved off, the scenes framed by the windows grew
beautiful in movement. The framing and the movement created them, gave
them a life that was not the life of wild nature only. They lost their
new pathos. Watching them, she was out in eternity, gliding along,
adding this hour to the strange sum of her central being that now, with
the remainder of the afternoon accounted for by the coast-ride and the
return, looked with indifference upon the evening coming almost too soon
and, although rich with a deep intensity of golden light, seeming
secondary. A superfluity she could forgo without loss.

                   *       *       *       *       *

It seemed as if daylight rather than night were standing outside the
drawn curtains. Yet everything was as usual. The room, the two figures,
the golden light. But between them and herself was this strange
numbness, complete, impossible to break, wrapping her like a cloak,
pressing upon and isolating her in bleak daylight.

Time passed by, bringing no change in her condition, no lessening and no
increase of this extraordinary numbness. Every sound and word and
movement, even her own words and movements were coming to her as if
from a distance and failing to reach her isolation. The warm richness of
evening was an illusion, slain. This was normality. She must learn to
endure it. To endure endless evenings stripped of evening glamour.

For the first time she was seeing herself as she had seen countless
women in the past, wondering over their aridity of mind and spirit. Now
she understood them, was sharing the cold clarity of their vision.
Sharing their desire for an occupation for empty hands, for something to
justify the space they occupied in the room and supply a screen for
their thoughts and an escape from the pressure of life swept clear of
the illusion of friends and festivities; of life whose end shows clearly
beyond an unvarying succession of evenings spent in knitting away the
hours that led to sleep and the next day.

'Would Miriam like, should we all like, a toon, to finish the evening?'

Looking up to follow his spectral movement across to the shelves where
the records were stacked up that belonged to the old life, she saw,
between his retreating form and herself, Alma beaming a sleepy-eyed
benediction upon a good day. For a moment she felt as if some word of
theirs might break the power that held her. But they were too far off;
alien.

He had switched on the light and stood clear within it, signalling to
her with his look of delighted guilt. Playing his foolish game.

'Something quite short, I think.'

He came back down the room, casket in hand.

'Have a parting cigarette, Miretta.'

The room was shut out by the darkness of his figure bent towards her,
warm and near. She took the proffered cigarette and as the light flared
between them and lit his flushed and guilty face, to which her eyes had
turned only for curious investigation, she saw again the strange
darkness of last night's voyaging. He moved away and with an icy shudder
her numbness passed from her, leaving her alive, ready to plunge into
the beginning of an endless golden evening; too late. Again she was
paying the price of his methodical calculations.

                   *       *       *       *       *

All the places she had known came unsummoned before her mind's eye with
an intimate new warmth of welcome, each equally near and accessible and
equally remote; so far away that several could be focused at once,
pictured for a moment in their places before they moved and mingled in a
confusion of impressions all joyously claiming the same quality: a
freshly plumbed interest that promised to have increased when again she
should drop back into them in an interval such as was being provided by
the journey. That brought her to London without any sense of transition
from one place to another.

Pulling up face to face with her hansom was one that had come from the
opposite direction. Its occupant leapt forth as she leapt forth and they
stood within a yard or two of each other paying their respective fares
and together ascended the wide steps of number fifty-two. Last week she
would have been tiresomely interested in him, disapproving or approving.
Standing, if he were acceptable, in a momentary wordless communion with
him, posing if he were preposterous in either of the many ways men had
of being preposterous, in direct opposition to his shallow ideas. To-day
he was revelation. Without even wishing to observe, she felt him there
pursuing the shape of his life that held no unshared mystery, wishing
her well as she wished him well. Disadvantage had fallen from her and
burden, leaving a calm delightful sense of power. Lightly she stepped
across the threshold and found the familiar scene unreproachful; shrunk
in all its proportions. Immediate things had lost their hold. Going
through the hall, she was obliged forcibly to call her mind to them, to
draw it back from where it had roved while she has stood upon the steps
comfortably ignoring the revealing young man, away down the street, down
through her London, her beloved territory, without let or hindrance. And
instead of creeping to her accustomed place half wondering whether it
were her duty to explain and risk disgrace, she was full of inward song
and wishing for congratulations.




                          Transcriber's Notes


This text is taken from: Dorothy M. Richardson, Pilgrimage IV: Dawn's
Left Hand. Virago Press, London, 2002, p. 129-267.

The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical
errors were silently corrected. Further careful corrections, some after
consulting other editions, are listed here (before/after):

   [p. 176]:
   ... spring scent but by summer in full bloom. ...
   ... spring scene but by summer in full bloom. ...

   [p. 254]:
   ... us against his personal beliefs? On principle? ...
   ... us against her personal beliefs? On principle? ...


[The end of _Dawn's Left Hand: Pilgrimage, Volume 10_ by Dorothy M. Richardson]