Chapter III (1)

Three months ago the Christmas had been a goal for which she could hardly wait. It had offered her, this time, more than its usual safe deep firelit seclusion beyond which no future was visible. It was to pay her in full for having missed the beginning of Eve’s venture, taking her down into the midst of it when everything was in order and the beginnings still near enough to be remembered. But having remained during the engrossing months, forgotten, at the same far-distant point, Christmas now suddenly reared itself up a few days off, offering nothing but the shadow of an unavoidable interruption. For the first time she could see life going on beyond it. She would go down into its irrelevance, taking part in everything with absent-minded animation, looking towards her return to town. It would not be Christmas, and the long days of forced absence threatened the features of the year that rose, far away and uncertain, beyond the obstruction.

But the afternoon she came home with four days holiday in her hand, past and future were swept from her path. To-morrow’s journey was a far-off appointment, her London friends remote shadows, banished from the endless continuance of life. She wandered about between Wimpole Street and St. Pancras, holding in imagination wordless converse with a stranger whose whole experience had melted and vanished like her own, into the flow of light down the streets; into the unending joy of the way the angles of buildings cut themselves out against the sky, glorious if she paused to survey them; and almost unendurably wonderful, keeping her hurrying on pressing, through insufficient silent outcries, towards something, anything, even instant death, if only they could be expressed when they moved with her movement, a maze of shapes, flowing, tilting into each other, in endless patterns, sharp against the light; sharing her joy in the changing same same song of the London traffic; the bliss of post-offices and railway stations, cabs going on and on towards unknown space; omnibuses rumbling securely from point to point, always within the magic circle of London.

Her meal was a crowded dinner-party, all the people in the restaurant its guests, plunging with her, released from experience, unhaunted by hope or regret, into the endless beginning. Into the wrapped contemplation of the gathering, the thought of her visit flashed like a star, dropping towards her, and when she was gathering things together for her packing, her eagerness flamed up and lit her room.

....... The many Christmasses with the Brooms had been part of her long run of escape from the pain-shadowed family life; their house at first a dream-house in the unbroken dream of her own life in London, a shelter where agony was unknown, and lately a forgetfulness, for the long days of the holiday, of the challenge that lived in the walls of her room. For so long the walls had ceased to be the thrilled companions of her freedom, they had seen her endless evening hours of waiting for the next day to entangle her in its odious revolution. They had watched her in bleak daylight listening to life going on obliviously all round her, and scornfully sped her desperate excursions into other lives, greeting her empty glad return with the reminder that relief would fade, leaving her alone again with their unanswered challenge. They knew the recurring picture of a form, drifting, grey face upwards, under a featureless grey sky, in shallows, “unreached by the human tide” and had seen its realisation in her vain prayer that life should not pass her by; mocking the echoes of her cry, and waiting indifferent, serene with the years they knew before she came, for those that would follow her meaningless impermanence. When she lost the sense of herself in moments of gladness, or in the long intervals of thought that encircled her intermittent reading, they were all round her, waiting, ready to remind her, undeceived by her daily busy passing in and out, relentlessly counting its secret accumulating shame.

During the last three months they had not troubled her. They had become transparent, while the influence of her summer still had them at bay, to the glow shed up from the hours she had spent downstairs with Mrs. Bailey, and before there was time for them to close round her once more, the figure of Michael Shatov, with Europe stretching wide behind him, had forced them into companionship with all the walls in the world. She had been conscious that they waited for his departure; but it was far away out of sight, and when she should be once more alone with them, their attack would find her surrounded; lives lived alone within the vanquished walls of single poor bare rooms in every town in Europe would come visibly to her aid, driving her own walls back into dependence.

But to-night they were radiant. On no walls in the world could there be a brighter light. Streaming from their gaslit spaces, wherever she turned, was the wide brilliance that had been on everything in the days standing behind the shadow that had driven her into their enclosure. Eve and Harriett, waiting for her together, in a new sunlit life, were the full answer to their challenge. She was going _home_. The walls were traveller’s walls. That had been their first fascination; but they had known her only as a traveller; now as she dipped into the unbroken life that would flow round her with the sound of her sisters’ blended voices, they knew whence she came and what had been left behind. They saw her years of travel contract to a few easily afforded moments, lit though she had not known it, by light instreaming from the past and flowing now visibly ahead across the farther years.

The distant forgotten forms of the friends of her London life, turning away slighted, filled her, watching them, with a half-repenting solicitude. But they had their mysterious secret life, incomprehensible, but their own; they turned away towards each other and their own affairs, all of them set, at varying angles, unquestioningly towards a prospect she did not wish to share.

She went eagerly to sleep and woke in a few moments in a morning whose sounds coming through the open window, called to her as she leapt out towards them, for responsive demonstrations. Her desire to shout, thrilled to her feet, winged them.

Sitting decorously at the breakfast-table, she felt in equal relationship to all the bright assembly, holding off Mr. Shatov’s efforts to engage her in direct conversation, that she might hear, thoughtless and uncomprehending, the general sound of interwoven bright inflections echoing quietly out into the vast morning. She ran out into it, sending off her needless telegram for the joy of skimming over the well-known flags with endless time to spare. The echoing London sky poured down upon them the light of all the world. Within it her share gleamed dancing, given to her by the London years, the London life, shining now, far away, in multitudinous detail, the contemplated enviable life of a stranger.

The third-class carriage was stuffy and cold, crowded with excited travellers whose separate eyes strove in vain to reach the heart of the occasion through a ceaseless exclamatory interchange about what lay just behind them and ahead at the end of the journey..... At some time, for some moments during the ensuing days, each one of them would be alone..... Consulting the many pairs of eyes, so different yet so strangely alike in their method of contemplation, so hindered and distracted, she felt, with a stifling pang of conviction, that their days would pass and bring no solitude, no single touch of realisation, and leave them going on, with eyes still quenched and glazed, striving outwards, now here now there, to reach some unapprehended goal.

Immersing herself in her corner she saw nothing more until Eve’s face appeared in the crowd waiting upon the seaside platform. Eve beamed welcome and eager wordless communications and turned at once to lead the way through the throng. They hurried, separated by Miriam’s hand-luggage, silenced by the din of the traffic rattling over the cobblestones, meeting and parting amongst the thronging pedestrians, down the steep slope of the narrow street until Eve turned, with a piloting backward glance, and led the way along the cobbled pavement of a side-street, still narrower and sloping even more steeply downhill. It was deserted, and as they went single-file along the narrow pavement, Miriam caught in the distance, the unwonted sound of the winter sea. She had not thought of the sea as part of her visit, and lost herself in the faint familiar roll and flump of the south-coast tide. It was enough. The holiday came and passed in the imagined sight of the waves tumbling in over the grey beach, and the breaking of the brilliant seaside light upon the varying house-fronts behind the promenade; she returned restored; the prize of far-off London renewed already, keenly, within her hands, to find Eve standing still just ahead, turned towards her; smiling too breathlessly for speech. They were in front of a tiny shop-front, slanting with the steep slant of the little road. The window was full of things set close to the panes on narrow shelves. Miriam stood back, pouring out her appreciation. It _was_ perfect; just as she had imagined it; exactly the little shop she had dreamed of keeping when she was a child. She felt a pang of envy.

“_Mine_” said Eve blissfully “my own.” Eve had property; fragile delicate _Eve_, the problem of the family. This was her triumph. Miriam hurried, lest her thoughts should become visible, to glance up and down the street and exclaim the perfection of the situation.

“I know” said Eve with dreamy tenderness, “and it’s all my own; the shop and the house; all mine.” Miriam’s eyes rose fearfully. Above the shop, a narrow strip of bright white plaster house shot up, two storeys high; charming, in the way it was complete, a house, and yet the whole of it, with a strip of sky above, and the small neat pavement below, in your eye at once, and beside it right and left, the irregular heights and widths of the small houses, close-built and flush with the edge of the little pavement, up and down the hill. But the thought of the number of rooms inside the little building brought, together with her longing to see them, a sense of the burden of possessions, and her envy disappeared. While she cried you’ve got a _house_, she wondered, scanning Eve’s radiant slender form, whence she drew with all her apparent helplessness, the strength to face such formidable things.

“I’ve let the two rooms over the shop. I live at the top.” As she exclaimed on the implied wealth, Miriam found her envy wandering back in the thought of the two rooms under the sky, well away from the shop in another world, the rest of the house securely cared for by other people. She moved to the window. “All the right things” she murmured, from her shocked survey of the rows of light green bottles filled with sweets, the boxes of soap, cigarettes, clay pipes, bootlaces, jewellery pinned to cards, crackers and tightly packed pink and white muslin Christmas stockings. Between the shelves she saw the crowded interior of the little shop, a strip of counter, a man with rolled up shirt sleeves, busily twisting a small screw of paper.... _Gerald_.

“Come inside” said Eve from the door.

“Hullo, Mirry, what d’you think of the emporium?” Gerald, his old easy manner, his smooth polished gentle voice, his neat, iron handshake across the mean little counter, gave Eve’s enterprise the approval of all the world. “I’ve done up enough screws of tea to last you the whole blessed evening” he went on from the midst of Miriam’s exclamations “and at least twenty people have been in since you left.” A little door flew open in the wall just behind him and Harriett, in an overall, stood at the top of a short flight of stairs, leaping up and down in the doorway. Miriam ran round behind the counter, freely, Eve’s shop, their shop, behind her. “Hulloh old silly” beamed Harriett kissing and shaking her “I just rushed down, can’t stay a minute, I’m in the middle of nine dinners, they’re all leaving to-morrow and you’re to come and sleep with _us_.” She fled down the steps, out through the shop and away up the hill, with a rousing attack on Gerald as she passed him leaning with Eve over the till. Miriam was welcomed. The fact of her visit was more to Harriett than her lodgers. She collected her belongings and carried them up the steps past a small dark flight of stairs into a dark little room. A small fire was burning in a tiny kitchen range; a candle guttered on the mantelpiece in the draught from the shop; there was no window and the air of the room was close with the combined odours of the things crowded into the small space. She went back into the bright familiar shop. Gerald was leaving; see you to-morrow he called from the door with his smile.

“_Now_; I’ll light the lamp and we’ll be cosy” said Eve leading the way back into the little room. Miriam waited impatiently for the lamp to make a live centre in the crowded gloom. The little black kitchen fire was intolerable as president of Eve’s leisure. But the dim lamp, standing low on a little table, made the room gloomier and Eve was back in the shop with a customer. Only the dingy little table, a battered tray bearing the remains of a hasty, shabby tea, the fall below it of a faded ugly fringed tablecloth and a patch of threadbare carpet, were clearly visible..... She could not remove her attention from them.

Lying sleepless by Eve’s side late that night, she watched the pictures that crowded the darkness. Her first moments in the little back room were far away. The small dark bedroom was full of the last picture of Eve, in her nightgown, quietly relentless after explaining that she always kept the window shut because plenty of air came in, taking a heavy string of large blue beads out of her top drawer, to put them in readiness with to-morrow’s dress. No; I don’t think that a bit; and if I _were_ a savage, I should hang myself all over with beads and _love_ it. She had spoken with such _conviction_...... Up here, with her things arranged round her as she had had them at home and in her bedroom at the Greens’, she kept her life as it had always been. She was still her unchanged self, but her freedom was giving her the strength to be sure of her opinions. It was as if she had been saying all the evening with long accumulating preparedness, holding her poise throughout the interruptions of customers and down into the details of the story of her adventures, _Yes_ I know your opinions, I have heard them all my life, and now I’m out in the world myself and can meet everybody as an equal, and say what I think, without wondering whether it suits my part as the Greens’ governess. She had got her strength from the things she had done. It was amazing to think of her summoning courage to break again with the Greens and borrowing from them to start in business, Mr. Green ‘setting his heart’ on the success of the little shop and meaning to come down and see how it was getting on. How awful it would be if it did not get on.... But it was getting on...... How terrifying it must have been at first not knowing the price of anything in the shop or what to buy for it ... and then, customers telling her the prices of things and where they were kept, and travellers being _kind_; respectful and friendly and ready to go out of their way to do _anything_ .... that was the other side of Maupassant’s “hourrah pour la petite difference” commis voyageurs .... and well-to-do people in the neighbourhood rushing in for some little thing, taken aback to find a lady behind the counter, and coming again for all sorts of things.... Eve would become like one of those middle-aged women shopkeepers in books, in the country, with a kind heart and a sarcastic tongue, seeing through everybody and having the same manner for the vicar and a ploughman, or a rather nicer manner for a ploughman. _No._ Eve was still sentimental....

Those wonderful letters were a bridge; a promise for the future.... They were the letters of a boy; _that_ was the struggling impression she had not been able to convey. She could start the day well by telling Eve that in the morning. They were the letters of a youth in love for the first time in his life ... and he had _fifteen_ grandchildren. “So wonderful when you think of that old, old man” had not expressed it at all. They were wonderful for _anybody_. Page after page, all breathing out the way things shine when the sense of someone who is not there, is there all the time. Eve knew what it had meant to him; “age makes no difference.” Then might life suddenly shine like that at any moment, right up to the end.... And it made Eve so wonderful; having no idea, all those years, and thinking him just a very kind old man to come, driving, almost from his death-bed, with a little rose-tree in the carriage for her. It was so perfect that he wrote only after she had gone, and he knew he was dying; a youth in love for the first time. If there were a future life he would be watching, for Eve to walk gently in crowned with song and making everything sing all round her.... But what of the wife, and of Eve’s future husband? In Heaven there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage .... but Kingsley said, then that has nothing to do with me and my wife. Perhaps that was an example of the things he suddenly thought of, walking quickly up and down the garden with a friend, and introduced by saying “I have _always_ thought” ..... But perhaps the things that occur to you suddenly for the first time in conversation _are_ the things you have always thought, without knowing it .... that was one of the good things in talking to Michael Shatov, finding out thoughts, looking at them when they were expressed and deciding to change them, or think them more decidedly than ever .. she could explain all that to Eve in the morning as an introduction to him. Or perhaps she could again say, having Eve’s attention free of the shop, “I have two pounds to spend on chocolate. Isn’t it extraordinary. I must, I am on my honour,” and then go on. It was _horrible_ that Eve had hardly noticed such a startling remark.... She turned impatiently; the morning would never come; she would never sleep in this stagnant shut-in motionless air. To-morrow night she would be in a room by herself at Harry’s; but not quite so near to the sea. How _could_ Eve shut out life and the sound of the sea? She puffed her annoyance, hardly caring if Eve were disturbed, ready to ask her if she could not smell the smell of the house and the shop and the little back room. But that was not true. She was imagining it because the motionless air was getting on her nerves. If she could not forget it she would have no sleep until she dozed with exhaustion in the morning. And to-morrow was Christmas Day. She lay still, straining her ears to catch the sound of the sea.

The next night the air poured in at an open window, silently lifting long light muslin curtains and waving them about the little narrow room filled as with moonlight by the soft blue light from the street-lamp below. The sound of the sea drowned the present in the sense of sea-side summers; bringing back moments of chance wakenings on sea-side holidays, when the high blaze of yesterday and to-morrow were together in the darkness. Miriam slept at once and woke refreshed and careless in the frosty sunrise. Her room was blazing with golden light. She lay motionless, contemplating it. There was no sound in the house. She could watch the sunlight till something happened. Harry would see that she got up in time for breakfast. There would be sunlight at breakfast in the room below; and Harry and Gerald and the remains of Christmas leisure..... “We only keep going because of Elspeth.” How could she have gone off to sleep last night without recalling that? If Harry and Gerald found marriage a failure, it was a failure. Perhaps it was a passing phase and they would think differently later on. But they had spoken so simply, as if it were a commonplace fact known to everybody ... they had met so many people by this time. Nearly all their lodgers had been married, and unhappy. Perhaps that was because they were nearly all theatrical people? If Harry had stayed in London and not had to work for a living would she have been happier? No; she was gayer down here; even more herself. It _amused_ her to have rushes, and turn out three rooms after ten o’clock at night. They both seemed to run the house as a sort of joke, and remained absolutely themselves. Perhaps that was just in talking about it, at Christmas, to her. It certainly must be horrible in the season, as Harry said, the best part of the house packed with selfish strangers for the very best part of the year; so much to do for them all day that there was never even time to run down to the sea...... Visitors did not think of that. If they considered their landlady it would spoil their one fortnight of being free. Landladies ought to be old; not minding about working all day for other people and never seeing the sea. Harry was too young to be a landlady ...... the gently moving curtains were flat against the window again for a moment, a veil of thin muslin screening the brilliant gold, making it an even tone all over the room; a little oblong of misty golden light. Even for Harry’s sake she could not let any tinge of sadness invade it... That was being exactly like the summer visitors...

“Good _Gracious_!” The door was open and Harry, entering with a jug of hot water was enveloped in the end of the out-blown curtains. “Why on Earth d’you have your window like that? It’s simply _bitter_.”

“I love it” said Miriam, watching Harriett’s active little moving form battle with the flying draperies. “I’m revelling in it.”

“Well I won’t presume to shut it; but revel _up_. Here you are. Breakfast’s nearly ready. Hold the ends while I get out and shut the door.”

Harry _too_; and she used to be so fond of open windows. But it was not a snub. She would say to Gerald she’s got her window bang open, isn’t she an old _Cure_? She got out singing into the fresh golden air leaving the window wide. The London temptation to shirk her swift shampoo and huddle on a garment did not come. The sense of summer was so strong in the bright air that she felt sure, if only she could have always bright screened light in her room, summer warmth and summer happiness would last the whole year round.

Gerald was pouring out coffee. In the kitchen the voices of Harriett and Mrs. Thimm were railing cheerfully together. Harriett came in with a rush, slamming the door. “Is it too warm for you in here Miss Henderson?” she asked as she drove Gerald to his own end of the table.

“It’s glorious” said Miriam subsiding into indefinite anticipation. The room was very warm with sunlight and a blazing fire. But there was no pressure anywhere. It was their youth and the way being with them made things go backwards as far as one could see and confidently forward from any room they happened to be in. A meal with them always seemed as if it might go on for ever. She glanced affectionately from one to the other, longing to convey to them in some form of words the thing they did not seem to know, the effect they made, together, through having been together from such early beginnings, how it gave and must always give a _confidence_ to the very expression of their hair, making them always about to start life together. It came from Harriett, and was reflected by Gerald, a light that played about him, decking him in his most unconscious, busy, man’s moments with the credit of having found Harriett. They seemed more suitably arranged, confronted here together in this bright eventful house, meeting adventures together, mutually efficient towards a common end, than with Gerald in business and Harry silken and leisurely in a suburban house ......

“We’ll be more glorious in a minute” said Gerald sweeping actively about. “I’ll just move that old fern.”

“Oh of _course_” mocked Harriett, “_look_ at the importance ...”

Whistling softly Gerald placed a small square box on the table amongst the breakfast things.

“_Oh_ dear me” moaned Harriett from behind the coffee pot, smirking coyly backwards over her shoulder, “hoh, _ar’n’t_ we grand.” “It’s the new _toy_” she rapped avertedly towards Miriam, in a despairing whisper. Gerald interrupted his whistling to fix on to the box a sort of trumpet, a thing that looked like a wide-open green nasturtium.

“Is it a musical box?” asked Miriam.

“D’you mean to say you’ve never seen a gramophone yet?” murmured Gerald, frowning and flicking away dust with his handkerchief. They did not mean as much as they appeared to do when they said life was not worth living ...... they had not discovered life. Gerald did not know the meaning of his interest in things. “People grieve and bemoan themselves, but it is not half so bad with them as they say” ......

“I haven’t. I’ve heard them squeaking inside public houses of course.”

“Now’s your chance then. Woa Jemima! That’s the ticket. _Now_ she’s off----”

Miriam waited, breathless; eagerly prepared to accept the coming wonder. A sound like the crackling of burning twigs came out into the silence. She remembered her first attempt to use a telephone, the need for concentrating calmly through the preliminary tumult, on the certainty that intelligible sounds would presently emerge, and listened encouragingly for a voice. The crackling changed to a metallic scraping, labouring steadily round and round, as if it would go on for ever; it ceased and an angry stentorian voice seemed to be struggling, half-smothered, in the neck of the trumpet. Miriam gazed, startled, at the yawning orifice, as the voice suddenly escaped and leapt out across the table with a shout--‘Edison-BELL RECord!’ Lightly struck chords tinkled far away, fairy music, sounding clear and distinct on empty space remote from the steady scraping of the machine. Then a song began. The whole machine seemed to sing it; vibrating with effort, sending forth the notes in a jerky staccato, the scarcely touched words clipped and broken to fit the jingling tune; the sustained upper notes at the end of the verse wavered chromatically, as if the machine were using its last efforts to reach the true pitch; it ceased and the far away chords came again, fainter and further away. In the second verse the machine struggled more feebly and slackened its speed, flattened suddenly to a lower key, wavered on, flattening from key to key and collapsed, choking, on a single downward-slurring squeak----

“Oh, but that’s absolutely _perfect_” gasped Miriam.

“You want to set it _slower_ silly; it all began too _high_.”

“_I_ know, la reine, _he_ knows, he’ll set it slower all right.”

This time the voice marched lugubriously forth, with a threatening emphasis on each word; the sustained notes blared wide through their mufflings; yawned out by an angry lion.

“My _word_” said Harriett “it’s a funeral this time.”

“But it’s _glorious_! Can you make it go as slowly as you like?”

“We’ll get it right presently, never fear.”

Miriam felt that no correct performance could be better than what she had heard, and listened carelessly to the beginning of the third performance. If it succeeded the blissful light flowing from the room out over her distant world must either be shattered by her tacit repudiation of the cheaply devised ditty, or treacherously preserved at the price of simulated satisfaction. The prelude sounded nearer this time, revealing a piano and an accompanist, and the song came steadily out, a pleasant kindly baritone, beating along on a middle key; a nice unimaginative brown-haired young man, who happened to have a voice. She ceased to attend; the bright breakfast-table, the cheerfully decorated square room bathed in the brilliant morning light that was flooding the upward slope of the town from the wide sky towering above the open sea, was suddenly outside space and time, going on for ever untouched; the early days flowed up, recovered completely from the passage of time, going forward with to-day added to them, forever. The march of the refrain came lilting across the stream of days, joyfully beating out the common recognition of the three listeners. She restrained her desire to take it up, flinging out her will to hold back the others, that they might face out the moment and let it make its full mark. In the next refrain they could all take the relief of shouting their acknowledgement, a hymn to the three-fold life. The last verse was coming successfully through; in an instant the chorus refrain would be there. It was old and familiar, woven securely into experience, beginning its life as memory. She listened eagerly. It was partly too, she thought, absence of singer and audience that redeemed both the music and the words. It was a song overheard; sounding out innocently across the morning. She saw the sun shining on the distant hill-tops, the comrades in line, and the lingering lover tearing himself away for the roll-call. The refrain found her far away, watching the scene until the last note should banish it.

The door opened and Elspeth stood in the doorway.

“_Well_ my pet?” said Harriett and Gerald gently, together.

She trotted round the open door, carefully closing it with her body, her steady eyes taking in the disposition of affairs. In a moment she stood near the table, the silky rounded golden crown of her head rising just above it. Miriam thrilled at her nearness, delighting in the firm clutch of the tiny hand on the edge of the table, the gentle shapely bulge of the ends of her hair inturned towards her neck, the little busy bustling expression of her bunchy motionless little muslin dress. Suddenly she looked up in her way, Gerald’s disarming gentleness, all Eve’s reined-in gaiety ... “I your baby?” she asked with a small lunge of affection. Miriam blushed. The tiny thing had _remembered_ from yesterday ...... Yes, she murmured encircling her and pressing her lips to the warm silken top of her head. Gerald burst into loud wailing. Elspeth moved backwards towards Harriett and stood propped against her, contemplating him with sunny interest. Harriett’s firm ringed hand covered the side of her head.

“Poor Poppa” she suggested.

“Be _cri_-ut Gerald!” Elspeth cried serenely, frowning with effort. She stood on tip-toe surveying the contents of the table and waved a peremptory hand towards the gramophone. Gerald tried to make a bargain. Lifted on to Harriett’s knee she bunched her hands and sat compact. The direct rays made her head a little sunlit sphere, smoothly outlined with silky pale gold hair bulging softly over each ear, the broken curve continued by the gentle bulge of her cheeks as she pursed her face to meet the sunlight. She peered unsmiling, but every curve smiled; a little sunny face, sunlit. Fearing that she would move, Miriam tried to centre attention by seeming engrossed in Gerald’s operations, glancing sideways meanwhile in an entrancement of effort to define her small perfection. The list of single items summoned images of children who missed her charm by some accentuation of character, pointing backwards to the emphatic qualities of a relative and forward so clearly that already they seemed adult. Elspeth predicted nothing. The closest observation revealed no point of arrest. Her undivided impression once caught, could be recovered in each separate feature.

Eve came in as the music ceased. In the lull that followed the general greetings Miriam imagined a repetition of the song, to carry Eve back into what had gone before and forward with them in the unchanged morning. But Mrs. Thimm broke in with a tray and scattered them all towards the fire. Let’s hear Molly Darling once more she thought in a casual tone. After yesterday Eve would take that as a lack of interest in her presence. Supposing she did? She was so changed that she could be treated without consideration, as an equal ...... but she overdid it, preening herself, caring more for the idea of independence than for the fact. That would not keep her going. She would not be strong enough to sustain her independence ......

The sense of triumph threw up an effulgence even while Miriam accused herself of cruelty in contemplating the droopy exhaustion which had outlived Eve’s day of rest. But she was not alone in this; nice good people were secretly impatient with relatives who were always threatening to break down and become problems. And Eve had almost ceased to be a relative. Descending to the rank of competitor she was no longer a superior ...... she was an inferior masquerading as an equal ...... that was what men meant in the newspapers. Then it couldn’t be true. There was some other explanation. It was because she was using her independence as a revenge for the past...... What men resented was the sudden reflection of their detachment by women who had for themselves discovered its secret, and knew what uncertainties went on behind it. She was resenting Eve’s independence as a man would do. Eve was saying she now understood the things that in the past she had only admired, and that they were not so admirable, and quite easy to do. But she disgraced the discovery by flaunting it. It was so evident that it was her shop, not she that had come into the room and spoiled the morning. Even now she was dwelling on next week. Inside her mind was nothing but her customers, travellers, the possible profits, her many plans for improvement. Nothing else could impress her. Anything she contributed would rest more than ever, now that Christmas Day was over, upon a back-ground of absent-minded complacency. Like herself, with the Brooms? Was it she who was being judged and not Eve? No, or only by herself. Harriett shared her new impressions of Eve, saw how eagerly in her clutch on her new interests she had renounced her old background of inexhaustible sympathy. Gerald did not. But men have no sense of atmosphere. They only see the appearances of things, understanding nothing of their relationships. Bewilderment, pessimistic philosophies, _regretful_ poetry ......

The song might banish Eve’s self-assertion and bring back something of her old reality. Music, any music, would always make Eve real. Perhaps Elspeth would ask for it. But in the long inactive seconds, things had rushed ahead shattering the sunlit hour. Nothing could make it settle again. Eve had missed it for ever. But she had discovered its presence. Its broken vestiges played about her retreat as she turned away to Elspeth; Gerald who alone was unconscious of her discovery, having himself been spell-bound without recognising his whereabouts, was inaccessibly filling his pipe. She was far-off now, trying to break her way in by an attack on Elspeth. Miriam watched anxiously, reading the quality of their daily intercourse. Elspeth was responding with little imitative movements, arch smiles and gestures. Miriam writhed. Eve would teach her to see life as people, a few prominent over-emphasised people in a fixed world..... But Elspeth soon broke away to trot up and down the hearth-rug, and when Gerald caught and held her, asking as he puffed at his pipe above her head a rallying question about the shop, she stood propped looking from face to face, testing voices.

The morning had changed to daytime...... Gerald and Eve made busy needless statements, going over in the form of question and answer the history of the shop, and things that had been obviously already discussed to exhaustion. Across Harriett’s face thoughts about Eve and her venture passed in swift comment on the conversation. Now and again she betrayed her impatience, leaping out into abrupt ironic emendations and presently rose with a gasp, thumping Miriam gently, “Come on, you’ve got to try on that blouse.” The colloquy snapped. Eve turned a flushed face and sat back looking uneasily into vacancy as if for something she had forgotten to say.

“Try it on down here,” said Gerald.

“Don’t be idiotic.”

“It’s all right. _We_ shan’t mind. We won’t look till she’s got it on.”

“If you look then, you will be dazzled by my radiance.” Miriam stood listening in astonishment to the echoes of the phrase, fashioned from nothing upon her lips by something within her, unknown, wildly to be welcomed if its power of using words that left her not merely untouched and unspent, but taut and invigorated, should prove to be reliable. She watched the words go forward outside her with a life of their own, palpable, a golden thread between herself and the world, the first strand of a bright pattern she and Gerald would weave from their separate engrossments whenever their lives should cross. Through Gerald’s bantering acknowledgement she gazed out before her into the future, an endless perspective of blissful unbroken silence, shielded by the gift of speech ...... The figure of Eve, sitting averted towards the fire, flung her back. To Eve her words were not silence; but a blow deliberately struck. With a thrill of sadness she recognised the creative power of anger. If she had not been angry with Eve she would have wondered whether Gerald were secretly amused by her continued interest in blouses, and have fallen stupidly dumb before the need of explaining, as her mind now rapidly proceeded to do, cancelling her sally as a base foreign achievement, that her interest was only a passing part of holiday relaxation, to be obliterated to-morrow by the renewal of a life that held everything he thought she was missing, in a way and with a quality new and rich beyond anything he could dream, and contemplating these things, would have silently left him with his judgment confirmed. She had moved before Gerald, safely ensphered in the life of words, and in the same movement was departing now, on the wings of Harriett’s rush, a fiend denying her kindred.

Running upstairs she reflected that if the finished blouse suited her it was upon Eve that it would most powerfully cast its spell. The shoulders had been good. Defects in the other parts could not spoil them, and the squareness of her shoulders was an odd thing for which she was not responsible. Eve only admired them because hers sloped. She would come down again as the gay buffoon Eve used to know, letting the effect of the blouse be incidental, making to-day to-day, shaking them all out of the contemplation of circumstances. She would give some of her old speeches and musical sketches, if she could manage to begin when Gerald was not there, and Eve would laugh till she cried. No one would guess that she was buoyed up by her own invisible circumstances, forgotten as she browsed amongst new impressions, and now returning upon her moment by moment with accumulated force. But upstairs, confronted by Harriett in the summerlit seaside sunshine, she found the past half-hour between them, pressing for comment, and they danced silently confronting each other, dancing and dancing till they had said their say.

The visit ended in the stillness that fell upon the empty carriage as the train left the last red-roofed houses behind and slid out into the open country. She swung for an instant over the spread of the town, serene unchanging sunlit grey, and brilliant white, green shuttered and balconied, towards the sea, warm yellow brick, red-roofed, towards the inland green, her visit still ahead of her. But the interiors of Eve’s dark little house and Harriett’s bright one slipped in between her and the pictured town, and the four days’ succession of incidents overtook her in disorder, playing themselves out, backwards and forwards, singly, in clear succession, two or three together, related to each other by some continuity of mood within herself, pell mell, swiftly interchanging, each scene in turn claiming the foremost place; moments stood out dark and overshadowing; the light that flooded the whole strove in vain to reach these painful peaks. The far-away spring offered a healing repetition of her visit; but the moments remained immovable. Eve would still be obstinately saying the Baws and really thinking she knew which side she was on ...... Wawkup and Poole Carey ...... those were quotations as certainly as were Eve’s newspaper ideas; Wimpole Street quotations. The thing was that Eve had learned to want to be always in the right and was not swift enough in gathering things ...... not _worldly_ enough. The train was rocking and swaying in its rush towards its first stop. After that the journey would seem only a few minutes, time passing more and more rapidly filled with the pressure of London coming nearer and nearer. But the junction was still a good way off.

“No. It’s nothing of that kind. All Russian students are like that. They have everything in common. On the inside of the paper he had written it will be unfriendly if it should occur to you to feel any sentiment of resentment. What could I do? Oh yes they would. A Russian would think nothing of spending two pounds on chocolate if he wanted to. They live on bread too, nothing but bread and tea, some of them, for the sake of being able to work. What I can’t make him see is that although I am earning my living and he is not, he is preparing to earn a much more solid living than I ever shall. He says he is ashamed to be doing nothing while I am already independent. The next moment he is indignant that I have not enough for clothes and food; I have to be absolutely rude to make him let me pay for myself at restaurants. When I say it is worth it and I have enough much more than thousands of women workers he is silent with indignation. Then when I say that what is really wrong is that I have been cheated of my student period and ought to be living on somebody as a student, he says, pairhaps, but you are in _life_, that is the more important.”

“All right, I will ask him. Poor little man. He has spent his Christmas at Tansley Street. He would adore Elspeth; although she is not a ‘beef-steak.’ He says there are no children in Europe finer than English children, and will stop suddenly in the middle of a serious conversation to say look, look; but _that_ is a _real_ English beef-steak.”

Harry had partly understood. But she still clung to her private thoughts. Meeting him to-day would not be quite the same as before she had mentioned him to anyone. Summoning his familiar form she felt that her talk had been treachery. Yet not to have mentioned him at all felt like treachery too.

“There’s quite an interesting Russian at Tansley Street now.” That meant simply nothing at all.... Christmas _had_ been an interruption ... Perhaps something would have happened in his first days of London without her. Perhaps he would not appear this evening.

Back at her work at Wimpole Street she forgot everything in a sudden glad realisation of the turn of the year. The sky was bright above the grey wall opposite her window. Soon there would be bright light in it at five o’clock, daylight remaining to walk home in, then at six, and she would see once more for another year the light of the sun on the green of the park. The alley of crocuses would come again, then daffodils in the grass and the green of the on-coming blue-bells. Her table was littered with newly paid accounts, enough to occupy her pen for the short afternoon with pleasant writing, the reward of the late evenings spent before Christmas in hurrying out overdue statements, and the easy prelude to next week’s crowded work on the yearly balance sheets. She sat stamping and signing, and writing picturesque addresses, her eyes dwelling all the while in contemplation of the gift of the outspread year. The patients were few and no calls came from the surgeries. Tea came up while she still felt newly-arrived from the outside world, and the outspread scenes in her mind were gleaming still with fresh high colour in bright light, but the last receipt was signed, and a pile of envelopes lay ready for the post.

She welcomed the sound of Mrs. Orly’s voice, tired and animated at the front door, and rose gladly as she came into the room with little bright broken incoherent phrases, and the bright deep unwearied dauntless look of welcome in her little tired face. She was swept into the den and kept there for a prolonged tea-time, being questioned in detail about her Christmas in Eve’s shop, seeing Mrs. Orly’s Christmas presents and presently moving in and out of groups of people she knew only by name. An extraordinary number of disasters had happened amongst them. She listened without surprise. Always all the year round these people seemed to live under the shadow of impending troubles. But Mrs. Orly’s dolorous list made Christmas seem to be, for them, a time devoted to the happening of things that crashed down in their midst, dealing out life-long results. Mrs. Orly talked rapidly, satisfied with gestures of sympathy, but Miriam was conscious that her sympathy was not falling where it was demanded. She watched the family centres unmoved, her mind hovering over their imagined houses, looking regretfully at the shattered whole, the views from their windows that belonged to the past and were suddenly strange as when they had first seen them; passing on to their servants and friends and outwards into their social life, following results as far as she could, the principal sufferers impressing her all the time in the likeness of people who suddenly make avoidable disturbances in the midst of a conversation. Driven back, from the vast questioning silence at the end of her outward journey, to the centres of Mrs. Orly’s pictures, she tried to dwell sympathetically with the stricken people and fled aghast before their inexorable circumstances. They were all so hemmed in, so closely grouped that they had no free edges, and were completely, publicly at the mercy of the things that happened. Everyone in social life was aware of this. Experienced people said “there is always _something_,” “a skeleton in every cupboard” ..... But why did people get into cupboards? Something or someone was to blame. In some way that pressed through the picture now in one form and now in another, just eluding expression in any single statement she could frame, these bright-looking lives, free of all that civilisation had to offer, were all to blame; all facing the same way, unaware of anything but the life they lived among themselves, they _made_ the shadow that hung over them all; they invited its sudden descents ...... She felt that her thoughts were cruel; like an unprovoked blow, worthy of instant revenge by some invisible observant third party; but even while in the presence of Mrs. Orly’s sympathy she accused herself of heartlessness and strove to retreat into a kindlier outlook, she was aware, moving within her conviction, of some dim shape of truth that no sympathy could veil.

At six o’clock the front door closed behind her, shutting her out into the multitudinous pattering of heavy rain. With the sight of the familiar street shortened by darkness to a span lit faintly by dull rain-shrouded lamps, her years of daily setting forth into London came about her more clearly than ever before as a single unbroken achievement. Jubilantly she reasserted, facing the invitation flowing towards her from single neighbourhoods standing complete and independent, in inexhaustibly various loveliness through the procession of night and day, linked by streets and by-ways living in her as mood and reverie, that to have the freedom of London was a life in itself. Incidents from Mrs. Orly’s conversation pressing forward through her outcry, heightened her sense of freedom. If the sufferers were her own kindred, if disaster threatened herself, walking in London, she would pass into that strange familiar state, where all clamourings seemed unreal and on in the end into complete forgetfulness.

Two scenes flashed forth from the panorama beyond the darkness and while she glanced at the vagrants stretched asleep on the grass in the Hyde Park summer, carefully to be skirted and yet most dreadfully claiming her companionship, she saw, narrow and gaslit, the little unlocated street that had haunted her first London years, herself flitting into it, always unknowingly, from a maze of surrounding streets, feeling uneasy, recognising it, hurrying to pass its awful centre where she must read the name of a shop, and, dropped helplessly into the deepest pit of her memory, struggle on through thronging images threatening, each time more powerfully, to draw her willingly back and back through the intervening spaces of her life to some deserved destruction of mind and body, until presently she emerged faint and quivering, in a wide careless thoroughfare. She had forgotten it; perhaps somehow learned to avoid it. Her imagined figure passed from the haunted scene, and from the vast spread of London the tide flowed through it, leaving it a daylit part of the whole, its spell broken and gone. She struggled with her stiffly opening umbrella, listening joyfully to the sound of the London rain. She asked nothing of life but to stay where she was, to go on ...... London was her pillar of cloud and fire, undeserved, but unsolicited, life’s free gift. In still exultation she heard her footsteps go down into the street and along the streaming pavement. The light from a lamp just ahead fell upon a figure, plunging in a swift diagonal across the muddy roadway towards her. He had come to meet her ... invading her street. She fled exasperated, as she slackened her pace, before this postponement of her meeting with London, and silently drove him off, as he swept round to walk at her side, asking him how he dared unpermitted to bring himself, and the evening, and the evening mood, across her inviolable hour. His overcoat was grey with rain and as she glanced he was scanning her silence with that slight quivering of his features. Poor brave little lonely man. He had spent his Christmas at Tansley Street.

“Well? How was it?” he said. He was a gaoler, shutting her in.

“Oh it was all right.”

“Your sisters are well? Ah I _must_ tell you,” his voice boomed confidently ahead into the darkness; “while I waited I have seen two of your doctors.”

“They are not doctors.”

“I had an immensely good impression. I find them both most fine English types.”

“Hm; they’re absolutely English.” She saw them coming out, singly, preoccupied, into their street. English. He standing under his lamp, a ramshackle foreigner whom they might have regarded with suspicion, taking them in with a flash of his prepared experienced brown eye.

“Abso-lutully. This unmistakable expression of humanity and fine sympathetic intelligence. Ah, it is fine.”

“I _know_. But they have very simple minds, they quote their opinions.”

“I do not say that you will find in the best English types a striking originality of _mentality_” he exclaimed reproachfully. Her attention pounced unwillingly upon the promised explanation of her own impressions, tired in advance at the prospect of travelling through his carefully pronounced sentences while the world she had come out to meet lay disregarded all about her. “But you will find what is perhaps more important, the characteristic features of your English civilisation.”

“I know. I can _see_ that; because I am neither English nor civilised.”