clearly bawled word. The sense of the large cold church, the great stone
pillars, the long narrow windows faintly stained with yellowish green,
the harsh North London congregation stirred and seemed to settle down
more securely. She saw the form of the vicar in the light grey stone
pulpit standing up short and neat against the cold grey stone wall,
enveloped in fine soft folds, his small puckered hands beautifully
cuffed, his plump crumpled little face, his small bald head fringed with
little saffron-white curls, his pink pouched busy mouth. What was it all
about? Pompous pottering, going on and on and on--in the Old Testament.
The whole church was in the Old Testament.... _Honour_ thy father and
thy mother. How horribly the words would echo through the great cold
church. _Why_ honour thy father and thy mother? What had they done that
was so honourable? Everybody was dying in cold secret fear. Christ, the
son of God, was part of it all, the same family ... vindictive.
Christmas and Easter, hard white cold flowers, no real explanation. “I
came not to destroy but to fulfil.” The stagnant blood flushed in her
face and tingled in her ears as the words occurred to her. Why didn’t
everybody die at once and stop it all?

                                   4

Miss Haddie paused at the door of her room and wheeled suddenly round to
face Miriam who had just reached the landing.

“You’ve not seen my little corner,” she tweedled breathlessly, throwing
open her door.

Miriam went in. “Oh how nice,” she said fearfully, breathing in the
freshness of a little square sun-filled muslin-draped, blue-papered
room. Taking refuge at the white-skirted window, she found a narrow view
of the park, greener than the one she knew. The wide yellow pathway
going up through the cricket ground had shifted away to the right.

“It’s really a--a--a dressing-room from your room.”

“Oh,” said Miriam vivaciously.

“There’s a door, a--a--a door. I daresay you’ve noticed.”

“Oh! _That’s_ the door in our cupboard!” The dim door behind the hanging
garments led to nothing but to Miss Haddie’s room. She began unbuttoning
her gloves.

Miss Haddie was hesitating near a cupboard, making little sounds.

“I suppose we must all make ourselves tidy now,” said Miriam.

“I thought you didn’t look very happy in church this morning,” cluttered
Miss Haddie rapidly.

Miriam felt heavy with anger. “Oh,” she said clumsily, “I had the most
frightful headache.”

“Poor child. I thought ye didn’t look yerself.”

The window was shut. But the room was mysteriously fresh, far away from
the school. A fly was hovering about the muslin window blind with little
reedy loops of song. The oboe ... in the quintet, thought Miriam
suddenly. “I don’t know,” she said, listening. The flies sang like this
at home. She had heard them without knowing it. She moved in her place
by the window. The fly swept up to the ceiling, wavering on a deep note
like a tiny gong.... Hot sunny refined lawns, roses in bowls on
summerhouse tea-tables, refined voices far away from the Caledonian
Road.

“Flies don’t _buzz_,” she said passionately. “They don’t _buzz_. Why do
people say they buzz?” The pain pressing behind her temples slackened.
In a moment it would be only a glow.

Miss Haddie stood with bent head, her face turning from side to side,
with its sour hesitating smile, her large eyes darting their strange
glances about the room.

“Won’t you sit down a minute? They haven’t sounded the first bell yet.”
Miriam sat down on the one little white-painted, cane-seated chair near
the dressing-table. “Eh--eh,” said Miss Haddie, beginning to unfasten
her veil. “She doesn’t approve of general conversation,” thought Miriam.
“She’s a female. Oh well, she’ll have to see I’m not.”

“What gave you yer headache?”

“Oh well, I don’t know. I suppose I was wondering what it was all
about.”

“I don’t think I quite understand ye.”

“Well, I mean--what that old gentleman was in such a state of mind
about.”

“D’ye mean Mr. La Trobe!”

“Yes. Why do you laugh?”

“I don’t understand what ye mean.”

Miriam watched Miss Haddie’s thin fingers feeling for the pins in her
black toque. “Of course not,” she thought, looking at the unveiled
shrivelled cheek.... “thirty-five years of being a lady.”

“Oh well,” she sighed fiercely.

“What is it ye mean, my dear?”

--‘couldn’t make head or tail of a thing the old dodderer said’--no ‘old
boy,’ no--these phrases would not do for Miss Haddie.

“I couldn’t agree with _anything_ he said.”

Miss Haddie sat down on the edge of the little white bed burying her
face in her hands and smoothing them up and down with a wiping movement.

“One can always criticise a sermon,” she said reproachfully.

“Well, why not?”

“I mean to say ye _can_,” said Miss Haddie from behind her fingers,
“but, but ye shouldn’t.”

“You can’t help it.”

“Oh yes, ye can. If ye listen in the right spirit,” gargled Miss Haddie
hurriedly.

“Oh, it isn’t only the sermon, it’s the whole thing,” said Miriam
crimsoning.

“Ye mustn’t think about the speaker,” went on Miss Haddie in faint
hurried rebuke. “That’s wrong. That sets people running from church to
church. You must attend your own parish church in the right spirit, let
the preacher be who--who--what he may.”

“Oh, but I think that’s positively _dangerous_,” said Miriam gravely.
“It simply means leaving your mind open for whatever they choose to say.
Like Rome.”

“Eh, no--o--o,” flared Miss Haddie dropping her hands, “nonsense. Not
like Rome at all.”

“But it _is_. It’s giving up your conscience.”

“You’re very determined,” laughed Miss Haddie bitterly.

“I’m certainly not going to give my mind up to a parson for him to do
what he likes with. That’s what it is. That’s what they do. I’ve seen it
again and again. I’ve heard people talking about sermons,” finished
Miriam with vivacious intentness.

Miss Haddie sat very still with her hands once more pressed tightly
against her face.

“Oh, my dear. This is a dreadful state of affairs. I’m afraid you’re all
wrong. That’s not it at all. If you listen only for the good, the good
will come to you.”

“But these men don’t know. How should they? They don’t agree amongst
themselves.”

“Oh, my dear, that is a very wrong attitude. How long have ye felt like
this?”

“Oh, all my life,” responded Miriam proudly.

“I’m very sorry, my dear.”

“Ever since I can remember. Always.”

There were ivory-backed brushes on the dressing-table. Miriam stared at
them and let her eyes wander on to a framed picture of an agonised
thorn-crowned head.

“Were you--have ye--eh--have ye been confirmed?”

“Oh yes.”

“Did ye discuss any of your difficulties with yer vicar?”

“Not I. I knew his mind too well. Had heard him preach for years. He
would have run round my questions. He wasn’t capable of answering them.
For instance, supposing I had asked him what I’ve _always_ wanted to
know. How can people, ordinary people, be expected to be like Christ, as
they say, when they think Christ was supernatural? Of course, if he was
supernatural it was easy enough for him to be as he was; if he was not
supernatural, then there’s nothing in the whole thing.”

“My _dear_ child! I’m dreadfully sorry ye feel like that. I’d no idea ye
felt like that, poor child. I knew ye weren’t quite happy always; I mean
I’ve thought ye weren’t quite happy in yer mind sometimes, but I’d no
idea--eh, eh, have ye ever consulted anybody--anybody able to give ye
advice?”

“There you are. That’s exactly the whole thing! _Who_ can one consult?
There isn’t anybody. The people who are qualified are the people who
have the thing called faith, which means that they beg the whole
question from the beginning.”

“Eh--dear--me--Miriam--child!”

“Well, I’m made that way. How can I help it if faith seems to me just an
abnormal condition of the mind with fanaticism at one end and
agnosticism at the other?”

“My dear, ye believe in God?”

“Well, you see, I see things like this. On one side a prime cause with a
certain object unknown to me, bringing humanity into being; on the other
side humanity, all more or less miserable, never having been consulted
as to whether they wanted to come to life. If that is belief, a South
Sea Islander could have it. But good people, people with faith, want me
to believe that one day God sent a saviour to rescue the world from sin
and that the world can never be grateful enough and must become as
Christ. Well. If God made people he is responsible and ought to save
them.”

“What do yer parents think about yer ideas?”

“They don’t know.”

“Ye’ve never mentioned yer trouble to them?”

“I did ask Pater once when we were coming home from the Stabat Mater
that question I’ve told you about.”

“What did he say?”

“He couldn’t answer. We were just by the gate. He said he thought it was
a remarkably reasonable dilemma. He laughed.”

“And ye’ve never had any discussion of these things with him?”

“No.”

“Ye’re an independent young woman,” said Miss Haddie.

Miriam looked up. Miss Haddie was sitting on the edge of her bed. A
faint pink flush on her cheeks made her eyes look almost blue. She was
no longer frowning. ‘I’m something new--a kind of different world. She
is wondering. I must stick to my guns,’ mused Miriam.

“I’ll not ask ye,” said Miss Haddie quietly and cheerfully, “to expect
any help from yer fellow creatures since ye’ve such a poor opinion of
them. But ye’re not happy. Why not go straight to the source?”

Miriam waited. For a moment the sheen on Miss Haddie’s silk sleeves had
distracted her by becoming as gentle and unchallenging as the light on
her mother’s dresses when there were other people in the room. She had
feared the leaping out of some emotional appeal. But Miss Haddie had a
plan. Strange secret knowledge.

“I should like to ask ye a question.”

“Yes?”

“Well, I’ll put it in this way. While ye’ve watched the doings of yer
fellow creatures ye’ve forgotten that the truth ye’re seeking is a--a
Person.”

Miriam pondered.

“That’s where ye ought to begin. And how about--what--what about--I
fancy ye’ve been neglecting the--the means of grace.... I think ye
have.” Miss Haddie rose and crossed the room to a little bookshelf at
the head of her bed, talking happily on. ‘Upright as a dart,’ commented
Miriam mentally, waiting for the fulfilment of the promise of Miss
Haddie’s cheerfulness. Against the straight lines of the wall-paper Miss
Haddie showed as swaying slightly backwards from the waist as she moved.

The first bell rang and Miriam got up to go. Miss Haddie came forward
with a small volume in her hands and held it out, standing close by her
and keeping her own hold on the volume. “Ye’ll find no argument in it.
Not but I think a few sound arguments would do ye good. Give it a try.
Don’t be stiff-necked. Just read it and see.” The smooth soft leather
slipped altogether into Miriam’s hands and she felt the passing contact
of a cool small hand and noted a faint fine scent coming to her from
Miss Haddie’s person.

In her own room she found that the soft binding of the book had rounded
corners and nothing on the cover but a small plain gold cross in the
right-hand corner. She feasted her eyes on it as she took off her
things. When the second bell rang she glanced inside the cover.
“Preparation for Holy Communion.” Hurriedly hiding it in her long drawer
under a pile of linen, she ran to the door. Running back again she took
it out and put it, together with her prayer book and hymn book, in the
small top drawer.

                                   5

The opportunity to use Miss Haddie’s book came with Nancie’s departure
for a week-end visit. Beadie was in the deeps of her first sleep and the
room seemed empty. The book lay open on her bed. She noted as she placed
it there when she began preparing for bed that it was written by a
bishop, a man she knew by name as being still alive. It struck her as
extraordinary that a book should be printed and read while the author
was alive, and she turned away with a feeling of shame from the idea of
the bishop, still going about in his lawn sleeves and talking, while
people read a book that he had written in his study. But it was very
interesting to have the book to look at, because he probably knew about
modern people with doubts and would not think about them as
‘infidels’--‘an honest agnostic has my sympathy,’ he might say, and it
was possible he did not believe in eternal punishment. If he did he
would not have had his book printed with rounded edges and that
beautiful little cross.... “Line upon Line” and the “Pilgrim’s Progress”
were not meant for modern minds. Archbishop Whateley had a “chaste and
eloquent wit” and was a “great gardener.” A witty archbishop fond of
gardening was simply aggravating and silly.

Restraining her desire to hurry, Miriam completed her toilet and at last
knelt down in her dressing-gown. Its pinked neck-frill fell heavily
against her face as she leant over the bed. Tucking it into her neck she
clasped her outstretched hands, leaving the book within the circle of
her arms. The attitude seemed a little lacking in respect for the
beautifully printed gilt-edged pages. Flattening her entwined hands
between herself and the edge of the bed, she read very slowly that just
as for worldly communion men cleanse and deck their bodies so for
attendance at the Holy Feast must there be a cleansing and decking of
the spirit. She knelt upright, feeling herself grow very grave. The cold
air of the bedroom flowed round her carrying conviction. Then that
dreadful feeling at early service, kneeling like a lump in the pew, too
late to begin to be good, the exhausted moments by the altar rail--the
challenging light on the shining brass rod, on the priest’s ring and the
golden lining of the cup, the curious bite of the wine in the
throat--the sullen disappointed home-coming; all the strange failure was
due to lack of preparation. She knelt for some moments, without
thoughts, breathing in the cleansing air, sighing heavily at intervals.
What she ought to do was clear. A certain time for preparation could be
taken every night, kneeling up in bed with the gas out if Nancie were
awake, and a specially long time on Saturday night. The decision took
her back to her book. She read that no man can cleanse himself, but it
is his part to examine his conscience and confess his sins with a prayer
for cleansing grace.

The list of questions for self-examination as to sins past and present
in thought, word, and deed brought back the sense of her body with its
load of well-known memories. Could they be got rid of? She could cast
them off, feel them sliding away like Christian’s Burden. But was that
all? Was it being reconciled with your brother to throw off ill-feeling
without letting him know and telling him you were sorry for unkind deeds
and words? Those you met would find out the change; but all the
others--those you had offended from your youth up--all your family?
Write to them. A sense of a checking of the tide that had seemed to flow
through her finger-tips came with this suggestion, and Miriam knelt
heavily on the hard floor, feeling the weight of her well-known body.
The wall-paper attracted her attention and the honeycomb pattern of the
thick fringed white counterpane. She shut the little book and rose from
her knees. Moving quickly about the room, she turned at random to her
washhand basin and vigorously rewashed her hands in its soapy water. The
Englishman, she reflected as she wasted the soap, puts a dirty shirt on
a clean body, and the Frenchman a clean shirt on a dirty body.

                               CHAPTER V

                                   1

Miriam felt very proud of tall Miss Perne when she met her in the hall
at the beginning of her second term. Miss Perne had kissed her and held
one of her hands in two small welcoming ones, talking in a gleeful
voice. “Well, my dear,” she said at the end of a little pause, “you’ll
have a clear evening. The gels do not return until to-morrow, so you’ll
be able to unpack and settle yerself in comfortably. Come and sit with
us when ye’ve done. We’ll have supper in the sitting-room. M’yes.”
Smiling and laughing she turned eagerly away. “Of course, Miss Perne,”
said Miriam in a loud wavering voice, arresting her, “I enjoyed my
holidays; but I want to tell you how glad I am to be back here.”

“Yes, yes,” said Miss Perne hilariously, “we’re all glad.”

There was a little break in her voice, and Miriam saw that she would
have once more taken her in her arms.

“I like being here,” she said hoarsely, looking down, and supported
herself by putting two trembling fingers on the hall table. She was
holding back from the gnawing of the despair that had made her sick with
pain when she heard once more the jingle-jingle, plock-plock of the
North London trams. This strong feeling of pride in Miss Perne was
beating it down. “I’m very glad, my dear,” responded Miss Perne in a
quivering gleeful falsetto. ‘If you can’t have what you like you must
like what you have,’ said Miriam over and over to herself as she went
with heavy feet up the four flights of stairs.

                                   2

A candle was already burning in the empty bedroom. “I’m back. I’m back.
It’s all over,” she gasped as she shut the door. “And a jolly good thing
too. This is my place. I can keep myself here and cost nothing and not
interfere with anybody. It’s just as if I’d never been away. It’ll
always be like that now. Short holidays, gone in a minute, and then the
long term. Getting out of touch with everything, things happening,
knowing nothing about them, going home like a visitor, and people
talking to you about things that are only theirs, now and not wanting to
hear about yours ... not about the little real everyday things that give
you an idea of anything but only the startling things that are not
important. You have to think of them though to make people
interested--awful, awful, awful, really only putting people further away
afterwards when you’ve told the thing and their interest dies down and
you can’t think of anything else to say. ‘Miss Perne’s hair is
_perfectly_ black--as black as coal, and she’s the eldest, just
_fancy_.’ Then everybody looks up. ‘My room’s downstairs, the room where
I teach, is in the basement. Directly breakfast is over----’

“‘Basement? What a pity! Basement rooms are awfully bad,’ and by the
time you have stopped them exclaiming and are just going to begin, you
see that they are fidgetting and thinking about something else.” ... Eve
had listened a little; because she wanted to tell everything about her
own place and had agreed that nobody really wanted to hear the
details.... The landscapes from the windows of the big country house,
all like pictures by Leader, the stables and laundry, a “laundry-maid”
who was sixty-five, the eldest pupil with seven muslin dresses in the
summer and being scolded because she swelled out after two helpings of
meat and two of pie and cream, and the youngest almost square in her
little covert coat and with a square face and large blue eyes and the
puppies who went out in a boat in Weston-super-Mare and were
sea-sick.... Eve did not seem to mind the family being common. Eve was
changing. “They are so jolly and strong. They enjoy life. They’re like
other people.” ... “D’you think that’s jolly? Would you like to be like
that--like other people?” “Rather. I mean to be.” “Do you?” “Of course
it can’t be done all at once. But it’s good for me to be there. It’s
awfully jolly to be in a house with no worry about money and plenty of
jolly food. Mrs. Green is so strong and clever. She can do anything.
She’s good for me, she keeps me going.” “Would you like to be like her?”
“Of course. They’re all so jolly--even when they’re old. Her sister’s
forty and she’s still pretty; not given up hope a bit.” “_Eve!_”

Eve had listened; but not agreed about the teaching, about making the
girls see how easy it was to get hold of the things and then letting
them talk about other things. “I see how you do it, and I see why the
girls obey you, of course.” Funny. Eve thought it was hard and inhuman.
That’s what she really thought.

Two newly purchased lengths of spotted net veiling were lying at the top
of her lightly packed trunk partly folded in uncrumpled tissue paper.
She took the crisp dye-scented net very gently into her hands, getting,
sitting alone on the floor by her trunk, the full satisfaction that had
failed her in the shop with Harriett’s surprise at her sudden desire
flowing over the counter and infecting the charm of baskets full of
cheap stockings and common bright-bordered handkerchiefs some of which
had borders so narrow and faint as really hardly to show when they were
scrumpled up. “Veiling, moddom? Yes, moddom,” the assistant had retorted
when she had asked for a veil. “Wot on _earth_ fower?” ... Without
answering Harriett she had bought two. There was no need to have bought
two. One could go back in the trunk as a store. They would be the
beginning of gradually getting a ‘suitable outfit,’ ‘things convenient
for you.’ She got up to put a veil in the little top drawer very
carefully; trying it across her face first. It almost obliterated her
features in the dim candle-light. It would be the greatest comfort on
winter walks, warm and like a rampart. ‘You’ve no idea how warm it keeps
you,’ she could say if anybody said anything. She arranged her clothes
very slowly and exactly in her half of the chest of drawers. “My
appointments ought to be an influence in the room--until all my things
are perfectly refined I shan’t be able to influence the girls as I
ought. I must begin it from now. At the end of the term I shall be
stronger. From strength to strength.” She wished she could go to bed at
once and prepare for to-morrow lying alone in the dark with the trams
going up and down outside as they would do night by night for the rest
of her life.

                                   3

The nine o’clock post brought a letter from Harriett. Miriam carried it
upstairs after supper. Placing it unopened on a chair by the head of her
bed under the gas bracket she tried to put away the warm dizzy feeling
it brought her in an elaborate toilet that included the placing in
readiness of everything she would need for the morning. When all was
complete she was filled with a peace that promised to remain
indefinitely as long as everything she had to do should be carried out
with unhurried exactitude. It could be made to become the atmosphere of
her life. It would come nearer and nearer and she would live more and
more richly into it until she had grown like those women who were called
blessed.... She looked about her. The plain room gave her encouragement.
It became the scene of adventure. She tip-toed about it in her
night-gown. All the world would come to her there. Flora knew. Flora was
the same, sweeping the floors and going to bed in an ugly room with two
other servants; but she was in it alone sometimes and knew....

“One verse to-night will be enough.” Opening her Bible at random she
read, “And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that
tribulation worketh patience.” Eagerly closing the volume she knelt down
smiling. “Oh do let tribulation work patience in me,” she murmured,
blushing, and got up staring gladly at the wall behind her bed. Shaking
her pillow lengthwise against the ironwork head of the bed, she
established herself with the bed-clothes neatly arranged, sitting up to
read Harriett’s letter before turning out the gas:

“Toosday morning--You’ve not gone yet, old tooral-ooral, but I’m writing
this because I know you’ll feel blue this evening, to tell you not to.
Becos, it’s _no_ time to Easter and becos here’s a great piece of news.
The last of the Neville Subscription Dances comes in the Easter holidays
and _you’re to come_. D’ye ’_ear_, Liza? Gerald says if you can’t stump
up he’s going to get you a ticket, and anyhow you’ve got to come. You’ll
enjoy it just as much as you did the first and probably more, because
most of the same people will be there. So Goodni’. Mind the lamp-post.
Harry. P.S.--Heaps of love, old silly. You’re just the same. It’s no
bally good pretending you’re not.”

Miriam felt her heart writhe in her breast. “Get thee behind me, Harry,”
she said, pushing the letter under the pillow and kneeling up to turn
out the gas. When she lay down again her mind was rushing on by
itself....

                                   4

Harry doesn’t realise a bit how short holidays are. Easter--nothing.
Just one dance and never seeing the people again. I was right just now.
I was on the right track then. I must get back to that. It’s no good
giving way right or left; I must make a beginning of my own life.... I
wish I had been called “Patience” and had thin features.... Adam Street,
Adelphi.... “Now do you want to be dancing out there with one of those
young fellows, my dear girl--No? That’s a very good thing for me. I’m an
old buffer who can’t manage more than every other dance or so. But if
you do me the honour of sitting here while those young barbarians romp
their Lancers?... Ah, that is excellent--I want you to talk to me. You
needn’t mind me. Hey? What? I’ve known that young would-be
brother-in-law of yours for many years and this evening I’ve been
watching your face. Do you mind that, dear girl, that I’ve watched your
face? In all homage. I’m a staunch worshipper of womanhood. I’ve seen
rough life as well as suave. I’m an old gold-digger--Ustralia took many
years of my life; but it never robbed me of my homage for women....

“That’s a mystery to me. How you’ve allowed your young sister to
overhaul you. Perhaps you have a Corydon hidden away somewhere--or don’t
think favourably of the bonds of matrimony? Is that it?

“You are not one to be easily happy. But that is no reason why you
should say you pity anyone undertaking to pass through life at your
side. Don’t let your thoughts and ideas allow you to miss happiness.
Women are made to find and dispense happiness. Even intense women like
yourself. But you won’t find it an easy matter to discover your mate.

“Have you ever thought of committing your ideas to paper? There’s a book
called ‘The Confessions of a Woman.’ It had a great sale and its
composition occupied the authoress for only six weeks. You could write
in your holidays.

“Think over what I’ve told you, my dear, dear girl. And don’t forget old
Bob Greville’s address. You’re eighteen. He’s only eight; eight Adam
Street. The old Adam. Waiting to hear from the new Eve--whenever she’s
unhappy.”

He would be there again, old flatterer, with his steely blue eyes and
that strong little Dr. Conelly--Conelly who held you like a vice and
swung you round and kept putting you back from him to say things. “If
only you knew the refreshment it is to dance with a girl who can talk
sense and doesn’t _giggle_.... Yes yes yes, women are _physically_
incapable of keeping a secret.... Meredith, he’s the man. He understands
woman as no other writer----” And the little dark man--De Vigne--who
danced like a snake.... Tired? Divinely drowsy? That’s what I like.
Don’t talk. Let yourself go. Little snail, Harriett called him. And that
giant, Conelly’s friend, whirling you round the room like a gust, with
his eyes fixed far away in the distance and dropping you with the
chaperones at the end of the dance. If _he_ had suddenly said “Let
yourself go” ... He too would have become a snail. God has made life
ugly.

Dear Mr. Greville, dear _Bob_. Do you know anything about a writer
called Meredith? If you have one of his books I should like to read it.
No. Dear Bob, I’m simply wretched. I want to talk to you.

                                   5

Footsteps sounded on the stairs--the servants, coming upstairs to bed.
No dancing for them. Work, caps and aprons. And those strange rooms
upstairs to sleep in that nobody ever saw. Probably Miss Perne went up
occasionally to look at them and see that they were all right; clean and
tidy.... They had to go up every night, carrying little jugs of water
and making no noise on the stairs, and come down every morning. They
were the servants--and there would never be any dancing. Nobody thought
about them.... They could not get away from each other, and cook....

To be a general servant would be very hard work. Perhaps impossible. But
there would be two rooms, the kitchen at the bottom of the house, and a
bedroom at the top, your own. It would not matter what the family was
like. You would look after them, like children, and be alone to read and
sleep.... Toothache. Cheap dentists; a red lamp “painless extractions”
... having to go there before nine in the morning, and be alone in a
cold room, the dentist doing what he thought best and coming back to
your work crying with pain, your head wrapped up in a black shawl.
Hospitals; being quite helpless and grateful for wrong treatment; coming
back to work, ill. Sinks and slops ... quinsey, all alone ... growths
... consumption.

Go to sleep. It would be better to think in the morning. But then this
clear first impression would be gone and school would begin and go on
from hour to hour through the term, mornings and afternoons and
evenings, dragging you along further and further and changing you,
months and months and years until it was too late to get back and there
was nothing ahead.

The thing to remember, to keep in mind all the time was to save
money--not to spend a single penny that could be saved, to be determined
about that so that when the temptation came you could just hang on until
it was past.

No fun in the holidays, no money spent on flowers and gloves and
blouses. Keeping stiff and sensible all the time. The family of the two
little Quaker girls had a home library, with lists, an inventory,
lending each other their books and talking about them, and albums of
pressed leaves and flowers with the Latin names, and went on wearing the
same plain clothes.... You had to be a certain sort of person to do
that.

It would spoil the holidays to be like that at home. Every penny must be
spent, if only on things for other people. Not spending would bring a
nice strong secret feeling and a horrid expression into one’s eyes.

The only way was to give up your family and stay at your work, like
Flora, and have a box of half-crowns in your drawer.... Spend and always
be afraid of “rainy days”--or save and never enjoy life at all.

But going out now and again in the holidays, feeling stiff and
governessy and just beginning to learn to be oneself again when it was
time to go back was not enjoying life ... your money was spent and
people forgot you and you forgot them and went back to your convent to
begin again.

Save, save. Sooner or later saving must begin. Why not at once. Harry,
it’s no good. I’m old already. I’ve got to be one of those who have to
give everything up.

I wonder if Flora is asleep?

That’s settled. Go to sleep. Get thee behind me. Sleep ... the dark cool
room. Air; we breathe it in and it keeps us alive. Everybody has air.
Manna. As much as you want, full measure, pressed down and running
over.... Wonderful. There is somebody giving things, whatever goes ...
something left.... Somebody seeing that things are not quite unbearable,
... but the pain, the pain all the time, mysterious black pain....

Into thy hands I commit my spirit. _In manus_ something.... You
understand if nobody else does. But _why_ must I be one of the ones to
give everything up? _Why_ do you make me suffer so?

                               CHAPTER VI

                                   1

Piecemeal statements in her letter home brought Miriam now and again a
momentary sense of developing activities, but she did not recognise the
completeness of the change in her position at the school until half-way
through her second term she found herself talking to the new pupil
teacher. She had heard apathetically of her existence during
supper-table conversations with the Misses Perne at the beginning of the
term. She was an Irish girl of sixteen, one of a large family living on
the outskirts of Dublin, and would be a boarder, attending the first
class for English and earning pocket money by helping with the lower
school. As the weeks went on and Miriam grew accustomed to hearing her
name--Julia Doyle--she began to associate it with an idea of charm that
brought her a sinking of heart. She knew her position in the esteem of
the Pernes was secure. But this new young teacher would work strange
miracles with the girls. She would do it quite easily and unconsciously.
The girls would be easy with her and would laugh and one would have to
hear them.

However, when at last her arrival was near and the three ladies
discussed the difficulty of having her met, Miriam plied them until they
reluctantly gave her permission to go, taking a workman’s train that
would bring her to Euston station at seven o’clock in the morning.

At the end of an hour spent pacing the half-dark platform exhausted with
cold and excitement and the monotonously reiterated effort to imagine
the arrival of one of Mrs. Hungerford’s heroines from a train journey,
Miriam, whose costume had been described in a letter to the girl’s
mother, was startled wandering amidst the vociferous passengers at the
luggage end of the newly arrived train by a liquid colourless intimate
voice at her elbow. “I think I’ll be right to say how d’you do.”

She turned and saw a slender girl in a middle-aged toque and an ill-cut
old-fashioned coat and skirt. What were they to say to each other, two
dowdy struggling women both in the same box? She must get her to Banbury
Park as quickly as possible. It was dreadful that they should be seen
together there on the platform in their ragbag clothes. At any rate they
must not talk. “Oh, I’m very pleased to see you. I’m glad you’ve come. I
suppose the train must have been late,” she said eagerly.

“Ah, we’ll be late I dare venture. Haven’t an idea of the hour.”

“Oh, yes,” said Miriam emphatically, “I’m sure the train’s _late_.”

“Where’ll we find a core?”

“What?”

“We’ll need a core for the luggage.”

“Oh yes, a cab. We must get a cab. We’d better find a porter.”

“Ah, I’ve a man here seeking out my things.”

Inside the cab Julia’s face shone chalky white, and Miriam found that
her eyes looked like Weymouth Bay--the sea in general, on days when
clouds keep sweeping across the sun. When she laughed she had dimples
and the thick white rims of her eyelids looked like piping cord round
her eyes. But she was not pretty. There were lines in her cheeks as well
as dimples, and there was something apologetic in her little gusty
laugh. She laughed a good deal as they started off, saying things,
little quiet remarks that Miriam could not understand and that did not
seem to be answers to her efforts to make conversation. Perhaps she was
not going the right way to make her talk. Perhaps she had not said any
of the things she thought she had said.

She cleared her throat and looked out of the window thinking over a
possible opening.

“I’ve never been so glad over anything in my life as hearing you’re one
of the teachers,” said Julia presently.

“The Pernes call me by my name, so I suppose you will too as you’re a
teacher,” said Miriam headlong.

“That’s awfully sweet of you,” replied Julia laughing and blushing a
clear deep rose. “It makes anyone feel at home. I’ll be looking out till
I hear it.”

“It’s----” Miriam laughed. “Isn’t it funny that people don’t like saying
their own names.”

“I wish you’d tell me about your teaching. I’m sure you’re awf’ly
clever.”

Miriam gave her a list of the subjects she taught in the lower school.

“You know all there is to know.”

“Oh well, and then I take the top girls now for German and the second
class for French reading, and two arithmetic classes in the upper
school, and a ‘shell’ of two very stupid girls to help with their
College of Preceptors.”

“You’re frightening me.”

                                   2

Miriam looked out of the cab window, hardly hearing Julia’s next remark.
The drab brick walls of King’s Cross station were coming towards them.
When they had got themselves and Julia’s luggage out of the cab and into
the train for Banbury Park she was still pondering uneasily over her own
dislike of appearing as a successful teacher. This stranger saw her only
as a teacher. That was what she had become. If she was really a teacher
now, just that in life, it meant that she must decide at once whether
she really meant to teach always. Everyone now would think of her as a
teacher; as someone who was never going to do anything else, when really
she had not even begun to think about doing any of the things that
professional teachers had to do. She was not qualifying herself for
examinations in her spare time as her predecessor had done. Supposing
she did. This girl Julia would certainly expect her to be doing so. What
then? If she were to work very hard and also develop her character, when
she was fifty she would be like Miss Cramp; good enough to be a special
visiting teacher, giving just a few lectures a week at several schools,
talking in a sad voice, feeling ill and sad, having a yellow face and
faded hair and not enough saved to live on when she was too old to work.
Prospect, said the noisy train. That was it, there was no prospect in
it. There was no prospect in teaching. What was there a prospect in,
going along in this North London train with this girl who took her at
her word?

She turned eagerly to Julia who was saying something and laughing
unconcernedly as she said it. “If you’d like to know what it is I’ve
come over for I’ll tell you at once. I’ve come over to learn Chopang’s
Funeral March. It’s all I think about. When I can play Chopang’s Funeral
March I’ll not call the Queen me aunt.”

                                   3

“Well, my dear child, I’m sure I wish I could arrange your life for ye,”
said Miss Haddie that evening. She was sitting on the edge of the
schoolroom table, having come in at ten o’clock to turn out the gas and
found Miriam sitting unoccupied. The room was cold and close with the
long-burning gas, and Miriam had turned upon her with a scornful half
laugh when she had playfully exclaimed at finding her there so late.
Miss Haddie was obviously still a little excited. She had presided at
schoolroom tea and Julia had filled the room with Dublin--the bay, the
streets, the jarveys and their outside cars, her journey, the channel
boat, her surprise at England.

“Eh, what’s the matter, Miriam, my dear?” For some time Miriam had
parried her questions, fiercely demanding that her mood should be
understood without a clue. Presently they had slid into an irritated
discussion of the respective values of sleep before and sleep after
midnight, in the midst of which Miriam had said savagely, “I wish to
goodness I knew what to do about things.”

Miss Haddie’s kindly desire gave her no relief. What did she mean but
the hopelessness of imagining that anybody could do anything about
anything. Nobody could ever understand what anyone else really wanted.
Only some people were fortunate. Miss Haddie was one of the fortunate
ones. She had her share in the school and many wealthy relatives and the
very best kind of good clothes and a good deal of strange old-fashioned
jewelry. And whatever happened there was money and her sisters and
relatives to look after her without feeling it a burden because of the
expense. And there she sat at the table looking at what she thought she
could see in another person’s life.

“If only one knew in the least what one _ought_ to do,” said Miriam
crossly.

Miss Haddie began speaking in a halting murmur, and Miriam rushed on
with flaming face. “I suppose I shall have to go on teaching all my
life, and I can’t think how on earth I’m going to do it. I don’t see how
I can work in the evenings, my eyes get so tired. If you don’t get
certificates there’s no prospect. And even if I did my throat is simply
agonies at the end of each morning.”

“Eh! my dear child! I’m sorry to hear that. Why have ye taken to that?
Is it something fresh?”

“Oh no, my throat always used to get tired. Mother’s is the same. We
can’t either of us talk for ten minutes without feeling it. It’s
perfectly awful.”

“But, my dear, oughtn’t ye to see someone--have some advice? I mean ye
ought to see a doctor.”

Miriam glanced at Miss Haddie’s concerned face and glanced away with a
flash of hatred. “Oh no. I s’pose I shall manage.”

“D’ye think yer wise--letting it go on?”

Miriam made no reply.

“Well now, my dear,” said Miss Haddie, getting down off the table, “I
think it’s time ye went to bed.”

“Phm,” said Miriam impatiently, “I suppose it is.”

Miss Haddie sat down again. “I wish I could help ye, my dear,” she said
gently.

“Oh, no one can do that,” said Miriam in a hard voice.

“Oh yes,” murmured Miss Haddie cheerfully, “there’s One who can.”

“Oh yes,” said Miriam, tugging a thread out of the fraying edge of the
table cover. “But it’s practically impossible to discover what on earth
they mean you to do.”

“N--aiche, my dear,” she said in an angry guttural, “ye’re always led.”

Miriam tugged at the thread and bit her lips.

“Why do ye suppose ye’ll go on teaching all yer life? Perhaps ye’ll
marry.”

“Oh no.”

“Ye can’t tell.”

“Oh, I never shall--in any case now.”

“Have ye quarrelled with him?”

“Oh, well, _him_,” said Miriam roundly, digging a pencil point between
the grainings of the table-cover. “It’s _they_, I think, goodness knows,
I don’t know; it’s so perfectly extraordinary.”

“You’re a very funny young lady.”

“Well, I shan’t marry _now_ anyhow.”

“Have ye refused somebody?”

“Oh well--there was someone--who went away--went to America--who was
coming back to see me when he came back----”

“Yes, my dear?”

“Well, you see, he’s handed in his checks.”

“Eh, my dear--I don’t understand,” said Miss Haddie thwarted and
frowning.

“Aw,” said Miriam, jabbing the table, “kicked the bucket.”

“My dear child, you use such strange language--I can’t follow ye.”

“Oh well, you see, he went to America. It was in New York. I heard about
it in January. He caught that funny illness. You know. Influenza--and
died.”

“Eh, my poor dear child, I’m very sorry for ye. Ye _do_ seem to have
troubles.”

“Ah well, yes, and then the queer thing is that he was really only the
friend of my real friend. And it was my real friend who told me about it
and gave me a message he sent me and didn’t like it, of course.
Naturally.”

“Well _really_, Miriam,” said Miss Haddie, blushing, with a little laugh
half choked by a cough.

“Oh yes, then of course one meets people--at dances. It’s appalling.”

“I wish I understood ye, my dear.”

“Oh well, it doesn’t make any difference now. I shall hardly ever meet
anybody now.”

Miss Haddie pondered over the table with features that worked slightly
as she made little murmuring sounds. “Eh no. Ye needn’t think that. Ye
shouldn’t think like that.... Things happen sometimes ... just when ye
least expect it.”

“Not to me.”

“Oh, things will happen to ye--never fear.... Now, my dear child, trot
along with ye off to bed.”

Miriam braced herself against Miss Haddie’s gentle shaking of her
shoulders and the quiet kiss on her forehead that followed it.

                                   4

The strengthening of her intimacy with Miss Haddie was the first of the
many changes brought to Miriam by Julia Doyle. At the beginning of the
spring term her two room mates were transferred to Julia’s care. The two
back rooms became a little hive of girls over which Julia seemed to
preside. She handled them all easily. There was rollicking and laughter
in the back bedrooms, but never any sign that the girls were “going too
far,” and their escapades were not allowed to reach across the landing.
Her large front room was, Miriam realised as the term went on, being
secretly and fiercely guarded by Julia.

The fabric of the days too had changed. All day--during the midday
constitutional when she often found Julia at her side walking in her
curious springy lounging way and took the walk in a comforting silence
resting her weary throat, during the evenings of study and the
unemployed intervals of the long Sundays--Julia seemed to come between
her and the girls. She mastered them all with her speech and laughter.
Miriam felt that when they were all together she was always in some
hidden way on the alert. She never jested with Miriam but when they were
alone, and rarely then. Usually she addressed her in a low tone and as
if half beside herself with some overpowering emotion. It was owing too
to Julia’s presence in the school that an unexpected freedom came to
Miriam every day during the hour between afternoon school and tea-time.

Persuaded by the rapid increase towards the end of the winter term of
the half-feverish exhaustion visiting her at the end of each day she had
confided in her mother, who had wept at this suggestion of an attack on
her health and called in the family doctor. “More air,” he said testily,
“air and movement.” Miriam repeated this to Miss Perne, who at once
arranged that she should be free if she chose to go out every afternoon
between school and tea-time.

At first she went into the park every day. It was almost empty during
the week at that hour. The cricket green was sparsely decked with
children and their maids. A few strollers were left along the poplar
avenue and round the asphalt-circled lake; but away on the further
slopes usually avoided in the midday walks because the girls found them
oppressive, Miriam discovered the solitary spring air. Day by day she
went as if by appointment to meet it. It was the same wandering eloquent
air she had known from the beginning of things. Whilst she walked along
the little gravel pathways winding about over the clear green slopes in
the flood of afternoon light it stayed with her. The day she had just
passed through was touched by it; it added a warm promise to the hours
that lay ahead--tea-time, the evening’s reading, the possible visit of
Miss Haddie, the quiet of her solitary room, the coming of sleep.

One day she left the pathways and strayed amongst pools of shadow lying
under the great trees. As she approached the giant trunks and the detail
of their shape and colour grew clearer her breathing quickened. She felt
her prim bearing about her like a cloak. The reality she had found was
leaving her again. Looking up uneasily into the forest of leaves above
her head she found them strange. She walked quickly back into the
sunlight, gazing reproachfully at the trees. There they were as she had
always known them; but between them and herself was her governess’ veil,
close drawn, holding them sternly away from her. The warm comforting
communicative air was round her, but she could not recover its secret.
She looked fearfully about her. To get away somewhere by herself every
day would not be enough. If that was all she could have, there would
come a time when there would be nothing anywhere. For a day or two she
came out and walked feverishly about in other parts of the park,
resentfully questioning the empty vistas. One afternoon, far away, but
coming towards her as if in answer to her question, was the figure of a
man walking quickly. For a moment her heart cried out to him. If he
would come straight on and, understanding, would walk into her life and
she could face things knowing that he was there, the light would come
back and would stay until the end--and there would be other lives, on
and on. She stood transfixed, trembling. He grew more and more distinct
and she saw a handbag and the outline of a bowler hat; a North London
clerk hurrying home to tea. With bent head she turned away and dragged
her shamed heavy limbs rapidly towards home.

                                   5

Early in May came a day of steady rain. Enveloped in a rain-cloak and
sheltered under her lowered umbrella she ventured down the hill towards
the shops. Near the railway arch the overshadowed street began to be
crowded with jostling figures. People were pouring from the city trams
at the terminus and coming out of the station entrance in a steady
stream. Hard intent faces, clashing umbrellas, the harsh snarling
monotone of the North London voice gave her the feeling of being an
intruder. Everything seemed to wonder what she was doing down there
instead of being at home in the schoolroom. A sudden angry eye above a
coarse loudly talking mouth all but made her turn to go with instead of
against the tide; but she pushed blindly on and through and presently
found herself in a quiet side street just off the station road looking
into a shop window.... “1 lb. super cream-laid boudoir note--with
envelopes--1s.” Her eyes moved about the window from packet to packet,
set askew and shining with freshness. If she had not brought so much
note-paper from home she could have bought some. Perhaps she could buy a
packet as a Christmas present for Eve and have it in her top drawer all
the time. But there was plenty of note-paper at home. She half turned to
go, and turning back fastened herself more closely against the window
meaninglessly reading the inscription on each packet. Standing back at
last she still lingered. A little blue-painted tin plate sticking out
from the side of the window announced in white letters “Carter
Paterson.” Miriam dimly wondered at the connection. Underneath it hung a
cardboard printed in ink, “Circulating Library, 2d. weekly.” This was
still more mysterious. She timidly approached the door and met the large
pleasant eye of a man standing back in the doorway.

“Is there a library here?” she said with beating heart.

She stood so long reading and re-reading half familiar titles, “Cometh
up as a Flower,” “Not like other Girls,” “The Heir of Redcliffe,” books
that she and Harriett had read and books that she felt were of a similar
type, that tea was already on the schoolroom table when she reached
Wordsworth House with an unknown volume by Mrs. Hungerford under her
arm. Hiding it upstairs, she came down to tea and sat recovering her
composure over her paper-covered “Cinq Mars,” a relic of the senior
Oxford examination now grown suddenly rich and amazing. To-day it could
not hold her. “The Madcap” was upstairs, and beyond it an unlimited
supply of twopenny volumes and Ouida. Red-bound volumes of Ouida on the
bottom shelf had sent her eyes quickly back to the safety of the upper
rows. Through the whole of tea-time she was quietly aware of a
discussion going on at the back of her mind as to who it was who had
told her that Ouida’s books were bad; evil books. She remembered her
father’s voice saying that Ouida was an extremely able woman, quite a
politician. Then of course her books were all right, for grown-up
people. It must have been someone at a dance who had made her curious
about them, someone she had forgotten. In any case, whatever they were,
there was no one now to prevent her reading them if she chose. She would
read them if she chose. Write to Eve about it first. No. Certainly not.
Eve might say “Better not, my dear. You will regret it if you do. You
won’t be the same.” Eve was different. She must not be led by Eve in any
case. She must leave off being led by Eve--or anybody. The figures
sitting round the table, bent over their books, quietly disinclined for
conversation or mischief under the shrewd eye of Miss Haddie, suddenly
looked exciting and mysterious. But perhaps the man in the shop would be
shocked. It would be impossible to ask for them; unless she could
pretend she did not know anything about them.

                                   6

For the last six weeks of the summer term she sat up night after night
propped against her upright pillow and bolster under the gas jet reading
her twopenny books in her silent room. Almost every night she read until
two o’clock. She felt at once that she was doing wrong; that the secret
novel-reading was a thing she could not confess, even to Miss Haddie.
She was spending hours of the time that was meant for sleep, for restful
preparation for the next day’s work, in a “vicious circle” of
self-indulgence. It was sin. She had read somewhere that sin promises a
satisfaction that it is unable to fulfil. But she found when the house
was still and the trams had ceased jingling up and down outside that she
grew steady and cool and that she rediscovered the self she had known at
home, where the refuge of silence and books was always open. Perhaps
that self, leaving others to do the practical things, erecting a little
wall of unapproachability between herself and her family that she might
be free to dream alone in corners had always been wrong. But it was
herself, the nearest most intimate self she had known. And the discovery
that it was not dead, that her six months in the German school and the
nine long months during which Banbury Park life had drawn a veil even
over the little slices of holiday freedom, had not even touched it,
brought her warm moments of reassurance. It was not perhaps a “good”
self, but it was herself, her own familiar secretly happy and rejoicing
self--not dead. Her hands lying on the coverlet knew it. They were again
at these moments her own old hands, holding very firmly to things that
no one might touch or even approach too nearly, things, everything, the
great thing that would some day communicate itself to someone through
these secret hands with the strangely thrilling finger-tips. Holding
them up in the gaslight she dreamed over their wisdom. They knew
everything and held their secret, even from her. She eyed them, communed
with them, passionately trusted them. They were not “artistic” or
“clever” hands. The fingers did not “taper” nor did the outstretched
thumb curl back on itself like a frond--like Nan Babington’s. They were
long, the tips squarish and firmly padded, the palm square and bony and
supple, and the large thumb joint stood away from the rest of the hand
like the thumb joint of a man. The right hand was larger than the left,
kindlier, friendlier, wiser. The expression of the left hand was less
reassuring. It was a narrower, lighter hand, more flexible, less
sensitive and more even in its touch--more smooth and manageable in
playing scales. It seemed to belong to her much less than the right; but
when the two were firmly interlocked they made a pleasant curious whole,
the right clasping more firmly, its thumb always uppermost, its fingers
separated firmly over the back of the left palm, the left hand clinging,
its fingers close together against the hard knuckles of the right.

It was only when she was alone and in the intervals of quiet reading
that she came into possession of her hands. With others they oppressed
her by their size and their lack of feminine expressiveness. No one
could fall in love with such hands. Loving her, someone might come to
tolerate them. They were utterly unlike Eve’s plump, white, inflexible
little palms. But they were her strength. They came between her and the
world of women. They would be her companions until the end. They would
wither. But the bones would not change. The bones would be laid
unchanged and wise, in her grave.

                                   7

She began her readings with Rosa Nouchette Carey. Reading her at home,
after tea by the breakfast-room fireside with red curtains drawn and the
wind busy outside amongst the evergreen shrubs under the window, it had
seemed quite possible that life might suddenly develop into the thing
the writer described. From somewhere would come an adoring man who
believed in heaven and eternal life. One would grow very good; and after
the excitement and interest had worn off one would go on, with firm
happy lips being good and going to church and making happy matches for
other girls or quietly disapproving of everybody who did not believe
just in the same way and think about good girls and happy marriages and
heaven, keeping such people outside. Smiling, wise and happy inside in
the warm; growing older, but that did not matter because the adored man
was growing older too.

Now it had all changed. The quiet house and fireside, gravity,
responsibility, a greying husband, his reading profile always dear, both
of them going on towards heaven, “all tears wiped away,” tears and
laughter of relief after death, still seemed desirable, but “women.” ...
Those awful, awful women, she murmured to herself stirring in bed. I
never thought of all the _awful_ women there would be in such a life. I
only thought of myself and the house and the garden and the man. What an
escape! Good God in heaven, what an escape! Far better to be alone and
suffering and miserable here in the school, alive....

Then there’ll be whole heaps of books, millions of books I can’t
read--perhaps nearly all the books. She took one more volume of Rosa, in
hope, and haunted its deeps of domesticity. “I’ve gone too far.” ... If
Rosa Nouchette Carey knew me, she’d make me one of the bad characters
who are turned out of the happy homes. I’m some sort of bad unsimple
woman. Oh, damn, damn, she sighed. I don’t know. Her hands seemed to
mock her, barring her way.

                                   8

Then came a series of Mrs. Hungerford--all the volumes she had not
already read. She read them eagerly, inspirited. The gabled country
houses, the sunlit twilit endless gardens, the deep orchards, the
falling of dew, the mists of the summer mornings, masses of flowers in
large rooms with carved oaken furniture, wide staircases with huge
painted windows throwing down strange patches of light on shallow
thickly carpetted stairs. These were the things she wanted; gay
house-parties, people with beautiful wavering complexions and masses of
shimmering hair catching the light, fragrant filmy diaphanous dresses;
these were the people to whom she belonged--a year or two of life like
that, dancing and singing in and out the houses and gardens; and then
marriage. Living alone, sadly estranged, in the house of a husband who
loved her and with whom she was in love, both of them thinking that the
other had married because they had lost their way in a thunderstorm or
spent the night sitting up on a mountain-top or because of a clause in a
will, and then one day both finding out the truth.... That is what is
meant by happiness ... happiness. But these things could only happen to
people with money. She would never have even the smallest share of that
sort of life. She might get into it as a governess--some of Mrs.
Hungerford’s heroines were governesses--but they had clouds of hair and
were pathetically slender and appealing in their deep mourning. She read
volume after volume, forgetting the titles--the single word ‘Hungerford’
on a cover inflamed her. Her days became an irrelevance and her evenings
a dreamy sunlit indulgence. Now and again she wondered what Julia Doyle
would think if she knew what she was reading and how it affected
her--whether she would still watch her in the way she did as she went
about her work pale and tired, whether she would go on guarding her so
fiercely?

                                   9

At last exasperated, tired of the mocking park, the mocking happy books,
she went one day to the lower shelf, and saying very calmly, “I think
I’ll take a Ouida,” drew out “Under Two Flags” with a trembling hand.
The brown-eyed man seemed to take an interminable time noting the number
of the book, and when at last she got into the air her limbs were heavy
with sadness. That night she read until three o’clock and finished the
volume the next night at the same hour, sitting upright when the last
word was read, refreshed. From that moment the red-bound volumes became
the centre of her life. She read “Moths” and “In Maremma” slowly word by
word, with an increasing steadiness and certainty. The mere sitting with
the text held before her eyes gave her the feeling of being strongly
confronted. The strange currents which came whenever she was alone and
at ease flowing to the tips of her fingers, seemed to flow into the book
as she held it and to be met and satisfied. As soon as the door was shut
and the gas alight, she would take the precious, solid trusty volume
from her drawer and fling it on her bed, to have it under her eyes while
she undressed. She ceased to read her Bible and to pray. Ouida, Ouida,
she would muse with the book at last in her hands. I want bad
things--strong bad things.... It doesn’t matter, Italy, the sky, bright
hot landscapes, things happening. I don’t care what people think or say.
I am older than anyone here in this house. I am myself.

                                   10

... If you had loved, if you loved, you could die, laughing, gasping out
your life on a battlefield, fading by inches in a fever-swamp, or living
on, going about seamed and old and ill. Whatever happened to you, if you
had cared, fearing nothing, neither death nor hell. God came. He would
welcome and forgive you. Life, struggle, pain. Happy laughter with
twisted lips--all waiting somewhere outside, beyond. It would come. It
must be made to come.

                                   11

Who was there in the world? Ted had failed. Ted belonged to the Rosa
Nouchette Carey world. He would marry one of those women. Bob knew. Bob
Greville’s profile was real. Sitting on the wide stairs at the Easter
Subscription Dance, his soft fine white hair standing up, the straight
line of polished forehead, the fine nose and compressed lips, the sharp
round chin with the three firm folds underneath it, the point of his
collar cutting across them, the keen blue eyes looking straight out
ahead, across Australia. The whole face listening. He had been listening
to her nearly all the evening. Now and again quiet questions. She could
go on talking to him whenever she liked. Go to him and go on talking,
and talking, safely, being understood. Talking on and on. But he was
old. Living old and alone in chambers in Adam Street--Adelphi.

                                   12

One day just before the end of the summer term, Miss Perne asked Miriam
to preside over the large schoolroom for the morning. The first and
second-class girls were settled there at their written examination in
English history. Rounding the schoolroom door she stood for a moment in
the doorway. The sunlight poured in through the wide bay window and the
roomful of quiet girls seemed like a field. Jessie Wheeler’s voice broke
the silence. “It’s the Hen,” she shouted gently. “It’s the blessed Hen!
Oh, _come_ on. You going to sit with us?”

“Yes. Be quiet,” said Miriam.

“Oh, thank goodness,” groaned Jessie, supported by groans and murmurs
from all over the room.

“Be quiet, girls, and get on with your papers,” said Miriam in a tone of
acid detachment from the top of her tide. She sat feeling that her arms
were round the entire roomful, that each girl struggling alone with the
list of questions was resting against her breast. “I’m going away from
them. I must be going away from them,” ran her thoughts regretfully.
“They can’t keep me. This is the utmost. I’ve won. There’ll never be
anything more than this, here.” It would always be the same--with
different girls. Certainty. Even the sunlight paid a sort of homage to
the fathomless certainty she felt. The sunlight in this little
schoolroom was telling her of other sunlights, vast and unbroken,
somewhere--coming, her own sunlights, when she should have wrenched
herself away. It was there; she glanced up again and again to watch it
breaking and splashing all over the room. It would come again, but how
differently. Quite soon. She might have spared herself all her
agonising. The girls did not know where she belonged. They were holding
her. But she would go away, to some huge open space. Leave them--ah, it
was unkind. But she had left them already in spirit.

If they could all get up together now and sing, let their voices peal
together up and up, throw all the books out of the window, they might go
on together, forward into the sunshine, but they would not want to do
that. Hardly any of them would want to do that. They would look at her
with knowing eyes, and look at the door, and stay where they were.

The room was very close. Polly Allen and Eunice Dupont, sitting together
at a little card-table in the darkest corner of the room, were
whispering. With beating heart Miriam got up and went and stood before
them. “You two are talking,” she said with her eyes on the thickness of
Polly’s shoulders as she sat in profile to the room. Eunice, opposite
her, against the wall, flashed up at her her beautiful fugitive grin as
from the darkness of a wood. History, thought Miriam. What has Eunice to
do with history, laws, Henry II, the English Constitution? “You don’t
talk,” she said coldly, feeling as she watched her that Eunice’s pretty
clothes were stripped away and she were stabbing at her soft rounded
body, “at examinations. Can’t you see that?” Eunice’s pale face grew
livid. “First because it isn’t fair and also because it disturbs other
people.” You can tell all the people who cheat by their smile, she
reflected on her way back. Eunice chuckled serenely two or three times.
“What have these North London girls to do with studies?” ... There was
not a single girl like Eunice at Barnes. Even the very pretty girls were
... refined.

                                   13

That afternoon Miriam spent her hour of leisure in calling on the Brooms
to enquire for Grace, who had been ill the whole of the term. She found
the house after some difficulty in one of a maze of little rows and
crescents just off the tram-filled main road. “She’s almost
perfect--almost perfection,” said Mrs. Philps, the Aunt Lucy Miriam had
heard of and seen in church.

They had been together in the little drawing-room talking about Grace
from the moment when Miriam was shown in to Mrs. Philps sitting darning
a duster in a low chair by the closed conservatory door. The glazed
closed door with the little strips of window on either side giving on to
a crowded conservatory made the little room seem dark. To Miriam it
seemed horribly remote. Her journey to it had been through immense
distances. Threading the little sapling-planted asphalt-pavemented
roadways between houses whose unbroken frontage was so near and so bare
as to forbid scrutiny, she felt she had reached the centre, the home and
secret of North London life. Off every tram-haunted main road, there
must be a neighbourhood like this where lived the common-mouthed
harsh-speaking people who filled the pavements and shops and walked in
the parks. To enter one of the little houses and speak there to its
inmates would be to be finally claimed and infected by the life these
people lived, the thing that made them what they were. At Wordsworth
House she was held up by the presence of the Pernes and Julia Doyle.
Here she was helpless and alone. When she had discovered the number she
sought and, crossing the little tiled pathway separated from the pathway
next door by a single iron rail, had knocked with the lacquered knocker
against the glazed and leaded door, her dreams for the future faded.
They would never be realised. They were just a part of the radiance that
shone now from the spacious houses she had lived in in the past. The
things she had felt this morning in the examination room were that, too.
They had nothing to do with the future. All the space was behind. Things
would grow less and less.

                                   14

Admitted to the dark narrowly echoing tiled passage, she stated her
errand and was conducted past a closed door and the opening of a narrow
staircase which shot steeply, carpeted with a narrow strip of
surprisingly green velvet carpeting, up towards an unlit landing and
admitted to Mrs. Philps.

“Wait a minute, Vashti,” said Mrs. Philps, holding Miriam’s hand as she
murmured her errand. “You’ll stay tea? Well, if you’re sure you can’t
I’ll not press you. Bring the biscuits and the sherry and two white
wine-glasses, Vashti. Get them now and bring them in at once. Sit down,
Miss Henderson. She’s little better than a step-girl. They’re all the
same.” Whilst she described her niece’s illness, Miriam wondered over
the immense bundle of little even black sausage-shaped rolls of hair
which stuck out, larger than her head and smoothed to a sphere by a
tightly drawn net, at the back of her skull. She was short and stout and
had bright red cheeks that shone in the gloom and rather prominent large
blue eyes that roamed as she talked, allowing Miriam to snatch
occasional glimpses of china-filled what-nots and beaded ottomans.
Presently Vashti returned clumsily with the wine, making a great bumping
and rattling round about the door. “You stupid thing, you’ve brought
claret. Don’t you know sherry when you see it? It’s at the back--behind
the Harvest Burgundy.” “I shall have to go soon,” said Miriam, relieved
at the sight of the red wine and longing to escape the sherry. Vashti
put down the tray and stood with open mouth. Even with her very high
heels she looked almost a dwarf. The room seemed less oppressive with
the strange long-necked decanter and the silver biscuit box standing on
a table in the curious greenish light. Mrs. Philps accepted the claret
and returned busily to her story, whilst Miriam sipped and glanced at a
large print in a heavy black frame leaning forward low over the small
white marble mantelpiece. It represented a young knight in armour
kneeling at an altar with joined and pointed hands held to his lips. An
angel standing in mid-air was touching his shoulder with a sword. “Why
doesn’t she kiss the top of his head,” thought Miriam as she sipped her
wine. The distant aisles and pillars of the church made the room seem
larger than it was. “I suppose they all look into that church when they
want to get away from each other,” she mused as Mrs. Philps went on with
her long sentences beginning “And Dr. Newman said--” And there was a
little mirror above a bulging chiffonier which was also an escape from
the confined space. Looking into it, she met Mrs. Philps’s glowing face
with the blue eyes widely staring and fixed upon her own, and heard her
declare, with her bunched cherry-coloured lips, that Grace was ‘almost
perfection.’ “Is she?” she responded eagerly, and Mrs. Philps elaborated
her theme. Grace, then, with her heavy body and strange hot voice, lying
somewhere upstairs in a white bed, was the most important thing in this
dark little house. “She was very near to death then,” Mrs. Philps was
saying tearfully, “very near, and when she came round from her delirium,
one of the first things she said to me as soon as she was strong enough
to whisper, was that she was perfectly certain about there being another
life.” Mrs. Philps’s voice faded and she sat with trembling lips and
eyes downcast. “_Did_ she!” Miriam almost shouted, half-rising from her
seat and turning from contemplating Mrs. Philps in the mirror to look
her full in the face. The dim green light streaming in from the
conservatory seemed like a tide that made everything in the room rock
slightly. A touch would sweep it all away and heaven would be there all
round them. “Did she,” whispered Miriam in a faint voice that shook her
chest. “‘Aunt,’ she said,” went on Mrs. Philps steadily, as the room
grew firm round Miriam and the breath she drew seemed like an early
morning breath, “‘I want to say something quickly,’ she said, ‘in case I
die. It’s that I know--for a positive fact, there is another life.’”

“What a perfectly stupendous thing,” said Miriam. “It’s so important.”

“I was much impressed. Of course, I knew she was nearly perfect. But
we’ve not been in the habit of talking about religion. I asked her if
she would like to see the vicar. ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘there’s no need. He
knows.’ I doubt if he knows as much as she does. But I didn’t make a
point of it.”

“Oh, but it’s simply wonderful. It’s much more important than anything a
vicar could say. It’s their business to say those things.”

“I don’t know about that. But she was so weak that I didn’t press it.”

“But it’s so important. What a wonderful thing to have in your family.
Did she say anything more?”

“She hasn’t returned to the subject again. She’s very weak.”

Wild clutching thoughts shook at Miriam. If only Grace could suddenly
appear in her night-gown, to be questioned. Or if she herself could stay
on there creeping humbly about in this little house, watering the
conservatory and darning dusters, being a relative of the Brooms,
devoting herself to Grace, waiting on her, hearing all she had to say.
What did it matter that the Brooms wore heavy mourning and gloated over
funerals if Grace upstairs in her room had really seen the white light
away in the distance far away beyond the noise of the world?

                              CHAPTER VII

                                   1

Harriett’s ringed fingers had finished dipping and drying the blue and
white tea-service. She sat for a moment staring ahead down-stream.
Sitting opposite her, Gerald watched her face with a half smile. Miriam
waited sitting at her side. It was the first moment of silence since she
had come home at midday. From the willow-curtained island against which
they were moored came little crepitations and flittings. Ahead of them
the river blazed gold and blue, hedged by high spacious trees.
“_Come_-to-tea, _come_-to-tea, hurryup-dear,” said a bird suddenly from
the island thicket.

“D’you know what bird that is, Gerald?” asked Miriam.

“Not from Adam,” breathed Gerald, swaying on his seat with a little
laugh. “It’s a bird. That’s all I know.”

“We’d better unmoor, silly,” muttered Harriett briskly, gathering up the
tiller ropes.

“Right, la reine.”

“Look here, let me do something this time, pull or something.”

“You sit still, my dear.”

“But I should simply love to.”

“You shall pull down-stream if you like later on when the bally sun’s
down. My advice to you now is to go and lounge in the bow.”

“Oh yes, Mim, you try it. Lie right down. It’s simply heavenly.”

The boat glided deliciously away up-stream as Miriam, relinquishing her
vision of Harriett sitting very upright in the stern in her white drill
dress, and Gerald’s lawn-shirted back and long lean arms grasping the
sculls, lay back on the bow cushions with her feet comfortably
outstretched under the unoccupied seat in front of her. Six hours ago,
shaking hands with a roomful of noisy home-going girls--and now nothing
to do but float dreamily out through the gateway of her six weeks’
holiday. The dust of the school was still upon her; the skin of her face
felt strained and tired, her hands were tired and hot, her blouse dim
with a week of school wear, and her black skirt oppressed her with its
invisible burden of grime. But she was staring up at a clean blue sky
fringed with tree-tops. She stretched herself out more luxuriously upon
her cushions. The river smoothly moving and lapping underneath the boat
was like a cradle. The soft fingers of the air caressed her temples and
moved along the outlines of her face and neck. Forty-two days ... like
this. To-morrow she would wake up a new person ... sing, and shout with
Harriett. She closed her eyes. The gently lifting water seemed to come
nearer; the invading air closed in on her. She gave herself ecstatically
to its touch; the muscles of her tired face relaxed and she believed
that she could sleep; cry or sleep.

                                   2

It was Gerald who had worked this miraculous first day for her.
“Boating” hitherto had meant large made-up parties of tennis-club
people, a fixed day, uneasy anticipations as to the weather, the
carrying of hampers of provisions and crockery, spirit lamps and
kettles, clumsy hired randans, or little fleets of stupidly competing
canoes, lack of space, heavy loads to pull, the need for ceaseless
chaff, the irritating triumphs of clever “knowing” girls in smart
clothes, the Pooles, or really beautiful people, like Nan Babington and
her cousin. Everything they said sounding wonderful and seeming to
improve the scenery; the jokes of the men, even Ted always joked all the
time, the misery of large noisy picnic teas on the grass, and in the end
great weariness and disappointment, the beauty of the river and the
trees only appearing the next day or perhaps long afterwards.

This boat was Gerald’s own private boat, a double-sculling skiff,
slender and gold-brown, beautifully fitted and with a locker containing
everything that was wanted for picnicking. They had arranged their
expedition at lunch-time, trained to Richmond, bought fruit and cakes
and got the boat’s water-keg filled by one of Redknap’s men. Gerald knew
how to do things properly. He had always been accustomed to things like
this boat. He would not care to have anything just anyhow. “Let’s do the
thing decently, la reine.” He would keep on saying that at intervals
until Harriett had learned too. How he had changed her since Easter when
their engagement had been openly allowed. The clothes he had bought for
her, especially this plain drill dress with its neat little coat. The
long black tie fastened with the plain heavy cable broach pinned in
lengthwise half-way down the ends of the tie, which reached almost to
her black belt. That was Gerald. Her shoes, the number of pairs of
light, expensive, beautifully made shoes. Her bearing, the change in her
voice, a sort of roundness about her old Harryish hardness. But she was
the same Harry, the Harry he had seen for the first time snorting with
anger over Mr. Marth’s sentimental singing at the Assembly Rooms
concert. “My hat, wasn’t la reine fuming!” He would forgive her all her
ignorance. It was her triumph. What an extraordinary time Harry would
have. Gerald was well-off. He had a private income behind his Canadian
Pacific salary. His grandfather had been a diplomatist, living abroad
nearly all the time, and his wealthy father and wealthy mother with a
large fortune of her own had lived in a large house in Chelsea, giving
dinner parties and going to the opera until nearly all the capital had
gone, both dying just in time to leave enough to bring Gerald in a small
income when he left Haileybury. And the wonderful thing was that Gerald
liked mouching about and giggling. He liked looking for hours in shop
windows and strolling on the Heath eating peppermints.

                                   3

Everything had disappeared into a soft blackness; only on the water a
faint light was left. It came and went; sometimes there was nothing but
darkness and the soft air. The small paper lantern swinging at the bow
made a little blot of light that was invisible from the stroke seat. The
boat went swiftly and easily. Miriam felt she could go on pulling for
hours at the top of her strength through the night. Leaning forward,
breasting the featureless darkness, sweeping the sculls back at the full
reach of her arms, leaning back and pressing her whole weight upwards
from the footboard against the pull of the water, her body became an
outstretched elastic system of muscles, rhythmically working against the
smooth dragging resistance of the dark water. Her sleeves were rolled
up, her collar-stud unfastened, her cool drowsy lids drooped over her
cool eyes. Each time she leaned backwards against her stroke, pressing
the footboard, the weight of her body dragged at a line of soreness
where the sculls pressed her hands, and with the final fling of the
water from the sculls a little stinging pain ran along the pads of her
palms. To-morrow there would be a row of happy blisters.

“You needn’t put more beef into it than you like, Mirry.” Gerald’s voice
came so quietly out of the darkness that it scarcely disturbed Miriam’s
ecstacy. She relaxed her swing, and letting the sculls skim and dip in
short easy strokes, sat glowing.

“I’ve never pulled a boat alone before.”

“It shows you can’t be a blue-stocking, thank the Lord,” laughed Gerald.

“Who said I was?”

“I’ve always understood you were a very wise lady, my dear.”

“Nobody told you she was a blue-stocking, silly. You invented the word
yourself.”

“I? I invented blue-stocking?”

“Yes, you, silly. It’s like your saying women never date their letters
just because your cousins don’t.”

“Vive la reine. The Lord deliver me from blue-stockings, anyhow.”

“All _right_, what _about_ it? There aren’t any here!”

“You’re not one, anyhow.”

                                   4

The next day after tea Eve arrived home from Gloucestershire.

Miriam had spent the day with Harriett. After breakfast, bounding
silently up and downstairs, they visited each room in turn, chased each
other about the echoing rooms and passages of the basement and all over
the garden. Miriam listened speechlessly to the sound of Harriett’s
heels soft on the stair carpet, ringing on the stone floors of the
basement, and the swish of her skirts as she flew over the lawn
following surrounding responding to Miriam’s wild tour of the garden.
Miriam listened and watched, her eyes and ears eagerly gathering and
hoarding visions. It could not go on. Presently some claim would be made
on Harriett and she would be alone. But when they had had their fill of
silently rushing about, Harriett piloted her into the drawing-room and
hastily began opening the piano. A pile of duets lay on the lid. She had
evidently gathered them there in readiness. Wandering about the room,
shifting the familiar ornaments, flinging herself into chair after
chair, Miriam watched her and saw that her strange quiet little snub
face was lit and shapely. Harriett, grown-up, serene and well-dressed
and going to be married in the spring, was transported by this new
coming together. When they had played the last of the duets that they
knew well, Harriett fumbled at the pages of a bound volume of operas in
obvious uncertainty. At any moment Miriam might get up and go off and
bring their sitting together on the long cretonne-covered duet stool to
an end. “Come on,” roared Miriam gently, “let’s try this”; and they
attacked the difficult pages. Miriam counted the metre, whispered it
intoned and sang it, carrying Harriett along with shouts “go _on_, go
_on_” when they had lost each other. They smashed their way along by
turns playing only a single note here and there into the framework of
Miriam’s desperate counting, or banging out cheerful masses of
discordant tones, anything to go on driving their way together through
the pages while the sunlight streamed half seen into the conservatory
and the flower-filled garden crowded up against the windows, anything to
come out triumphantly together at the end and to stop satisfied, the
sounds of the house, so long secretly known to them both, low now around
them, heard by them together, punctuating their joy. The gong sounded
for lunch. “Eve,” Miriam remembered suddenly, “Eve’s coming this
afternoon.” The thought set gladness thundering through her as she rose
from the piano. “Let’s go for a walk after lunch,” she muttered.
Harriett blushed.

“Awri,” she responded tenderly.

                                   5

The mile of gently rising roadway leading to the Heath was overarched by
huge trees. Shadowy orchards, and the silent sunlit outlying meadows and
park land of a large estate streamed gently by them beyond the trees as
they strode along through the cool leaf-scented air. They strode
speechlessly ahead as if on a pilgrimage, keeping step. Harriett’s
stylish costume had a strange unreal look in the great lane, under the
towering trees. Miriam wondered if she found it dull and was taking it
so boldly because they were walking along it together. Obviously she did
not want to talk. She walked along swiftly and erect, looking eagerly
ahead as if, when they reached the top and the Heath and the windmill,
they would find something they were both looking for. Miriam felt she
could glance about unnoticed and looked freely, as she had done so many
hundreds of times before, at the light on the distant meadows and lying
along the patches of undergrowth between the trunks of the trees. They
challenged and questioned her silently as they had always done and she
them, in a sort of passionate sulkiness. They gave no answer, but the
scents in the cool tree-filled air went on all the time offering steady
assurance, and presently as walking became an unconscious rhythm and the
question of talk or no talk had definitely decided itself, the challenge
of the light was silenced and the shaded roadway led on to paradise. Was
there anyone anywhere who saw it as she did? Anyone who looking along
the alley of white road would want to sit down in the roadway or kneel
amongst the undergrowth and shout and shout? In the north of London
there were all those harsh street voices infesting the trees and the
parks. No! they did not exist. There was no North London. Let them die.
They did not know the meaning of far-reaching meadows, park-land, deer,
the great silent Heath, the silent shoulders of the windmill against the
far-off softness of the sky. Harsh streetiness ... cunning, knowing ...
do you _blame_ me? ... or charwomanishness, smarmy; churchy or chapelish
sentimentality. Sentimentality. No need to think about them.

“Never the time and the place and the loved one all together.” Who said
that? Was it true? Dreadful. It couldn’t be. So many people had seen
moonlit gardens, together. All the happy people who were sure of each
other. “I say, Harriett,” she said at the top of her voice, bringing
Harriett curvetting in the road just in front of her. “I say, listen.”
Harriett ran up the remaining strips of road and out on to the Heath. It
was ablaze with sunlight--as the river and the trees had been
yesterday--a whole day of light and Eve on her way home, almost home.
Harriett must not know how she was rushing to Eve; with what tingling
fingers. “Oh, what I was going to ask you was whether you can see the
moonlight like it is when you are alone, when Gerald is there.”

“... It isn’t the same as when you are alone,” said Harriett quietly,
arranging the cuff of her glove.

“Do explain what you mean.”

“Well, it’s different.”

“I see. You don’t know how.”

“It’s quite different.”

“Does Gerald like the moonlight?”

“_I_ dunno. I never asked him.”

“Fancy the Roehampton people living up here all the time.”

“There’s their old washing going flip-flap over there.”

Harriett was finding out that she was back in the house with Eve.

“Let’s rush to the windmill. Let’s sing.”

“Come on; only we can’t rush and sing too.”

“Yes we can, come on.” Running up over hillocks and stumbling through
sandy gorse-grown hollows they sang a hunting song, Miriam leading with
the short galloping phrases, Harriett’s thinner voice dropping in,
broken and uncertain, with a strange brave sadness in it that went to
Miriam’s heart.

                                   6

“Eve, you look exactly like Dudley’s gracious lady in these things.
Don’t you feel like it?” Eve stopped near the landing window and stood
in her light green canvas dress with its pale green silk sleeves
shedding herself over Miriam from under her rose-trimmed white chip hat.
Miriam was carrying her light coat and all the small litter of her
journey. “Go on up,” she said, “I want to talk,” and Eve hurried on,
Miriam stumblingly following her, holding herself in, eyes and ears wide
for the sight and sound of the slender figure flitting upstairs through
the twilight. The twilight wavered and seemed to ebb and flow,
suggesting silent dawn and full midday, and the house rang with a
soundless music.

“It was Mrs. Wallace who suggested my _wearing_ all my best things for
the journey,” panted Eve; “they don’t get crushed with packing and they
needn’t get dirty if you’re careful.”

“You look exactly like Dudley’s gracious lady. You know you do. You know
it perfectly well.”

“They do seem jolly now I’m back. They don’t seem anything down there.
Just ordinary with everybody in much grander things.”

“How do you mean, grander? What sort of things?”

“Oh, all sorts of lovely white dresses.”

“It is extraordinary about all those white dresses,” said Miriam
emphatically, pushing her way after Eve into Sarah’s bedroom. “Can I
come in? I’m coming in. Sarah says it’s because men like them and she
gets simply sick of girls in white and cream dresses all over the place
in the summer, and it’s a perfect relief to see anyone in a colour in
the sun. They have red sunshades sometimes, but Sarah says that’s not
enough; you want people in colours. I wonder if there’s anything in it?”

“Of course there is,” said Sarah, releasing the last strap of Eve’s
trunk.

“They’d _all_ put on coloured things if it weren’t for that.”

“Men tell them.”

“Do they?”

“The engaged men tell them--or brothers.”

“I can’t think how you get to know these things, sober Sally.”

“Oh, you can tell.”

“Well, then, _why_ do men like silly white and cream dresses, pasty,
whitewashy clothes altogether?”

“It’s something they want; it looks different to them.”

“Sarah knows all sorts of things,” said Miriam excitedly, watching the
confusion of the room from the windows. “She says she knows why the
Pooles look down and smirk; their dimples and the line of their chins;
that men admire them looking down like that. _Isn’t_ it frightful.
Disgusting. And men don’t seem to see through them.”

“It’s those kind of girls get on best.”

Miriam sighed.

“Oh well, don’t let’s think about them. Not to-night, anyhow,” cooed
Eve.

“Sarah says there are much more awful reasons. I can’t think how she
finds them all out. Sober Sally. I know she’s right. It’s too utterly
sickening somehow, for words.”

“Mim.”

“_Pooh_--barooo, _baroooo_.”

“Mim----”

“Damnation.”

“Mimmy--Jim.”

“I said DAMNATION.”

“Oh, it’s all right. What have we got to do with horrid knowing people.”

“Well, they’re there, all the time. You can’t get away from them.
They’re all over the place. Either the knowing ones or the simpering
ones. It’s all the same in the end.”

Eve quietly began to unpack. “Oh well,” she smiled, “we’re _all_
different when there are men about to when we’re by ourselves. We all
make eyes in a way.”

“Eve! What a perfectly beastly thing to say.”

“It isn’t, my dear,” said Eve pensively. “You should see yourself; you
do.”

“Sally, _do_ I?”

                                   7

“Of course you do,” giggled Eve quietly, “as much as anybody.”

“Then I’m the most crawling thing on the face of the earth,” thought
Miriam, turning silently to the tree-tops looming softly just outside
the window; “and the worst of it is I only know it at moments now and
again.” The tree-tops serene with some happy secret cast her off, and
left her standing with groping crisping fingers unable to lift the
misery that pressed upon her heart. “God, what a filthy world! God what
a filthy world!” she muttered. “Everyone hemmed and hemmed and hemmed
into it.” Harriett came in and stepped up on to the high canopied bed.
“Ullo,” she said in general, sitting herself up tailor-fashion in the
middle of the bed so that the bright twilight fell full upon her head
and the breast and shoulders of her light silk-sleeved dress. Humming
shreds of a violin obligato, Eve rustled out layer after layer of
paper-swathed garments, to be gathered up by Sarah moving solidly about
between the wardrobe and the chest of drawers in her rather heavy boots.
There would not be any talk. But silently the room filled and
overflowed. Turning at last from her window, Miriam glanced at her
sisters and let her thoughts drop into the flowing tide. Harry, sitting
there sharp and upright in the fading light, coming in to them with her
future life streaming out behind her spreading and shining and rippling,
herself the radiant point of that wonderful life, actually there, neatly
enthroned amongst them, one of them, drawing them all with her out
towards its easy security; Eve, happy with her wardrobe of dainty
things, going fearlessly forward to some unseen fate, not troubling
about it. Sarah’s strange clean clear channel of wisdom. Where would it
lead? It would always drive straight through everything.

All these things meant that the mere simple awfulness of things
at home had changed. These three girls she had known so long as
fellow-prisoners, and who still bore at moments in their eyes, their
movements, the marks of the terrors and uncertainties amongst which
they had all grown up, were going on, out into life, scored and
scarred, but alive and changeable, able to become quite new. Memories
of strange crises and the ageing deadening shifts they had invented
to tide them over humiliating situations were here crowded in the
room together with them all. But these memories were no longer as
they had so often been, the principal thing in the room whenever they
were all gathered silently together. If Eve and Harriett had got away
from the past and now had happy eyes and mouths.... Sarah’s solid
quiet cheerfulness, now grown so large and free that it seemed even
when she was stillest to knock your mind about like something in a
harlequinade.... Why had they not all known in the past that they would
change? Why had they been so oppressed whenever they stopped to think?

Those American girls in “Little Women” and “Good Wives” made fun out of
everything. But they had never had to face real horrors and hide them
from everybody, mewed up.

                                   8

When it was nearly dark Sarah lit the gas. Harriett had gone downstairs.
Miriam lowered the Venetian blinds, shutting out the summer. To-morrow
it would be there again, waiting for them when they woke in the morning.
In her own and Harriett’s room the daylight would be streaming in
through the Madras muslin curtains, everything in the room very silent
and distinct; nothing to be heard but the little flutterings of birds
under the eaves. You could listen to it for ever if you kept perfectly
still. When you drew back the curtains the huge day would be standing
outside clear with gold and blue and dense with trees and flowers.

Sarah’s face was uneasy. She seemed to avoid meeting anyone’s eyes.
Presently she faced them, sitting on a low rocking chair with her
tightly clasped hands stretched out beyond her knees. She glanced
fearfully from one to the other and bit her lips. “What now,” thought
Miriam. The anticipated holidays disappeared. Of course. She might have
known they would. For a moment she felt sick, naked and weak. Then she
braced herself to meet the shock. I must sit tight, I must sit tight and
not show anything. Eve’s probably praying. Oh, make haste, Sally, and
get it over.

“What’s the matter, Sally?” said Eve in a low voice.

“Oh, Eve and Mim, I’m awfully sorry.”

“You’d better tell us at once,” said Eve, crimsoning.

“Haven’t you noticed anything?”

Miriam looked at Sarah’s homely prosperous shape. It couldn’t be
anything. It was a nightmare. She waited, pinching her wrist.

“What is it, Sally?” breathed Eve, tapping her green-clad knee. Clothes
and furniture and pictures ... houses full of things and people talking
in the houses and having meals and pretending, talking and smiling and
pretending.

“It’s mother.”

“What on earth do you mean, Sarah?” said Miriam angrily.

“She’s ill. Bennett took her to a specialist. There’s got to be--she’s
got to have an operation.”

Miriam drew up the blind with a noisy rattle, smiling at Eve frowning
impatiently at the noise. Driving the heavy sash up as far as it would
go, she leaned her head against the open frame. The garden did not seem
to be there. The tepid night air was like a wall, a black wall. For a
moment a splintered red light, like the light that comes from a violent
blow on the forehead, flashed along it. Sarah and Eve were talking in
strange voices, interrupting each other. It would be a relief to do
something, faint or something selfish. But she must hear what they were
saying; listen to both the voices cutting through the air of the hot
room. Propped weak-limbed against the window open-mouthed for air she
forced herself to hear, pressing her cold hands closely together. The
gas light that had seemed so bright hardly seemed to light the room at
all. Everything looked small, even Grannie’s old Chippendale bedstead
and the double-fronted wardrobe. The girls were little monkey ghosts
babbling together beside Eve’s open trunk. Did they see that it was
exactly like a grave?

                                   9

The sun shone through the apple trees, making the small half-ripe apples
look as though they were coated with enamel.

It was quite clear that if they did go away together, the four of them,
she, Eve, Gerald and Harriett to Brighton or somewhere, they would be
able to forget. You could tell that from the strange quiet easy tone of
Harriett’s and Gerald’s voices. There would be the aquarium. She
supposed they would go to the aquarium with its strange underground
smell of stagnant sea air and stare into the depths of those strange
green tanks and watch the fish flashing about like shadows or skimming
by near the front of the tank with the light full on their softly tinted
scales. Harriett sat steadily at her side on the overturned seed-box,
middle-aged and responsible, quietly discussing the details of the plan
with Gerald, cross-legged at their feet on the grass plot. They had not
said anything about the reasons for going; but of course Gerald must
know all that. He knew everything now, all about the money troubles, all
the awful things, and it seemed to make no difference to him. He made
light of it. It was humiliating to think that he had come just as things
had reached their worst, the house going to be sold, Pater and mother
and Sarah going into lodgings in September, and the maddening helpless
worry about mother and all the money for that. And yet it was a good
thing he had known them all in the old house and seen them there, even
pretending to be prosperous. And yet the house and garden was nothing to
him. Just a house and garden. Harriett’s house and garden, and he was
going to take Harriett away. The house and garden did not matter.

She glanced at the sunlit fruit trees, the thickets of the familiar
kitchen garden, the rising grass bank at the near end of the distant
lawn, the eloquent back of the large red house. He could not see all the
things there were there, all the long years, or know what it was to have
that cut away and nothing ahead but Brighton aquarium with Harriett and
Eve, and then the school again, and disgraceful lodgings in some strange
place, no friends and everybody looking down on them. She met his eyes
and they both smiled.

“Keep her perfectly quiet for the next few weeks, that’s the idea, and
when it’s all over she’ll be better than she’s ever been in her life.”

“D’you think so?”

“I don’t think, I know she will; people always are. I’ve known scores of
people have operations. It’s nothing nowadays. Ask Bennett.”

“Does he think she’ll be better?”

“Of course.”

“Did he say so?”

“Of _course_ he did.”

“Well, I s’pose we’d really better go.”

“Of course, we’re going.”

“I’m going to look for a place in a family after next term. I shall give
notice when I get back. You get more money in a family Eve says, and
home life, and if you haven’t a home they’re only too glad to have you
there in the holidays too.”

“You take my advice, my dear girl. Don’t go into a family. Eve’ll find
it out before she’s much older.”

“I must have more money.”

“Mirry’s so silly. She insists on paying her share of Brighton. Isn’t
she an owl?”

“Oh well, of course, if she’s going to make a point of spending her cash
when she needn’t she’d better find a more paying job. That’s certain
sure.”

                              CHAPTER VIII

                                   1

“You know I’m funny. I never talk to young ladies.”

Miriam looked leisurely at the man walking at her side along the
grass-covered cliff; his well-knit frame, his well-cut blue serge, the
trimness of collar and tie, his faintly blunted regular features, clean
ruddy skin and clear expressionless German blue eyes. Altogether he was
rather like a German, with his red and white and gold and blue colouring
and his small military moustache. She could imagine him snapping
abruptly in a booming chest voice, “Mit Frauen spreche ich über_haupt_
nicht.” But he spoke slowly and languidly, he was an Englishman and
somehow looked like a man who was accustomed to refined society. It was
true he never spoke at the boarding-house meals, excepting an occasional
word with his friend, and he had been obliged to join their Sunday walk
because his friend was so determined to come. Still he was not awkward
or clumsy either at table or now. Only absolutely quiet, and then saying
such a startling rather rude thing quite suddenly. One could stare at
him to discover the reason of his funny speech, because evidently he was
quite common, not a bounder but quite a common young man, speaking of
women as ‘young ladies.’ Then how on earth did he manage to look
distinguished. Oppressed and ill at ease she turned away to the
far-reaching green levels and listened to the sea tumbling heavily far
below against the cliffs. Away ahead Eve and her little companion
walking jauntily along, his tight dust-coloured curls exposed to the
full sunlight, his cane swinging round as he talked and laughed, seemed
to be turning inland towards the downs. They had seen Ovingdean in the
distance, stupid Ovingdean that everybody had talked about at breakfast,
and were finding the way. How utterly silly. They did not see how
utterly silly it was to make up your mind to “go to Ovingdean” and then
go to Ovingdean. How utterly silly everybody and everything was.

Eve looked very straight and slim and was walking happily, bending her
head a little as she always did when she was listening. Their backs
looked happy. And here she was forced to walk with this nice-looking
strange solid heavyish man and his cold insulting remark; almost the
only thing he had said since they had been alone together. It had been
rather nice walking along the top of the cliff side by side saying
nothing. They walked exactly in step and his blunted features looked
quite at ease; and she had gone easily along disposing of him with a
gentle feeling of proprietorship, and had watched the gentle swing and
movement of the landscape as they swung along. It seemed secure and
painless and was gradually growing beautiful, and then suddenly she felt
that he must have his thoughts, men were always thinking, and would be
expecting her to be animated and entertaining. Lumpishly she had begun
about the dullness of the beach and promenade on Sundays and the need to
find something to do between dinner and tea--lies. All conversation was
a lie. And somehow she had led him to his funny German remark.

“How do you mean?” she said at last anxiously. It was very rude
intruding upon him like that. He had spoken quite simply. She ought to
have laughed and changed the conversation. But it was no laughing
matter. He did not know what he was saying or how horribly it hurt. A
worldly girl would chaff and make fun of him. It was detestable to make
fun of men; just a way of flirting. But Sarah said that being rude to
men or talking seriously to them was flirting just as much. Not true.
Not true. And yet it was true, she did want to feel happy walking along
with this man, have some sort of good understanding with him, him as a
man with her as a woman. Was that flirting? If so she was just a more
solemn underhand flirt than the others, that was all. She felt very sad.
Anyhow she had asked her question now. She looked at his profile.
Perhaps he would put her off in some way. Then she would walk slower and
slower until Harriett and Gerald caught them up and come home walking
four in a row, taking Harriett’s arm. His face had remained quite
expressionless.

“Well,” he said at length in his slow well-modulated tone, “I always
take care to get out of the way when there are any young ladies about.”

“When do you mean?” _I_ didn’t ask you to come, _I_ don’t want to talk
to you you food-loving, pipe-loving, comfort-loving beast, she thought.
But it would be impossible to finish the holiday and go back to the
school with this strange statement uninvestigated.

“Well, when my sisters have young ladies in in the evening I always get
out of the way.”

Ah, thought Miriam, you are one of those men who flirt with servants and
shop-girls ... perhaps those awful women.... Either she must catch Eve
up or wait for Harriett ... not be alone any longer with this man.

“I see. You simply run away from them,” she said scornfully; “go out for
a walk or something.” A small Brixton sitting-room full of Brixton
girls--Gerald said that Brixton was something too chronic for words,
just like Clapham, and there was that joke about the man who said he
would not go to heaven even if he had the chance because of the strong
Clapham contingent that would be there--after all ...

“I go and sit in my room.”

“Oh,” said Miriam brokenly, “in the winter? Without a fire?”

Mr. Parrow laughed. “I don’t mind about that. I wrap myself up and get a
book.”

“What sort of book?”

“I’ve got a few books of my own; and there’s generally something worth
reading in ‘Tit-Bits.’”

How did he manage to look so refined and cultured? Those girls were
quite good enough for him, probably too good. But he would go on
despising them and one of them would marry him and give him beef-steak
puddings. And here he was walking by the sea in the sunlight, confessing
his suspicions and fears and going back to Brixton.

“You’ll have to marry one of those young ladies one day,” she said
abruptly.

“That’s out of the question, even if I was a marrying man.”

“Nonsense,” said Miriam, as they turned down the little pathway leading
towards the village. Poor man, how cruel to encourage him to take up
with one of those giggling dressy girls.

“D’you mean to say you’ve been never specially interested in anybody?”

“Yes. I never have.”

                                   2

Ovingdean had to be faced. They were going to look at Ovingdean and then
walk back to the boarding-house to tea. Now that she knew all about his
home-life she would not be able to meet his eyes across the table. Two
tired elm trees stood one on either side of the road at the entrance to
the village. Here they all gathered and then went forward in a strolling
party.

When they turned at last to walk home and fell again into couples as
before, Miriam searched her empty mind for something to say about the
dim, cool musty church, the strange silent deeps of it there amongst the
great green downs, the waiting chairs, the cold empty pulpit and the
little cold font, and the sunlit front of the old Grange where King
Charles had taken refuge. Mr. Parrow would know she was speaking
insincerely if she said anything about these things. There was a long,
long walk ahead. For some time they walked in silence. “D’you know
anything about architecture?” she said at last angrily ... cruel silly
question. Of course he didn’t. But men she walked with ought to know
about architecture and be able to tell her things.

“No. That’s a subject I don’t know anything about.”

“D’you like churches?”

“I don’t know that I’ve ever thought about it.”

“Then you probably don’t.”

“Oh, well, I don’t know about that. I don’t see any objection to them.”

“Then you’re probably an atheist.”

“I don’t know, I’m sure.”

“Do you go to church?”

“I can’t say I do in the usual way, unless I’m on a holiday.”

“Perhaps you go for walks instead?”

“Well, I generally stay in bed and have a rest.”

That dreadful room with the dreadful man hiding in it and reading
“Tit-Bits” and staying in bed in it on bright Sunday mornings.

How heavily they were treading on the orange and yellow faces of the Tom
Thumbs scattered over the short green grass.

“How much do you think people could marry on?” said Mr. Parrow suddenly
in a thin voice.

“Oh well, that depends on who they are.”

“I suppose it does do that.”

“And where they are going to live.”

“D’you think anyone could marry on a hundred and fifty?”

“Of course,” said Miriam emphatically, mentally shivering over the
vision of a tiresome determined cheerful woman with a thin pinched
reddish nose, an everlasting grey hat and a faded ulster going on year
after year; two or three common children she would never be able to
educate, with horribly over-developed characters. It was rather less
than the rent of their house. “Of course, everything would depend on the
woman,” she said wisely. After all a hundred and fifty, with no doubt
and anxiety about it was a very wonderful thing to have. Probably
everybody was wasteful, buying the wrong things and silly things,
ornaments and brooches and serviette rings; ... and not thinking things
out and not putting things down in books and not really enjoying
managing the hundred and fifty and always wanting more. It ought to be
quite jolly being thoroughly common and living in a small way and having
common neighbours doing the same.

“But you think if a man could find a young lady who could agree about
prices it would be possible.”

“Of course it would.”

The houses on the eastern ridges of Brighton came into sight in the
distance and stood blazing in the sunlight. There was a high half
broken-down piece of fencing at the edge of the cliff to their left a
little ahead of them, splintered and sunlit.

“How much a week is a hundred and fifty a year?”

“Three pound.”

They gravitated towards the fence and stood vaguely near it looking out
across the unruffled glare of the open sea. Why had she always thought
that the bright blue and gold ripples seen from the beach and the
promenade on jolly weekdays was the best of the sea? It was much more
lovely up there, the great expanse in its quiet Sunday loneliness. You
could see and think about far-off things instead of just dreaming on the
drowsy hot sands, seeing nothing but the rippling stripes of bright blue
and bright gold. She put her elbows on the upper bar. Mr. Parrow did the
same and they stood gazing out across the open sea--Mr. Parrow was
probably wondering how long they were going to stand silently there and
thinking about his tea ... of course; let him stand--until Eve’s voice
sounded near them in a dimpling laugh. They walked home in a row, Eve
and Mr. Green in the centre, asking riddles one against the other. Every
time Miriam spoke Mr. Parrow laughed or made some little responsive
sound.

                                   3

When Mr. Green and Mr. Parrow went back to London at the end of the week
Eve and Miriam saw them off at the station. The four went off boldly
together down the flight of white stone steps and made their way up into
the town.

“Good-bye,” called Miss Meldrum affectionately from the doorway. “I
shall send both of you a copy of the photograph.”

“It’s most generous of Miss Meldrum to go to all that expense to give us
a pleasant memento,” said Mr. Green in his small ringing voice as they
all swung out into the clean bare roadway. Miriam felt as if they were a
bit of the photograph walking up the hill, and went freely and
confidently along with a sense of being steered and guided by Miss
Meldrum. Why had she had the group taken--so odd and bold of her, having
the photographer waiting in the garden for them before they had finished
breakfast, and then laughing and talking and pushing them all about as
if they were her dearest friends. It was whilst they were all out in the
garden together, hanging about and being arranged, with the
photographer’s voice like the voice of a ventriloquist, knocking them
coldly about, that Gerald and Mr. Green had arranged about the evening
at the Crystal Palace on the last day of Miriam’s holiday. Miriam had
held back from the group, feeling nervous about her hair, there had been
no time to go to their rooms, and had forced Eve to do the same.
Harriett, with a cheerful shiny face, was sitting on the grass with
Gerald in a line with the traveller from Robinson and Cleaver’s, and his
thin-voiced sheeny-haired mocking fiancée. They all looked very small
and bald. The fiancée kept clearing her throat and rearranging her smart
feet and rattling her bangles. The traveller’s heavy waxed moustache was
crooked and his slippery blue eyes looked like the eyes of an old man.
Next to him were two newly arrived restively sneering young men, one on
either side of the saintly-faced florist’s assistant from Wigmore
Street, who sat in an easy pose with her skirt draping gracefully over
her feet and her long white chin propped on her hands. She looked
reproachfully about amongst the laughing and talking and seemed to feel
that they were all in church.

Miss Meldrum and Miss Stringer, the two bald Scotch chemists who went
out every evening to look for a comet, the pale frowning girl from
Plaistow with her mad-eyed cousin whose grey curls bunched in a
cherry-coloured velvet band seemed to say “death--death” to Miriam more
dreadfully out here amongst the greenery than when she suddenly caught
sight of them at table, sat disconnectedly in chairs behind the
squatters on the grass. At the last moment she and Eve were obliged to
fall in at the back of the group with Mr. Green and Mr. Parrow, and now
the four of them were walking in a row up the staring white hill with
the evening at the Crystal Palace ahead of them in far-away London. It
was quite right. They were being like ‘other people.’ People met and
made friends and arranged to meet again. And then things happened. It
was quite right and ordinary and safe and warm. Of course Eve and Mr.
Green must meet again. He was evidently quite determined that they
should. That was what was carrying them all so confidently up the hill.
Perhaps he would in the end turn into another Gerald. When they turned
off into the unfamiliar Brighton streets Eve and Mr. Green went on
ahead. Walking quickly in step along the narrow pavement amongst the
unconcerned Brighton townspeople they looked so small and pitiful.

                                   4

The brilliant sunlight showed up all the shabbiness of Mr. Green’s
London suit. He looked even smaller than he did in his holiday tweed.
Miriam wanted to call to them and stop them, stop Eve’s bright figure
and her mop of thickly twisted brown hair and ask her what she was
dreaming of, leave the two men there and go back, go out away alone with
Eve down to the edge of the sea. She hesitated in her walking, not
daring even to glance at her companion who was trudging along with bent
head, carrying his large brown leather bag. The street was crowded and
she manoeuvred so that everyone they met should pass between them.
Perhaps they would be able to reach the station without being obliged to
speak to each other. Parrow. It was either quite a nice name or pitiful;
like a child trying to say sparrow. Did he know that to other people it
was a strange, important sort of name, rounded like the padding in the
shoulders of his coat and his blunted features?

Nobody knew him at all well. Not a single person in the world. If he
were run over and killed on the way to the station, nobody would ever
have known anything about him.... People did die like that ... probably
most people; in a minute, alone and unknown; too late to speak.

Something was coming slowly down the middle of the roadway from amongst
the confusion of the distant traffic; an elephant--a large grey
elephant. Firmly delicately undisturbed by the noise of the street, the
huge crimson gold-braided howdah it carried on its back, and the
strange, coloured things coming along behind it, the thickening of
people on the pavement and the suddenly increased noise of the town, it
came stepping. It was wonderful. “Wise and beautiful! Wise and
beautiful!” cried a voice far away in Miriam’s brain. It’s a circus said
another voice within her.... He doesn’t know he’s in a circus.... She
hurried forward to reach Eve. Eve turned a flushed face. “I _say_; it’s
a circus,” said Miriam bitingly. The blare of a band broke out farther
up the street. People were jostled against them by a clown who came
bounding and leaping his way along the crowded pavement crying
incoherent words with a thrilling blatter of laughter. The elephant was
close upon them alone in the road space cleared by its swinging walk....
If only everyone would be quiet they could hear the soft padding of its
feet. Slowly, gently, modestly it went by followed by a crowd of smaller
things; sad-eyed monkeys on horseback in gold coatlets, sullen caged
beasts on trolleys drawn by beribboned unblinkered human-looking horses,
tall white horses pacing singly by, bearing bobbing princesses and men
in masks and cloaks.

                                   5

Here and there in the long sunlit hours of the holiday by the Brighton
sea Miriam found the far-away seaside holidays of her childhood. Going
out one afternoon with Eve and Miss Stringer walking at Eve’s side,
listening to the conversation of the two girls, she had felt when they
reached the deserted end of the esplanade and proposed turning round and
walking home, an uncontrollable desire to be alone, and had left them,
impatiently, without a word of excuse and gone on down the grey stone
steps and out among the deserted weed-grown sapphire-pooled chalk
hummocks at the foot of the cliffs. For a while she was chased by little
phrases from Miss Stringer’s quiet talking--“if you want people to be
interested in you, you must be interested in them”; “you can get on with
everybody if you make up your mind to”--and by the memory of her
well-hung clothes and her quiet regular features spoilt by the nose that
Gerald said was old-maidish, and her portmanteau full of finery,
unpacked on the first-floor landing outside the tiny room she
occupied--piles of underlinen startlingly threaded with ribbons.

At the end of half an hour’s thoughtless wandering over the weed-grown
rocks she found herself sitting on a little patch of dry silt at the end
of a promontory of sea-smoothed hummocks with the pools of bright
blue-green fringed water all about her watching the gentle rippling of
the retreating waves over the weedy lower levels. She seemed long to
have been listening and watching, her mind was full of things she felt
she would never forget, the green-capped white faces of the cliffs, a
patch of wet sand dotted with stiffly waiting seagulls, the more distant
wavelets ink black and golden pouring in over the distant hummocks, the
curious whispering ripples near her feet. She must go back. Her mind
slid out making a strange half-familiar compact with all these things.
She was theirs, she would remember them all, always. They were not alone
because she was with them and knew them. She had always known them she
reflected, remembering with a quick pang a long, unpermitted wandering
out over the cliff edge beyond Dawlish, the sun shining on pinkish sandy
scrub, the expression of the bushes; hurrying home with the big rough
spaniel that belonged to the house they had hired. She must have been
about six years old. She had gone back with a secret, telling them
nothing of the sunlight or the bushes, only of a strange lady, sitting
on the jetty as she came down over the sands, who had caught her in her
arms and horribly kissed her. She had forgotten the lady and been so
happy when she reached home that no one had scolded her. And when they
questioned her it seemed that there was only the lady to tell them
about. Her mother had looked at her and kissed her. And now she must go
back again, and say nothing. The strange promise, the certainty she felt
out here on the rocks must be taken back to the Brighton front and the
boarding-house. It would disappear as soon as she got back. Here on the
Brighton rocks it was not so strong as it had been in Dawlish. And it
would disappear more completely. There had been during the intervening
years holidays with Sarah and Eve and Harriett in seaside lodgings, over
which the curious conviction that possessed her now had spread like a
filmy veil. But now it would hardly ever come; there were always people
talking, the strangers one worked for, or the hard new people like Miss
Stringer, people who had a number of things they were always saying.

She tried to remember when the strange independent joy had begun and
thought she could trace it back to a morning in the garden at Babington,
the first thing she could remember, when she had found herself toddling
alone along the garden path between beds of flowers almost on a level
with her head and blazing in the sunlight. Bees with large bodies were
sailing heavily across the path from bed to bed, passing close by her
head and making a loud humming in the air. She could see the flowers
distinctly as she walked quickly back through the afternoon throng on
the esplanade; they were sweet williams and “everlasting” flowers, the
sweet williams smelling very strongly sweet in her nostrils, and one
sheeny brown everlasting flower that she had touched with her nose,
smelling like hot paper.

                                   6

She wanted to speak to someone of these things. Until she could speak to
someone about them she must always be alone. Always quite alone, she
thought, looking out as she walked across the busy stretch of sea
between the two piers, dotted with pleasure boats. It would be
impossible to speak to anyone about them unless one felt perfectly sure
that the other person felt about them in the same way and knew that they
were more real than anything else in the world, knew that everything
else was a fuss about nothing. But everybody else seemed to be really
interested in the fuss. That was the extraordinary thing. Miss Meldrum
presiding at the boarding-house table with her white padded hair and her
white face and bright steady brown eyes, listening to everybody and
making jokes with everybody and keeping things going, sometimes looked
as if she knew it was all a pretence, but if you spoke to her she would
think you were talking about religion and would kiss you. She had
already kissed Miriam once--for playing accompaniments to the hymns on a
Sunday evening, and made her feel as if there were some sly secret
between them. If she played the hymns again she would play them stonily
... mother would look as she always did if you suddenly began to talk
anything about things in general as if you were going to make some
confession she had been waiting for all her life. Now, with the
operation and all the uncertainty ahead she would probably cry. She
would want to explain in some way, as she had done one day long ago; how
dreadful it had been ... mother, I never feel tired, not really tired,
and however I behave I always feel frightfully happy inside ... my
blessed chick, it’s your splendid health--and the influence of the Holy
Spirit.... But I hate everybody.... What foolish nonsense. You mustn’t
think such things. You will make yourself unpopular....

She must keep her secret to herself. This Brighton life crushed it back
more than anything there had been in Germany or at Banbury Park. In
Germany she had found it again and again, and at Banbury Park, though it
could never come out and surround her, it was never far off. It lurked
just beyond the poplars in the park, at the end of the little empty
garden at twilight, amongst the books in the tightly packed bookcase. It
was here, too, in and out the sunlit days. As one opened the door of the
large, sparely furnished breakfast-room it shone for a moment in the
light pouring over the table full of seated forms; it haunted the
glittering scattered sand round about the little blank platform where
the black and white minstrels stood singing in front of their harmonium,
and poured out across the blaze of blue and gold sea ripples, when the
town band played Anitra’s Dance or the moon song from the Mikado; it lay
all along the deserted promenade and roadway as you went home to lunch,
and at night it spoke in the flump flump of the invisible sea against
the lower woodwork of the pier pavilion.

                                   7

But every day at breakfast over the eggs, bacon and tomatoes--knowing
voices began their day’s talking, the weary round of words and ugly
laughter went steadily on, narrow horrible sounds that made you feel
conscious of the insides of people’s throats and the backs of their
noses--as if they were not properly formed. The talk was like a silly
sort of battle.... Innuendo, Miriam would say to herself, feeling that
the word was too beautiful for what she wanted to express; _double
entendre_ was also unsatisfactory. These people were all enemies
pretending to be friends. Why did they pretend? Why not keep quiet? Or
all sing between their eating, different songs, it would not matter. She
and Eve and Harriett and Gerald did sometimes hum the refrains of the
nigger minstrels’ songs, or one of them would hum a scrap of a solo and
all three sing the chorus. Then people were quiet, listening and smiling
their evil smiles and Miss Meldrum was delighted. It seemed improper and
half-hearted as no one else joined in; but after the first few days the
four of them always sang between the courses at dinner. Gerald did not
seem to mind the chaffy talk and the vulgar jokes, and would generally
join in; and he said strange disturbing things about the boarders, as if
he knew all about them. And he and Harriett talked to the niggers too
and found out about them. It spoilt them when one knew that they
belonged to small London musical halls, and had wives and families and
illnesses and trouble. Gerald and Harriett did not seem to mind this.
They did not seem to mind anything out of doors. They were free and hard
and contemptuous of everyone except the niggers and a few very
stylish-looking people who sailed along and took no notice of anybody.
Gerald said extraordinary, disturbing things about the girls on the
esplanade. Miriam and Eve were interested in some of the young men they
saw. They talked about them and looked out for them. Sometimes they
exchanged glances with them. Were she and Eve also “on show”; waiting to
be given “half an inch”; would she or Eve be “perfectly awful in the
dark”? Did the young men they specially favoured with their notice say
things about them? When these thoughts buzzed about in Miriam’s brain
she wanted to take a broom and sweep everybody into the sea.... She
discovered that a single steady unexpected glance, meeting her own, from
a man who had the right kind of bearing--something right about the set
of the shoulders--could disperse all the vague trouble she felt at the
perpetual spectacle of the strolling crowds, the stiffly waiting
many-eyed houses, the strange stupid bathing-machines, and send her
gaily forward in a glad world where there was no need to be alone in
order to be happy. A second encounter was sad, shameful, ridiculous; the
man became absurd and lost his dignity; the joyous sense of looking
through him right out and away to an endless perspective, of being told
that the endlessness was there and telling that the endlessness was
there had gone; the eyes were eyes, solid and mocking and helpless--to
be avoided in future; and when they had gone, the sunset or the curious
quivering line along the horizon were no longer gateways, but hard
barriers, until by some chance one was tranquilly alone again--when the
horizon would beckon and lift and the pathway of gold across the sea at
sunset call to your feet until they tingled and ached.

Life was ugly and cruel. The secret of the sea and of the evenings and
mornings must be given up. It would fade more and more. What was life?
Either playing a part all the time in order to be amongst people in the