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woolf-years.txt
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The Years
1880
It was an uncertain spring. The weather, perpetually changing, sent clouds of blue and of purple flying over the land. In the country farmers, looking at the fields, were apprehensive; in London umbrellas were opened and then shut by people looking up at the sky. But in April such weather was to be expected. Thousands of shop assistants made that remark, as they handed neat parcels to ladies in flounced dresses standing on the other side of the counter at Whiteley’s and the Army and Navy Stores. Interminable processions of shoppers in the West end, of business men in the East, paraded the pavements, like caravans perpetually marching — so it seemed to those who had any reason to pause, say, to post a letter, or at a club window in Piccadilly. The stream of landaus, victorias and hansom cabs was incessant; for the season was beginning. In the quieter streets musicians doled out their frail and for the most part melancholy pipe of sound, which was echoed, or parodied, here in the trees of Hyde Park, here in St. James’s by the twitter of sparrows and the sudden outbursts of the amorous but intermittent thrush. The pigeons in the squares shuffled in the tree tops, letting fall a twig or two, and crooned over and over again the lullaby that was always interrupted. The gates at the Marble Arch and Apsley House were blocked in the afternoon by ladies in many-coloured dresses wearing bustles, and by gentlemen in frock coats carrying canes, wearing carnations. Here came the Princess, and as she passed hats were lifted. In the basements of the long avenues of the residential quarters servant girls in cap and apron prepared tea. Deviously ascending from the basement the silver teapot was placed on the table, and virgins and spinsters with hands that had staunched the sores of Bermondsey and Hoxton carefully measured out one, two, three, four spoonfuls of tea. When the sun went down a million little gaslights, shaped like the eyes in peacocks’ feathers, opened in their glass cages, but nevertheless broad stretches of darkness were left on the pavement. The mixed light of the lamps and the setting sun was reflected equally in the placid waters of the Round Pond and the Serpentine. Diners-out, trotting over the Bridge in hansom cabs, looked for a moment at the charming vista. At length the moon rose and its polished coin, though obscured now and then by wisps of cloud, shone out with serenity, with severity, or perhaps with complete indifference. Slowly wheeling, like the rays of a searchlight, the days, the weeks, the years passed one after another across the sky.
Colonel Abel Pargiter was sitting after luncheon in his club talking. Since his companions in the leather armchairs were men of his own type, men who had been soldiers, civil servants, men who had now retired, they were reviving with old jokes and stories now their past in India, Africa, Egypt, and then, by a natural transition, they turned to the present. It was a question of some appointment, of some possible appointment.
Suddenly the youngest and the sprucest of the three leant forward. Yesterday he had lunched with . . . Here the voice of the speaker fell. The others bent towards him; with a brief wave of his hand Colonel Abel dismissed the servant who was removing the coffee cups. The three baldish and greyish heads remained close together for a few minutes. Then Colonel Abel threw himself back in his chair. The curious gleam which had come into all their eyes when Major Elkin began his story had faded completely from Colonel Pargiter’s face. He sat staring ahead of him with bright blue eyes that seemed a little screwed up, as if the glare of the East were still in them; and puckered at the corners as if the dust were still in them. Some thought had struck him that made what the others were saying of no interest to him; indeed, it was disagreeable to him. He rose and looked out of the window down into Piccadilly. Holding his cigar suspended he looked down on the tops of omnibuses, hansom cabs, victorias, vans and landaus. He was out of it all, his attitude seemed to say; he had no longer any finger in that pie. Gloom settled on his red handsome face as he stood gazing. Suddenly a thought struck him. He had a question to ask; he turned to ask it; but his friends were gone. The little group had broken up. Elkins was already hurrying through the door; Brand had moved off to talk to another man. Colonel Pargiter shut his mouth on the thing he might have said, and turned back again to the window overlooking Piccadilly. Everybody in the crowded street, it seemed, had some end in view. Everybody was hurrying along to keep some appointment. Even the ladies in their victorias and broughams were trotting down Piccadilly on some errand or other. People were coming back to London; they were settling in for the season. But for him there would be no season; for him there was nothing to do. His wife was dying; but she did not die. She was better today; would be worse tomorrow; a new nurse was coming; and so it went on. He picked up a paper and turned over the pages. He looked at a picture of the west front of Cologne Cathedral. He tossed the paper back into its place among the other papers. One of these days — that was his euphemism for the time when his wife was dead — he would give up London, he thought, and live in the country. But then there was the house; then there were the children; and there was also . . . his face changed; it became less discontented; but also a little furtive and uneasy.
He had somewhere to go, after all. While they were gossiping he had kept that thought at the back of his mind. When he turned round and found them gone, that was the balm he clapped on his wound. He would go and see Mira; Mira at least would be glad to see him. Thus when he left the club he turned not East, where the busy men were going; nor West where his own house in Abercorn Terrace was; but took his way along the hard paths through the Green Park towards Westminster. The grass was very green; the leaves were beginning to shoot; little green claws, like birds’ claws, were pushing out from the branches; there was a sparkle, an animation everywhere; the air smelt clean and brisk. But Colonel Pargiter saw neither the grass nor the trees. He marched through the Park, in his closely buttoned coat, looking straight ahead of him. But when he came to Westminster he stopped. He did not like this part of the business at all. Every time he approached the little street that lay under the huge bulk of the Abbey, the street of dingy little houses, with yellow curtains and cards in the window, the street where the muffin man seemed always to be ringing his bell, where children screamed and hopped in and out of white chalk-marks on the pavement, he paused, looked to the right, looked to the left; and then walked very sharply to Number Thirty and rang the bell. He gazed straight at the door as he waited with his head rather sunk. He did not wish to be seen standing on that door- step. He did not like waiting to be let in. He did not like it when Mrs Sims let him in. There was always a smell in the house; there were always dirty clothes hanging on a line in the back garden. He went up the stairs, sulkily and heavily, and entered the sitting-room.
Nobody was there; he was too early. He looked round the room with distaste. There were too many little objects about. He felt out of place, and altogether too large as he stood upright before the draped fireplace in front of a screen upon which was painted a kingfisher in the act of alighting on some bulrushes. Footsteps scurried about hither and thither on the floor above. Was there somebody with her? he asked himself listening. Children screamed in the street outside. It was sordid; it was mean; it was furtive. One of these days, he said to himself . . . but the door opened and his mistress, Mira, came in.
“Oh Bogy, dear!” she exclaimed. Her hair was very untidy; she was a little fluffy-looking; but she was very much younger than he was and really glad to see him, he thought. The little dog bounced up at her.
“Lulu, Lulu,” she cried, catching the little dog in one hand while she put the other to her hair, “come and let Uncle Bogy look at you.”
The Colonel settled himself in the creaking basket-chair. She put the dog on his knee. There was a red patch — possibly eczema — behind one of its ears. The Colonel put on his glasses and bent down to look at the dog’s ear. Mira kissed him where his collar met his neck. Then his glasses fell off. She snatched them and put them on the dog. The old boy was out of spirits today, she felt. In that mysterious world of clubs and family life of which he never spoke to her something was wrong. He had come before she had done her hair, which was a nuisance. But her duty was to distract him. So she flitted — her figure, enlarging as it was, still allowed her to glide between table and chair — hither and thither; removed the fire-screen and set a light, before he could stop her, to the grudging lodging-house fire. Then she perched on the arm of his chair.
“Oh, Mira!” she said, glancing at herself in the looking-glass and shifting her hair-pins, “what a dreadfully untidy girl you are!” She loosed a long coil and let it fall over her shoulders. It was beautiful gold-glancing hair still, though she was nearing forty and had, if the truth were known, a daughter of eight boarded out with friends at Bedford. The hair began to fall of its own accord, of its own weight, and Bogy seeing it fall stooped and kissed her hair. A barrel-organ had begun to play down the street and the children all rushed in that direction, leaving a sudden silence. The Colonel began to stroke her neck. He began fumbling, with the hand that had lost two fingers, rather lower down, where the neck joins the shoulders. Mira slipped onto the floor and leant her back against his knee.
Then there was a creaking on the stairs; someone tapped as if to warn them of her presence. Mira at once pinned her hair together, got up and shut the door.
The Colonel began in his methodical way to examine the dog’s ears again. Was it eczema? or was it not eczema? He looked at the red patch, then set the dog on its legs in the basket and waited. He did not like the prolonged whispering on the landing outside. At length Mira came back; she looked worried; and when she looked worried she looked old. She began hunting about under cushions and covers. She wanted her bag, she said; where had she put her bag? In that litter of things, the Colonel thought, it might be anywhere. It was a lean, poverty-stricken-looking bag when she found it under the cushions in the corner of the sofa. She turned it upside down. Pocket handkerchiefs, screwed up bits of paper, silver and coppers fell out as she shook it. But there should have been a sovereign, she said. “I’m sure I had one yesterday,” she murmured.
“How much?” said the Colonel.
It came to one pound — no, it came to one pound eight and sixpence, she said, muttering something about the washing. The Colonel slipped two sovereigns out of his little gold case and gave them to her. She took them and there was more whispering on the landing.
“Washing . . .?” thought the Colonel, looking round the room. It was a dingy little hole; but being so much older than she was it did not do to ask questions about the washing. Here she was again. She flitted across the room and sat on the floor and put her head against his knee. The grudging fire which had been flickering feebly had died down now. “Let it be,” he said impatiently, as she took up the poker. “Let it go out.” She resigned the poker. The dog snored; the barrel organ played. His hand began its voyage up and down her neck, in and out of the long thick hair. In this small room, so close to the other houses, dusk came quickly; and the curtains were half drawn. He drew her to him; he kissed her on the nape of the neck; and then the hand that had lost two fingers began to fumble rather lower down where the neck joins the shoulders.
A sudden squall of rain struck the pavement, and the children, who had been skipping in and out of their chalk cages, scudded away home. The elderly street singer, who had been swaying along the kerb, with a fisherman’s cap stuck jauntily on the back of his head, lustily chanting “Count your blessings, Count your blessings —” turned up his coat collar and took refuge under the portico of a public house where he finished his injunction: “Count your blessings. Every One.” Then the sun shone again; and dried the pavement.
“It’s not boiling,” said Milly Pargiter, looking at the tea-kettle. She was sitting at the round table in the front drawing-room of the house in Abercorn Terrace. “Not nearly boiling,” she repeated. The kettle was an old-fashioned brass kettle, chased with a design of roses that was almost obliterated. A feeble little flame flickered up and down beneath the brass bowl. Her sister Delia, lying back in a chair beside her, watched it too. “Must a kettle boil?” she asked idly after a moment, as if she expected no answer, and Milly did not answer. They sat in silence watching the little flame on a tuft of yellow wick. There were many plates and cups as if other people were coming; but at the moment they were alone. The room was full of furniture. Opposite them stood a Dutch cabinet with blue china on the shelves; the sun of the April evening made a bright stain here and there on the glass. Over the fireplace the portrait of a red-haired young woman in white muslin holding a basket of flowers on her lap smiled down on them.
Milly took a hairpin from her head and began to fray the wick into separate strands so as to increase the size of the flame.
“But that doesn’t do any good,” Delia said irritably as she watched her. She fidgeted. Everything seemed to take such an intolerable time. Then Crosby came in and said, should she boil the kettle in the kitchen? and Milly said No. How can I put a stop to this fiddling and trifling, she said to herself, tapping a knife on the table and looking at the feeble flame that her sister was teasing with a hairpin. A gnat’s voice began to wail under the kettle; but here the door burst open again and a little girl in a stiff pink frock came in.
“I think Nurse might have put you on a clean pinafore,” said Milly severely, imitating the manner of a grown-up person. There was a green smudge on her pinafore as if she had been climbing trees.
“It hadn’t come back from the wash,” said Rose, the little girl, grumpily. She looked at the table, but there was no question of tea yet.
Milly applied her hairpin to the wick again. Delia leant back and glanced over her shoulder out of the window. From where she sat she could see the front door steps.
“Now, there’s Martin,” she said gloomily. The door slammed; books were slapped down on the hall table, and Martin, a boy of twelve, came in. He had the red hair of the woman in the picture, but it was rumpled.
“Go and make yourself tidy,” said Delia severely. “You’ve plenty of time,” she added. “The kettle isn’t boiling yet.”
They all looked at the kettle. It still kept up its faint melancholy singing as the little flame flickered under the swinging bowl of brass.
“Blast that kettle,” said Martin, turning sharply away.
“Mama wouldn’t like you to use language like that,” Milly reproved him as if in imitation of an older person; for their mother had been ill so long that both sisters had taken to imitating her manner with the children. The door opened again.
“The tray, Miss . . . ” said Crosby, keeping the door open with her foot. She had an invalid’s tray in her hands.
“The tray,” said Milly. “Now who’s going to take up the tray?” Again she imitated the manner of an older person who wishes to be tactful with children.
“Not you, Rose. It’s too heavy. Let Martin carry it; and you can go with him. But don’t stay. Just tell Mama what you’ve been doing; and then the kettle . . . the kettle. . . . ”
Here she applied her hairpin to the wick again. A thin puff of steam issued from the serpent-shaped spout. At first intermittent, it gradually became more and more powerful, until, just as they heard steps on the stairs, one jet of powerful steam issued from the spout.
“It’s boiling!” Milly exclaimed. “It’s boiling!”
They ate in silence. The sun, judging from the changing lights on the glass of the Dutch cabinet, seemed to be going in and out. Sometimes a bowl shone deep blue; then became livid. Lights rested furtively upon the furniture in the other room. Here was a pattern; here was a bald patch. Somewhere there’s beauty, Delia thought, somewhere there’s freedom, and somewhere, she thought, he is — wearing his white flower. . . . But a stick grated in the hall.
“It’s Papa!” Milly exclaimed warningly.
Instantly Martin wriggled out of his father’s armchair; Delia sat upright. Milly at once moved forward a very large rose-sprinkled cup that did not match the rest. The Colonel stood at the door and surveyed the group rather fiercely. His small blue eyes looked round them as if to find fault; at the moment there was no particular fault to find; but he was out of temper; they knew at once before he spoke that he was out of temper.
“Grubby little ruffian,” he said, pinching Rose by the ear as he passed her. She put her hand at once over the stain on her pinafore.
“Mama all right?” he said, letting himself down in one solid mass into the big armchair. He detested tea; but he always sipped a little from the huge old cup that had been his father’s. He raised it and sipped perfunctorily.
“And what have you all been up to?” he asked.
He looked round him with the smoky but shrewd gaze that could be genial, but was surly now.
“Delia had her music lesson, and I went to Whiteley’s —” Milly began, rather as if she were a child reciting a lesson.
“Spending money, eh?” said her father sharply, but not unkindly.
“No, Papa; I told you. They sent the wrong sheets —”
“And you, Martin?” Colonel Pargiter asked, cutting short his daughter’s statement. “Bottom of the class as usual?”
“Top!” shouted Martin, bolting the word out as if he had restrained it with difficulty until this moment.
“Hm — you don’t say so,” said his father. His gloom relaxed a little. He put his hand into his trouser pocket and brought out a handful of silver. His children watched him as he tried to single out one sixpence from all the florins. He had lost two fingers of the right hand in the Mutiny, and the muscles had shrunk so that the right hand resembled the claw of some aged bird. He shuffled and fumbled; but as he always ignored the injury, his children dared not help him. The shiny knobs of the mutilated fingers fascinated Rose.
“Here you are, Martin,” he said at length, handing the sixpence to his son. Then he sipped his tea again and wiped his moustaches.
“Where’s Eleanor?” he said at last, as if to break the silence.
“It’s her Grove day,” Milly reminded him.
“Oh, her Grove day,” muttered the Colonel. He stirred the sugar round and round in the cup as if to demolish it.
“The dear old Levys,” said Delia tentatively. She was his favourite daughter; but she felt uncertain in his present mood how much she could venture.
He said nothing.
“Bertie Levy’s got six toes on one foot,” Rose piped up suddenly. The others laughed. But the Colonel cut them short.
“You hurry up and get off to your prep., my boy,” he said, glancing at Martin, who was still eating.
“Let him finish his tea, Papa,” said Milly, again imitating the manner of an older person.
“And the new nurse?” the Colonel asked, drumming on the edge of the table. “Has she come?”
“Yes . . . ” Milly began. But there was a rustling in the hall and in came Eleanor. It was much to their relief; especially to Milly’s. Thank goodness, there’s Eleanor she thought, looking up — the soother, the maker-up of quarrels, the buffer between her and the intensities and strifes of family life. She adored her sister. She would have called her goddess and endowed her with a beauty that was not hers, with clothes that were not hers, had she not been carrying a pile of little mottled books and two black gloves. Protect me, she thought, handing her a teacup, who am such a mousy, downtrodden inefficient little chit, compared with Delia, who always gets her way, while I’m always snubbed by Papa, who was grumpy for some reason. The Colonel smiled at Eleanor. And the red dog on the hearthrug looked up too and wagged his tail, as if he recognised her for one of those satisfactory women who give you a bone, but wash their hands afterwards. She was the eldest of the daughters, about twenty-two, no beauty, but healthy, and though tired at the moment, naturally cheerful.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” she said. “I got kept. And I didn’t expect —” She looked at her father.
“I got off earlier than I thought,” he said hastily. “The meeting —” he stopped short. There had been another row with Mira.
“And how’s your Grove, eh?” he added.
“Oh, my Grove —” she repeated; but Milly handed her the covered dish.
“I got kept,” Eleanor said again, helping herself. She began to eat; the atmosphere lightened.
“Now tell us, Papa,” said Delia boldly — she was his favourite daughter —“what you’ve been doing with yourself. Had any adventures?”
The remark was unfortunate.
“There aren’t any adventures for an old fogy like me,” said the Colonel surlily. He ground the grains of sugar against the walls of his cup. Then he seemed to repent of his gruffness; he pondered for a moment.
“I met old Burke at the Club; asked me to bring one of you to dinner; Robin’s back, on leave,” he said.
He drank up his tea. Some drops fell on his little pointed beard. He took out his large silk handkerchief and wiped his chin impatiently. Eleanor, sitting on her low chair, saw a curious look first on Milly’s face, then on Delia’s. She had an impression of hostility between them. But they said nothing. They went on eating and drinking until the Colonel took up his cup, saw there was nothing in it, and put it down firmly with a little chink. The ceremony of tea-drinking was over.
“Now, my boy, take yourself off and get on with your prep.,” he said to Martin.
Martin withdrew the hand that was stretched towards a plate.
“Cut along,” said the Colonel imperiously. Martin got up and went, drawing his hand reluctantly along the chairs and tables as if to delay his passage. He slammed the door rather sharply behind him. The Colonel rose and stood upright among them in his tightly buttoned frock-coat.
“And I must be off too,” he said. But he paused a moment, as if there was nothing particular for him to be off to. He stood there very erect among them, as if he wished to give some order, but could not at the moment think of any order to give. Then he recollected.
“I wish one of you would remember,” he said, addressing his daughters impartially, “to write to Edward. . . . Tell him to write to Mama.”
“Yes,” said Eleanor.
He moved towards the door. But he stopped.
“And let me know when Mama wants to see me,” he remarked. Then he paused and pinched his youngest daughter by the ear.
“Grubby little ruffian,” he said, pointing to the green stain on her pinafore. She covered it with her hand. At the door he paused again.
“Don’t forget,” he said, fumbling with the handle, “don’t forget to write to Edward.” At last he had turned the handle and was gone.
They were silent. There was something strained in the atmosphere, Eleanor felt. She took one of the little books that she had dropped on the table and laid it open on her knee. But she did not look at it. Her glance fixed itself rather absent-mindedly upon the farther room. The trees were coming out in the back garden; there were little leaves — little ear-shaped leaves on the bushes. The sun was shining, fitfully; it was going in and it was going out, lighting up now this, now —
“Eleanor,” Rose interrupted. She held herself in a way that was oddly like her father’s.
“Eleanor,” she repeated in a low voice, for her sister was not attending.
“Well?” said Eleanor, looking at her.
“I want to go to Lamley’s,” said Rose.
She looked the image of her father, standing there with her hands behind her back.
“It’s too late for Lamley’s,” said Eleanor.
“They don’t shut till seven,” said Rose.
“Then ask Martin to go with you,” said Eleanor.
The little girl moved off slowly towards the door. Eleanor took up her account-books again.
“But you’re not to go alone, Rose; you’re not to go alone,” she said, looking up over them as Rose reached the door. Nodding her head in silence, Rose disappeared.
She went upstairs. She paused outside her mother’s bedroom and snuffed the sour-sweet smell that seemed to hang about the jugs, the tumblers, the covered bowls on the table outside the door. Up she went again, and stopped outside the schoolroom door. She did not want to go in, for she had quarrelled with Martin. They had quarrelled first about Erridge and the microscope and then about shooting Miss Pym’s cats next door. But Eleanor had told her to ask him. She opened the door.
“Hullo, Martin —” she began.
He was sitting at a table with a book propped in front of him, muttering to himself — perhaps it was Greek, perhaps it was Latin.
“Eleanor told me —” she began, noting how flushed he looked, and how his hand closed on a bit of paper as if he were going to screw it into a ball. “To ask you . . . ” she began, and braced herself and stood with her back against the door.
Eleanor leant back in her chair. The sun now was on the trees in the back garden. The buds were beginning to swell. The spring light of course showed up the shabbiness of the chair-covers. The large armchair had a dark stain on it where her father had rested his head, she noticed. But what a number of chairs there were — how roomy, how airy it was after that bedroom where old Mrs Levy — But Milly and Delia were both silent. It was the question of the dinner-party, she remembered. Which of them was to go? They both wanted to go. She wished people would not say, “Bring one of your daughters.” She wished they would say, “Bring Eleanor,” or “Bring Milly,” or “Bring Delia,” instead of lumping them all together. Then there could be no question.
“Well,” said Delia abruptly, “I shall . . . ”
She got up as if she were going somewhere. But she stopped. Then she strolled over to the window that looked out onto the street. The houses opposite all had the same little front gardens; the same steps; the same pillars; the same bow windows. But now dusk was falling and they looked spectral and insubstantial in the dim light. Lamps were being lit; a light glowed in the drawing-room opposite; then the curtains were drawn, and the room was blotted out. Delia stood looking down at the street. A woman of the lower classes was wheeling a perambulator; an old man tottered along with his hands behind his back. Then the street was empty; there was a pause. Here came a hansom jingling down the road. Delia was momentarily interested. Was it going to stop at their door or not? She gazed more intently. But then, to her regret, the cabman jerked his reins, the horse stumbled on; the cab stopped two doors lower down.
“Someone’s calling on the Stapletons,” she called back, holding apart the muslin blind. Milly came and stood beside her sister, and together, through the slit, they watched a young man in a top- hat get out of the cab. He stretched his hand up to pay the driver.
“Don’t be caught looking,” said Eleanor warningly. The young man ran up the steps into the house; the door shut upon him and the cab drove away.
But for the moment the two girls stood at the window looking into the street. The crocuses were yellow and purple in the front gardens. The almond trees and privets were tipped with green. A sudden gust of wind tore down the street, blowing a piece of paper along the pavement; and a little swirl of dry dust followed after. Above the roofs was one of those red and fitful London sunsets that make window after window burn gold. There was a wildness in the spring evening; even here, in Abercorn Terrace the light was changing from gold to black, from black to gold. Dropping the blind, Delia turned, and coming back into the drawing-room, said suddenly:
“Oh my God!”
Eleanor, who had taken her books again, looked up disturbed.
“Eight times eight . . . ” she said aloud. “What’s eight times eight?”
Putting her finger on the page to mark the place, she looked at her sister. As she stood there with her head thrown back and her hair red in the sunset glow, she looked for a moment defiant, even beautiful. Beside her Milly was mouse-coloured and nondescript.
“Look here, Delia,” said Eleanor, shutting her book, “you’ve only got to wait . . . ” She meant but she could not say it, “until Mama dies.”
“No, no, no,” said Delia, stretching her arms out. “It’s hopeless. . . . ” she began. But she broke off, for Crosby had come in. She was carrying a tray. One by one with an exasperating little chink she put the cups, the plates, the knives, the jam-pots, the dishes of cake and the dishes of bread and butter, on the tray. Then, balancing it carefully in front of her, she went out. There was a pause. In she came again and folded the table-cloth and moved the tables. Again there was a pause. A moment or two later back she came carrying two silk-shaded lamps. She set one in the front room, one in the back room. Then she went, creaking in her cheap shoes, to the window and drew the curtains. They slid with a familiar click along the brass rod, and soon the windows were obscured by thick sculptured folds of claret-coloured plush. When she had drawn the curtains in both rooms, a profound silence seemed to fall upon the drawing-room. The world outside seemed thickly and entirely cut off. Far away down the next street they heard the voice of a street hawker droning; the heavy hooves of van horses clopped slowly down the road. For a moment wheels ground on the road; then they died out and the silence was complete.
Two yellow circles of light fell under the lamps. Eleanor drew her chair up under one of them, bent her head and went on with the part of her work that she always left to the last because she disliked it so much — adding up figures. Her lips moved and her pencil made little dots on the paper as she added eights to sixes, fives to fours.
“There!” she said at last. “That’s done. Now I’ll go and sit with Mama.”
She stooped to pick up her gloves.
“No,” said Milly, throwing aside a magazine she had opened, “I’ll go . . . ”
Delia suddenly emerged from the back room in which she had been prowling.
“I’ve nothing whatever to do,” she said briefly. “I’ll go.”
She went upstairs, step by step, very slowly. When she came to the bedroom door with the jugs and glasses on the table outside, she paused. The sour-sweet smell of illness slightly sickened her. She could not force herself to go in. Through the little window at the end of the passage she could see flamingo-coloured curls of cloud lying on a pale-blue sky. After the dusk of the drawing- room, her eyes dazzled. She seemed fixed there for a moment by the light. Then on the floor above she heard children’s voices — Martin and Rose quarrelling.
“Don’t then!” she heard Rose say. A door slammed. She paused. Then she drew in a deep breath of air, looked once more at the fiery sky, and tapped on the bedroom door.
The nurse rose quietly; put her finger to her lips, and left the room. Mrs Pargiter was asleep. Lying in a cleft of the pillows with one hand under her cheek, Mrs Pargiter moaned slightly as if she wandered in a world where even in sleep little obstacles lay across her path. Her face was pouched and heavy; the skin was stained with brown patches; the hair which had been red was now white, save that there were queer yellow patches in it, as if some locks had been dipped in the yolk of an egg. Bare of all rings save her wedding ring, her fingers alone seemed to indicate that she had entered the private world of illness. But she did not look as if she were dying; she looked as if she might go on existing in this borderland between life and death for ever. Delia could see no change in her. As she sat down, everything seemed to be at full tide in her. A long narrow glass by the bedside reflected a section of the sky; it was dazzled at the moment with red light. The dressing-table was illuminated. The light struck on silver bottles and on glass bottles, all set out in the perfect order of things that are not used. At this hour of the evening the sick- room had an unreal cleanliness, quiet and order. There by the bedside was a little table set with spectacles, prayer-book and a vase of lilies of the valley. The flowers, too, looked unreal. There was nothing to do but to look.
She stared at the yellow drawing of her grandfather with the high light on his nose; at the photograph of her Uncle Horace in his uniform; at the lean and twisted figure on the crucifix to the right.
“But you don’t believe in it!” she said savagely, looking at her mother sunk in sleep. “You don’t want to die.”
She longed for her to die. There she was — soft, decayed but everlasting, lying in the cleft of the pillows, an obstacle, a prevention, an impediment to all life. She tried to whip up some feeling of affection, of pity. For instance, that summer, she told herself, at Sidmouth, when she called me up the garden steps. . . . But the scene melted as she tried to look at it. There was the other scene of course — the man in the frock-coat with the flower in his button-hole. But she had sworn not to think of that till bedtime. What then should she think of? Grandpapa with the white light on his nose? The prayer-book? The lilies of the valley? Or the looking-glass? The sun had gone in; the glass was dim and reflected now only a dun-coloured patch of sky. She could resist no longer.
“Wearing a white flower in his button-hole,” she began. It required a few minutes’ preparation. There must be a hall; banks of palms; a floor beneath them crowded with people’s heads. The charm was beginning to work. She became permeated with delicious starts of flattering and exciting emotion. She was on the platform; there was a huge audience; everybody was shouting, waving handkerchiefs, hissing and whistling. Then she stood up. She rose all in white in the middle of the platform; Mr Parnell was by her side.
“I am speaking in the cause of Liberty,” she began, throwing out her hands, “in the cause of Justice. . . . ” They were standing side by side. He was very pale but his dark eyes glowed. He turned to her and whispered. . . .
There was a sudden interruption. Mrs Pargiter had raised herself on her pillows.
“Where am I?” she cried. She was frightened and bewildered, as she often was on waking. She raised her hand; she seemed to appeal for help. “Where am I?” she repeated. For a moment Delia was bewildered too. Where was she?
“Here, Mama! Here!” she said wildly. “Here, in your own room.”
She laid her hand on the counterpane. Mrs Pargiter clutched it nervously. She looked round the room as if she were seeking someone. She did not seem to recognise her daughter.
“What’s happening?” she said. “Where am I?” Then she looked at Delia and remembered.
“Oh, Delia — I was dreaming,” she murmured half apologetically. She lay for a moment looking out of the window. The lamps were being lit, and a sudden soft spurt of light came in the street outside.
“It’s been a fine day . . . ” she hesitated, “for . . . ” It seemed as if she could not remember what for.
“A lovely day, yes, Mama,” Delia repeated with mechanical cheerfulness.
“ . . . for . . . ” her mother tried again.
What day was it? Delia could not remember.
“ . . . for your Uncle Digby’s birthday,” Mrs Pargiter at last brought out.
“Tell him from me — tell him how very glad I am.”
“I’ll tell him,” said Delia. She had forgotten her uncle’s birthday; but her mother was punctilious about such things.
“Aunt Eugénie —” she began.
But her mother was staring at the dressing-table. Some gleam from the lamp outside made the white cloth look extremely white.
“Another clean table-cloth!” Mrs Pargiter murmured peevishly. “The expense, Delia, the expense — that’s what worries me —”
“That’s all right, Mama,” said Delia dully. Her eyes were fixed upon her grandfather’s portrait; why, she wondered, had the artist put a dab of white chalk on the tip of his nose?
“Aunt Eugénie brought you some flowers,” she said.
For some reason Mrs Pargiter seemed pleased. Her eyes rested contemplatively on the clean table-cloth that had suggested the washing bill a moment before.
“Aunt Eugénie . . . ” she said. “How well I remember”— her voice seemed to get fuller and rounder —“the day the engagement was announced. We were all of us in the garden; there came a letter.” She paused. “There came a letter,” she repeated. Then she said no more for a time. She seemed to be going over some memory.
“The dear little boy died, but save for that . . . ” She stopped again. She seemed weaker tonight, Delia thought; and a start of joy ran through her. Her sentences were more broken than usual. What little boy had died? She began counting the twists on the counterpane as she waited for her mother to speak.
“You know all the cousins used to come together in the summer,” her mother suddenly resumed. “There was your Uncle Horace. . . . ”
“The one with the glass eye,” said Delia.
“Yes. He hurt his eye on the rocking-horse. The aunts thought so much of Horace. They would say . . . ” Here there was a long pause. She seemed to be fumbling to find the exact words.
“When Horace comes . . . remember to ask him about the dining-room door.”
A curious amusement seemed to fill Mrs Pargiter. She actually laughed. She must be thinking of some long-past family joke, Delia supposed, as she watched the smile flicker and fade away. There was complete silence. Her mother lay with her eyes shut; the hand with the single ring, the white and wasted hand, lay on the counterpane. In the silence they could hear a coal click in the grate and a street hawker droning down the road. Mrs Pargiter said no more. She lay perfectly still. Then she sighed profoundly.
The door opened, and the nurse came in. Delia rose and went out. Where am I? she asked herself, staring at a white jug stained pink by the setting sun. For a moment she seemed to be in some borderland between life and death. Where am I? she repeated, looking at the pink jug, for it all looked strange. Then she heard water rushing and feet thudding on the floor above.
“Here you are, Rosie,” said Nurse, looking up from the wheel of the sewing-machine as Rose came in.
The nursery was brightly lit; there was an unshaded lamp on the table. Mrs C., who came every week with the washing, was sitting in the armchair with a cup in her hand. “Go and get your sewing, there’s a good girl,” said Nurse as Rose shook hands with Mrs C., “or you’ll never be done in time for Papa’s birthday,” she added, clearing a space on the nursery table.
Rose opened the table drawer and took out the boot-bag that she was embroidering with a design of blue and red flowers for her father’s birthday. There were still several clusters of little pencilled roses to be worked. She spread it on the table and examined it as Nurse resumed what she was saying to Mrs C. about Mrs Kirby’s daughter. But Rose did not listen.
Then I shall go by myself, she decided, straightening out the boot- bag. If Martin won’t come with me, then I shall go by myself.
“I left my work-box in the drawing-room,” she said aloud.
“Well, then, go and fetch it,” said Nurse, but she was not attending; she wanted to go on with what she was saying to Mrs C. about the grocer’s daughter.
Now the adventure has begun, Rose said to herself as she stole on tiptoe to the night nursery. Now she must provide herself with ammunition and provisions; she must steal Nurse’s latchkey; but where was it? Every night it was hidden in a new place for fear of burglars. It would be either under the handkerchief-case or in the little box where she kept her mother’s gold watch-chain. There it was. Now she had her pistol and her shot, she thought, taking her own purse from her own drawer, and enough provisions, she thought, as she hung her hat and coat over her arm, to last a fortnight.
She stole past the nursery, down the stairs. She listened intently as she passed the schoolroom door. She must be careful not to tread on a dry branch, or to let any twig crack under her, she told herself, as she went on tiptoe. Again she stopped and listened as she passed her mother’s bedroom door. All was silent. Then she stood for a moment on the landing, looking down into the hall. The dog was asleep on the mat; the coast was clear; the hall was empty. She heard voices murmuring in the drawing-room.
She turned the latch of the front door with extreme gentleness, and closed it with scarcely a click behind her. Until she was round the corner she crouched close to the wall so that nobody could see her. When she reached the corner under the laburnum tree she stood erect.
“I am Pargiter of Pargiter’s Horse,” she said, flourishing her hand, “riding to the rescue!”
She was riding by night on a desperate mission to a besieged garrison, she told herself. She had a secret message — she clenched her fist on her purse — to deliver to the General in person. All their lives depended upon it. The British flag was still flying on the central tower — Lamley’s shop was the central tower; the General was standing on the roof of Lamley’s shop with his telescope to his eye. All their lives depended upon her riding to them through the enemy’s country. Here she was galloping across the desert. She began to trot. It was growing dark. The street lamps were being lit. The lamplighter was poking his stick up into the little trap- door; the trees in the front gardens made a wavering network of shadow on the pavement; the pavement stretched before her broad and dark. Then there was the crossing; and then there was Lamley’s shop on the little island of shops opposite. She had only to cross the desert, to ford the river, and she was safe. Flourishing the arm that held the pistol, she clapped spurs to her horse and galloped down Melrose Avenue. As she ran past the pillar-box the figure of a man suddenly emerged under the gas lamp.
“The enemy!” Rose cried to herself. “The enemy! Bang!” she cried, pulling the trigger of her pistol and looking him full in the face as she passed him. It was a horrid face: white, peeled, pock- marked; he leered at her. He put out his arm as if to stop her. He almost caught her. She dashed past him. The game was over.
She was herself again, a little girl who had disobeyed her sister, in her house shoes, flying for safety to Lamley’s shop.
Fresh-faced Mrs Lamley was standing behind the counter folding up the newspapers. She was pondering among her twopenny watches, cards of tools, toy boats and boxes of cheap stationery something pleasant, it seemed; for she was smiling. Then Rose burst in. She looked up enquiringly.
“Hullo, Rosie!” she exclaimed. “What d’you want, my dear?”
She kept her hand on the pile of newspapers. Rose stood there panting. She had forgotten what she had come for.
“I want the box of ducks in the window,” Rose at last remembered.
Mrs Lamley waddled round to fetch it.
“Isn’t it rather late for a little girl like you to be out alone?” she asked, looking at her as if she knew she had come out in her house shoes, disobeying her sister.
“Good-night, my dear, and run along home,” she said, giving her the parcel. The child seemed to hesitate on the doorstep: she stood there staring at the toys under the hanging oil lamp; then out she went reluctantly.
I gave my message to the General in person, she said to herself as she stood outside on the pavement again. And this is the trophy, she said, grasping the box under her arm. I am returning in triumph with the head of the chief rebel, she told herself, as she surveyed the stretch of Melrose Avenue before her. I must set spurs to my horse and gallop. But the story no longer worked. Melrose Avenue remained Melrose Avenue. She looked down it. There was the long stretch of bare street in front of her. The trees were trembling their shadows over the pavement. The lamps stood at great distances apart, and there were pools of darkness between. She began to trot. Suddenly, as she passed the lamp-post, she saw the man again. He was leaning with his back against the lamp-post, and the light from the gas lamp flickered over his face. As she passed he sucked his lips in and out. He made a mewing noise. But he did not stretch his hands out at her; they were unbuttoning his clothes.
She fled past him. She thought that she heard him coming after her. She heard his feet padding on the pavement. Everything shook as she ran; pink and black spots danced before her eyes as she ran up the door-steps, fitted her key in the latch and opened the hall door. She did not care whether she made a noise or not. She hoped somebody would come out and speak to her. But nobody heard her. The hall was empty. The dog was asleep on the mat. Voices still murmured in the drawing-room.
“And when it does catch,” Eleanor was saying, “it’ll be much too hot.”
Crosby had piled the coals into a great black promontory. A plume of yellow smoke was sullenly twining round it; it was beginning to burn, and when it did burn it would be much too hot.
“She can see Nurse stealing the sugar, she says. She can see her shadow on the wall,” Milly was saying. They were talking about their mother.
“And then Edward,” she added, “forgetting to write.”
“That reminds me,” said Eleanor. She must remember to write to Edward. But there would be time after dinner. She did not want to write; she did not want to talk; always when she came back from the Grove she felt as if several things were going on at the same time. Words went on repeating themselves in her mind — words and sights. She was thinking of old Mrs Levy, sitting propped up in bed with her white hair in a thick flop like a wig and her face cracked like an old glazed pot.
“Them that’s been good to me, them I remember . . . them that’s ridden in their coaches when I was a poor widder woman scrubbing and mangling —” Here she stretched out her arm, which was wrung and white like the root of a tree. “Them that’s been good to me, them I remember . . . ” Eleanor repeated as she looked at the fire. Then the daughter came in who was working for a tailor. She wore pearls as big as hen’s eggs; she had taken to painting her face; she was wonderfully handsome. But Milly made a little movement.
“I was thinking,” said Eleanor on the spur of the moment, “the poor enjoy themselves more than we do.”
“The Levys?” said Milly absent-mindedly. Then she brightened.
“Do tell me about the Levys,” she added. Eleanor’s relations with “the poor”— the Levys, the Grubbs, the Paravicinis, the Zwinglers and the Cobbs — always amused her. But Eleanor did not like talking about “the poor” as if they were people in a book. She had a great admiration for Mrs Levy, who was dying of cancer.
“Oh, they’re much as usual,” she said sharply. Milly looked at her. Eleanor’s “broody” she thought. The family joke was, “Look out. Eleanor’s broody. It’s her Grove day.” Eleanor was ashamed, but she always was irritable for some reason when she came back from the Grove — so many different things were going on in her head at the same time: Canning Place; Abercorn Terrace; this room; that room. There was the old Jewess sitting up in bed in her hot little room; then one came back here, and there was Mama ill; Papa grumpy; and Delia and Milly quarrelling about a party. . . . But she checked herself. She ought to try to say something to amuse her sister.
“Mrs Levy had her rent ready, for a wonder,” she said. “Lily helps her. Lily’s got a job at a tailor’s in Shoreditch. She came in all covered with pearls and things. They do love finery — Jews,” she added.
“Jews?” said Milly. She seemed to consider the taste of the Jews; and then to dimiss it.
“Yes,” she said. “Shiny.”
“She’s extraordinarily handsome,” said Eleanor, thinking of the red cheeks and the white pearls.
Milly smiled; Eleanor always would stick up for the poor. She thought Eleanor the best, the wisest, the most remarkable person she knew.
“I believe you like going there more than anything,” she said. “I believe you’d like to go and live there if you had your way,” she added, with a little sigh.
Eleanor shifted in her chair. She had her dreams, her plans, of course; but she did not want to discuss them.
“Perhaps you will, when you’re married?” said Milly. There was something peevish yet plaintive in her voice. The dinner-party; the Burkes’ dinner-party, Eleanor thought. She wished Milly did not always bring the conversation back to marriage. And what do they know about marriage? she asked herself. They stay at home too much, she thought; they never see anyone outside their own set. Here they are cooped up, day after day. . . . That was why she had said, “The poor enjoy themselves more than we do.” It had struck her coming back into that drawing-room, with all the furniture and the flowers and the hospital nurses. . . . Again she stopped herself. She must wait till she was alone — till she was brushing her teeth at night. When she was with the others she must stop herself from thinking of two things at the same time. She took the poker and struck the coal.
“Look! What a beauty!” she exclaimed. A flame danced on top of the coal, a nimble and irrelevant flame. It was the sort of flame they used to make when they were children, by throwing salt on the fire. She struck again, and a shower of gold-eyed sparks went volleying up the chimney. “D’you remember,” she said, “how we used to play at firemen, and Morris and I set the chimney on fire?”
“And Pippy went and fetched Papa,” said Milly. She paused. There was a sound in the hall. A stick grated; someone was hanging up a coat. Eleanor’s eyes brightened. That was Morris — yes; she knew the sound he made. Now he was coming in. She looked round with a smile as the door opened. Milly jumped up.
Morris tried to stop her.
“Don’t go —” he began.
“Yes!” she exclaimed. “I shall go. I shall go and have a bath,” she added on the spur of the moment. She left them.
Morris sat down in the chair she had left empty. He was glad to find Eleanor alone. Neither of them spoke for a moment. They watched the yellow plume of smoke, and the little flame dancing nimbly, irrelevantly, here and there on the black promontory of coals. Then he asked the usual question:
“How’s Mama?”
She told him; there was no change: “except that she sleeps more,” she said. He wrinkled his forehead. He was losing his boyish look, Eleanor thought. That was the worst of the Bar, everyone said; one had to wait. He was devilling for Sanders Curry; and it was dreary work, hanging about the Courts all day, waiting.
“How’s old Curry?” she asked — old Curry had a temper.
“A bit liverish,” said Morris grimly.
“And what have you been doing all day?” she asked.
“Nothing in particular,” he replied.
“Still Evans v. Carter?”
“Yes,” he said briefly.
“And who’s going to win?” she asked.
“Carter, of course,” he replied.
Why “of course” she wanted to ask? But she had said something silly the other day — something that showed that she had not been attending. She muddled things up; for example, what was the difference between Common Law and the other kind of law? She said nothing. They sat in silence, and watched the flame playing on the coals. It was a green flame, nimble, irrelevant.
“D’you think I’ve been an awful fool,” he asked suddenly. “With all this illness, and Edward and Martin to be paid for — Papa must find it a bit of a strain.” He wrinkled his brow up in the way that made her say to herself that he was losing his boyish look.
“Of course not,” she said emphatically. Of course it would have been absurd for him to go into business; his passion was for the Law.
“You’ll be Lord Chancellor one of these days,” she said. “I’m sure of it.” He shook his head, smiling.
“Quite sure,” she said, looking at him as she used to look at him when he came back from school and Edward had all the prizes and Morris sat silent — she could see him now — bolting his food with nobody making a fuss of him. But even while she looked, a doubt came over her. Lord Chancellor, she had said. Ought she not to have said Lord Chief Justice? She never could remember which was which: and that was why he would not discuss Evans v. Carter with her.
She never told him about the Levys either, except by way of a joke. That was the worst of growing up, she thought; they couldn’t share things as they used to share them. When they met they never had time to talk as they used to talk — about things in general — they always talked about facts — little facts. She poked the fire. Suddenly a blare of sound rang through the room. It was Crosby applying herself to the gong in the hall. She was like a savage wreaking vengeance upon some brazen victim. Ripples of rough sound rang through the room. “Lord, that’s the dressing-bell!” said Morris. He got up and stretched himself. He raised his arms and held them for a moment suspended above his head. That’s what he’ll look like when he’s the father of a family, Eleanor thought. He let his arms fall and left the room. She sat brooding for a moment; then she roused herself. What must I remember? she asked herself. To write to Edward, she mused, crossing over to her mother’s writing-table. It’ll be my table now, she thought, looking at the silver candlestick, the miniature of her grandfather, the tradesmen’s books — one had a gilt cow stamped on it — and the spotted walrus with a brush in its back that Martin had given his mother on her last birthday.
Crosby held open the door of the dining-room as she waited for them to come down. The silver paid for polishing, she thought. Knives and forks rayed out round the table. The whole room, with its carved chairs, oil paintings, the two daggers on the mantel-piece, and the handsome sideboard — all the solid objects that Crosby dusted and polished every day — looked at its best in the evening. Meat-smelling and serge-curtained by day, it looked lit up, semi- transparent in the evening. And they were a handsome family, she thought as they filed in — the young ladies in their pretty dresses of blue and white sprigged muslin; the gentlemen so spruce in their dinner jackets. She pulled the Colonel’s chair out for him. He was always at his best in the evening; he enjoyed his dinner; and for some reason his gloom had vanished. He was in his jovial mood. His children’s spirits rose as they noted it.
“That’s a pretty frock you’re wearing,” he said to Delia as he sat down.
“This old one?” she said, patting the blue muslin.
There was an opulence, an ease and a charm about him when he was in a good temper that she liked particularly. People always said she was like him; sometimes she was glad of it — tonight for instance. He looked so pink and clean and genial in his dinner-jacket. They became children again when he was in this mood, and were spurred on to make family jokes at which they all laughed for no particular reason.
“Eleanor’s broody,” said her father, winking at them. “It’s her Grove day.”
Everybody laughed; Eleanor had thought he was talking about Rover, the dog, when in fact he was talking about Mrs Egerton, the lady. Crosby, who was handing the soup, crinkled up her face because she wanted to laugh too. Sometimes the Colonel made Crosby laugh so much that she had to turn away and pretend to be doing something at the sideboard.
“Oh, Mrs Egerton —” said Eleanor, beginning her soup.
“Yes, Mrs Egerton,” said her father, and went on telling his story about Mrs Egerton, “whose golden hair was said by the voice of slander not to be entirely her own.”
Delia liked listening to her father’s stories about India. They were crisp, and at the same time romantic. They conveyed an atmosphere of officers dining together in mess jackets on a very hot night with a huge silver trophy in the middle of the table.
He used always to be like this when we were small, she thought. He used to jump over the bonfire on her birthday, she remembered. She watched him flicking cutlets dexterously on to plates with his left hand. She admired his decision, his common sense. Flicking the cutlets on to plates, he went on —
“Talking of the lovely Mrs Egerton reminds me — did I ever tell you the story of old Badger Parkes and —”
“Miss —” said Crosby in a whisper, opening the door behind Eleanor’s back. She whispered a few words to Eleanor privately.
“I’ll come,” said Eleanor, getting up.
“What’s that — what’s that?” said the Colonel, stopping in the middle of his sentence. Eleanor left the room.
“Some message from Nurse,” said Milly.
The Colonel, who had just helped himself to cutlets, held his knife and fork in his hand. They all held their knives suspended. Nobody liked to go on eating.
“Well, let’s get on with our dinner,” said the Colonel, abruptly attacking his cutlet. He had lost his geniality. Morris helped himself tentatively to potatoes. Then Crosby reappeared. She stood at the door, with her pale-blue eyes looking very prominent.
“What is it, Crosby? What is it?” said the Colonel.
“The Mistress, sir, taken worse, I think, sir,” she said with a curious whimper in her voice. Everybody got up.
“You wait. I’ll go and see,” said Morris. They all followed him out into the hall. The Colonel was still holding his dinner napkin. Morris ran upstairs; in a moment he came down again.
“Mama’s had a fainting-fit,” he said to the Colonel. “I’m going to fetch Prentice.” He snatched his hat and coat and ran down the front steps. They heard him whistling for a cab as they stood uncertainly in the hall.
“Finish your dinner, girls,” said the Colonel peremptorily. But he paced up and down the drawing-room, holding his dinner napkin in his hand.
“It has come,” Delia said to herself; “it has come!” An extraordinary feeling of relief and excitement possessed her. Her father was pacing from one drawing-room to the other; she followed him in; but she avoided him. They were too much alike; each knew what the other was feeling. She stood at the window looking up the street. There had been a shower of rain. The street was wet; the roofs were shining. Dark clouds were moving across the sky; the branches were tossing up and down in the light of the street lamps. Something in her was tossing up and down too. Something unknown seemed to be approaching. Then a gulping sound behind her made her turn. It was Milly. She was standing by the mantelpiece under the picture of the white-robed girl with the flower-basket, and the tears slid slowly down her cheeks. Delia moved towards her; she ought to go up to her and put her arms round her shoulders; but she could not do it. Real tears were sliding down Milly’s cheeks. But her own eyes were dry. She turned to the window again. The street was empty — only the branches were tossing up and down in the lamplight. The Colonel paced up and down; once he knocked against a table and said “Damn!” They heard steps moving about in the room upstairs. They heard voices murmuring. Delia turned to the window.
A hansom came trotting down the street. Morris jumped out directly the cab stopped. Dr. Prentice followed him. He went straight upstairs and Morris joined them in the drawing-room.
“Why not finish your dinner?” the Colonel said gruffly, coming to a halt and standing upright before them.
“Oh, after he’s gone,” said Morris irritably.
The Colonel resumed his pacing.
Then he stopped his pacing, and stood with his hands behind him in front of the fire. He had a braced look as if he were holding himself ready for an emergency.
We’re both acting, Delia thought to herself, stealing a glance at him, but he’s doing it better than I am.
She looked out of the window again. The rain was falling. When it crossed the lamplight it glanced in long strips of silver light.
“It’s raining,” she said in a low voice, but nobody answered her.
At last they heard footsteps on the stairs and Dr. Prentice came in. He shut the door quietly but said nothing.
“Well?” said the Colonel, facing up to him.
There was a prolonged pause.
“How d’you find her?” said the Colonel.
Dr. Prentice moved his shoulders slightly.
“She’s rallied,” he said. “For the moment,” he added.
Delia felt as if his words struck her violently a blow on the head. She sank down on the arm of a chair.
So you’re not going to die, she said, looking at the girl balanced on the trunk of a tree; she seemed to simper down at her daughter with smiling malice. You’re not going to die — never, never! she cried clenching her hands together beneath her mother’s picture.
“Now, shall we get on with our dinner?” said the Colonel, taking up the napkin which he had dropped on the drawing-room table.
It was a pity — the dinner was spoilt, Crosby thought, bringing up the cutlets from the kitchen again. The meat was dried up, and the potatoes had a brown crust on top of them. One of the candles was scorching its shade too, she observed as she put the dish down in front of the Colonel. Then she shut the door on them, and they began to eat their dinner.
All was quiet in the house. The dog slept on its mat at the foot of the stairs. All was quiet outside the sickroom door. A faint sound of snoring came from the bedroom where Martin lay asleep. In the day nursery Mrs C. and the nurse had resumed their supper, which they had interrupted when they heard sounds in the hall below. Rose lay asleep in the night nursery. For some time she slept profoundly, curled round with the blankets tight twisted over her head. Then she stirred and stretched her arms out. Something had swum up on top of the blackness. An oval white shape hung in front of her dangling, as if it hung from a string. She half opened her eyes and looked at it. It bubbled with grey spots that went in and out. She woke completely. A face was hanging close to her as if it dangled on a bit of string. She shut her eyes; but the face was still there, bubbling in and out, grey, white, purplish and pock-marked. She put out her hand to touch the big bed next hers. But it was empty. She listened. She heard the clatter of knives and the chatter of voices in the day nursery across the passage. But she could not sleep.
She made herself think of a flock of sheep penned up in a hurdle in a field. She made one of the sheep jump the hurdle; then another. She counted them as they jumped. One, two, three, four — they jumped over the hurdle. But the fifth sheep would not jump. It turned round and looked at her. Its long narrow face was grey; its lips moved; it was the face of the man at the pillar-box, and she was alone with it. If she shut her eyes there it was; if she opened them, there it was still.
She sat up in bed and cried out, “Nurse! Nurse!”
There was dead silence everywhere. The clatter of knives and forks in the next room had ceased. She was alone with something horrible. Then she heard a shuffling in the passage. It came closer and closer. It was the man himself. His hand was on the door. The door opened. An angle of light fell across the wash- stand. The jug and basin were lit up. The man was actually in the room with her . . . but it was Eleanor.
“Why aren’t you asleep?” said Eleanor. She put down her candle and began to straighten the bedclothes. They were all crumpled up. She looked at Rose. Her eyes were very bright and her cheeks were flushed. What was the matter? Had they woken her, moving about downstairs in Mama’s room?
“What’s been keeping you awake?” she asked. Rose yawned again; but it was a sigh rather than a yawn. She could not tell Eleanor what she had seen. She had a profound feeling of guilt; for some reason she must lie about the face she had seen.
“I had a bad dream,” she said. “I was frightened.” A queer nervous jerk ran through her body as she sat up in bed. What was the matter? Eleanor wondered, again. Had she been fighting with Martin? Had she been chasing cats in Miss Pym’s garden again?
“Have you been chasing cats again?” she asked. “Poor cats,” she added; “they mind it just as much as you would,” she said. But she knew that Rose’s fright had nothing to do with the cats. She was grasping her finger tightly; she was staring ahead of her with a queer look in her eyes.
“What was your dream about?” she asked, sitting down on the edge of the bed. Rose stared at her; she could not tell her; but at all costs Eleanor must be made to stay with her.
“I thought I heard a man in the room,” she brought out at last. “A robber,” she added.
“A robber? Here?” said Eleanor. “But Rose, how could a robber get into your nursery? There’s Papa, there’s Morris — they would never let a robber come into your room.”
“No,” said Rose. “Papa would kill him,” she added. There was something queer about the way she twitched.
“But what are you all doing?” she said restlessly. “Haven’t you gone to bed yet? Isn’t it very late?”
“What are we all doing?” said Eleanor. “We’re sitting in the drawing-room. It’s not very late.” As she spoke a faint sound boomed through the room. When the wind was in the right direction they could hear St. Paul’s. The soft circles spread out in the air: one, two, three, four — Eleanor counted eight, nine, ten. She was surprised that the strokes stopped so soon.
“There, it’s only ten o’clock, you see,” she said. It had seemed to her much later. But the last stroke dissolved in the air. “So now you’ll go to sleep,” she said. Rose clutched her hand.
“Don’t go, Eleanor; not yet,” she implored her.
“But tell me, what’s frightened you?” Eleanor began. Something was being hidden from her, she was sure.
“I saw . . . ” Rose began. She made a great effort to tell her the truth; to tell her about the man at the pillar-box. “I saw . . . ” she repeated. But here the door opened and Nurse came in.
“I don’t know what’s come over Rosie tonight,” she said, bustling in. She felt a little guilty; she had stayed downstairs with the other servants gossiping about the mistress.
“She sleeps so sound generally,” she said, coming over to the bed.
“Now, here’s Nurse,” said Eleanor. “She’s coming to bed. So you won’t be frightened any more, will you?” She smoothed down the bed-clothes and kissed her. She got up and took her candle.
“Good-night, Nurse,” she said, turning to leave the room.
“Good-night, Miss Eleanor,” said Nurse, putting some sympathy into her voice; for they were saying downstairs that the mistress couldn’t last much longer.
“Turn over and go to sleep, dearie,” she said, kissing Rose on the forehead. For she was sorry for the little girl who would so soon be motherless. Then she slipped the silver links out of her cuffs and began to take the hairpins out of her hair, standing in her petticoats in front of the yellow chest of drawers.
“I saw,” Eleanor repeated, as she shut the nursery door. “I saw . . . ” What had she seen? Something horrible, something hidden. But what? There it was, hidden behind her strained eyes. She held the candle slightly slanting in her hand. Three drops of grease fell on the polished skirting before she noticed them. She straightened the candle and walked down the stairs. She listened as she went. There was silence. Martin was asleep. Her mother was asleep. As she passed the doors and went downstairs a weight seemed to descend on her. She paused, looking down into the hall. A blankness came over her. Where am I? she asked herself, staring at a heavy frame. What is that? She seemed to be alone in the midst of nothingness; yet must descend, must carry her burden — she raised her arms slightly, as if she were carrying a pitcher, an earthenware pitcher on her head. Again she stopped. The rim of a bowl outlined itself upon her eyeballs; there was water in it; and something yellow. It was the dog’s bowl, she realised; that was the sulphur in the dog’s bowl; the dog was lying curled up at the bottom of the stairs. She stepped carefully over the body of the sleeping dog and went into the drawing-room.
They all looked up as she came in; Morris had a book in his hand but he was not reading; Milly had some stuff in her hand but she was not sewing; Delia was lying back in her chair, doing nothing whatever. She stood there hesitating for a moment. Then she turned to the writing-table. “I’ll write to Edward,” she murmured. She took up the pen, but she hesitated. She found it difficult to write to Edward, seeing him before her, when she took up the pen, when she smoothed the notepaper on the writing-table. His eyes were too close together; he brushed up his crest before the looking-glass in the lobby in a way that irritated her. ‘Nigs’ was her nickname for him. “My dear Edward,” she began to write, choosing ‘Edward’ not ‘Nigs’ on this occasion.
Morris looked up from the book he was trying to read. The scratching of Eleanor’s pen irritated him. She stopped; then she wrote; then she put her hand to her head. All the worries were put on her of course. Still she irritated him. She always asked questions; she never listened to the answers. He glanced at his book again. But what was the use of trying to read? The atmosphere of suppressed emotion was distasteful to him. There was nothing that anybody could do, but there they all sat in attitudes of suppressed emotion. Milly’s stitching irritated him, and Delia lying back in her chair doing nothing as usual. There he was cooped up with all these women in an atmosphere of unreal emotion. And Eleanor went on writing, writing, writing. There was nothing to write about — but here she licked the envelope and dabbed down the stamp.
“Shall I take it?” he said, dropping his book.
He got up as if he were glad to have something to do. Eleanor went to the front door with him and stood holding it open while he went to the pillar-box. It was raining gently, and as she stood at the door, breathing in the mild damp air, she watched the curious shadows that trembled on the pavement under the trees. Morris disappeared under the shadows round the corner. She remembered how she used to stand at the door when he was a small boy and went to a day school with a satchel in his hand. She used to wave to him; and when he got to the corner he always turned and waved back. It was a curious little ceremony, dropped now that they were both grown up. The shadows shook as she stood waiting; in a moment he emerged from the shadows. He came along the street and up the steps.
“He’ll get that tomorrow,” he said —“anyhow by the second post.”
He shut the door and stooped to fasten the chain. It seemed to her, as the chain rattled, that they both accepted the fact that nothing more was going to happen tonight. They avoided each other’s eyes; neither of them wanted any more emotion tonight. They went back into the drawing-room.
“Well,” said Eleanor, looking round her, “I think I shall go to bed. Nurse will ring,” she said, “if she wants anything.”
“We may as well all go,” said Morris. Milly began to roll up her embroidery. Morris began to rake out the fire.
“What an absurd fire —” he exclaimed irritably. The coals were all stuck together. They were blazing fiercely.
Suddenly a bell rang.
“Nurse!” Eleanor exclaimed. She looked at Morris. She left the room hurriedly. Morris followed her.
But what’s the good? Delia thought to herself. It’s only another false alarm. She got up. “It’s only Nurse,” she said to Milly, who was standing up with a look of alarm on her face. She can’t be going to cry again, she thought, and strolled off into the front room. Candles were burning on the mantelpiece; they lit up the picture of her mother. She glanced at the portrait of her mother. The girl in white seemed to be presiding over the protracted affair of her own deathbed with a smiling indifference that outraged her daughter.
“You’re not going to die — you’re not going to die!” said Delia bitterly, looking up at her. Her father, alarmed by the bell, had come into the room. He was wearing a red smoking-cap with an absurd tassel.
But it’s all for nothing, Delia said silently, looking at her father. She felt that they must both check their rising excitement. “Nothing’s going to happen — nothing whatever,” she said, looking at him. But at that moment Eleanor came into the room. She was very white.
“Where’s Papa?” she said, looking round. She saw him. “Come, Papa, come,” she said, stretching out her hand. “Mama’s dying. . . . And the children,” she said to Milly over her shoulder.
Two little white patches appeared above her father’s ears, Delia noticed. His eyes fixed themselves. He braced himself. He strode past them up the stairs. They all followed in a little procession behind. The dog, Delia noticed, tried to come upstairs with them; but Morris cuffed him back. The Colonel went first into the bedroom; then Eleanor; then Morris; then Martin came down, pulling on a dressing-gown; then Milly brought Rose wrapped in a shawl. But Delia hung back behind the others. There were so many of them in the room that she could get no further than the doorway. She could see two nurses standing with their backs to the wall opposite. One of them was crying — the one, she observed, who had only come that afternoon. She could not see the bed from where she stood. But she could see that Morris had fallen on his knees. Ought I to kneel too? she wondered. Not in the passage, she decided. She looked away; she saw the little window at the end of the passage. Rain was falling; there was a light somewhere that made the raindrops shine. One drop after another slid down the pane; they slid and they paused; one drop joined another drop and then they slid again. There was complete silence in the bedroom.
Is this death? Delia asked herself. For a moment there seemed to be something there. A wall of water seemed to gape apart; the two walls held themselves apart. She listened. There was complete silence. Then there was a stir, a shuffle of feet in the bedroom and out came her father, stumbling.
“Rose!” he cried. “Rose! Rose!” He held his arms with the fists clenched out in front of him.
You did that very well, Delia told him as he passed her. It was like a scene in a play. She observed quite dispassionately that the raindrops were still falling. One sliding met another and together in one drop they rolled to the bottom of the window-pane.
It was raining. A fine rain, a gentle shower, was peppering the pavements and making them greasy. Was it worth while opening an umbrella, was it necessary to hail a hansom, people coming out from the theatres asked themselves, looking up at the mild, milky sky in which the stars were blunted. Where it fell on earth, on fields and gardens, it drew up the smell of earth. Here a drop poised on a grass-blade; there filled the cup of a wild flower, till the breeze stirred and the rain was spilt. Was it worth while to shelter under the hawthorn, under the hedge, the sheep seemed to question; and the cows, already turned out in the grey fields, under the dim hedges, munched on, sleepily chewing with raindrops on their hides. Down on the roofs it fell — here in Westminster, there in the Ladbroke Grove; on the wide sea a million points pricked the blue monster like an innumerable shower bath. Over the vast domes, the soaring spires of slumbering University cities, over the leaded libraries, and the museums, now shrouded in brown holland, the gentle rain slid down, till, reaching the mouths of those fantastic laughers, the many-clawed gargoyles, it splayed out in a thousand odd indentations. A drunken man slipping in a narrow passage outside the public house, cursed it. Women in childbirth heard the doctor say to the midwife, “It’s raining.” And the walloping Oxford bells, turning over and over like slow porpoises in a sea of oil, contemplatively intoned their musical incantation. The fine rain, the gentle rain, poured equally over the mitred and the bareheaded with an impartiality which suggested that the god of rain, if there were a god, was thinking Let it not be restricted to the very wise, the very great, but let all breathing kind, the munchers and chewers, the ignorant, the unhappy, those who toil in the furnace making innumerable copies of the same pot, those who bore red hot minds through contorted letters, and also Mrs Jones in the alley, share my bounty.
It was raining in Oxford. The rain fell gently, persistently, making a little chuckling and burbling noise in the gutters. Edward, leaning out of the window, could still see the trees in the college garden, whitened by the falling rain. Save for the rustle of the trees and the rain falling, it was perfectly quiet. A damp, earthy smell came up from the wet ground. Lamps were being lit here and there in the dark mass of the college; and there was a pale-yellowish mound in one corner where lamplight fell upon a flowering tree. The grass was becoming invisible, fluid, grey, like water.
He drew in a long breath of satisfaction. Of all the moments in the day he liked this best, when he stood and looked out into the garden. He breathed in again the cool damp air, and then straightened himself and turned back into the room. He was working very hard. His day was parcelled out on the advice of his tutor into hours and half-hours; but he still had five minutes before he need begin. He turned up the reading-lamp. It was partly the green light that made him look a little pale and thin, but he was very handsome. With his clear-cut features and the fair hair that he brushed up with a flick of his fingers into a crest, he looked like a Greek boy on a frieze. He smiled. He was thinking as he watched the rain how, after the interview between his father and his tutor — when old Harbottle had said “Your son has a chance”— the old boy had insisted upon looking up the rooms that his own father had had when his father was at college. They had burst in and found a chap called Thompson on his knees blowing up the fire with a bellows.
“My father had these rooms, sir,” the Colonel had said, by way of apology. The young man had got very red and said, “Don’t mention it.” Edward smiled. “Don’t mention it,” he repeated. It was time to begin. He turned the lamp a little higher. When the lamp was turned higher he saw his work cut out in a sharp circle of bright light from the surrounding dimness. He looked at the textbooks, at the dictionaries lying before him. He always had some doubts before he began. His father would be frightfully cut-up if he failed. His heart was set on it. He had sent him a dozen of fine old port “by way of a stirrup-cup,” so he said. But after all Marsham was in for it; then there was the clever little Jew-boy from Birmingham — but it was time to begin. One after another the bells of Oxford began pushing their slow chimes through the air. They tolled ponderously, unequally, as if they had to roll the air out of their way and the air was heavy. He loved the sound of the bells. He listened till the last stroke had struck; then pulled his chair to the table; time was up; he must work now.
A little dint sharpened between his brows. He frowned as he read. He read; and made a note; then he read again. All sounds were blotted out. He saw nothing but the Greek in front of him. But as he read, his brain gradually warmed; he was conscious of something quickening and tightening in his forehead. He caught phrase after phrase exactly, firmly, more exactly, he noted, making a brief note in the margin, than the night before. Little negligible words now revealed shade of meaning which altered the meaning. He made another note; that was the meaning. His own dexterity in catching the phrase plumb in the middle gave him a thrill of excitement. There it was, clean and entire. But he must be precise; exact; even his little scribbled notes must be clear as print. He turned to this book; then that book. Then he leant back to see, with his eyes shut. He must let nothing dwindle off into vagueness. The clocks began striking. He listened. The clocks went on striking. The lines that had graved themselves on his face slackened; he leant back; his muscles relaxed; he looked up from his books into the dimness. He felt as if he had thrown himself down on the turf after running a race. But for a moment it seemed to him that he was still running; his mind went on without the book. It travelled by itself without impediments through a world of pure meaning; but gradually it lost its meaning. The books stood out on the wall: he saw the cream-coloured panels; a bunch of poppies in a blue vase. The last of the strokes had sounded. He gave a sigh and rose from the table.
He stood by the window again. It was raining, but the whiteness had gone. Save for a wet leaf shining here and there, the garden was all dark now — the yellow mound of the flowering tree had vanished. The college buildings lay round the garden in a low couched mass, here red-stained, here yellow-stained, where lights burnt behind curtains; and there lay the chapel, huddling its bulk against the sky which, because of the rain, seemed to tremble slightly. But it was no longer silent. He listened; there was no sound in particular; but, as he stood looking out, the building hummed with life. There was a sudden roar of laughter; then the tinkle of a piano; then a nondescript clatter and chatter — of china partly; then again the sound of rain falling, and the gutters chuckling and burbling as they sucked up the water. He turned back into the room.
It had grown chilly; the fire was almost out; only a little red glowed under the grey ash. Opportunely he remembered his father’s gift — the wine that had come that morning. He went to the side table and poured himself out a glass of port. As he raised it against the light he smiled. He saw again his father’s hand with two smooth knobs instead of fingers holding the glass, as he always held the glass, to the light before he drank.
“You can’t drive a bayonet through a chap’s body in cold blood,” he remembered him saying.
“And you can’t go in for an exam. without drinking,” said Edward. He hesitated; he held the glass to the light in imitation of his father. Then he sipped. He set the glass on the table in front of him. He turned again to the Antigone. He read; then he sipped; then he read; then he sipped again. A soft glow spread over his spine at the nape of his neck. The wine seemed to press open little dividing doors in his brain. And whether it was the wine or the words or both, a luminous shell formed, a purple fume, from which out stepped a Greek girl; yet she was English. There she stood among the marble and the asphodel, yet there she was among the Morris wall-papers and the cabinets — his cousin Kitty, as he had seen her last time he dined at the lodge. She was both of them — Antigone and Kitty; here in the book; there in the room; lit up, risen, like a purple flower. No, he exclaimed, not in the least like a flower! For if ever a girl held herself upright, lived, laughed and breathed, it was Kitty, in the white and blue dress that she had worn last time he dined at the Lodge. He crossed to the window. Red squares showed through the trees. There was a party at the Lodge. Who was she talking to? What was she saying? He went back to the table.
“Oh, damn!” he exclaimed, prodding the paper with his pencil. The point broke. Then there was a tap at the door, a sliding tap, not a commanding tap, the tap of one who passes, not of one who comes in. He went and opened the door. There on the stair above loomed the figure of a huge young man who was leaning over the banisters. “Come in,” said Edward.
The huge young man came slowly down the stairs. He was very large. His eyes, which were prominent, became apprehensive at the sight of the books on the table. He looked at the books on the table. They were Greek. But there was wine after all.
Edward poured out wine. Beside Gibbs he looked what Eleanor called ‘finicky.’ He felt the contrast himself. The hand with which he lifted his glass was like a girl’s beside Gibbs’s great red paw. Gibbs’s hand was burnt bright scarlet; it was like a piece of raw meat.
Hunting was the subject they had in common. They talked about hunting. Edward leant back and let Gibbs do the talking. It was all very pleasant, listening to Gibbs, riding through these English lanes. He was talking about cubbing in September; and a raw but handy hack. He was saying, “You remember that farm on the right as you go up to Stapleys? and the pretty girl?”— he winked —“worse luck, she’s married to a keeper.” He was saying — Edward watched him gulping down his port — how he wished this damned summer were over. Then, again, he was telling the old story about the spaniel bitch. “You’ll come and stop with us in September,” he was saying when the door opened so silently that Gibbs did not hear it, and in glided another man — quite another man.
It was Ashley who came in. He was the very opposite of Gibbs. He was neither tall nor short, neither dark nor fair. But he was not negligible — far from it. It was partly the way he moved, as if chair and table rayed out some influence which he could feel by means of some invisible antennae, or whiskers, like a cat. Now he sank down, cautiously, gingerly, and looked at the table and half read a line in a book. Gibbs stopped in the middle of his sentence.
“Hullo, Ashley,” he said rather curtly. He stretched out and poured himself another glass of the Colonel’s port. Now the decanter was empty.
“Sorry,” he said, glancing at Ashley.
“Don’t open another bottle for me,” said Ashley quickly. His voice sounded a little squeaky, as if he were ill at ease.
“Oh, but we shall want some more too,” said Edward casually. He went into the dining-room to fetch it.
“Damned awkward,” he reflected as he stooped among the bottles. It meant, he reflected grimly as he chose his bottle, another row with Ashley, and he had had two rows with Ashley about Gibbs already this term.
He went back with the bottle and sat down on a low stool between them. He uncorked the wine and poured it out. They both looked at him, as he sat between them, admiringly. The vanity, which Eleanor always laughed at in her brother, was flattered. He liked to feel their eyes on him. And yet he was at his ease with both of them, he thought; the thought pleased him; he could talk hunting with Gibbs and books with Ashley. But Ashley could only talk about books, and Gibbs — he smiled — could only talk about girls. Girls and horses. He poured out three glasses of wine.
Ashley sipped gingerly, and Gibbs, with his great red hands on the glass, gulped rather. They talked about races; then they talked about examinations. Then Ashley, glancing at the books on the table, said:
“And what about you?”
“I’ve not the ghost of a chance,” said Edward. His indifference was affected. He pretended to despise examinations; but it was pretence. Gibbs was taken in by him; but Ashley saw through him. He often caught Edward out in small vanities like this; but they only served to endear him the more. How beautiful he looks, he was thinking: there he sat between them with the light falling on the top of his fair hair; like a Greek boy; strong; yet in some way, weak, needing his protection.
He ought to be rescued from brutes like Gibbs, he thought savagely. For how Edward could tolerate that clumsy brute, he thought looking at him, who always seemed to smell of beer and horses (he was listening to him) Ashley could not conceive. As he came in he had caught the tail of an infuriating sentence — of a sentence that seemed to show that they had made some plan together.
“Well, then, I’ll see Storey about that hack,” Gibbs was saying now, as if he were finishing some private talk that they had been having before he came in. A spasm of jealousy ran through Ashley. To hide it, he stretched out his hand and took up a book that lay open on the table. He pretended to read it.
He did it to insult him, Gibbs felt. Ashley, he knew, thought him a great hulking brute; the dirty little swine came in, spoilt the talk, and then began to give himself airs at Gibbs’s expense. Very well; he had been going to go; now he would stay; he would twist his tail for him — he knew how. He turned to Edward and went on talking.
“You won’t mind pigging it,” he said. “My people will be up in Scotland.”
Ashley turned a page viciously. They would be alone then. Edward began to relish the situation; he played up to it maliciously.
“All right,” he said. “But you’ll have to see I don’t make a fool of myself,” he added.
“Oh, it’ll only be cubbing,” said Gibbs. Ashley turned another page. Edward glanced at the book. It was being held upside down. But as he glanced at Ashley he caught his head against the panels and the poppies. How civilised he looked, he thought, compared with Gibbs; and how ironical. He respected him immensely. Gibbs had lost his glamour. There he was, telling the same old story of the spaniel bitch all over again. There would be a devil’s own row tomorrow, he thought, and glanced surreptitiously at his watch. It was past eleven; and he must do an hour’s work before breakfast. He swallowed down the last drops of his wine, stretched himself, yawned ostentatiously and rose.
“I’m off to bed,” he said. Ashley looked at him appealingly. Edward could torture him horribly. Edward began unbuttoning his waistcoat; he had a perfect figure, Ashley thought, looking at him, standing between them.
“But don’t you hurry” said Edward, yawning again. “Finish your drinks.” He smiled at the thought of Ashley and Gibbs finishing their drinks together.
“There’s plenty more in there if you want it.” He indicated the next room and left them.
“Let ’em fight it out together,” he thought as he shut the bedroom door. His own fight would come soon enough; he knew that from the look on Ashley’s face. He was infernally jealous. He began to undress. He put his money methodically in two heaps on either side of the looking-glass, for he was a little near about money; folded his waistcoat carefully on a chair; then glanced at himself in the looking-glass, and brushed his crest up with the half-conscious gesture that irritated his sister. Then he listened.
A door slammed outside. One of them had gone — either Gibbs or Ashley. But one, he rather thought, was still there. He listened intently. He heard someone moving about in the sitting-room. Very quickly, very firmly, he turned the key in the door. A moment later the handle moved.
“Edward!” said Ashley. His voice was low and controlled.
Edward made no answer.
“Edward!” said Ashley, rattling the handle.
The voice was sharp and appealing.
“Good-night,” said Edward sharply. He listened. There was a pause. Then he heard the door shut. Ashley was gone.
“Lord! What a row there’ll be tomorrow,” said Edward, going to the window and looking out at the rain that was still falling.
The party at the Lodge was over. The ladies stood in the doorway in their flowing gowns, and looked up at the sky from which a gentle rain was falling.
“Is that a nightingale?” said Mrs Larpent, hearing a bird twitter in the bushes. Then old Chuffy — the great Dr. Andrews — standing slightly behind her with his domed head exposed to the drizzle and his hirsute, powerful but not prepossessing countenance turned upward, gave a roar of laughter. It was a thrush, he said. The laughter was echoed back like a hyena laughing from the stone walls. Then, with a wave of the hand dictated by centuries of tradition, Mrs Larpent drew back her foot, as if she had encroached upon one of the chalk marks which decorate academic lintels and, signifying that Mrs Lathom, wife of the Divinity professor, should precede her, they passed out into the rain.
In the long drawing-room at the Lodge they were all standing up.
“I’m so glad Chuffy — Dr. Andrews — came up to your expectations,” Mrs Malone was saying in her courteous manner. As residents they called the great Doctor “Chuffy”; he was Dr. Andrews to American visitors.
The other guests had gone. But the Howard Fripps, the Americans, were staying in the house. Mrs Howard Fripp was saying that Dr. Andrews had been perfectly charming to her. And her husband, the Professor, was saying something equally polite to the Master. Kitty, the daughter, standing a little in the background, wished that they would get it over and come to bed. But she had to stand there until her mother gave the signal for them to move.
“Yes, I never knew Chuffy in better form,” her father continued, implying a compliment to the little American lady who had made such a conquest. She was small and vivacious, and Chuffy liked ladies to be small and vivacious.
“I adore his books,” she said in her queer nasal voice. “But I never expected to have the pleasure of sitting next him at dinner.”
Did you really like the way he spits when he talks? Kitty wondered, looking at her. She was extraordinarily pretty and gay. All the other women had looked dowdy and dumpy beside her, except her mother. For Mrs Malone, standing by the fireplace with her foot on the fender, with her crisp white hair curled stiffly, never looked in the fashion or out of it. Mrs Fripp, on the contrary, looked in the fashion.
And yet they laughed at her, Kitty thought. She had caught the Oxford ladies lifting their eyebrows at some of Mrs Fripp’s American phrases. But Kitty liked her American phrases; they were so different from what she was used to. She was American, a real American; but nobody would have taken her husband for an American, Kitty thought, looking at him. He might have been any professor, from any University, she thought, with his distinguished wrinkled face, his goatee beard and the black ribbon of his eyeglass crossing his shirt-front as if it were some foreign order. He spoke without any accent — at least without any American accent. Yet he too was different somehow. She had dropped her handkerchief. He stooped at once and gave it her with a bow that was almost too courteous — it made her shy. She bent her head and smiled at the Professor, rather shyly, as she took the handkerchief.
“Thank you so much,” she said. He made her feel awkward. Beside Mrs Fripp she felt even larger than usual. Her hair, of the true Rigby red, never lay smooth as it should have done; Mrs Fripp’s hair looked beautiful, glossy and tidy.
But now Mrs Malone, glancing at Mrs Fripp, said, “Well, ladies —?” and waved her hand.
There was something authoritative about her action — as if she had done it again and again; and been obeyed again and again. They moved towards the door. Tonight there was a little ceremony at the door; Professor Fripp bent very low over Mrs Malone’s hand, not quite so low over Kitty’s hand, and held the door wide open for them.
“He rather overdoes it,” Kitty thought to herself as they passed out.
The ladies took their candles and went in single file up the wide low stairs. Portraits of former masters of Katharine’s looked down on them as they mounted. The light of the candles flickered over the dark gold-framed faces as they went up stair after stair.
Now she’ll stop, thought Kitty, following behind, and ask who that is.
But Mrs Fripp did not stop. Kitty gave her good marks for that. She compared favourably with most of their visitors, Kitty thought. She had never done the Bodleian quite so quick as she had done it that morning. Indeed, she had felt rather guilty. There were a great many more sights to be seen, had they wished it. But in less than an hour of it Mrs Fripp had turned to Kitty and had said in her fascinating, if nasal, voice:
“Well, my dear, I guess you’re a bit fed-up with sights — what d’you say to an ice in that dear old bun-shop with the bow windows?”
And they had eaten ices when they ought to have been going round the Bodleian.
The procession had now reached the first landing, and Mrs Malone stopped at the door of the famous room where distinguished guests always slept when they stayed at the Lodge. She gave one look round as she held the door open.
“The bed where Queen Elizabeth did not sleep,” she said, making the usual little joke as they looked at the great four-poster. The fire was burning; the water-jug was swaddled up like an old woman with the toothache; and the candles were lit on the dressing-table. But there was something strange about the room tonight, Kitty thought, glancing over her mother’s shoulder; a dressing-gown flashed green and silver upon the bed. And on the dressing-table there were a number of little pots and jars and a large powder-puff stained pink. Could it be, was it possible, that the reason why Mrs Fripp looked so very bright and the Oxford ladies looked so very dingy was that Mrs Fripp — But Mrs Malone was saying, “You have everything you want?” with such extreme politeness that Kitty guessed that Mrs Malone too had seen the dressing-table. Kitty held out her hand. To her surprise, instead of taking it, Mrs Fripp pulled her down and kissed her.
“Thanks a thousand times for showing me all those sights,” she said. “And remember, you’re coming to stay with us in America,” she added. For she had liked the big shy girl who had so obviously preferred eating ices to showing her the Bodleian; and she had felt sorry for her too for some reason.
“Good-night, Kitty,” said her mother as she shut the door; and they touched each other perfunctorily on the cheek.
Kitty went on upstairs to her own room. She still felt the spot where Mrs Fripp had kissed her; the kiss had left a little glow on her cheek.
She shut the door. The room was very stuffy. It was a warm night, but they always shut the windows and drew the curtains. She opened the windows and drew the curtains. It was raining as usual. Arrows of silver rain crossed the dark trees in the garden. Then she kicked off her shoes. That was the worst of being so large — shoes were always too tight; white satin shoes in particular. Then she began to unhook her dress. It was difficult; there were so many hooks and all at the back; but at last the white satin dress was off and laid neatly across the chair; and then she began to brush her hair. It had been Thursday at its very worst, she reflected; sights in the morning; people for lunch; undergraduates for tea; and a dinner-party in the evening.
However, she concluded, tugging the comb through her hair, it’s over . . . it’s over.
The candles flickered and then the muslin blind, blowing out in a white balloon, almost touched the flame. She opened her eyes with a start. She was standing at the open window with a light beside her in her petticoat.
“Anybody might see in,” her mother had said, scolding her only the other day.
Now, she said, moving the candle to a table at the right, nobody can see in.
She began to brush her hair again. But with the light at the side instead of in front she saw her face from a different angle.
Am I pretty? she asked herself, putting down her comb and looking in the glass. Her cheek-bones were too prominent; her eyes were set too far apart. She was not pretty; no, her size was against her. What did Mrs Fripp think of me, she wondered?
She kissed me, she suddenly remembered with a start of pleasure, feeling again the glow on her cheek. She asked me to go with them in America. What fun that would be! she thought. What fun to leave Oxford and go to America! She tugged the comb through her hair, which was like a fuzz bush.
But the bells were making their usual commotion. She hated the sound of the bells; it always seemed to her a dismal sound; and then, just as one stopped, here was another beginning. They went walloping one over another, one after another, as if they would never be finished. She counted eleven, twelve, and then they went on thirteen, fourteen . . . clock repeating clock through the damp, drizzling air. It was late. She began to brush her teeth. She glanced at the calendar above the washstand and tore off Thursday and screwed it into a ball, as if she were saying “That’s over! That’s over!” Friday in large red letters confronted her. Friday was a good day; on Friday she had her lesson with Lucy; she was going to tea with the Robsons. “Blessed is he who has found his work” she read on the calendar. Calendars always seemed to be talking at you. She had not done her work. She glanced at a row of blue volumes, “The Constitutional History of England, by Dr. Andrews.” There was a paper slip in volume three. She should have finished her chapter for Lucy; but not tonight. She was too tired tonight. She turned to the window. A roar of laughter floated out from the undergraduates’ quarters. What are they laughing at, she wondered as she stood by the window. It sounded as if they were enjoying themselves. They never laugh like that when they come to tea at the Lodge, she thought, as the laughter died away. The little man from Balliol sat twisting his fingers, twisting his fingers. He would not talk; but he would not go. Then she blew out the candle and got into bed. I rather like him, she thought, stretching out in the cool sheets, though he twists his fingers. As for Tony Ashton, she thought, turning on her pillow, I don’t like him. He always seemed to be cross-examining her about Edward, whom Eleanor, she thought, calls ‘Nigs’. His eyes were too close together. A bit of a barber’s block, she thought. He had followed her at the picnic the other day — the picnic when the ant got into Mrs Lathom’s skirts. There he was always beside her. But she didn’t want to marry him. She didn’t want to be a Don’s wife and live in Oxford for ever. No, no, no! She yawned, turned on her pillow, and listening to a belated bell that went walloping like a slow porpoise through the thick drizzling air, yawned once more and fell asleep.
The rain fell steadily all night long, making a faint mist over the fields, chuckling and burbling in the gutters. In gardens it fell over flowering bushes of lilac and laburnum. It slipped gently over the leaden domes of libraries, and splayed out of the laughing mouths of gargoyles. It smeared the window where the Jew boy from Birmingham sat mugging up Greek with a wet towel round his head; where Dr. Malone sat up late writing another chapter in his monumental history of the college. And in the garden of the Lodge outside Kitty’s window it sluiced the ancient tree under which Kings and poets had sat drinking three centuries ago, but now it was half fallen and had to be propped up by a stake in the middle.
“Umbrella, Miss?” said Hiscock, offering Kitty an umbrella as she left the house rather later than she should have left it the following afternoon. There was a chilliness in the air which made her glad, as she caught sight of a party with white and yellow frocks and cushions bound for the river, that she was not going to sit in a boat today. No parties today, she thought, no parties today. But she was late, the clock warned her.
She strode along until she came to the cheap red villas that her father disliked so much that he would always make a round to avoid them. But as it was in one of these cheap red villas that Miss Craddock lived, Kitty saw them haloed with romance. Her heart beat faster as she turned the corner by the new chapel and saw the steep steps of the house where Miss Craddock actually lived. Lucy went up those steps and down them every day; that was her window; this was her bell. The bell came out with a jerk when she pulled it; but it did not go back again, for everything was ramshackle in Lucy’s house; but everything was romantic. There was Lucy’s umbrella in the stand; and it too was not like other umbrellas; it had a parrot’s head for a handle. But as she went up the steep shiny stairs excitement became mixed with fear: once more she had scamped her work; she had not “given her mind to it” again this week.
“She’s coming!” thought Miss Craddock, holding her pen suspended. Her nose was red-tipped; there was something owl-like about the eyes, round which there was a sallow, hollow depression. There was the bell. The pen had been dipped in red ink; she had been correcting Kitty’s essay. Now she heard her step on the stairs. “She’s coming!” she thought with a little catch of her breath, laying down the pen.
“I’m awfully sorry, Miss Craddock,” Kitty said, taking off her things and sitting down at the table. “But we had people staying in the house.”
Miss Craddock brushed her hand over her mouth in a way she had when she was disappointed.
“I see,” she said. “So you haven’t done any work this week either.”
Miss Craddock took up her pen and dipped it in the red ink. Then she turned to the essay.
“It wasn’t worth correcting,” she remarked, pausing with her pen in the air.
“A child of ten would have been ashamed of it.” Kitty blushed bright red.
“And the odd thing is,” said Miss Craddock putting down her pen when the lesson was over, “that you’ve got quite an original mind.”
Kitty flushed bright red with pleasure.
“But you don’t use it,” said Miss Craddock. “Why don’t you use it?” she added, looking at her out of her fine grey eyes.
“You see, Miss Craddock,” Kitty began eagerly, “my mother —”
“Hm . . . hm . . . hm . . . ” Miss Craddock stopped her. Confidences were not what Dr. Malone paid her for. She got up.
“Look at my flowers,” she said, feeling that she had snubbed her too severely. There was a bowl of flowers on the table; wild flowers, blue and white, stuck into a cushion of wet green moss.
“My sister sent them from the moors,” she said.
“The moors?” said Kitty. “Which moors?” She stooped and touched the little flowers tenderly. How lovely she is, Miss Craddock thought; for she was sentimental about Kitty. But I will not be sentimental, she told herself.
“The Scarborough moors,” she said aloud. “If you keep the moss damp but not too damp, they’ll last for weeks,” she added, looking at the flowers.
“Damp, but not too damp,” Kitty smiled. “That’s easy in Oxford, I should think. It’s always raining here.” She looked at the window. Mild rain was falling.
“If I lived up there, Miss Craddock —” she began, taking her umbrella. But she stopped. The lesson was over.
“You’d find it very dull,” said Miss Craddock, looking at her. She was putting on her cloak. Certainly she looked very lovely, putting on her cloak.
“When I was your age,” Miss Craddock continued, remembering her rôle as teacher, “I would have given my eyes to have the opportunities you have, to meet the people you meet; to know the people you know.”
“Old Chuffy?” said Kitty, remembering Miss Craddock’s profound admiration for that light of learning.
“You irreverent girl!” Miss Craddock expostulated. “The greatest historian of his age!”
“Well, he doesn’t talk history to me,” said Kitty, remembering the damp feel of a heavy hand on her knee.
She hesitated; but the lesson was over; another pupil was coming. She glanced round the room. There was a plate of oranges on the top of a pile of shiny exercise-books: a box that looked as if it contained biscuits. Was this her only room, she wondered? Did she sleep on the lumpy-looking sofa with the shawl thrown over it? There was no looking-glass, and she stuck her hat on rather to one side, thinking as she did so that Miss Craddock despised clothes.
But Miss Craddock was thinking how wonderful it was to be young and lovely and to meet brilliant men.
“I’m going to tea with the Robsons,” said Kitty, holding out her hand. The girl, Nelly Robson, was Miss Craddock’s favourite pupil; the only girl, she used to say, who knew what work meant.
“Are you walking?” said Miss Craddock, looking at her clothes. “It’s some way, you know. Down Ringmer Road, past the gasworks.”
“Yes, I’m walking,” said Kitty, shaking hands.
“And I will try to work hard this week,” she said, looking down on her with eyes full of love and admiration. Then she descended the steep stairs whose oilcloth shone bright with romance; and glanced at the umbrella that had a parrot for handle.
The son of the Professor, who had done it all off his own bat, “a most creditable performance”, to quote Dr. Malone, was mending the hen coops in the back garden at Prestwich Terrace — a scratched up little place. Hammer, hammer, hammer, he went, fixing a board to the rotten roof. His hands were white, unlike his father’s, and long fingered too. He had no love of doing these jobs himself. But his father mended the boots on Sunday. Down came the hammer. He went at it, hammering the long shiny nails that sometimes split the wood, or drove outside. For it was rotten. He hated hens too, imbecile fowls, a huddle of feathers, watching him out of their red beady eyes. They scratched up the path; left little curls of feather here and there on the beds, which were more to his fancy. But nothing grew there. How grow flowers like other people if one kept hens? A bell rang.
“Curse it! There’s some old woman come to tea,” he said, holding his hammer suspended; and then brought it down on the nail.
As she stood on the step, noting the cheap lace curtains and the blue and orange glass, Kitty tried to remember what it was that her father had said about Nelly’s father. But a little maid let her in. I’m much too large, Kitty thought, as she stood for a moment in the room to which the maid had admitted her. It was a small room, crowded with objects. And I’m too well dressed she thought, looking at herself in the glass over the fireplace. But here her friend Nelly came in. She was dumpy; over her large grey eyes she wore steel spectacles, and her brown holland overall seemed to increase her air of uncompromising veracity.
“We’re having tea in the back room,” she said, looking her up and down. What has she been doing? Why is she dressed in an overall? Kitty thought, following her into the room where tea had already begun.
“Pleased to see you,” said Mrs Robson formally, looking over her shoulder. But nobody seemed in the least pleased to see her. Two children were already eating. Slices of bread and butter were in their hands, but they stayed the bread and butter and stared at Kitty as she sat down.
She seemed to see the whole room at once. It was bare yet crowded. The table was too large; there were hard green-plush chairs; yet the table-cloth was coarse; darned in the middle; and the china was cheap with its florid red roses. The light was extraordinarily bright in her eyes. A sound of hammering came in from the garden outside. She looked at the garden; it was a scratched-up, earthy garden without flower-beds; and there was a shed at the end of the garden from which the sound of hammering came.
They’re all so short too, Kitty thought, glancing at Mrs Robson. Only her shoulders came above the tea things; but her shoulders were substantial. She was a little like Bigge, the cook at the Lodge, but more formidable. She gave one brief look at Mrs Robson and then began to pull off her gloves secretly, swiftly, under the cover of the table-cloth. But why does nobody talk? she thought nervously. The children kept their eyes fixed upon her with a look of solemn amazement. Their owl-like stare went up and down over her uncompromisingly. Happily before they could express their disapproval, Mrs Robson told them sharply to go on with their tea; and the bread and butter slowly rose to their mouths again.
Why don’t they say something? Kitty thought again, glancing at Nelly. She was about to speak when an umbrella grated in the hall; and Mrs Robson looked up and said to her daughter:
“There’s Dad!”
Next moment in trotted a little man, who was so short that he looked as if his jacket should have been an Eton jacket, and his collar a round collar. He wore, too, a very thick watch-chain, made of silver, like a schoolboy’s. But his eyes were keen and fierce, his moustache bristly, and he spoke with a curious accent.
“Pleased to see you,” he said, and gripped her hand hard in his. He sat down, tucked a napkin under his chin so that it obscured his heavy silver watch-chain under its stiff white shield. Hammer, hammer, hammer came from the shed in the garden.
“Tell Jo tea’s on the table,” said Mrs Robson to Nelly, who had brought in a dish with a cover on it. The cover was removed. Actually they were going to eat fried fish and potatoes at tea- time, Kitty remarked.
But Mr Robson had turned his rather alarming blue eyes upon her. She expected him to say, “How is your father, Miss Malone?”
But he said:
“You’re reading history with Lucy Craddock?”
“Yes,” she said. She liked the way he said Lucy Craddock, as if he respected her. So many of the Dons sneered at her. She liked feeling too, as he made her feel, that she was nobody’s daughter in particular.
“You’re interested in history?” he said, applying himself to his fish and potatoes.
“I love it,” she said. His bright blue eyes, gazing straight at her rather fiercely, seemed to make her say quite shortly what she meant.
“But I’m frightfully lazy,” she added. Here Mrs Robson looked at her rather sternly, and handed her a thick slice of bread on the point of a knife.
Anyhow their taste is awful, she said by way of revenge for the snub that she felt was intended. She focussed her eyes on a picture opposite — an oily landscape in a heavy gilt frame. There was a blue and red Japanese plate on either side of it. Everything was ugly, especially the pictures.
“The moor at the back of our house,” said Mr Robson, seeing her look at a picture.
It struck Kitty that the accent with which he spoke was a Yorkshire accent. In looking at the picture he had increased his accent.
“In Yorkshire?” she said. “We come from there too. My mother’s family I mean,” she added.
“Your mother’s family?” said Mr Robson.
“Rigby,” she said, and blushed slightly.
“Rigby?” said Mrs Robson, looking up.
“I wur-r-rked for a Miss Rigby before I married.”
What sort of wur-r-rk had Mrs Robson done? Kitty wondered. Sam explained.
“My wife was a cook, Miss Malone, before we married,” he said. Again he increased his accent as if he were proud of it. I had a great-uncle who rode in a circus, she felt inclined to say: and an Aunt who married . . . but here Mrs Robson interrupted her.
“The Hollies,” she said. “Two very old ladies; Miss Ann and Miss Matilda.” She spoke more gently.
“But they must be dead long ago,” she concluded. For the first time she leant back in her chair and stirred her tea, just as old Snap at the farm, Kitty thought, stirred her tea round and round and round.
“Tell Jo we’re not sparing the cake,” said Mr Robson, cutting himself a slice of that craggy-looking object; and Nell went out of the room once more. The hammering stopped in the garden. The door opened. Kitty, who had altered the focus of her eyes to suit the smallness of the Robson family, was taken by surprise. The young man seemed immense in that little room. He was a handsome young man. He brushed his hand through his hair as came in, for a wood shaving had stuck in it.
“Our Jo,” said Mrs Robson, introducing them. “Go and get the kittle, Jo,” she added; and he went at once as if he were used to it. When he came back with the kettle, Sam began chaffing him about a hencoop.
“It takes you a long time, my son, to mend a hencoop,” he said. There was some family joke which Kitty could not follow about mending boots and hencoops. She watched him eating steadily under his father’s banter. He was not Eton or Harrow, or Rugby or Winchester; or reading or rowing. He reminded her of Alf, the farm hand up at Carter’s, who had kissed her under the shadow of the haystack when she was fifteen, and old Carter loomed up leading a bull with a ring through its nose and said “Stop that!” She looked down again. She would rather like Jo to kiss her; better than Edward, she thought to herself suddenly. She remembered her own appearance, which she had forgotten. She liked him. Yes, she liked them all very much, she told herself; very much indeed. She felt as if she had given her nurse the slip and run off on her own.
Then the children began scrambling down off their chairs; the meal was over. She began to fish under the table for her gloves.
“These them?” said Jo, picking them up off the floor. She took them and crumpled them up in her hand.
He cast one quick sulky look at her as she stood in the doorway. She’s a stunner, he said to himself, but my word, she gives herself airs!
Mrs Robson ushered her into the little room where, before tea, she had looked in the glass. It was crowded with objects. There were bamboo tables; velvet books with brass hinges; marble gladiators askew on the mantelpiece and innumerable pictures. . . . But Mrs Robson, with a gesture that was exactly like Mrs Malone’s when she pointed to the Gainsborough that was not quite certainly a Gainsborough, was displaying a huge silver salver with an inscription.
“The salver my husband’s pupils gave him,” Mrs Robson began, pointing to the inscription. Kitty began to spell out the inscription.
“And this . . . ” said Mrs Robson, when she had done, pointing to a document framed like a text on the wall.
But here Sam, who stood in the background fiddling with his watch- chain, stepped forward and indicated with his stubby forefinger the picture of an old woman looking rather over life size in the photographer’s chair.
“My mother,” he said and stopped. He gave a queer little chuckle.
“Your mother?” Kitty repeated, stooping to look. The unwieldy old lady, posed in all the stiffness of her best clothes, was plain in the extreme. And yet Kitty felt that admiration was expected.
“You’re very like her, Mr Robson,” was all she could find to say. Indeed they had something of the same sturdy look; the same piercing eyes; and they were both very plain. He gave an odd little chuckle.
“Glad you think so,” he said. “Brought us all up. Not one of them a patch on her though.” He gave his odd little chuckle again.
Then he turned to his daughter, who had come in and was standing there in her overall.
“Not a patch on her,” he repeated, pinching Nell on the shoulder. As she stood there with her father’s hand on her shoulder under the portrait of her grandmother, a sudden rush of self-pity came over Kitty. If she had been the daughter of people like the Robsons, she thought; if she had lived in the north — but it was clear they wanted her to go. Nobody ever sat down in this room. They were all standing up. Nobody pressed her to stay. When she said that she must go, they all came out into the little hall with her. They were all about to go on with what they were doing, she felt. Nell was about to go into the kitchen and wash up the tea things; Jo was about to return to his hencoops; the children were about to be put to bed by their mother; and Sam — what was he about to do? She looked at him standing there with his heavy watch-chain, like a schoolboy’s. You are the nicest man I have ever met, she thought, holding out her hand.
“Pleased to have made your acquaintance,” said Mrs Robson in her stately way.
“Hope you’ll come again soon,” said Mr Robson, grasping her hand very hard.
“Oh, I should love to!” she exclaimed, pressing their hands as hard as she could. Did they know how much she admired them? she wanted to say. Would they accept her in spite of her hat and her gloves? she wanted to ask. But they were all going off to their work. And I am going home to dress for dinner, she thought as she walked down the little front steps, pressing her pale kid gloves in her hands.
The sun was shining again; the damp pavements gleamed; a gust of wind tossed up the wet branches of the almond trees in the villa gardens; little twigs and tufts of blossom whirled onto the pavement and stuck there. As she stood still for a second at a crossing she too seemed to be tossed aloft out of her usual surroundings. She forgot where she was. The sky, blown into a blue open space, seemed to be looking down not here upon streets and houses, but upon open country, where the wind brushed the moors, and sheep, with grey fleeces ruffled, sheltered under stone walls. She could almost see the moors brighten and darken as the clouds passed over them.
But then in two strides the unfamiliar street became the street she had always known. Here she was again in the paved alley; there were the old curiosity shops with their blue china and their brass warming-pans; and next moment she was out in the famous crooked street with all the domes and steeples. The sun lay in broad stripes across it. There were the cabs and the awnings and the book-shops; the old men in black gowns billowing; the young women in pink and blue dresses flowing; and the young men in straw hats carrying cushions under their arms. But for a moment all seemed to her obsolete, frivolous, inane. The usual undergraduate in cap and gown with books under his arm looked silly. And the portentous old men with their exaggerated features, looked like gargoyles, carved, mediaeval, unreal. They were all like people dressed up and acting parts, she thought. Now she stood at her own door and waited for Hiscock, the butler, to take his feet off the fender and waddle upstairs. Why can’t you talk like a human being? she thought, as he took her umbrella and mumbled his usual remark about the weather.
Slowly, as if a weight had got into her feet too, she went upstairs, seeing through open windows and open doors the smooth lawn, the recumbent tree and the faded chintzes. Down she sank on the edge of her bed. It was very stuffy. A bluebottle buzzed round and round; a lawn mower squeaked in the garden below. Far away pigeons were cooing — Take two coos, Taffy. Take two coos. Tak. . . . Her eyes half shut. It seemed to her that she was sitting on the terrace of an Italian inn. There was her father pressing gentians on to a rough sheet of blotting paper. The lake below lapped and dazzled. She plucked up courage and said to her father: “Father . . . ” He looked up very kindly over his spectacles. He held the little blue flower between his thumb and finger. “I want . . . ” she began slipping off the balustrade upon which she was sitting. But here a bell struck. She rose and crossed to the washing-table. What would Nell think of this, she thought, tilting up the beautifully polished brass jug and dipping her hands in the hot water. Another bell tolled. She crossed to the dressing-table. The air from the garden outside was full of murmurings and cooings. Wood shavings, she said as she took up her brush and comb — he had wood shavings in his hair. A servant passed with a pile of tin dishes on his head. The pigeons were cooing Take two coos, Taffy. Take two coos. . . . But there was the dinner bell. In a moment she had pinned her hair up, hooked her dress on, and ran down the slippery stairs, sliding her palm along the banisters as she used to do when she was a child in a hurry. And there they all were.
Her parents were standing in the hall. A tall man was with them. His gown was thrown back and one last ray of sunshine lit up his genial, authoritative face. Who was he? Kitty could not remember.
“My word!” he exclaimed, looking up at her with admiration.
“It is Kitty, isn’t it?” he said. Then he took her hand and pressed it.
“How you’ve grown!” he exclaimed. He looked at her as if he were looking not at her but at his own past.
“You don’t remember me?” he added.
“Chingachgook!” she exclaimed, recalling some childish memory.
“But he is now Sir Richard Norton,” said her mother, giving him a proud little pat on the shoulder; and they turned away, for the gentlemen were dining in Hall.
It was dull fish, Kitty thought; the plates were half cold. It was stale bread she thought, cut in meagre little squares; the colour, the gaiety of Prestwich Terrace was still in her eyes, in her ears. She granted, as she looked round, the superiority of the Lodge china and silver; and the Japanese plates and the picture had been hideous; but this dining-room with its hanging creepers and its vast cracked canvases was so dark. At Prestwich Terrace the room was full of light; the sound of hammer, hammer, hammer still rang in her ears. She looked out at the fading greens in the garden. For the thousandth time she echoed her childish wish that the tree would either lie down or stand up instead of doing neither. It was not actually raining, but gusts of whiteness seemed to blow about the garden as the wind stirred the thick leaves on the laurels.
“Didn’t you notice it?” Mrs Malone suddenly appealed to her.
“What, Mama?” Kitty asked. She had not been attending.
“The odd taste in the fish,” said her mother.
“I don’t think I did,” she said; and Mrs Malone went on talking to the butler. The plates were changed; another dish was brought in. But Kitty was not hungry. She bit one of the green sweets that were provided for her, and then the modest dinner, retrieved for the ladies from the relics of last night’s party, was over and she followed her mother into the drawing-room.
It was too big when they were alone, but they always sat there. The pictures seemed to be looking down at the empty chairs, and the empty chairs seemed to be looking up at the pictures. The old gentleman who had ruled the college over a hundred years ago seemed to vanish in the daytime, but he came back when the lamps were lit. The face was placid, solid and smiling, and singularly like Dr. Malone, who, had a frame been set round him, might have hung over the fireplace too.
“It’s nice to have a quiet evening once in a way,” Mrs Malone was saying, “though the Fripps . . . ” Her voice tailed off as she put on her spectacles and took up The Times. This was her moment of relaxation and recuperation after the day’s work. She suppressed a little yawn as she glanced up and down the columns of the newspaper.
“What a charming man he was,” she observed casually, as she looked at the births and deaths. “One would hardly have taken him for an American.”
Kitty recalled her thoughts. She was thinking of the Robsons. Her mother was talking about the Fripps.
“And I liked her too,” she said rashly. “Wasn’t she lovely?”
“Hum — m — m. A little overdressed for my taste,” said Mrs Malone dryly. “And that accent —” she went on, looking through the paper, “I sometimes hardly understood what she said.”
Kitty was silent. Here they differed; as they did about so many things.
Suddenly Mrs Malone looked up:
“Yes, just what I was saying to Bigge this morning,” she said, laying down the paper.
“What, Mama?” said Kitty.
“This man — in the leading article,” said Mrs Malone. She touched it with her finger.
“‘With the best flesh, fish and fowl in the world,’” she read, “‘we shall not be able to turn them to account because we have none to cook them’— what I was saying to Bigge this morning.” She gave her quick little sigh. Just when one wanted to impress people, like those Americans, something went wrong. It had been the fish this time. She foraged for her work things, and Kitty took up the paper.
“It’s the leading article,” said Mrs Malone. That man almost always said the very thing that she was thinking, which comforted her, and gave her a sense of security in a world which seemed to her to be changing for the worse.
“‘Before the rigid and now universal enforcement of school attendance . . .?’” Kitty read out.
“Yes. That’s it,” said Mrs Malone, opening her work-box and looking for her scissors.
“’ . . . the children saw a good deal of cooking which, poor as it was, yet gave them some taste and inkling of knowledge. They now see nothing and they do nothing but read, write, sum, sew or knit,’” Kitty read out.
“Yes, yes,” said Mrs Malone. She unrolled the long strip of embroidery upon which she was working a design of birds pecking at fruit copied from a tomb at Ravenna. It was for the spare bedroom.
The leading article bored Kitty with its pompous fluency. She searched the paper for some little piece of news that might interest her mother. Mrs Malone liked someone to talk to her or read aloud to her as she worked. Night after night her embroidery served to weave the after-dinner talk into a pleasant harmony. One said something and stitched; looked at the design, chose another coloured silk, and stitched again. Sometimes Dr Malone read poetry aloud — Pope: Tennyson. Tonight she would have liked Kitty to talk to her. But she was becoming increasingly conscious of difficulty with Kitty. Why? She glanced at her. What was wrong? she wondered. She gave her quick little sigh.
Kitty turned over the large pages. Sheep had the fluke; Turks wanted religious liberty; there was the General Election.
“Mr Gladstone —” she began.
Mrs Malone had lost her scissors. It annoyed her.
“Who can have taken them again?” she began. Kitty went down on the floor to look for them. Mrs Malone ferreted in the work-box; then she plunged her hand into the fissure between the cushion and the chair frame and brought up not only the scissors but also a little mother-of-pearl paper-knife that had been missing for ever so long. The discovery annoyed her. It proved Ellen never shook up the cushions properly.
“Here they are, Kitty,” she said. They were silent. There was always some constraint between them now.
“Did you enjoy your party at the Robsons’, Kitty?” she asked, resuming her embroidery. Kitty did not answer. She turned the paper.
“There’s been an experiment,” she said. “An experiment with electric light. ‘A brilliant light,’” she read, “‘was seen to shoot forth suddenly shooting out a profound ray across the water to the Rock. Everything was lit up as if by daylight.’” She paused. She saw the bright light from the ships on the drawing- room chair. But here the door opened and Hiscock came in with a note on a salver.
Mrs Malone took it and read it in silence.
“No answer,” she said. From the tone of her mother’s voice Kitty knew that something had happened. She sat holding the note in her hand. Hiscock shut the door.
“Rose is dead!” said Mrs Malone. “Cousin Rose.”
The note lay open on her knee.
“It’s from Edward,” she said.
“Cousin Rose is dead?” said Kitty. A moment before she had been thinking of a bright light on a red rock. Now everything looked dingy. There was a pause. There was silence. Tears stood in her mother’s eyes.
“Just when the children most wanted her,” she said, sticking the needle into her embroidery. She began to roll it up very slowly. Kitty folded The Times and laid it on a little table, slowly, so that it should not crackle. She had only seen Cousin Rose once or twice. She felt awkward.
“Fetch me my engagement book,” said her mother at last. Kitty brought it.
“We must put off our dinner on Monday,” said Mrs Malone, looking through her engagements.
“And the Lathoms’ party on Wednesday,” Kitty murmured, looking over her mother’s shoulder.
“We can’t put off everything,” said her mother sharply, and Kitty felt rebuked.
But there were notes to be written. She wrote them at her mother’s dictation.
Why is she so ready to put off all our engagements? thought Mrs Malone, watching her write. Why doesn’t she enjoy going out with me any more? She glanced through the notes that her daughter brought her.
“Why don’t you take more interest in things here, Kitty?” she said irritably, pushing the letters away.
“Mama, dear —” Kitty began, deprecating the usual argument.
“But what is it you want to do?” her mother persisted. She had put away her embroidery; she was sitting upright, she was looking rather formidable.
“Your father and I only want you to do what you want to do,” she continued.
“Mama, dear —” Kitty repeated.
“You could help your father if it bores you helping me,” said Mrs Malone. “Papa told me the other day that you never come to him now.” She referred, Kitty knew, to his history of the college. He had suggested that she should help him. Again she saw the ink flowing — she had made an awkward brush with her arm — over five generations of Oxford men, obliterating hours of her father’s exquisite penmanship; and could hear him say with his usual courteous irony, “Nature did not intend you to be a scholar, my dear,” as he applied the blotting-paper.
“I know,” she said guiltily. “I haven’t been to Papa lately. But then there’s always something —” She hesitated.
“Naturally,” said Mrs Malone, “with a man in your father’s position . . . ” Kitty sat silent. They both sat silent. They both disliked this petty bickering; they both detested these recurring scenes; and yet they seemed inevitable. Kitty got up, took the letters she had written and put them in the hall.
What does she want? Mrs Malone asked herself, looking up at the picture without seeing it. When I was her age . . . she thought, and smiled. How well she remembered sitting at home on a spring evening like this up in Yorkshire, miles from anywhere. You could hear the beat of a horse’s hoof on the road miles away. She could remember flinging up her bedroom window and looking down on the dark shrubs in the garden and crying out, “Is this life?” And in the winter there was the snow. She could still hear the snow flopping off the trees in the garden. And here was Kitty, living in Oxford, in the midst of everything.
Kitty came back into the drawing-room and yawned very slightly. She raised her hand to her face with an unconscious gesture of fatigue that touched her mother.
“Tired, Kitty?” she said. “It’s been a long day; you look pale.”
“And you look tired too,” said Kitty.
The bells came pushing forth one after another, one on top of another, through the damp, heavy air.
“Go to bed, Kitty,” said Mrs Malone. “There! It’s striking ten.”
“But aren’t you coming too, Mama?” said Kitty, standing beside her chair.
“Your father won’t be back just yet,” said Mrs Malone, putting on her spectacles again.
Kitty knew it was useless to try to persuade her. It was part of the mysterious ritual of her parents’ lives. She bent down and gave her mother the little perfunctory peck that was the only sign they ever gave each other outwardly of their affection. Yet they were very fond of each other; yet they always quarrelled.
“Good-night, and sleep well,” said Mrs Malone.
“I don’t like to see your roses fade,” she added, putting her arm round her for once in a way.
She sat still after Kitty had gone. Rose is dead, she thought — Rose who was about her own age. She read the note again. It was from Edward. And Edward, she mused, is in love with Kitty, but I don’t know that I want her to marry him, she thought, taking up her needle. No, not Edward. . . . There was young Lord Lasswade. . . . That would be a nice marriage, she thought. Not that I want her to be rich, not that I care about rank, she thought, threading her needle. No, but he could give her what she wants. . . . What was it? . . . Scope, she decided, beginning to stitch. Then again her thoughts turned to Rose. Rose was dead. Rose who was about her own age. That must have been the first time he proposed to her, she thought, the day we had the picnic on the moors. It was a spring day. They were sitting on the grass. She could see Rose wearing a black hat with a cock’s feather in it over her bright red hair. She could still see her blush and look extremely pretty when Abel rode up, much to their surprise — he was stationed at Scarborough — the day they had the picnic on the moors.
The house at Abercorn Terrace was very dark. It smelt strongly of spring flowers. For some days now wreaths had been piled one on top of another on the hall table. In the dimness — all the blinds were drawn — the flowers gleamed; and the hall smelt with the amorous intensity of a hot-house. Wreath after wreath, they kept arriving. There were lilies with broad bars of gold in them; others with spotted throats sticky with honey; white tulips, white lilac — flowers of all kinds, some with petals as thick as velvet, others transparent, paper-thin; but all white, and clubbed together, head to head, in circles, in ovals, in crosses so that they scarcely looked like flowers. Black-edged cards were attached to them, “With deep sympathy from Major and Mrs Brand”; “With love and sympathy from General and Mrs Elkin”; “For dearest Rose from Susan.” Each card had a few words written on it.
Even now with the hearse at the door the bell rang; a messenger boy appeared bearing more lilies. He raised his cap, as he stood in the hall, for men were lurching down the stairs carrying the coffin. Rose, in deep black, prompted by her nurse, stepped forward and dropped her little bunch of violets on the coffin. But it slipped off as it swayed down the brilliant sunlit steps on the slanting shoulders of Whiteleys’ men. The family followed after.
It was an uncertain day, with passing shadows and darting rays of bright sunshine. The funeral started at a walking pace. Delia, getting into the second carriage with Milly and Edward, noticed that the houses opposite had their blinds drawn in sympathy, but a servant peeped. The others, she noticed, did not seem to see her; they were thinking of their mother. When they got into the main road the pace quickened, for the drive to the cemetery was a long one. Through the slit of the blind, Delia noticed dogs playing; a beggar singing; men raising their hats as the hearse passed them. But by the time their own carriage passed, the hats were on again. Men walked briskly and unconcernedly along the pavement. The shops were already gay with spring clothing; women paused and looked in at the windows. But they would have to wear nothing but black all the summer, Delia thought, looking at Edward’s coal-black trousers.
They scarcely spoke, or only in little formal sentences, as if they were already taking part in the ceremony. Somehow their relations had changed. They were more considerate, and a little important too, as if their mother’s death had laid new responsibilities on them. But the others knew how to behave; it was only she who had to make an effort. She remained outside, and so did her father, she thought. When Martin suddenly burst out laughing at tea, and then stopped and looked guilty, she felt — that is what Papa would do, that is what I should do if we were honest.
She glanced out of the window again. Another man raised his hat — a tall man, a man in a frock-coat, but she would not allow herself to think of Mr Parnell until the funeral was over.
At last they reached the cemetery. As she took her place in the little group behind the coffin and walked up the church, she was relieved to find that she was overcome by some generalised and solemn emotion. People stood up on both sides of the church and she felt their eyes on her. Then the service began. A clergyman, a cousin, read it. The first words struck out with a rush of extraordinary beauty. Delia, standing behind her father, noticed how he braced himself and squared his shoulders.
“I am the resurrection and the life.”
Pent up as she had been all these days in the half-lit house which smelt of flowers, the outspoken words filled her with glory. This she could feel genuinely; this was something that she said herself. But then, as Cousin James went on reading, something slipped. The sense was blurred. She could not follow with her reason. Then in the midst of the argument came another burst of familiar beauty. “And fade away suddenly like the grass, in the morning it is green, and groweth up; but in the evening it is cut down, dried up, and withered.” She could feel the beauty of that. Again it was like music; but then Cousin James seemed to hurry, as if he did not altogether believe what he was saying. He seemed to pass from the known to the unknown; from what he believed to what he did not believe; even his voice altered. He looked clean, he looked starched and ironed like his robes. But what did he mean by what he was saying? She gave it up. Either one understood or one did not understand, she thought. Her mind wandered.
But I will not think of him, she thought, seeing a tall man who stood beside her on a platform and raised his hat, until it’s over. She fixed her eyes upon her father. She watched him dab a great white pocket-handkerchief to his eyes and put it in his pocket; then he pulled it out and dabbed his eyes with it again. Then the voice stopped; he put his handkerchief finally in his pocket; and again they all formed up, the little group of the family, behind the coffin and again the dark people on either side rose, and watched them and let them go first and followed after.
It was a relief to feel the soft damp air blowing its leafy smell in her face again. But again now that she was out of doors, she began to notice things. She noticed how the black funeral horses were pawing the ground; they were scraping little pits with their hooves in the yellow gravel. She remembered hearing that funeral horses came from Belgium and were very vicious. They looked vicious she thought; their black necks were flecked with foam — but she recalled herself. They went straggling in ones and twos along a path until they reached a fresh mound of yellow earth heaped beside a pit; and there again she noticed how the grave-diggers stood at a little distance, rather behind, with their spades.
There was a pause; people kept on arriving and took up their positions, some a little higher, some a little lower. She observed a poor-looking shabby woman prowling on the outskirts, and tried to think whether she were some old servant, but she could not put a name to her. Her Uncle Digby, her father’s brother, stood directly opposite her, with his top-hat held like some sacred vessel between his hands, the image of grave decorum. Some of the women were crying; but not the men; the men had one pose; the women had another, she observed. Then it all began again. The splendid gust of music blew through them —“Man that is born of a woman”: the ceremony had renewed itself; once more they were grouped, united. The family pressed a little closer to the graveside and looked fixedly at the coffin which lay with its polish and its brass handles there in the earth to be buried for ever. It looked too new to be buried for ever. She stared down into the grave. There lay her mother; in that coffin — the woman she had loved and hated so. Her eyes dazzled. She was afraid that she might faint; but she must look; she must feel; it was the last chance that was left her. Earth dropped on the coffin; three pebbles fell on the hard shiny surface; and as they dropped she was possessed by a sense of something everlasting; of life mixing with death, of death becoming life. For as she looked she heard the sparrows chirp quicker and quicker; she heard wheels in the distance sound louder and louder; life came closer and closer. . . .
“We give thee hearty thanks,” said the voice, “for that it has pleased thee to deliver this our sister out of the miseries of this sinful world —”
What a lie! she cried to herself. What a damnable lie! He had robbed her of the one feeling that was genuine; he had spoilt her one moment of understanding.
She looked up. She saw Morris and Eleanor side by side; their faces were blurred; their noses were red; the tears were running down them. As for her father he was so stiff and so rigid that she had a convulsive desire to laugh aloud. Nobody can feel like that, she thought. He’s overdoing it. None of us feel anything at all, she thought: we’re all pretending.
Then there was a general movement; the attempt at concentration was over. People strolled off this way and that; there was no attempt now to form into a procession; little groups came together; people shook hands rather furtively, among the graves, and even smiled.
“How good of you to come!” said Edward, shaking hands with old Sir James Graham, who gave him a little pat on the shoulder. Ought she to go and thank him too? The graves made it difficult. It was becoming a shrouded and subdued morning party among the graves. She hesitated — she did not know what she ought to do next. Her father had walked on. She looked back. The grave-diggers had come forward; they were piling the wreaths one on top of another neatly; and the prowling woman had joined them and was stooping down to read the names on the cards. The ceremony was over; rain was falling.
1891
The autumn wind blew over England. It twitched the leaves off the trees, and down they fluttered, spotted red and yellow, or sent them floating, flaunting in wide curves before they settled. In towns coming in gusts round the corners, the wind blew here a hat off; there lifted a veil high above a woman’s head. Money was in brisk circulation. The streets were crowded. Upon the sloping desks of the offices near St. Paul’s, clerks paused with their pens on the ruled page. It was difficult to work after the holidays. Margate, Eastbourne and Brighton had bronzed them and tanned them. The sparrows and starlings, making their discordant chatter round the eaves of St. Martin’s, whitened the heads of the sleek statues holding rods or rolls of paper in Parliament Square. Blowing behind the boat train, the wind ruffled the channel, tossed the grapes in Provence, and made the lazy fisher boy, who was lying on his back in his boat in the Mediterranean, roll over and snatch a rope.
But in England, in the North, it was cold. Kitty, Lady Lasswade, sitting on the terrace beside her husband and his spaniel, drew the cloak round her shoulders. She was looking at the hill top, where the snuffer-shaped monument raised by the old Earl made a mark for ships at sea. There was mist on the woods. Near at hand the stone ladies on the terrace had scarlet flowers in their urns. Thin blue smoke drifted across the flaming dahlias in the long beds that went down to the river. “Burning weeds,” she said aloud. Then there was a tap on the window, and her little boy in a pink frock stumbled out, holding his spotted horse.
In Devonshire where the round red hills and the steep valleys hoarded the sea air leaves were still thick on the trees — too thick, Hugh Gibbs said at breakfast. Too thick for shooting, he said, and Milly, his wife, left him to go to his meeting. With her basket on her arm she walked down the well-kept crazy pavement with the swaying movement of a woman with child. There hung the yellow pears on the orchard wall, lifting the leaves over them, they were so swollen. But the wasps had got at them — the skin was broken. With her hand on the fruit she paused. Pop, pop, pop sounded in the distant woods. Someone was shooting.
The smoke hung in veils over the spires and domes of the University cities. Here it choked the mouth of a gargoyle; there it clung to the walls that were peeled yellow. Edward, who was taking his brisk constitutional, noted smell, sound and colour; which suggested how complex impressions are; few poets compress enough; but there must be some line in Greek or Latin, he was thinking, which sums up the contrast — when Mrs Lathom passed him and he raised his cap.
In the Law Courts the leaves lay dry and angular on the flagstones. Morris, remembering his childhood, shuffled his feet through them on his way to his chambers, and they scattered edgeways along the gutters. Not yet trodden down they lay in Kensington Gardens, and children, crunching the shells as they ran, scooped up a handful and scudded on through the mist down the avenues, with their hoops.
Racing over the hills in the country the wind blew vast rings of shadow that dwindled again to green. But in London the streets narrowed the clouds; mist hung thick in the East End by the river; made the voices of men crying “Any old iron to sell, any old iron,” sound distant; and in the suburbs the organs were muted. The wind blew the smoke — for in every back garden in the angle of the ivy- grown wall that still sheltered a few last geraniums, leaves were heaped up; keen fanged flames were eating them — out into the street, into windows that stood open in the drawing-room in the morning. For it was October, the birth of the year.
Eleanor was sitting at her writing-table with her pen in her hand. It’s awfully queer, she thought, touching the ink-corroded patch of bristle on the back of Martin’s walrus with the point of her pen, that that should have gone on all these years. That solid object might survive them all. If she threw it away it would still exist somewhere or other. But she never had thrown it away because it was part of other things — her mother for example. . . . She drew on her blotting paper; a dot with strokes raying out round it. Then she looked up. They were burning weeds in the back garden; there was a drift of smoke; a sharp acrid smell; and leaves were falling. A barrel organ was playing up the street. “Sur le pont d’Avignon” she hummed in time to it. How did it go? — the song Pippy used to sing as she wiped your ears with a piece of slimy flannel?
“Ron, ron, ron, et plon, plon plon,” she hummed. Then the tune stopped. The organ had moved further away. She dipped her pen in the ink.
“Three times eight,” she murmured, “is twenty-four,” she said decidedly; wrote a figure at the bottom of the page, swept together the little red and blue books and took them to her father’s study.
“Here’s the housekeeper!” he said good-humouredly as she came in. He was sitting in his leather armchair reading a pinkish financial paper.
“Here’s the housekeeper,” he repeated, looking up over his glasses. He was getting slower and slower, she thought; and she was in a hurry. But they got on extremely well; they were almost like brother and sister. He put down his paper and went to the writing- table.
But I wish you would hurry, Papa, she thought as she watched the deliberate way in which he unlocked the drawer in which he kept his cheque-book, or I shall be late.
“Milk’s very high,” he said, tapping the book with the gilt cow. “Yes. It’s eggs in October,” she said.
As he made out the cheque with extreme deliberation she glanced round the room. It looked like an office, with its files of papers and its deed-boxes, except that horses’ bits hung by the fireplace, and there was the silver cup he had won at polo. Would he sit there all the morning reading the financial papers and considering his investments, she wondered? He stopped writing.
“And where are you off to now?” he asked with his shrewd little smile.
“A Committee,” she said.
“A Committee,” he repeated, signing his firm heavy signature. “Well, stand up for yourself; don’t be sat on, Nell.” He entered a figure in the ledger.
“Are you coming with me this afternoon, Papa?” she said as he finished writing the figure. “It’s Morris’s case you know; at the Law Courts.”
He shook his head.
“No; I’ve got to be in the City at three,” he said.
“Then I shall see you at lunch,” she said, making a movement to go. But he held up his hand. He had something to say, but he hesitated. He was getting rather heavier in the face, she noted; there were little veins in his nose; he was getting rather too red and heavy.
“I was thinking of looking in at the Digbys’,” he said, at length. He got up and walked to the window. He looked out at the back garden. She fidgeted.
“How the leaves are falling!” he remarked.
“Yes,” she said. “They’re burning weeds.”
He stood looking at the smoke for a moment.
“Burning weeds,” he repeated, and stopped.
“It’s Maggie’s birthday,” at last he came out with it. “I thought I’d take her some little present —” He paused. He meant that he wished her to buy it, she knew.
“What would you like to give her?” she asked.
“Well,” he said vaguely, “something pretty you know — something she could wear.”
Eleanor reflected — Maggie, her little cousin; was she seven or eight?
“A necklace? A brooch? Something like that?” she asked quickly.
“Yes, something like that,” said her father, settling down in his chair again. “Something pretty, something she could wear, you know.” He opened the paper and gave her a little nod. “Thank you, my dear,” he said as she left the room.
On the hall table, between a silver salver laden with visiting- cards — some with their corners turned down, some large, some small — and a piece of purple plush with which the Colonel polished his top hat — lay a thin foreign envelope with “England” marked in large letters in the corner. Eleanor, running down the stairs in a hurry, swept it into her bag as she passed. Then she ran at a peculiar ambling trot down the Terrace. At the corner she stopped and looked anxiously down the road. Among the other traffic she singled out one bulky form; mercifully, it was yellow; mercifully she had caught her bus. She hailed it and climbed on top. She sighed with relief as she pulled the leather apron over her knees. All responsibility now rested with the driver. She relaxed; she breathed in the soft London air; she heard the dull London roar with pleasure. She looked along the street and relished the sight of cabs, vans and carriages all trotting past with an end in view. She liked coming back in October to the full stir of life after the summer was over. She had been staying in Devonshire with the Gibbses. That’s turned out very well, she thought, thinking of her sister’s marriage to Hugh Gibbs, seeing Milly with her babies. And Hugh — she smiled. He rode about on a great white horse, breaking up litters. But there are too many trees and cows and too many little hills instead of one big one, she thought. She did not like Devonshire. She was glad to be back in London, on top of the yellow bus, with her bag stuffed with papers, and everything beginning again in October. They had left the residential quarter; the houses were changing; they were turning into shops. This was her world; here she was in her element. The streets were crowded; women were swarming in and out of shops with their shopping baskets. There was something customary, rhythmical about it, she thought, like rooks swooping in a field, rising and falling.
She, too, was going to her work — she turned her watch on her wrist without looking at it. After the Committee, Duffus; after Duffus, Dickson. Then lunch; and the Law Courts . . . then lunch and the Law Courts at two-thirty, she repeated. The bus trundled along the Bayswater Road. The streets were becoming poorer and poorer.
Perhaps I oughtn’t to have given the job to Duffus, she said to herself — she was thinking of Peter Street where she had built houses; the roof was leaking again; there was a bad smell in the sink. But here the omnibus stopped; people got in and out; the omnibus went on again — but it’s better to give the work to a small man, she thought, looking at the huge plate-glass windows of one of the large shops, instead of going to one of those big firms. There were always small shops side by side with big shops. It puzzled her. How did the small shops manage to make a living? she wondered. But if Duffus, she began — here the omnibus stopped; she looked up; she rose “— if Duffus thinks he can bully me,” she said as she went down the steps, “he’ll find he’s mistaken.”
She walked quickly up the cinder path to the galvanised iron shed in which the meeting took place. She was late; there they were already. It was her first meeting since the holidays, and they all smiled at her. Judd even took his toothpick out of his mouth — a sign of recognition that flattered her. Here we all are again, she thought, taking her place and laying her papers on the table.
But she meant “them”, not herself. She did not exist; she was not anybody at all. But there they all were — Brocket, Cufnell, Miss Sims, Ramsden, Major Porter and Mrs Lazenby. The Major preaching organisation; Miss Sims (ex-mill hand) scenting condescension; Mrs Lazenby, offering to write to her cousin Sir John, upon which Judd, the retired shopkeeper, snubbed her. She smiled as she took her seat. Miriam Parrish was reading letters. But why starve yourself, Eleanor asked as she listened. She was thinner than ever.
She looked round the room as the letters were read. There had been a dance. Festoons of red and yellow paper were slung across the ceiling. The coloured picture of the Princess of Wales had loops of yellow roses at the corners; a sea-green ribbon across her breast, a round yellow dog on her lap, and pearls slung and knotted over her shoulders. She wore an air of serenity, of indifference; a queer comment upon their divisions, Eleanor thought; something that the Lazenbys worshipped; that Miss Sims derided; that Judd looked at cocking his eyebrows, picking his teeth. If he had had a son, he had told her, he would have sent him to the Varsity. But she recalled herself. Major Porter had turned to her.
“Now, Miss Pargiter,” he said, drawing her in, because they were both of the same social standing, “you haven’t given us your opinion.”
She pulled herself together and gave him her opinion. She had an opinion — a very definite opinion. She cleared her throat and began.
The smoke blowing through Peter Street had condensed, between the narrowness of the houses, into a fine grey veil. But the houses on either side were clearly visible. Save for two in the middle of the street, they were all precisely the same — yellow-grey boxes with slate tents on top. Nothing whatever was happening; a few children were playing in the street, two cats turned something over in the gutter with their paws. Yet a woman leaning out of the windows searched this way, that way, up and down the street as if she were raking every cranny for something to feed on. Her eyes, rapacious, greedy, like the eyes of a bird of prey, were also sulky and sleepy, as if they had nothing to feed their hunger upon. Nothing happened — nothing whatever. Still she gazed up and down with her indolent dissatisfied stare. Then a trap turned the corner. She watched it. It stopped in front of the houses opposite which, since the sills were green, and there was a plaque with a sunflower stamped on it over the door, were different from the others. A little man in a tweed cap got out and rapped at the door. It was opened by a woman who was about to have a baby. She shook her head; looked up and down the street; then shut the door. The man waited. The horse stood patiently with the reins drooping and its head bent. Another woman appeared at the window, with a white many-chinned face, and an under lip that stood out like a ledge. Leaning out of the window side by side the two women watched the man. He was bandy-legged; he was smoking. They passed some remark about him together. He walked up and down as if he were waiting for somebody. Now he threw away his cigarette. They watched him. What would he do next? Was he going to give his horse a feed? But here a tall woman wearing a coat and skirt of grey tweed came round the corner hastily; and the little man turned and touched his cap.
“Sorry I’m late,” Eleanor called out, and Duffus touched his cap with the friendly smile that always pleased her.
“That’s all right, Miss Pargiter,” he said. She always hoped that he did not feel that she was the ordinary employer.
“Now we’ll go over it,” she said. She hated the job, but it had to be done.
The door was opened by Mrs Toms, the downstairs lodger.
Oh dear, thought Eleanor, observing the slant of her apron, another baby coming, after all I told her.
They went from room to room of the little house, Mrs Toms and Mrs Grove following after. There was a crack here; a stain there. Duffus had a foot-rule in his hand with which he tapped the plaster. The worst of it is, she thought, as she let Mrs Toms do the talking, that I can’t help liking him. It was his Welsh accent largely; he was a charming ruffian. He was as supple as an eel, she knew; but when he talked like that, in that sing-song, which reminded her of Welsh valleys. . . . But he had cheated her at every point. There was a hole you could poke your finger through in the plaster.
“Look at that, Mr Duffus, there —” she said, stooping and poking her finger. He was licking his pencil. She loved going to his yard with him and seeing him size up planks and bricks; she loved his technical words for things, his little hard words.
“Now we’ll go upstairs,” she said. He seemed to her like a fly struggling to haul itself up out of a saucer. It was touch and go with small employers like Duffus; they might haul themselves up and become the Judds of their day and send their sons to the Varsity; or on the other hand they might fall in and then — He had a wife and five children; she had seen them in the room behind the shop, playing with reels of cotton on the floor. And she always hoped that they would ask her in. . . . But here was the top floor where old Mrs Potter lay bedridden. She knocked; she called out in a loud cheerful voice, “May we come in?”
There was no answer. The old woman was stone deaf; so in they went. There she was, as usual, doing nothing whatever, propped up in the corner of her bed.
“I’ve brought Mr Duffus to look at your ceiling,” Eleanor shouted.
The old woman looked up and began plucking with her hands like a large tousled ape. She looked at them wildly, suspiciously.
“The ceiling, Mr Duffus,” said Eleanor. She pointed to a yellow stain on the ceiling. The house had only been built five years; and yet everything wanted repairing. Duffus threw open the window and leant out. Mrs Potter clutched hold of Eleanor’s hand, as if she suspected that they were going to hurt her.
“We’ve come to look at your ceiling,” Eleanor repeated very loudly. But the words conveyed nothing. The old woman went off into a whining plaint; the words ran themselves together into a chant that was half plaint, half curse. If only the Lord would take her. Every night, she said, she implored Him to let her go. All her children were dead.
“When I wake in the morning . . . ” she began.
“Yes, yes, Mrs Potter,” Eleanor tried to soothe her; but her hands were firmly grasped.
“I pray Him to let me go,” Mrs Potter continued.
“It’s the leaves in the gutter,” said Duffus, popping his head in again.
“And the pain —” Mrs Potter stretched out her hands; they were knotted and grooved like the gnarled roots of a tree.
“Yes, yes,” said Eleanor. “But there’s a leak; it’s not only the dead leaves,” she said to Duffus.
Duffus put his head out again.
“We’re going to make you more comfortable,” Eleanor shouted to the old woman. Now she was cringing and fawning; now she had pressed her hand to her lips.
Duffus drew his head in again.
“Have you found out what’s wrong?” Eleanor said to him sharply. He was entering something in his pocket-book. She longed to go. Mrs Potter was asking her to feel her shoulder. She felt her shoulder. Her hand was still grasped. There was medicine on the table; Miriam Parrish came every week. Why do we do it? she asked herself as Mrs Potter went on talking. Why do we force her to live? she asked, looking at the medicine on the table. She could stand it no longer. She withdrew her hand.
“Good-bye, Mrs Potter,” she shouted. She was insincere; she was hearty. “We’re going to mend your ceiling,” she shouted. She shut the door. Mrs Groves waddled in advance of her to show her the sink in the scullery. A wisp of yellow hair hung down behind her dirty ears. If I had to do this every day of my life, Eleanor thought, as she followed them down into the scullery, I should become a bag of bones like Miriam; with a string of beads. . . . And what’s the use of that? she thought, stooping to smell the sink in the scullery.
“Well, Duffus,” she said, facing him when the inspection was over, with the smell of drains still in her nose. “What d’you propose to do about it?”
Her anger was rising; it was his fault largely. He had swindled her. But as she stood facing him and observed his little underfed body, and how his bow tie had worked up over his collar, she felt uncomfortable.
He shuffled and squirmed; she felt that she was going to lose her temper.
“If you can’t make a good job of it,” she said curtly, “I shall employ somebody else.” She adopted the tone of the Colonel’s daughter; the upper middle-class tone that she detested. She saw him turn sullen before her eyes. But she rubbed it in.
“You ought to be ashamed of it,” she told him. He was impressed she could see. “Good morning,” she said briefly.
The ingratiating smile was not produced for her benefit again, she observed. But you have to bully them or else they despise you, she thought as Mrs Toms let her out, and once more she observed the slant in her apron. A crowd of children stood round staring at Duffus’s pony. But none of them, she noticed, dared stroke the pony’s nose.
She was late. She gave one look at the sunflower on the terra- cotta plaque. That symbol of her girlish sentiment amused her grimly. She had meant it to signify flowers, fields in the heart of London; but now it was cracked. She broke into her usual ambling trot. The movement seemed to break up the disagreeable crust; to jolt off the grasp of the old woman’s hand that was still on her shoulder. She ran; she dodged. Shopping women got in her way. She dashed into the road waving her hand among the carts and horses. The conductor saw her, curved his arm round her and hauled her up. She had caught her bus.
She trod on the toe of a man in the corner, and pitched down between two elderly women. She was panting slightly; her hair was coming down; she was red with running. She cast a glance at her fellow-passengers. They all looked settled, elderly, as if their minds were made up. For some reason she always felt that she was the youngest person in an omnibus, but today, since she had won her scrap with Judd, she felt that she was grown up. The grey line of houses jolted up and down before her eyes as the omnibus trundled along the Bayswater Road. The shops were turning into houses; there were big houses and little houses; public houses and private houses. And here a church raised its filigree spire. Underneath were pipes, wires, drains. . . . Her lips began moving. She was talking to herself. There’s always a public house, a library and a church, she was muttering.
The man on whose toe she had trodden sized her up; a well-known type; with a bag; philanthropic; well nourished; a spinster; a virgin; like all the women of her class, cold; her passions had never been touched; yet not unattractive. She was laughing. . . . Here she looked up and caught his eye. She had been talking aloud to herself in an omnibus. She must cure herself of the habit. She must wait till she brushed her teeth. But luckily the bus was stopping. She jumped out. She began to walk quickly up Melrose Place. She felt vigorous and young. She noticed everything freshly after Devonshire. She looked down the long many-pillared vista of Abercorn Terrace. The houses, with their pillars and their front gardens, all looked highly respectable; in every front room she seemed to see a parlourmaid’s arm sweep over the table, laying it for luncheon. In several rooms they were already sitting down to luncheon; she could see them between the tent-shaped opening made by the curtains. She would be late for her own luncheon, she thought as she ran up the front steps and fitted her latch-key in the door. Then, as if someone were speaking, words formed in her mind. “Something pretty, something to wear.” She stopped with her key in the lock. Maggie’s birthday; her father’s present; she had forgotten it. She paused. She turned, she ran down the steps again. She must go to Lamley’s.
Mrs Lamley, who had grown stout these last years, was masticating a mouthful of cold mutton in the back room when she saw Miss Eleanor through the glass door.
“Good morning, Miss Eleanor,” she began, coming out.
“Something pretty, something to wear,” Eleanor panted. She was looking very well — quite brown after her holiday, Mrs Lamley noticed.
“For my niece — I mean cousin. Sir Digby’s little girl,” Eleanor brought out.
Mrs Lamley deprecated the cheapness of her goods.
There were toy boats; dolls; twopenny gold watches — but nothing nice enough for Sir Digby’s little girl. But Miss Eleanor was in a hurry.
“There,” she said, pointing to a card of bead necklaces. “That’ll do.”
It looked a little cheap, Mrs Lamley thought; reaching down a blue necklace with gold spots, but Miss Eleanor was in such a hurry that she wouldn’t even have it wrapped in brown paper.
“I shall be late as it is, Mrs Lamley,” she said, with a genial wave of her hand; and off she ran.
Mrs Lamley liked her. She always seemed so friendly. It was such a pity she didn’t marry — such a mistake to let the younger sister marry before the elder. But then she had the Colonel to look after, and he was getting on now, Mrs Lamley concluded, going back to her mutton in the back shop.
“Miss Eleanor won’t be a minute,” said the Colonel as Crosby brought in the dishes. “Leave the covers on.” He stood with his back to the fireplace waiting for her. Yes, he thought, I don’t see why not. “I don’t see why not,” he repeated, looking at the dish-cover. Mira was on the scene again; the other fellow had turned out, as he knew he would, a bad egg. And what provision was he to make for Mira? What was he to do about it? It had struck him that he would like to put the whole thing before Eleanor. Why not after all? She’s not a child any longer, he thought; and he didn’t like this business of — of — shutting things up in drawers. But he felt some shyness at the thought of telling his own daughter.
“Here she is,” he said abruptly to Crosby, who stood waiting mutely behind him.
No, no, he said to himself with sudden conviction, as Eleanor came in. I can’t do it. For some reason when he saw her he realised that he could not tell her. And after all, he thought, seeing how bright-cheeked, how unconcerned she looked, she has her own life to live. A spasm of jealousy passed through him. She’s got her own affairs to think about, he thought as they sat down.
She pushed a necklace across the table towards him.
“Hullo, what’s that?” he said, looking at it blankly.
“Maggie’s present, Papa,” she said. “The best I could do. . . . I’m afraid it’s rather cheap.”
“Yes; that’ll do very nicely,” he said, glancing at it absentmindedly. “Just what she’ll like,” he added, shoving it to one side. He began to carve the chicken.
She was very hungry; she was still rather breathless. She felt a little “spun round,” as she put it to herself. What did you spin things round on? she wondered, helping herself to bread sauce — a pivot? The scene had changed so often that morning; and every scene required a different adjustment; bringing this to the front; sinking that to the depths. And now she felt nothing; hungry merely; merely a chicken-eater; blank. But as she ate, the sense of her father imposed itself. She liked his solidity, as he sat opposite her munching his chicken methodically. What had he been doing, she wondered. Taking shares out of one company and putting them in another? He roused himself.
“Well, how was the Committee?” he asked. She told him, exaggerating her triumph with Judd.
“That’s right. Stand up to ’em, Nell. Don’t let yourself be sat on,” he said. He was proud of her in his own way; and she liked him to be proud of her. At the same time she did not mention Duffus and Rigby Cottages. He had no sympathy with people who were foolish about money, and she never got a penny interest: it all went on repairs. She turned the conversation to Morris and his case at the Law Courts. She looked at her watch again. Her sister-in-law Celia had told her to meet her at the Law Courts at two-thirty sharp.
“I shall have to hurry,” she said.
“Ah, but these lawyer chaps always know how to spin things out,” said the Colonel. “Who’s the Judge?”
“Sanders Curry,” said Eleanor.
‘Then it’ll last till Domesday,” said the Colonel.
“Which Court’s he sitting in?” he asked.
Eleanor did not know.
“Here, Crosby —” said the Colonel. He sent Crosby for The Times. He began opening and turning the great sheets with his clumsy fingers as Eleanor swallowed her tart. By the time she had poured out coffee he had found out in which court the case was being heard.
“And you’re going to the City, Papa?” she said as she put down her cup.
“Yes. To a meeting,” he said. He loved going to the City, whatever he did there.
“Odd it should be Curry who’s trying the case,” she said, rising. They had dined with him not long ago in a dreary great house somewhere off Queen’s Gate.
“D’you remember that party?” she said, getting up. “The old oak?” Curry collected oak chests.
“All shams I suspect,” said her father. “Don’t hurry,” he expostulated. “Take a cab, Nell — if you want any change —” he began, fumbling with his curtailed fingers for silver. As she watched him Eleanor felt the old childish feeling that his pockets were bottomless silver mines from which half-crowns could be dug eternally.
“Well, then,” she said, taking the coins, “we shall meet at tea.”
“No,” he reminded her, “I’m going round by the Digbys’.”
He took the necklace in his large hairy hand. It looked a little cheap, Eleanor was afraid.
“And what about a box for this, eh?” he asked.
“Crosby, find a box for the necklace,” said Eleanor. And Crosby, suddenly radiating importance, hurried off to the basement.
“It’ll be dinner then,” she said to her father. That’ll mean, she thought with relief, that I needn’t be back for tea.
“Yes, dinner,” he said. He held a spill of paper in his hand which he was applying to the end of his cigar. He sucked. A little puff of smoke rose from the cigar. She liked the smell of cigars. She stood for a moment and drew it in.
“And give my love to Aunt Eugénie,” she said. He nodded as he puffed at his cigar.
It was a treat to take a hansom — it saved fifteen minutes. She leant back in the corner, with a little sigh of content, as the flaps clicked above her knees. For a minute her mind was completely vacant. She enjoyed the peace, the silence, the rest from exertion as she sat there in the corner of the cab. She felt detached, a spectator, as it trotted along. The morning had been a rush; one thing on top of another. Now, until she reached the Law Courts, she could sit and do nothing. It was a long way; and the horse was a plodding horse, a red-coated hairy horse. It kept up its steady jog-trot all down the Bayswater Road. There was very little traffic; people were still at luncheon. A soft grey mist filled up the distance; the bells jingled; the houses passed. She ceased to notice what houses they were passing. She half shut her eyes, and then, involuntarily, she saw her own hand take a letter from the hall table. When? That very morning. What had she done with it? Put it in her bag? Yes. There it was, unopened; a letter from Martin in India. She would read it as they drove along. It was written on very thin paper in Martin’s little hand. It was longer than usual; it was about an adventure with somebody called Renton. Who was Renton? She could not remember. “We started at dawn,” she read.
She looked out of the window. They were being held up by traffic at the Marble Arch. Carriages were coming out of the Park. A horse pranced; but the coachman had him well in hand.
She read again: “I found myself alone in the middle of the jungle. . . . ”
But what were you doing? she asked.
She saw her brother; his red hair; his round face; and the rather pugnacious expression which always made her afraid that he would get himself into trouble one of these days. And so he had, apparently.
“I had lost my way; and the sun was sinking,” she read.
“The sun was sinking . . . ” Eleanor repeated, glancing ahead of her down Oxford Street. The sun shone on dresses in a window. A jungle was a very thick wood, she supposed; made of stunted little trees; dark green in colour. Martin was in the jungle alone, and the sun was sinking. What happened next? “I thought it better to stay where I was.” So he stood in the midst of little trees alone, in the jungle; and the sun was sinking. The street before her lost its detail. It must have been cold, she thought, when the sun sank. She read again. He had to make a fire. “I looked in my pocket and found that I had only two matches . . . The first match went out.” She saw a heap of dry sticks and Martin alone watching the match go out. “Then I lit the other, and by sheer luck it did the trick.” The paper began to burn; the twigs caught; a fan of fire blazed up. She skipped on in her anxiety to reach the end . . . —“once I thought I heard voices shouting, but they died away.”
“They died away!” said Eleanor aloud.
They had stopped at Chancery Lane. An old woman was being helped across the road by a policeman; but the road was a jungle.
“They died away,” she said. “And then?”
“ . . . I climbed a tree . . . I saw the track . . . the sun was rising. . . . They had given me up for dead.”
The cab stopped. For a moment Eleanor sat still. She saw nothing but stunted little trees, and her brother looking at the sun rising over the jungle. The sun was rising. Flames for a moment danced over the vast funereal mass of the Law Courts. It was the second match that did the trick, she said to herself as she paid the driver and went in.
“Oh, there you are!” cried a little woman in furs, who was standing by one of the doors.
“I had given you up. I was just going in.” She was a small cat- faced woman, worried, but very proud of her husband.
They pushed through the swing doors into the Court where the case was being tried. It seemed dark and crowded at first. Men in wigs and gowns were getting up and sitting down and coming in and going out like a flock of birds settling here and there on a field. They all looked unfamiliar; she could not see Morris. She looked about her, trying to find him.
“There he is,” Celia whispered.
One of the barristers in the front row turned his head. It was Morris; but how odd he looked in his yellow wig! His glance passed over them without any sign of recognition. Nor did she smile at him; the solemn sallow atmosphere forbade personalities; there was something ceremonial about it all. From where she sat she could see his face in profile; the wig squared his forehead, and gave him a framed look, like a picture. Never had she seen him to such advantage; with such a brow, with such a nose. She glanced round. They all looked like pictures; all the barristers looked emphatic, cut out, like eighteenth-century portraits hung upon a wall. They were still rising and settling, laughing, talking. . . . Suddenly a door was thrown open. The usher demanded silence for his lordship. There was silence; everybody stood up; and the Judge came in. He made one bow and took his seat under the Lion and the Unicorn. Eleanor felt a little thrill of awe run through her. That was old Curry. But how transformed! Last time she had seen him he was sitting at the head of a dinner-table; a long yellow strip of embroidery went rippling down the middle; and he had taken her, with a candle, round the drawing-room to look at his old oak. But now, there he was, awful, magisterial, in his robes.
A barrister had risen. She tried to follow what the man with a big nose was saying; but it was difficult to pick it up now. She listened, however. Then another barrister rose — a chicken-breasted little man, wearing gold pince-nez. He was reading some document; then he too began to argue. She could understand parts of what he was saying; though how it bore on the case she did not know. When was Morris going to speak, she wondered? Not yet apparently. As her father had said, these lawyer chaps knew how to spin things out. There had been no need to hurry over luncheon; an omnibus would have done just as well. She fixed her eyes on Morris. He was cracking some joke with the sandy man next to him. Those were his cronies, she thought; this was his life. She remembered his passion for the Bar as a boy. It was she who had talked Papa round; one morning she had taken her life in her hand and gone to his study . . . but now, to her excitement, Morris himself got up.
She felt her sister-in-law stiffen with nervousness and clasp her little bag tightly. Morris looked very tall, and very black and white as he began. One hand was on the edge of his gown. How well she knew that gesture of Morris’s, she thought — grasping something, so that you saw the white scar where he had cut himself bathing. But she did not recognise the other gesture — the way he flung his arm out. That belonged to his public life, his life in the Courts. And his voice was unfamiliar. But every now and then as he warmed to his speech, there was a tone in his voice that made her smile; it was his private voice. She could not help half turning to her sister-in-law as if to say, How like Morris! But Celia was looking with absolute fixity ahead of her at her husband. Eleanor, too, tried to fix her mind upon the argument. He spoke with extraordinary clearness; he spaced his words beautifully. Suddenly the Judge interrupted:
“Do I understand you to hold, Mr Pargiter . . .?” he said in urbane yet awful tones; and Eleanor was thrilled to see how instantly Morris stopped short; how respectfully he bent his head as the Judge spoke.
But will he know the answer? she thought, as if he were a child, shifting in her seat with nervousness lest he might break down. But he had the answer at his finger-ends. Without hurry or flutter he opened a book; found his place; read out a passage, upon which old Curry nodded, and made a note in the great volume that lay open in front of him. She was immensely relieved.
“How well he did that!” she whispered. Her sister-in-law nodded; but she still grasped her bag tightly. Eleanor felt that she could relax. She glanced round her. It was an odd mixture of solemnity and licence. Barristers kept coming in and out. They stood leaning against the wall of the Court. In the pale top light all their faces looked parchment-coloured; all their features seemed cut out. They had lit the gas. She gazed at the Judge himself. He was now lying back in his great carved chair under the Lion and the Unicorn, listening. He looked infinitely sad and wise, as if words had been beating upon him for centuries. Now he opened his heavy eyes, wrinkled his forehead, and the little hand that emerged frailly from the enormous cuff wrote a few words in the great volume. Then again he lapsed with half-shut eyes into his eternal vigil over the strife of unhappy human beings. Her mind wandered. She leant back against the hard wooden seat and let the tide of oblivion flow over her. Scenes from her morning began to form themselves; to obtrude themselves. Judd at the Committee; her father reading the paper; the old woman plucking at her hand; the parlourmaid sweeping the silver over the table; and Martin lighting his second match in the jungle. . . .
She fidgeted. The air was fuggy; the light dim; and the Judge now that the first glamour had worn off, looked fretful; no longer immune from human weakness, and she remembered with a smile how very gullible he was, there in that hideous house in Queen’s Gate, about old oak. “This I picked up at Whitby,” he had said. And it was a sham. She wanted to laugh; she wanted to move. She rose and whispered:
“I’m going.”
Her sister-in-law made a little murmur, perhaps of protest. But Eleanor made her way as silently as she could through the swing doors, out into the street.
The uproar, the confusion, the space of the Strand came upon her with a shock of relief. She felt herself expand. It was still daylight here; a rush, a stir, a turmoil of variegated life came racing towards her. It was as if something had broken loose — in her, in the world. She seemed, after her concentration, to be dissipated, tossed about. She wandered along the Strand, looking with pleasure at the racing street; at the shops full of bright chains and leather cases; at the white-faced churches; at the irregular jagged roofs laced across and across with wires. Above was the dazzle of a watery but gleaming sky. The wind blew in her face. She breathed in a gulp of fresh wet air. And that man, she thought, thinking of the dark little Court and its cut-out faces, has to sit there all day, every day. She saw Sanders Curry again, lying back in his great chair, with his face falling in folds of iron. Every day, all day, she thought, arguing points of law. How could Morris stand it? But he had always wanted to go to the Bar.
Cabs, vans and omnibuses streamed past; they seemed to rush the air into her face; they splashed the mud onto the pavement. People jostled and hustled and she quickened her pace in time with theirs. She was stopped by a van turning down one of the little steep streets that led to the river. She looked up and saw the clouds moving between the roofs, dark clouds, rain-swollen; wandering, indifferent clouds. She walked on.
Again she was stopped at the entrance to Charing Cross station. The sky was wide at that point. She saw a file of birds flying high, flying together; crossing the sky. She watched them. Again she walked on. People on foot, people in cabs were being sucked in like straws round the piers of a bridge; she had to wait. Cabs piled with boxes went past her.
She envied them. She wished she were going abroad; to Italy, to India. . . . Then she felt vaguely that something was happening. The paper boys at the gates were dealing out papers with unusual rapidity. Men were snatching them and opening them and reading them as they walked on. She looked at a placard that was crumpled across a boy’s legs. “Death” was written in very large black letters.
Then the placard blew straight, and she read another word: “Parnell.”
“Dead” . . . she repeated. “Parnell.” She was dazed for a moment. How could he be dead — Parnell? She bought a paper. They said so. . . .
“Parnell is dead!” she said aloud. She looked up and saw the sky again; clouds were passing; she looked down into the street. A man pointed at the news with his forefinger. Parnell is dead he was saying. He was gloating. But how could he be dead? It was like something fading in the sky.
She walked slowly along towards Trafalgar Square, holding the paper in her hand. Suddenly the whole scene froze into immobility. A man was joined to a pillar; a lion was joined to a man; they seemed stilled, connected, as if they would never move again.
She crossed into Trafalgar Square. Birds chattered shrilly somewhere. She stopped by the fountain and looked down into the large basin full of water. The water rippled black as the wind ruffled it. There were reflections in the water, branches and a pale strip of sky. What a dream, she murmured; what a dream . . . But someone jostled her. She turned. She must go to Delia. Delia had cared. Delia had cared passionately. What was it she used to say — flinging out of the house, leaving them all for the Cause, for this man? Justice, Liberty? She must go to her. This would be the end of all her dreams. She turned and hailed a cab.
She leant over the flaps of the cab looking out. The streets they were driving through were horribly poor; and not only poor, she thought, but vicious. Here was the vice, the obscenity, the reality of London. It was lurid in the mixed evening light. Lamps were being lit. Paper-boys were crying, Parnell . . . Parnell. He’s dead, she said to herself, still conscious of the two worlds; one flowing in wide sweeps overhead, the other tip-tapping circumscribed upon the pavement. But here she was . . . She held up her hand. She stopped the cab opposite a little row of posts in an alley. She got out and made her way into the Square.
The sound of the traffic was dulled. It was very silent here. In the October afternoon, with dead leaves falling, the old faded Square looked dingy and decrepit and full of mist. The houses were let out in offices, to societies, to people whose names were pinned up on the door-posts. The whole neighbourhood seemed to her foreign and sinister. She came to the old Queen Anne doorway with its heavy carved eyebrows and pressed the bell at the top of six or seven bells. Names were written over them, sometimes only on visiting-cards. Nobody came. She pushed the door open and went in; she mounted the wooden stairs with carved banisters, that seemed to have been degraded from their past dignity. Jugs of milk with bills under them stood in the deep window-seats. Some of the panes were broken. Outside Delia’s door, at the top, there was a milk-jug too, but it was empty. Her card was fixed by a drawing- pin to a panel. She knocked and waited. There was no sound. She turned the handle. The door was locked. She stood for a moment listening. A little window at the side gave on to the square. Pigeons crooned on the tree-tops. The traffic hummed far off; she could just hear paperboys crying death . . . death . . . death. The leaves were falling. She turned and went downstairs.
She strolled along the streets. Children had chalked the pavement into squares; women leant from the upper windows, raking the street with a rapacious, dissatisfied stare. Rooms were let out to single gentlemen only. There were cards in them which said “Furnished Apartments” or “Bed and Breakfast.” She guessed at the life that went on behind those thick yellow curtains. This was the purlieus in which her sister lived, she thought, turning; she must often come back this way at night alone. Then she went back to the Square and climbed the stairs and rattled at the door again. But there was no sound within. She stood for a moment watching the leaves fall; she heard the paper-boys crying and the pigeons crooning in the tree-tops. Take two coos, Taffy; take two coos, Taffy; tak . . . Then a leaf fell.
The traffic at Charing Cross thickened as the afternoon wore on. People on foot, people in cabs were being sucked in at the gates of the station. Men swung along at a great pace as if there were some demon in the station who would be enraged if they kept him waiting. But even so they paused and snatched a paper as they passed. The clouds parting and massing let the light shine and then veiled it. The mud, now dark brown, now liquid gold, was splashed up by the wheels and hooves, and in the general churn and uproar the shrill chatter of the birds on the eaves was silenced. The hansoms jingled and passed; jingled and passed. At last among all the jingling cabs came one in which sat a stout red-faced man holding a flower wrapped in tissue-paper — the Colonel.
“Hi!” he cried as the cab passed the gates; and drove one hand through the trap-door in the roof. He leant out and a paper was thrust up at him.
“Parnell!” he exclaimed, as he fumbled for his glasses. “Dead, by Jove!”
The cab trotted on. He read the news two or three times over. He’s dead, he said, taking off his glasses. A shock of something like relief, of something that had a tinge of triumph in it, went through him as he leant back in the corner. Well, he said to himself, he’s dead — that unscrupulous adventurer — that agitator who had done all the mischief, that man. .. Some feeling connected with his own daughter here formed in him; he could not say exactly what, but it made him frown. Anyhow he’s dead now, he thought. How had he died? Had he killed himself? It wouldn’t be surprising. . . . Anyhow he was dead and that was an end of it. He sat holding the paper crumpled in one hand, the flower wrapped in tissue paper in the other, as the cab drove down Whitehall. . . . One could respect him, he thought, as the cab passed the House of Commons, which was more than could be said for some of the other fellows . . . and there’d been a lot of nonsense talked about the divorce case. He looked out. The cab was driving near a certain street where he used to stop and look about him years ago. He turned and glanced down a street to the right. But a man in public life can’t afford to do those things, he thought. He gave a little nod as the cab passed on. And now she’s written to ask me for money, he thought. The other chap had turned out, as he knew he would, a bad egg. She’d lost all her looks, he was thinking; she had grown very stout. Well, he could afford to be generous. He put on his glasses again and read the City news.
It would make no difference, Parnell’s death, coming now, he thought. Had he lived, had the scandal died down — he looked up. The cab was going the long way round as usual. “Left!” he shouted, “Left!” as the driver, as they always did, took the wrong turning.
In the rather dark basement at Browne Street, the Italian manservant was reading the paper in his shirt sleeves, when the housemaid waltzed in carrying a hat.
“Look what she’s given me!” she cried. To atone for the mess in the drawing-room, Lady Pargiter had given her a hat. “Ain’t I stylish?” she said, pausing in front of the glass with the great Italian hat that looked as if it were made of spun glass on one side of her head. And Antonio had to drop his paper and catch her round the waist from sheer gallantry, since she was no beauty, and her action was merely a parody of what he remembered in the hill towns of Tuscany. But a cab stopped in front of the railings; two legs stood still there, and he must detach himself, put on his jacket and go upstairs to answer the bell.
He takes his time, the Colonel thought, as he stood on the door- step waiting. The shock of the death had been absorbed almost; it still swept round in his system; but did not prevent him from thinking, as he stood there, that they had had the bricks re- pointed; but how had they money to spare, with the three boys to educate, and the two little girls? Eugénie was a clever woman of course; but he wished she would get a parlourmaid instead of these Italian dagoes who always seemed to be swallowing macaroni. Here the door opened, and as he went upstairs he thought he heard, from somewhere in the background, a shout of laughter.
He liked Eugénie’s drawing-room, he thought, as he stood there waiting. It was very untidy. There was a litter of shavings from something that was being unpacked on the floor. They had been to Italy, he remembered. A looking-glass stood on the table. It was probably one of the things she had picked up there: the sort of thing that people did pick up in Italy; an old glass, covered with spots. He straightened his tie in front of it.
But I prefer a glass in which one can see oneself, he thought, turning away. There was the piano open; and the tea — he smiled — with the cup half full as usual; and branches stuck about the room, branches of withering red and yellow leaves. She liked flowers. He was glad he had remembered to bring her his usual gift. He held the flower wrapped in tissue paper in front of him. But why was the room so full of smoke? A gust blew in. Both windows in the back room were open, and the smoke was blowing in from the garden. Were they burning weeds, he wondered? He walked to the window and looked out. Yes, there they were — Eugénie and the two little girls. There was a bonfire. As he looked, Magdalena, the little girl who was his favourite, tossed a whole armful of dead leaves. She jerked them as high as she could, and the fire blazed up. A great fan of red flame flung out.
“That’s dangerous!” he called out.
Eugénie pulled the children back. They were dancing with excitement. The other little girl, Sara, ducked under her mother’s arm, seized another armful of leaves and flung them again. A great fan of red flame flung out. Then the Italian servant came and mentioned his name. He tapped on the window. Eugénie turned and saw him. She held the children back with one hand and raised the other in welcome.
“Stay where you are!” she cried. “We’re coming!”
A cloud of smoke blew straight at him; it made his eyes water, and he turned and sat down in the chair by the sofa. In another second she came, hurrying towards him with both her hands stretched out. He rose and took them.
“We’re having a bonfire,” she said. Her eyes were glowing; her hair was looping down. “That’s why I’m all so blown-about,” she added, putting her hand to her head. She was untidy, but extremely handsome all the same, Abel thought. A fine large woman, growing ample, he noted as she shook hands; but it suited her. He admired that type more than the pink-and-white pretty Englishwoman. The flesh flowed over her like warm yellow wax; she had great dark eyes like a foreigner, and a nose with a ripple in it. He held out his camellia; his customary gift. She made a little exclamation as she took the flower from the tissue paper and sat down.
“How very good of you!” she said, and held it for a moment in front of her, and then did what he had often seen her do with a flower — put the stalk between her lips. Her movements charmed him as usual.
“Having a bonfire for the birthday?” he asked. . . . “No, no, no,” he protested, “I don’t want tea.”
She had taken her cup, and sipped the cold tea that was left in it. As he watched her, some memory of the East came back to him; so women sat in hot countries in their doorways in the sun. But it was very cold at the moment with the window open and the smoke blowing in. He still had his newspaper in his hand; he laid it on the table.
“Seen the news?” he asked.
She put down her cup and slightly opened her large dark eyes. Immense reserves of emotion seemed to dwell in them. As she waited for him to speak, she raised her hand as if in expectation.
“Parnell,” said Abel briefly. “He’s dead.”
“Dead?” Eugénie echoed him. She let her hand fall dramatically.
“Yes. At Brighton. Yesterday.”
“Parnell is dead!” she repeated.
“So they say,” said the Colonel. Her emotion always made him feel more matter-of-fact; but he liked it. She took up the paper.
“Poor thing!” she exclaimed, letting it fall.
“Poor thing?” he repeated. Her eyes were full of tears. He was puzzled. Did she mean Kitty O’Shea? He hadn’t thought of her.
“She ruined his career for him,” he said with a little snort.
“Ah, but how she must have loved him!” she murmured.
She drew her hand over her eyes. The Colonel was silent for a moment. Her emotion seemed to him out of all proportion to its object; but it was genuine. He liked it.
“Yes,” he said, rather stiffly. “Yes, I suppose so.” Eugénie picked up the flower again and held it, twirling it. She was oddly absentminded now and then, but he always felt at his ease with her. His body relaxed. He felt relieved of some obstruction in her presence.
“How people suffer! . . . ” she murmured, looking at the flower. “How they suffer, Abel!” she said. She turned and looked straight at him.
A great gust of smoke blew in from the other room.
“You don’t mind the draught?” he asked, looking at the window. She did not answer at once; she was twirling her flower. Then she roused herself and smiled.
“Yes, yes. Shut it!” she said with a wave of her hand. He went and shut the window. When he turned round, she had got up and was standing at the looking-glass, arranging her hair.
“We’ve had a bonfire for Maggie’s birthday,” she murmured, looking at herself in the Venetian glass that was covered with spots. “That’s why, that’s why —” she smoothed her hair and fixed the camellia in her dress. “I’m so very —”
She put her head a little on one side as if to observe the effect of the flower in her dress. The Colonel sat down and waited. He glanced at his paper.
“They seem to be hushing things up,” he said.
“You don’t mean —” Eugénie was beginning; but here the door opened and the children came in. Maggie, the elder, came first; the other little girl, Sara, hung back behind her.
“Hullo!” the Colonel exclaimed. “Here they are!” He turned round. He was very fond of children. “Many happy returns of the day to you, Maggie!” He felt in his pocket for the necklace that Crosby had done up in a cardboard box. Maggie came up to him to take it. Her hair had been brushed, and she was dressed in a stiff clean frock. She took the parcel and undid it; she held the blue-and- gold necklace dangling from her finger. For a moment the Colonel doubted whether she liked it. It looked a little garish as she held it dangling in her hand. And she was silent. Her mother at once supplied the words she should have spoken.
“How lovely, Maggie! How perfectly lovely!”
Maggie held the beads in her hand and said nothing.
“Thank Uncle Abel for the lovely necklace,” her mother prompted her.
“Thank you for the necklace, Uncle Abel,” said Maggie. She spoke directly and accurately, but the Colonel felt another twinge of doubt. A pang of disappointment out of all proportion to its object came over him. Her mother, however, fastened it round her neck. Then she turned away to her sister, who was peeping from behind a chair.
“Come, Sara,” said her mother. “Come and say how-d’you-do.”
She held out her hand partly to coax the little girl, partly, Abel guessed, in order to conceal the very slight deformity that always made him uncomfortable. She had been dropped when she was a baby; one shoulder was slightly higher than the other; it made him feel squeamish; he could not bear the least deformity in a child. It did not affect her spirits, however. She skipped up to him, whirling round on her toe, and kissed him lightly on the cheek. Then she tugged at her sister’s frock, and they both rushed away into the back room laughing.
“They are going to admire your lovely present, Abel,” said Eugénie. “How you spoil them! — and me too,” she added, touching the camellia on her breast.
“I hope she liked it?” he asked. Eugénie did not answer him. She had taken up the cup of cold tea again and was sipping it in her indolent Southern manner.
“And now,” she said, leaning back comfortably, “tell me all your news.”
The Colonel, too, lay back in his chair. He pondered for a moment. What was his news? Nothing occurred to him on the spur of the moment. With Eugénie, too, he always wanted to make a little splash; she put a shine on things. While he hesitated, she began:
“We’ve been having a wonderful time in Venice! I took the children. That’s why we’re all so brown. We had rooms not on the Grand Canal — I hate the Grand Canal — but just off it. Two weeks of blazing sun; and the colours”— she hesitated —“marvellous!” she exclaimed, “marvellous!” She threw out her hand. She had gestures of extraordinary significance. That’s how she rigs things up, he thought. But he liked her for it.
He had not been to Venice for years.
“Any pleasant people there?” he asked.
“Not a soul,” she said. “Not a soul. No one except a dreadful Miss —. One of those women who make one ashamed of one’s country,” she said energetically.
“I know ’em,” he chuckled.
“But coming back from the Lido in the evening,” she resumed, “with the clouds above and the water below — we had a balcony; we used to sit there.” She paused.
“Was Digby with you?” the Colonel asked.
“No, poor Digby. He took his holiday earlier, in August. He was up in Scotland with the Lasswades shooting. It does him good, you know.” There she goes, rigging thing’s up again, he thought.
But she resumed.
“Now tell me about the family. Martin and Eleanor, Hugh and Milly, Morris and . . . ” She hesitated; he suspected that she had forgotten the name of Morris’ wife.
“Celia,” he said. He stopped. He wanted to tell her about Mira. But he told her about the family: Hugh and Milly; Morris and Celia. And Edward.
“They seem to think a lot of him at Oxford,” he said gruffly. He was very proud of Edward.
“And Delia?” said Eugénie. She glanced at the paper. The Colonel at once lost his affability. He looked glum and formidable, like an old bull with his head down, she thought.
“Perhaps it will bring her to her senses,” he said sternly. They were silent for a moment. There were shouts of laughter from the garden.
“Oh those children!” she exclaimed. She rose and went to the window. The Colonel followed her. The children had stolen back into the garden. The bonfire was burning fiercely. A clear pillar of flame rose in the middle of the garden. The little girls were laughing and shouting as they danced round it. A shabby old man, something like a decayed groom to look at, stood there with a rake in his hand. Eugénie flung up the window and cried out. But they went on dancing. The Colonel leant out too; they looked like wild creatures with their hair flying. He would have liked to go down and jump over the bonfire, but he was too old. The flames leapt high — clear gold, bright red.
“Bravo!” he cried, clapping his hands. “Bravo!”
“Little demons!” said Eugénie. She was as much excited as they were, he observed. She leant out of the window and cried to the old man with the rake:
“Make it blaze! Make it blaze!”
But the old man was raking out the fire. The sticks were scattered. The flames had sunk.
The old man pushed the children away.
“Well, that’s over,” said Eugénie, heaving a sigh. She turned. Someone had come into the room.
“Oh, Digby, I never heard you!” she exclaimed. Digby stood there with a case in his hands.
“Hullo, Digby!” said Abel, shaking hands.
“What’s all this smoke?” said Digby, looking round him.
He’s aged a bit, Abel thought. There he stood in his frock coat with the top buttons undone. His coat was a little threadbare; his hair was white on top. But he was very handsome; beside him the Colonel felt large, weather-beaten and rough. He was a little ashamed that he had been caught leaning out of the window clapping his hands. He looks older, he thought, as they stood side by side; yet he’s five years younger than I am. He was a distinguished man in his way; the top of his tree; a knight and all the rest of it. But he’s not as rich as I am, he remembered with satisfaction; for he had always been the failure of the two.
“You look so tired, Digby!” Eugénie exclaimed, sitting down. “He ought to take a real holiday,” she said, turning to Abel. “I wish you’d tell him so.” Digby brushed away a white thread that had stuck to his trousers. He coughed slightly. The room was full of smoke.
“What’s all this smoke for?” he asked his wife.
“We’ve been having a bonfire for Maggie’s birthday,” she said as if excusing herself.
“Oh yes,” he said. Abel was irritated; Maggie was his favourite; her father ought to have remembered her birthday.
“Yes,” said Eugénie, turning to Abel again, “he lets everybody else take a holiday, but he never takes one himself. And then, when he’s done a full day’s work at the office, he comes back with his bag full of papers —” She pointed at the bag.
“You shouldn’t work after dinner,” said Abel. “That’s a bad habit.” Digby did look a bit off-colour, he thought. Digby brushed aside this feminine effusiveness.
“Seen the news?” he said to his brother, indicating the paper.
“Yes. By Jove!” said Abel. He liked talking politics with his brother, though he slightly resented his official airs as if he could say more but must not. And then it’s all in the papers the day after, he thought. Still they always talked politics. Eugénie lying back in her corner always let them talk; she never interrupted. But at length she got up and began tidying the litter that had fallen from the packing-case. Digby stopped what he was saying and watched her. He was looking at the glass.
“Like it?” said Eugénie, with her hand on the frame.
“Yes,” said Digby; but there was a hint of criticism in his voice. “Quite a pretty one.”
“It’s only for my bedroom,” she said quickly. Digby watched her stuffing the bits of paper into the box.
“Remember,” he said, “we’re dining with the Chathams tonight.”
“I know.” She touched her hair again. “I shall have to make myself tidy,” she said. Who were “the Chathams?” Abel wondered. Bigwigs, mandarins, he supposed half contemptuously. They moved a great deal in that world. He took it as a hint that he should go. They had come to the end of what they had to say to each other — he and Digby. He still hoped, however, that he might talk with Eugénie alone.
“About this African business —” he began, bethinking him of another question — when the children came in; they had come to say good- night. Maggie was wearing his necklace and it looked very pretty, he thought, or was it she who looked so pretty? But their frocks, their clean blue and pink frocks, were crumpled; they were smudged with the sooty London leaves that they had been holding in their arms.
“Grubby little ruffians!” he said, smiling at them. “Why d’you wear your best clothes to play in the garden?” said Sir Digby, as he kissed Maggie. He said it jokingly, but there was a hint of disapproval in his tones. Maggie made no answer. Her eyes were riveted on the camellia that her mother wore in the front of her dress. She went up and stood looking at her.
“And you — what a little sweep!” said Sir Digby, pointing to Sara.
“It’s Maggie’s birthday,” said Eugénie, holding out her arm again as if to protect the little girl.
“That is a reason, I should have thought,” said Sir Digby, surveying his daughters, “to — er — to — er — reform one’s habits.” He stumbled, trying to make his sentence sound playful; but it turned out as it generally did when he talked to the children, lame and rather pompous.
Sara looked at her father as if she were considering him.
“To — er — to — er — reform one’s habits,” she repeated. Emptied of all meaning, she had got the rhythm of his words exactly. The effect was somehow comic. The Colonel laughed; but Digby, he felt, was annoyed. He only patted Sara on the head when she came to say good-night; but he kissed Maggie as she passed him.
“Had a nice birthday?” he said, pulling her to him. Abel made it an excuse to go.
“But there is no need for you to go yet, Abel?” Eugénie protested as he held out his hand.
She kept hold of his hand as if to prevent him from going. What did she mean? Did she want him to stay, did she want him to go? Her eyes, her large dark eyes, were ambiguous.
“But you’re dining out?” he said.
“Yes,” she replied, letting his hand fall, and as she said no more there was nothing for it, he supposed — he must take himself off.
“Oh, I can find my way out alone,” he said as he left the room.
He went downstairs rather slowly. He felt depressed and disappointed. He had not seen her alone; he had not told her anything. Perhaps he never would tell anybody anything. After all, he thought as he went downstairs, slowly, heavily, it was his own affair; it didn’t matter to anybody else. One must burn one’s own smoke, he thought as he took his hat. He glanced round.
Yes . . . the house was full of pretty things. He looked vaguely at a great crimson chair with gilt claws that stood in the hall. He envied Digby his house, his wife, his children. He was getting old, he felt. All his children were grown-up; they had left him. He paused on the doorstep and looked out into the street. It was quite dark; lamps were lit; the autumn was drawing in; and as he marched up the dark windy street, now spotted with raindrops, a puff of smoke blew full in his face; and leaves were falling.
1907
It was midsummer; and the nights were hot. The moon, falling on water, made it white, inscrutable, whether deep or shallow. But where the moonlight fell on solid objects it gave them a burnish and a silver plating, so that even the leaves in country roads seemed varnished. All along the silent country roads leading to London carts plodded; the iron reins fixed in the iron hands, for vegetables, fruit, flowers travelled slowly. Heaped high with round crates of cabbage, cherries, carnations, they looked like caravans piled with the goods of tribes migrating in search of water, driven by enemies to seek new pasturage. On they plodded, down this road, that road, keeping close to the kerb. Even the horses, had they been blind, could have heard the hum of London in the distance; and the drivers, dozing, yet saw through half shut eyes the fiery gauze of the eternally burning city. At dawn, at Covent Garden, they laid down their burdens; tables and trestles, even the cobbles were frilled as with some celestial laundry with cabbages, cherries and carnations.
All the windows were open. Music sounded. From behind crimson curtains, rendered semi-transparent and sometimes blowing wide came the sound of the eternal waltz — After the ball is over, after the dance is done — like a serpent that swallowed its own tail, since the ring was complete from Hammersmith to Shoreditch. Over and over again it was repeated by trombones outside public houses; errand boys whistled it; bands inside private rooms where people were dancing played it. There they sat at little tables at Wapping in the romantic Inn that overhung the river, between timber warehouses where barges were moored; and here again in Mayfair. Each table had its lamp; its canopy of tight red silk, and the flowers that had sucked damp from the earth that noon relaxed and spread their petals in vases. Each table had its pyramid of strawberries, its pale plump quail; and Martin, after India, after Africa, found it exciting to talk to a girl with bare shoulders, to a woman iridescent with green beetles wings in her hair in a manner that the waltz condoned and half concealed under its amorous blandishments. Did it matter what one said? For she looked over her shoulder, only half listening, as a man came in wearing decorations, and a lady, in black with diamonds, beckoned him to a private corner.
As the night wore on a tender blue light lay on the market carts still plodding close to the kerb, past Westminster, past the yellow round clocks, the coffee stalls and the statues that stood there in the dawn holding so stiffly their rods or rolls of paper. And the scavengers followed after, sluicing the pavements. Cigarette ends, little bits of silver paper, orange peel — all the litter of the day was swept off the pavement and still the carts plodded, and the cabs trotted, indefatigably, along the dowdy pavements of Kensington, under the sparkling lights of Mayfair, carrying ladies with high head dresses and gentlemen in white waistcoats along the hammered dry roads which looked in the moonlight as if they were plated with silver.
“Look!” said Eugénie as the cab trotted over the bridge in the summer twilight. “Isn’t that lovely?”
She waved her hand at the water. They were crossing the Serpentine; but her exclamation was only an aside; she was listening to what her husband was saying. Their daughter Magdalena was with them; and she looked where her mother pointed. There was the Serpentine, red in the setting sun; the trees grouped together, sculptured, losing their detail; and the ghostly architecture of the little bridge, white at the end, composed the scene. The lights — the sun-light and the artificial light — were strangely mixed.
“ . . . of course it’s put the Government in a fix,” Sir Digby was saying. “But then that’s what he wants.”
“Yes . . . he’ll make a name for himself, that young man,” said Lady Pargiter.
The cab passed over the bridge. It entered the shadow of the trees. Now it left the Park and joined the long line of cabs, taking people in evening dress to plays, to dinner-parties, that was streaming towards the Marble Arch. The light grew more and more artificial; yellower and yellower. Eugénie leant across and touched something on her daughter’s dress. Maggie looked up. She had thought that they were still talking politics.
“So,” said her mother, arranging the flower in front of her dress. She put her head a little on one side and looked at her daughter approvingly. Then she gave a sudden laugh and threw her hand out. “D’you know what made me so late?” she said. “That imp, Sally . . . ”
But her husband interrupted her. He had caught sight of an illuminated clock.
“We shall be late,” he said.
“But eight-fifteen means eight-thirty,” said Eugénie as they turned down a side street.
All was silent in the house at Browne Street. A ray from the street lamp fell through the fanlight and, rather capriciously, lit up a tray of glasses on the hall table; a top hat; and a chair with gilt paws. The chair, standing empty, as if waiting for someone, had a look of ceremony; as if it stood on the cracked floor of some Italian ante-room. But all was silent. Antonio, the man servant, was asleep; Mollie, the housemaid, was asleep; downstairs in the basement a door flapped to and fro — otherwise all was silent.
Sally in her bedroom at the top of the house turned on her side and listened intently. She thought she heard the front door click. A burst of dance music came in through the open window and made it impossible to hear.
She sat up in bed and looked out through the slit of the blind. Through the gap she could see a slice of the sky; then roofs; then the tree in the garden; then the backs of houses opposite standing in a long row. One of the houses was brilliantly lit and from the long open windows came dance music. They were waltzing. She saw shadows twirling across the blind. It was impossible to read; impossible to sleep. First there was the music; then a burst of talk; then people came out into the garden; voices chattered, then the music began again.
It was a hot summer’s night, and though it was late, the whole world seemed to be alive; the rush of traffic sounded distant but incessant.
A faded brown book lay on her bed; as if she had been reading. But it was impossible to read; impossible to sleep. She lay back on the pillow with her hands behind her head.
“And he says,” she murmured, “the world is nothing but . . . ” She paused. What did he say? Nothing but thought, was it? she asked herself as if she had already forgotten. Well, since it was impossible to read and impossible to sleep, she would let herself be thought. It was easier to act things than to think them. Legs, body, hands, the whole of her must be laid out passively to take part in this universal process of thinking which the man said was the world living. She stretched herself out. Where did thought begin?
In the feet? she asked. There they were, jutting out under the single sheet. They seemed separated, very far away. She closed her eyes. Then against her will something in her hardened. It was impossible to act thought. She became something; a root; lying sunk in the earth; veins seemed to thread the cold mass; the tree put forth branches; the branches had leaves.
“— the sun shines through the leaves,” she said, waggling her finger. She opened her eyes in order to verify the sun on the leaves and saw the actual tree standing out there in the garden. Far from being dappled with sunlight, it had no leaves at all. She felt for a moment as if she had been contradicted. For the tree was black, dead black.
She leant her elbow on the sill and looked out at the tree. A confused clapping sound came from the room where they were having the dance. The music had stopped; people began to come down the iron staircase into the garden which was marked out with blue and yellow lamps dotted along the wall. The voices grew louder. More people came and more people came. The dotted square of green was full of the flowing pale figures of women in evening dress; of the upright black-and-white figures of men in evening dress. She watched them moving in and out. They were talking and laughing; but they were too far off for her to hear what they were saying. Sometimes a single word or a laugh rose above the rest, and then there was a confused babble of sound. In their own garden all was empty and silent. A cat slid stealthily along the top of a wall; stopped; and then went on again as if drawn on some secret errand. Another dance struck up.
“Over again, over and over again!” she exclaimed impatiently. The air, laden with the curious dry smell of London earth, puffed in her face, blowing the blind out. Stretched flat on her bed, she saw the moon; it seemed immensely high above her. Little vapours were moving across the surface. Now they parted and she saw engravings chased over the white disc. What were they, she wondered — mountains? valleys? And if valleys, she said to herself half closing her eyes, then white trees; then icy hollows, and nightingales, two nightingales calling to each other, calling and answering each other across the valleys. The waltz music took the words “calling and answering each other” and flung them out; but as it repeated the same rhythm again and again, it coarsened them, it destroyed them. The dance music interfered with everything. At first exciting, then it became boring and finally intolerable. Yet it was only twenty minutes to one.
Her lip raised itself, like that of a horse that is going to bite. The little brown book was dull. She reached her hand above her head and took down another book from the shelf of battered books without looking at it. She opened the book at random; but her eye was caught by one of the couples who were still sitting out in the garden though the others had gone in. What were they saying, she wondered? There was something gleaming in the grass, and, as far as she could see, the black-and-white figure stooped and picked it up.
“And as he picks it up,” she murmured, looking out, “he says to the lady beside him: Behold, Miss Smith, what I have found on the grass — a fragment of my heart; of my broken heart, he says. I have found it in the grass; and I wear it on my breast”— she hummed the words in time to the melancholy waltz music —“my broken heart, this broken glass, for love —” she paused and glanced at the book. On the fly-leaf was written:
“Sara Pargiter from her Cousin Edward Pargiter.”
“ . . . for love,” she concluded, “is best.”
She turned to the title-page.
“The Antigone of Sophocles, done into English verse by Edward Pargiter,” she read.
Once more she looked out of the window. The couple had moved. They were going up the iron staircase. She watched them. They went into the ballroom. “And suppose in the middle of the dance,” she murmured, “she takes it out; and looks at it and says, ‘What is this?’ and it’s only a piece of broken glass — of broken glass. . . . ” She looked down at the book again.
“The Antigone of Sophocles,” she read. The book was brand-new; it cracked as she opened it; this was the first time she had opened it.
“The Antigone of Sophocles, done into English verse by Edward Pargiter,” she read again. He had given it her in Oxford; one hot afternoon when they had been trailing through chapels and libraries. “Trailing and wailing,” she hummed, turning over the pages, “and he said to me, getting up from the low armchair, and brushing his hand through his hair”— she glanced out of the window — “‘my wasted youth, my wasted youth.’” The waltz was now at its most intense, its most melancholy. “Taking in his hand,” she hummed in time to it, “this broken glass, this faded heart, he said to me . . . ” Here the music stopped; there was a sound of clapping; the dancers once more came out into the garden.
She skipped through the pages. At first she read a line or two at random; then, from the litter of broken words, scenes rose, quickly, inaccurately, as she skipped. The unburied body of a murdered man lay like a fallen tree-trunk, like a statue, with one foot stark in the air. Vultures gathered. Down they flopped on the silver sand. With a lurch, with a reel, the top-heavy birds came waddling; with a flap of the grey throat swinging, they hopped — she beat her hand on the counterpane as she read — to that lump there. Quick, quick, quick with repeated jerks they struck the mouldy flesh. Yes. She glanced at the tree outside in the garden. The unburied body of the murdered man lay on the sand. Then in a yellow cloud came whirling — who? She turned the page quickly. Antigone? She came whirling out of the dust-cloud to where the vultures were reeling and flung white sand over the blackened foot. She stood there letting fall white dust over the blackened foot. Then behold! there were more clouds; dark clouds; the horsemen leapt down; she was seized; her wrists were bound with withies; and they bore her, thus bound — where?
There was a roar of laughter from the garden. She looked up. Where did they take her? she asked. The garden was full of people. She could not hear a word that they were saying. The figures were moving in and out.
“To the estimable court of the respected ruler?” she murmured, picking up a word or two at random, for she was still looking out into the garden. The man’s name was Creon. He buried her. It was a moonlight night. The blades of the cactuses were sharp silver. The man in the loincloth gave three sharp taps with his mallet on the brick. She was buried alive. The tomb was a brick mound. There was just room for her to lie straight out. Straight out in a brick tomb, she said. And that’s the end, she yawned, shutting the book.
She laid herself out, under the cold smooth sheets, and pulled the pillow over her ears. The one sheet and the one blanket fitted softly round her. At the bottom of the bed was a long stretch of cool fresh mattress. The sound of the dance music became dulled. Her body dropped suddenly; then reached ground. A dark wing brushed her mind, leaving a pause; a blank space. Everything — the music, the voices — became stretched and generalised. The book fell on the floor. She was asleep.
“It’s a lovely night,” said the girl who was going up the iron steps with her partner. She rested her hand on the balustrade. It felt very cold. She looked up; a slice of yellow light lay round the moon. It seemed to laugh round it. Her partner looked up too, and then mounted another step without saying anything for he was shy.
“Going to the match tomorrow?” he said stiffly, for they scarcely knew each other.
“If my brother gets off in time to take me,” she said, and went up another step too. Then, as they entered the ballroom, he gave her a little bow and left her; for his partner was waiting.
The moon which was now clear of clouds lay in a bare space as if the light had consumed the heaviness of the clouds and left a perfectly clear pavement, a dancing ground for revelry. For some time the dappled iridescence of the sky remained unbroken. Then there was a puff of wind; and a little cloud crossed the moon.
There was a sound in the bedroom. Sara turned over.
“Who’s that?” she murmured. She sat up and rubbed her eyes.
It was her sister. She stood at the door, hesitating. “Asleep?” she said in a low voice.
“No,” said Sara. She rubbed her eyes. “I’m awake,” she said, opening them.
Maggie came across the room and sat down on the edge of the bed. The blind was blowing out; the sheets were slipping off the bed. She felt dazed for a moment. After the ballroom, it looked so untidy. There was a tumbler with a toothbrush in it on the wash- stand; the towel was crumpled on the towel-horse; and a book had fallen on the floor. She stooped and picked up the book. As she did so, the music burst out down the street. She held back the blind. The women in pale dresses, the men in black and white, were crowding up the stairs into the ballroom. Snatches of talk and laughter were blown across the garden.
“Is there a dance?” she asked.
“Yes. Down the street,” said Sara.
Maggie looked out. At this distance the music sounded romantic, mysterious, and the colours flowed over each other, neither pink nor white nor blue.
Maggie stretched herself and unpinned the flower that she was wearing. It was drooping; the white petals were stained with black marks. She looked out of the window again. The mixture of lights was very odd; one leaf was a lurid green; another was a bright white. The branches crossed each other at different levels. Then Sally laughed.
“Did anybody give you a piece of glass,” she said, “saying to you, Miss Pargiter . . . my broken heart?”
“No,” said Maggie, “why should they?” The flower fell off her lap onto the floor.
“I was thinking,” said Sara. “The people in the garden . . . ”
She waved her hand at the window. They were silent for a moment, listening to the dance music.
“And who did you sit next?” Sara asked after a time.
“A man in gold lace,” said Maggie.
“In gold lace?” Sara repeated.
Maggie was silent. She was getting used to the room; the discrepancy between this litter and the shiny ballroom was leaving her. She envied her sister lying in bed with the window open and the breeze blowing in.
“Because he was going to a party,” she said. She paused. Something had caught her eye. A branch swayed up and down in the little breeze. Maggie held the blind so that the window was uncurtained. Now she could see the whole sky, and the houses and the branches in the garden.
“It’s the moon,” she said. It was the moon that was making the leaves white. They both looked at the moon, which shone like a silver coin, perfectly polished, very sharp and hard.
“But if they don’t say O my broken heart,” said Sara, “what do they say, at parties?”
Maggie flicked off a white fleck that had stuck to her arm from her gloves.
“Some people say one thing,” she said, getting up, “and some people say another.”
She picked up the little brown book which lay on the counterpane and smoothed out the bedclothes. Sara took the book out of her hand.
“This man,” she said, tapping the ugly little brown volume, “says the world’s nothing but thought, Maggie.”
“Does he?” said Maggie, putting the book on the wash-stand. It was a device, she knew, to keep her standing there, talking.
“D’you think it’s true?” Sara asked.
“Possibly,” said Maggie, without thinking what she was saying. She put out her hand to draw the curtain.
“The world’s nothing but thought, does he say?” she repeated, holding the curtain apart.
She had been thinking something of the kind when the cab crossed the Serpentine; when her mother interrupted her. She had been thinking, Am I that, or am I this? Are we one, or are we separate — something of the kind.
“Then what about trees and colours?” she said, turning round.
“Trees and colours?” Sara repeated.
“Would there be trees if we didn’t see them?” said Maggie.
“What’s ‘I’? . . . ‘I’ . . . ” She stopped. She did not know what she meant. She was talking nonsense.
“Yes,” said Sara. “What’s ‘I’?” She held her sister tight by the skirt, whether she wanted to prevent her from going, or whether she wanted to argue the question.
“What’s ‘I’?” she repeated.
But there was a rustling outside the door and her mother came in.
“Oh my dear children!” she exclaimed, “still out of bed? Still talking?”
She came across the room, beaming, glowing, as if she were still under the influence of the party. Jewels flashed on her neck and her arms. She was extraordinarily handsome. She glanced round her.
“And the flower’s on the floor, and everything’s so untidy,” she said. She picked up the flower that Maggie had dropped and put it to her lips.
“Because I was reading, Mama, because I was waiting,” said Sara. She took her mother’s hand and stroked the bare arm. She imitated her mother’s manner so exactly that Maggie smiled. They were the very opposite of each other — Lady Pargiter so sumptuous; Sally so angular. But it’s worked, she thought to herself, as Lady Pargiter allowed herself to be pulled down onto the bed. The imitation had been perfect.
“But you must go to sleep, Sal,” she protested. “What did the doctor say? Lie straight, lie still, he said.” She pushed her back onto the pillows.
“I am lying straight and still,” said Sara. “Now”— she looked up at her —“tell me about the party.”
Maggie stood upright in the window. She watched the couples coming down the iron staircase. Soon the garden was full of pale whites and pinks, moving in and out. She half heard them behind her talking about the party.
“It was a very nice party,” her mother was saying.
Maggie looked out of the window. The square of the garden was filled with differently tinted colours. They seemed to ripple one over the other until they entered the angle where the light from the house fell, when they suddenly turned to ladies and gentlemen in full evening dress.
“No fish-knives?” she heard Sara saying.
She turned.
“Who was the man I sat next?” she asked.
“Sir Matthew Mayhew,” said Lady Pargiter.
“Who is Sir Matthew Mayhew?” said Maggie.
“A most distinguished man, Maggie!” said her mother, flinging her hand out.
“A most distinguished man,” Sara echoed her.
“But he is,” Lady Pargiter repeated, smiling at her daughter whom she loved, perhaps because of her shoulder.
“It was a great honour to sit next him, Maggie,” she continued. “A great honour,” she said reprovingly. She paused, as if she saw a little scene. She looked up.
“And then,” she resumed, “when Mary Palmer says to me, Which is your daughter? I see Maggie, miles away, at the other end of the room, talking to Martin, whom she might have met every day of her life in an omnibus!”
Her words were stressed so that they seemed to rise and fall. She emphasised the rhythm still further by tapping with her fingers on Sally’s bare arm.
“But I don’t see Martin every day,” Maggie protested.
“I haven’t seen him since he came back from Africa.” Her mother interrupted her.
“But you don’t go to parties, my dear Maggie, to talk to your own cousins. You go to parties to —”
Here the dance music crashed out. The first chords seemed possessed of frantic energy, as if they were summoning the dancers imperiously to return. Lady Pargiter stopped in the middle of her sentence. She sighed; her body seemed to become indolent and suave. The heavy lids lowered themselves slightly over her large dark eyes. She swayed her head slowly in time to the music.
“What’s that they’re playing?” she murmured. She hummed the tune, beating time with her hand. “Something I used to dance to.”
“Dance it now, Mama,” said Sara.
“Yes, Mama. Show us how you used to dance,” Maggie urged her.
“But without a partner —?” Lady Pargiter protested.
Maggie pushed a chair away.
“Imagine a partner,” Sara urged her.
“Well,” said Lady Pargiter. She rose. “It was something like this,” she said. She paused; she held her skirt out with one hand; she slightly crooked the other in which she held the flower; she twirled round and round in the space which Maggie had cleared. She moved with extraordinary stateliness. All her limbs seemed to bend and flow in the lilt and the curve of the music; which became louder and clearer as she danced to it. She circled in and out among the chairs and tables and then, as the music stopped, “There!” she exclaimed. Her body seemed to fold and close itself together as she sighed “There!” and sank all in one movement on the edge of the bed.
“Wonderful!” Maggie exclaimed. Her eyes rested on her mother with admiration.
“Nonsense,” Lady Pargiter laughed, panting slightly. “I’m much too old to dance now; but when I was young; when I was your age —” She sat there panting.
“You danced out of the house onto the terrace and found a little note folded in your bouquet —” said Sara, stroking her mother’s arm. “Tell us that story, Mama.”
“Not tonight,” said Lady Pargiter. “Listen — there’s the clock striking!”
Since the Abbey was so near, the sound of the hour filled the room; softly, tumultuously, as if it were a flurry of soft sighs hurrying one on top of another, yet concealing something hard. Lady Pargiter counted. It was very late.
“I’ll tell you the true story one of these days,” she said as she bent to kiss her daughter goodnight.
“Now! Now!” cried Sara, holding her fast.
“No, not now — not now!” Lady Pargiter laughed, snatching away her hand. “There’s Papa calling me!”
They heard footsteps in the passage outside, and then Sir Digby’s voice at the door.
“Eugénie! It’s very late, Eugénie!” they heard him say.
“Coming!” she cried. “Coming!”
Sara caught her by the train of her dress. “You haven’t told us the story of the bouquet, Mamma!” she cried.
“Eugénie!” Sir Digby repeated. His voice sounded peremptory. “Have you locked —”
“Yes, yes, yes,” said Eugénie. “I will tell you the true story another time,” she said, freeing herself from her daughter’s grasp. She kissed them both quickly and went out of the room.
“She won’t tell us,” said Maggie, picking up her gloves. She spoke with some bitterness.
They listened to the voices talking in the passage. They could hear their father’s voice. He was expostulating. His voice sounded querulous and cross.
“Pirouetting up and down with his sword between his legs; with his opera hat under his arm and his sword between his legs,” said Sara, pummelling her pillows viciously.
The voices went further away, downstairs.
“Who was the note from, d’you think?” said Maggie. She paused, looking at her sister burrowing into her pillows.
“The note? What note?” said Sara. “Oh, the note in the bouquet. I don’t remember,” she said. She yawned.
Maggie shut the window and pulled the curtain but she left a chink of light.
“Pull it tight, Maggie,” said Sara irritably. “Shut out that din.”
She curled herself up with her back to the window. She had raised a hump of pillow against her head as if to shut out the dance music that was still going on. She pressed her face into a cleft of the pillows. She looked like a chrysalis wrapped round in the sharp white folds of the sheet. Only the tip of her nose was visible. Her hip and her feet jutted out at the end of the bed covered by a single sheet. She gave a profound sigh that was half a snore; she was asleep already.
Maggie went along the passage. Then she saw that there were lights in the hall beneath. She stopped and looked down over the banister. The hall was lit up. She could see the great Italian chair with the gilt claws that stood in the hall. Her mother had thrown her evening cloak over it, so that it fell in soft golden folds over the crimson cover. She could see a tray with whisky and a soda-water syphon on the hall table. Then she heard the voices of her father and mother as they came up the kitchen stairs. They had been down in the basement; there had been a burglary up the street; her mother had promised to have a new lock put on the kitchen door but had forgotten. She could hear her father say:
“ . . . they’d melt it down; we should never get it back again.”
Maggie went on a few steps upstairs.
“I’m so sorry, Digby,” Eugénie said as they came into the hall. “I will tie a knot in my handkerchief; I will go directly after breakfast tomorrow morning. . . . Yes,” she said, gathering her cloak in her arms, “I will go myself, and I will say ‘I’ve had enough of your excuses, Mr Toye. No, Mr Toye, you have deceived me once too often. And after all these years!’”
Then there was a pause. Maggie could hear soda-water squirted into a tumbler; the chink of a glass; and then the lights went out.
1908
It was March and the wind was blowing. But it was not “blowing.” It was scraping, scourging. It was so cruel. So unbecoming. Not merely did it bleach faces and raise red spots on noses; it tweaked up skirts; showed stout legs; made trousers reveal skeleton shins. There was no roundness, no fruit in it. Rather it was like the curve of a scythe which cuts, not corn, usefully; but destroys, revelling in sheer sterility. With one blast it blew out colour — even a Rembrandt in the National Gallery, even a solid ruby in a Bond Street window: one blast and they were gone. Had it any breeding place it was in the Isle of Dogs among tin cans lying beside a workhouse drab on the banks of a polluted city. It tossed up rotten leaves, gave them another span of degraded existence; scorned, derided them, yet had nothing to put in the place of the scorned, the derided. Down they fell. Uncreative, unproductive, yelling its joy in destruction, its power to peel off the bark, the bloom, and show the bare bone, it paled every window; drove old gentlemen further and further into the leather smelling recesses of clubs; and old ladies to sit eyeless, leather cheeked, joyless among the tassels and antimacassars of their bedrooms and kitchens. Triumphing in its wantonness it emptied the streets; swept flesh before it; and coming smack against a dust cart standing outside the Army and Navy Stores, scattered along the pavement a litter of old envelopes; twists of hair; papers already blood smeared, yellow smeared, smudged with print and sent them scudding to plaster legs, lamp posts, pillar boxes, and fold themselves frantically against area railings.
Matty Stiles, the caretaker, huddled in the basement of the house in Browne Street, looked up. There was a rattle of dust along the pavement. It worked its way under the doors, through the window frames; on to chests and dressers. But she didn’t care. She was one of the unlucky ones. She had been thinking it was a safe job, sure to last the summer out anyhow. The lady was dead; the gentleman too. She had got the job through her son the policeman. The house with its basement would never let this side of Christmas — so they told her. She had only to show parties round who came with orders to view from the agent. And she always mentioned the basement — how damp it was. “Look at that stain on the ceiling.” There it was, sure enough. All the same, the party from China took a fancy to it. It suited him, he said. He had business in the city. She was one of the unlucky ones — after three months to turn out and lodge with her son in Pimlico.
A bell rang. Let him ring, ring, ring, she growled. She wasn’t going to open the door any more. There he was standing on the door-step. She could see a pair of legs against the railing. Let him ring as much as he liked. The house was sold. Couldn’t he see the notice on the board? Couldn’t he read it? Hadn’t he eyes? She huddled closer to the fire, which was covered with pale ash. She could see his legs there, standing on the door-step, between the canaries’ cage and the dirty linen which she had been going to wash, but this wind made her shoulder ache cruel. Let him ring the house down, for all she cared.
Martin was standing there.
“Sold” was written on a strip of bright red paper pasted across the house-agent’s board.
“Already!” said Martin. He had made a little circle to look at the house in Browne Street. And it was already sold. The red strip gave him a shock. It was sold already, and Digby had only been dead three months — Eugénie not much more than a year. He stood for a moment gazing at the black windows now grimed with dust. It was a house of character; built some time in the eighteenth century. Eugénie had been proud of it. And I used to like going there, he thought. But now an old newspaper was on the door-step; wisps of straw had caught in the railings; and he could see, for there were no blinds, into an empty room. A woman was peering up at him from behind the bars of a cage in the basement. It was no use ringing. He turned away. A feeling of something extinguished came over him as he went down the street.
It’s a grimy, it’s a sordid end, he thought; I used to enjoy going there. But he disliked brooding over unpleasant thoughts. What’s the good of it? he asked himself.
“The King of Spain’s daughter,” he hummed as he turned the corner, “came to visit me . . . ”
“And how much longer,” he asked himself, pressing the bell, as he stood on the door-step of the house in Abercorn Terrace, “is old Crosby going to keep me waiting?” The wind was very cold.
He stood there, looking at the buff-coloured front of the large, architecturally insignificant, but no doubt convenient family mansion in which his father and sister still lived. “She takes her time nowadays,” he thought, shivering in the wind. But here the door opened, and Crosby appeared.
“Hullo, Crosby!” he said.
She beamed on him so that her gold tooth showed. He was always her favourite, they said, and the thought pleased him today.
“How’s the world treating you?” he asked, as he gave her his hat.
She was just the same — more shrivelled, more gnat-like, and her blue eyes were more prominent than ever.
“Feeling the rheumatics?” he asked, as she helped him off with his coat. She grinned, silently. He felt friendly; he was glad to find her much as usual. “And Miss Eleanor?” he asked, as he opened the drawing-room door. The room was empty. She was not there. But she had been there, for there was a book on the table. Nothing had been changed he was glad to see. He stood in front of the fire and looked at his mother’s picture. In the course of the past few years it had ceased to be his mother; it had become a work of art. But it was dirty.
There used to be a flower in the grass, he thought, peering into a dark corner: but now there was nothing but dirty brown paint. And what’s she been reading? he wondered. He took the book that was propped up against the teapot and looked at it. “Renan,” he read. “Why Renan?” he asked himself, beginning to read as he waited.
“Mr Martin, Miss,” said Crosby, opening the study door. Eleanor looked round. She was standing by her father’s chair with her hands full of long strips of newspaper cuttings, as if she had been reading them aloud. There was a chess-board in front of him; the chess-men were set out for a game; but he was lying back in his chair. He looked lethargic, and rather gloomy.
“Put ’em away. . . . Keep ’em safe somewhere,” he said, jerking his thumb at the cuttings. That was a sign that he had grown very old, Eleanor thought — wanting newspaper cuttings kept. He had grown inert and ponderous after his stroke; there were red veins in his nose and in his cheeks. She too felt old, heavy and dull.
“Mr Martin’s called,” Crosby repeated.
“Martin’s come,” Eleanor said. Her father seemed not to hear. He sat still with his head sunk on his breast. “Martin,” Eleanor repeated. “Martin . . . ”
Did he want to see him or did he not want to see him? She waited as if for some sluggish thought to rise. At last he gave a little grunt; but what it meant she was not certain.
“I’ll send him in after tea,” she said. She paused for a moment. He roused himself and began fumbling with his chess-men. He still had courage, she observed with pride. He still insisted upon doing things for himself.
She went into the drawing-room and found Martin standing in front of the placid, smiling picture of their mother. He held a book in his hand.
“Why Renan?” he said as she came in. He shut the book and kissed her. “Why Renan?” he repeated. She flushed slightly. It made her shy, for some reason, that he had found the book there, open. She sat down and laid the press cuttings on the tea-table.
“How’s Papa?” he asked. She had lost something of her bright colour, he thought, glancing at her, and her hair had a tuft of grey in it.
“Rather gloomy,” she said, glancing at the press cuttings.
“I wonder,” she added, “who writes that sort of thing?”
“What sort of thing?” said Martin. He picked up one of the crinkled strips and began reading it: “’ . . . an exceptionally able public servant . . . a man of wide interests. . . . ’ Oh, Digby,” he said. “Obituaries. I passed the house this afternoon,” he added. “It’s sold.”
“Already?” said Eleanor.
“It looked very shut-up and desolate,” he added. “There was a dirty old woman in the basement.”
Eleanor took out a hair-pin and began fraying the wick of the kettle. Martin watched her for a moment in silence.
“I liked going there,” he said at length. “I liked Eugénie,” he added.
Eleanor paused.
“Yes . . . ” she said doubtfully. She had never felt at her ease with her. “She exaggerated,” she added.
“Well of course,” Martin laughed. He smiled, recalling some memory. “She had less sense of truth than . . . that’s no sort of use, Nell,” he broke off, irritated by her fumbling with the wick.
“Yes, yes,” she protested. “It boils in time.”
She paused. Stretching out towards the tea-caddy, she measured the tea. “One, two, three, four,” she counted.
She still used the nice old silver tea-caddy, he noticed, with the sliding lid. He watched her measuring the tea methodically — one, two, three, four. He was silent.
“We can’t tell a lie to save our souls,” he said abruptly.
What makes him say that? Eleanor wondered.
“When I was with them in Italy — ” she said aloud. But here the door opened and Crosby came in carrying some sort of dish. She left the door ajar and a dog pushed in after her.
“I mean —” Eleanor added; but she could not say what she meant with Crosby in the room fidgeting about.
“It’s time Miss Eleanor got a new kettle,” said Martin, pointing to the old brass kettle, faintly engraved with a design of roses, which he had always hated.
“Crosby,” said Eleanor, still poking with her pin, “doesn’t hold with new inventions. Crosby won’t trust herself in the Tube, will you, Crosby?”
Crosby grinned. They always spoke to her in the third person, because she never answered but only grinned. The dog snuffed at the dish she had just put down. “Crosby’s letting that beast get much too fat,” said Martin, pointing at the dog.
“That’s what I’m always telling her,” said Eleanor.
“If I were you, Crosby,” said Martin, “I’d cut down his meals and take him for a brisk run round the park every morning.” Crosby opened her mouth wide.
“Oh, Mr Martin!” she protested, shocked by his brutality into speech.
The dog followed her out of the room.
“Crosby’s the same as ever,” said Martin.
Eleanor had lifted the lid of the kettle and was looking in. There were no bubbles on the water yet.
“Damn that kettle,” said Martin. He took up one of the newspaper cuttings and began to make it into a spill.
“No, no, Papa wants them kept,” said Eleanor. “But he wasn’t like that,” she said, laying her hand on the newspaper cuttings. “Not in the least.”
“What was he like?” Martin asked.
Eleanor paused. She could see her uncle clearly in her mind’s eye; he held his top-hat in his hand; he laid his hand on her shoulder as they stopped in front of some picture. But how could she describe him?
“He used to take me to the National Gallery,” she said.
“Very cultivated, of course,” said Martin. “But he was such a damned snob.”
“Only on the surface,” said Eleanor.
“And always finding fault with Eugénie about little things,” Martin added.
“But think of living with her,” said Eleanor.
“That manner —” She threw her hand out; but not as Eugénie threw her hand out, Martin thought.
“I liked her,” he said. “I liked going there.” He saw the untidy room; the piano open; the window open; a wind blowing the curtains, and his aunt coming forward with her arms open. “What a pleasure, Martin! what a pleasure!” she would say. What had her private life been, he wondered — her love affairs? She must have had them — obviously, obviously.
“Wasn’t there some story,” he began, “about a letter?” He wanted to say, Didn’t she have an affair with somebody? But it was more difficult to be open with his sister than with other women, because she treated him as if he were a small boy still. Had Eleanor ever been in love, he wondered, looking at her.
“Yes,” she said. “There was a story —”
But here the electric bell rang sharply. She stopped.
“Papa,” she said. She half rose.
“No,” said Martin. “I’ll go.” He got up. “I promised him a game of chess.”
“Thanks, Martin. He’ll enjoy that,” said Eleanor with relief as he left the room, and she found herself alone.