Interim: Pilgrimage, Volume 5

by Dorothy M. Richardson

2

Her resolutions kept her at work on Saturday afternoon. A steady morning’s work disposed of the correspondence and the inrush of paid accounts. After lunch she worked in the surgeries until they were ready for Monday morning and made an attack on the mass of clerical work that remained from the old year. She sat working until she grew so cold that she knew if she stayed on in the cold window space she would have the beginning of a cold. Better to go, and have late evenings every day next week, cheered by the protests of the Orlys and ending with warm hours in the den. As she got up and felt the aching of her throat and the harsh hot chill running through her nerves she realised that anyhow she was in for a cold. There was no room to go to to get warm before going out. There seemed to be no warmth anywhere in the world. Torpid and stupid, miserably realising the increasing glow of her nose and the numb clumsiness of her feet she put away the ledgers and got into her outdoor things. She resented the sight of the bound volume of The Dental Cosmos that she had put aside to take home. Her interest in it was useless; as useless as everything else in the freezing world. Sounds of dancing and chanting came up the basement stairs. When their work was done they could laugh and sing in a warm room.

Turning northwards toward the Marylebone Road she met a bleak wind and turned back and down Devonshire Street and eastwards towards St. Pancras through a maze of side streets. The icy wind drove against her all the way. When she crossed a wide thoroughfare it was reinforced from the north. Eddies of colourless dust swirled about the pavements. At every crossing in the many little streets there was some big vehicle just upon her keeping her shrinking in the cold while it rumbled over the cobbles, overwhelming her with a harsh grating roar that filled the streets and the sky. Darkness was beginning; a hard black January darkness, utterly different to the friendly exciting twilights of the old year standing far far away with summer just behind them and Christmas ahead....

Inside the house a cold grey twilight was blotting out the warm brownness. A door opened as she turned the stairhead on the second floor and a tall thin pale-faced young man in dark clothes and a light waistcoat flashed past her and leaped lightly downstairs. Miriam carried her impression up to her room, going hurriedly and stumbling on the stairs as she went.... Something hard, metallic, like a wire spring, cold and relentless. Belonging to a cold dreadful darkness and not knowing it; confident. He had whistled going downstairs, or sung. Had he? Perhaps he was the foreigner who had sung last night? Perfectly and awfully dreadful.... The whole house and even her own room had been changed in a twinkling. Coming in it had had a warmth, even in the cold twilight. Now it lay open and bleak, all its rooms naked and visible, a house “foreign young gentlemen” heard of and came to live in. He was one of the “Norwegian young gentlemen” who had lived in Mrs. Reynolds’ boarding house in Woburn Place and this was just another boarding house to him. Perhaps the house was full of boarders.... She had grown accustomed to the Baileys having come up from the basement to the ground floor and had got into the habit of coming briskly through the hall with a preoccupied manner, ignoring the invariable appearance of a peeping form at the partly opened door of the dining-room. It was strange now to reflect that the house had always been full of lodgers. What sort of people had they been? She could not remember ever having met a lodger face to face, or heard any sounds in the many downstairs rooms.... Perhaps it had been partly through going out so early and coming back only when the A.B.C. closed and being out or away so much at week-ends ... but also she must have been oblivious.... The house had been her own; waiting for her when she found it; the quiet road of large high grey mysterious houses, the two rows of calm balconied facades, the green squares at either end, the green door she waited for as she turned unseeing into the road from the quiet thoroughfare of Endsleigh Gardens, her triumphant faithful latchkey, the sheltered dimness of the hall, the great staircase, the many large closed doors, the lonely obscurity of her empty top floor. What had come now was the fulfilment of the apprehension she had had when Mrs. Bailey had spoken the word boarders. Here they were. They would come and go and go up and downstairs from their bedrooms to that dining-room where the disturbing disclosure had been made and the unknown drawing-room.... Perhaps it would be a failure. She could not imagine Mrs. Bailey and the two vague furtive children in skimpy blue serge dresses dealing with the young Norwegian gentleman. He would not stay.... If boarders failed Mrs. Bailey might give up the house altogether.... She found herself sitting in her outdoor things with the large volume heavy on her knees in the middle of the room. She felt too languid and miserable to get up and take the small chair and the large book to the table and began wretchedly turning the pages with her gloved hands. Here it was. She glanced through the long article, reading passages here and there. There seemed to be nothing more; she had gathered the gist of it all in glancing through it at Wimpole Street. There was no need to have brought it home. It was quite clear that she belonged to the lymphatico-nervous class. It was the worst of the four classes of humanity. But all the symptoms were hers.... She read once more the account of the nervo-bilious type. It was impossible to fit into that. Those people were dark and sanguine and energetic. It was very strange. Having bilious attacks and not having the advantages of the bilious temperament. It meant having the worst of everything. No energy no initiative no hopefulness no resisting power; and sometimes bilious attacks. She was useless; an encumbrance; left out of life forever, because it was better for life to leave her out.... She sat staring at the shabby panels of her wardrobe, hating them for their quiet merciless agreement with her thoughts. To stop now and come to an end would be a relief. But there was nothing anywhere that would come in and end her. Why did life produce people with lymphatico-nervous temperaments? Perhaps it was the explanation of all she had suffered in the past; of the things that had driven her again and again to go away and away, anywhere. She wrenched herself away from her thoughts and flung forward to the sense of sunshine, sudden beautiful things, unreasonable secret happiness, waiting somewhere beyond the blackness, to come again. But it would be mean to take them. She brought nothing to anybody. She had no right to anything. She ought to be branded and go about in a cloak.... There was no one in the world who would care if she never appeared anywhere again. She sat shrinking before this thought. It was the plain and simple truth. Nothing that any kind and cheerful person might say could alter it. It would only make it worse. She wondered that she had never put it to herself before. It must always have been there since her mother’s death. There were one or two people who thought they cared. But they only cared because they did not know. It they saw more of her they would cease even to think they cared; and they had their own lives.... She had gone on being happy exactly in the same way as she had forgotten there were people in the house; just going lymphatico-nervously about with her eyes shut. But any alternative was worse. Insincere. If one could not die one must go dragging on, keeping oneself to oneself. That was why it was a relief to be in London; surrounded by people who did not know what one was really like. Social life, any sort of social life anywhere would not help. It only made it worse. Being like this was not a morbid state due to the lack of cheerful society. People who said that were wrong. The sign that they were wrong was the way they went about being deliberately cheerful and sociable. That was worse than anything; the refusal to face the truth. But at least they could endure people.... If one could not endure anyone one ought to be dead ... to sit staring in front of one until one was dead ... the wardrobe did not disagree. She averted her eyes as from an observer. They fell upon her hopeless person dressed in the clothes in which she moved about in the world. She was bitterly cold. But she sat on unable to summon courage to turn and face her room. Her eyes wandered vacantly back to the panels and down to the drawer below them and back again. The warm quiet booming of a gong came up through the house. She got to her feet and stood listening in amazement. Mrs. Bailey had instituted a boarding-house gong! She went out on to the landing; the gong ceased and rattled gently against its framework released from hands that had stilled its reverberation. A voice sounded in the hall and then the dining-room door closed and there was silence. They were having tea. Of course; every day; life going on down there in the dining-room. Involuntarily her feet were on the stairs. She went down the narrow flight holding to the balustrade to steady the stumbling of her benumbed limbs. What was she doing? Going down to Mrs. Bailey; going to stand for a moment close by Mrs. Bailey’s tea-tray. No; impossible to let the Baileys save her; having done nothing for herself. Impossible to be beholden to the Baileys for anything. Restoration by them would be restoration to shame. She had moved unconsciously. Her life was still her own. She was in the world, in a house, going down some stairs. For the present the pretence of living could go on. She could not go back to her room; nor forward to any other room. She pushed blindly on, bitter anger growing within her. She had moved towards the Baileys. It was irrevocable. She had departed from all her precedents. She would always know it. Wherever she found herself it would always be there, at the root of her consciousness, shaming her, showing in everything she did or said. Half-way downstairs she restrained her heavy movements and began to go swiftly and stealthily. Mean, mean mean; utterly mean and damned, a sneaking evil spirit. She pulled herself upright and cleared her throat in a business-like way. The echo of Harriett’s voice in her voice plumbed her for tears. But there were no tears. Only something close round her that moulded her face in lines of despair. The hall was in sight. She was going down to the hall to look for letters on the hall table, and go back. She paused in the hall. If the dining-room door opened she would kill someone with a cold blind glance and go angrily on and out of the front door. If it did not open? It remained closed. It was not going to open. It came quietly wide as if someone had been waiting behind it with the handle turned. Mrs. Bailey was in the hall with a firm little hand on her arm.—Well, young lady?—Miriam turned full round, shrinking backwards towards the hall table. Mrs. Bailey was clutching her hands—Won’t you come in and have a cup of tea?——I can’t whispered Miriam briskly, moving towards the dining-room door.—I’ve got to go out she murmured, standing just inside the open door.—Going out asked Mrs. Bailey in a refined little voice throwing a proud fond shy glance towards Miriam from her recovered place behind the tea-tray. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes sparkled brightly under the gaslight. Miriam’s glance elastic in the warmth coming from the room swept from the flood of yellow hair on the back of the youngest Bailey girl sitting close at her mother’s left hand, across to the far side of the table. The pale grey-blue eyes of the eldest Bailey girl were directed towards the bread and butter her hand was stretched out to take with the unseeing look they must have had when she had turned her face towards the door. At her side, between her and her mother sat the young Norwegian gentleman, a dark blue upright form with a narrow gold bar set aslant in the soft mass of black silk tie bulging about the uncreased flatness of his length of grey waistcoat. He had reared his head smoothly upright and a smooth metallic glance had slid across her from large dark clear easily opened eyes. He was very young, about twenty; the leanness of his dart-like perfectly clad form led slenderly up to a lean distinguished head. But above the wide high pale brow where the bone stared squarely through the skin and was beaten in at the temples the skull had a snakelike flatness the polished hair was poor and worn.—Yes, murmured Miriam abstractedly, I’m just going out——Don’t catch cold young lady, smiled Mrs. Bailey.—Oh well, I’ll try not to, said Miriam departing. They’ll never do it, she told herself as she made her way through the darkness towards her A.B.C. He’ll find out. He thinks he is learning English in an English family.