6
This was one of those mild February days; it is a mistake to imagine that the winter is gone; but it is gone in your mind; you can see ahead two summers and only one winter. I go with you was meant as a question.... It was on the tip of her tongue to turn and say you should have said shall I go with you; she was rebuked by a glimpse of Mr. Mendizabal swinging sturdily unconsciously along on the gutter side of the narrow width of pavement, swinging his stick, the strong modelling of his white face unconscious under his strong black hair and the jaunty sweep of his black banded grey hat. “Jaunty and debonair”; but without a touch of weakness. What a lovely mild evening; extraordinary for the time of year; he would be furious at being interrupted for that, thinking of her as a stiff formal institutrice and shouting something ironic that would bring the world about their ears. Quel beau temps; that was it.
“Quel beau temps.” They had reached the Gower Street curb and stood waiting to plunge through the passing traffic.
“Une soirée superbe mademoiselle” shouted Mr. Mendizabal in a smooth flattened squeal as they crossed side by side; “hah-eh!” he squealed pushing her off to dart clear of a hansom and away to the opposite curb. Miriam pulled back just in time, receiving the angry yell of the driver full in her upturned face. Mr. Mendizabal was waiting unconcernedly outside the chemist’s, singing, with French words. She disposed hastily of the incident, eager to be walking on through the darkness towards the mingled darkness and gold of the coming streets. They went along past the grey heights of University College Hospital, separate creatures of mysteriously different races; she expected that when they reached the light she would find herself alone—and swung with one accord round into the brilliance of the Tottenham Court Road; the tide of light and sound raising them into a companionship that needed no bending into shapes of conversation. It was something to him and it was something to her, and they threaded their way together, meeting and separating and rejoining, unanimous and apart. We are both batteurs de pavé, she thought; both people who must be free to be nothing; saying to everything je m’en fiche ... the hushed happiness that had begun in the dining-room half an hour ago seized her again suddenly, sending her forward almost on tiptoe. It was securely there; the vista it opened growing in beauty as she walked. There was some source of light within her, something that was ready to spread out all round her and ahead and flow over the past. It confirmed scenes she had read and wondered at and cherished, seeking in vain in the world for women who were like the women described in them. She understood what women in books meant by sacred “It is all too sacred for words.” There was no choice in all that; only secret and sacred beauty; unity with all women who had felt in the same way; the freedom of following certainties. Outside it was this other self untouched and always new, her old free companion attending to no one. She tossed Mr. Mendizabal shreds of German or French whenever the increasing throng of passing pedestrians allowed them to walk for a moment side by side.
His apparent oblivion of her incoherence gave full freedom to her delight in her collection of idioms and proverbs. Each one flung out with its appropriate emphasis and the right foreign intonation gave her a momentary change of personality. He caught the shreds and returned them woven into phrases increasing her store of convincing foreignness, comfortably, from the innocence of his polyglot experience, requiring no instructive contribution from her, reassuringly assuming her equal knowledge, his conscious response being only to her joyousness, his eyes wide ahead, his features moulded to gaiety. The burden of her personal dinginess and resourcelessness in a strong resourceful world was hidden by him because he was not aware of dinginess and resourcelessness anywhere. Dingy and resourceless she wandered along keeping as long as her scraps of convincing impersonation should hold out, to her equal companionship with his varied experience; bearing within her in secret unfathomable abundance the gift of ideal old-English rose and white gracious adorable womanhood given her by Dr. Heber. At the turning into Oxford Street they lost each other. Miriam wandered in solitude amidst jostling bodies. The exhausted air rang with lifeless strident voices in shoutings and heavy thick flattened unconcerned speech; even from above a weight seemed to press. Clearer space lay ahead; but it was the clear space of Oxford Street and pressed upon her without ray or break. Once it had seemed part of the golden west-end; but Oxford Street was not the west-end. It was more lifeless and hopeless than even the north of London; more endurable because life was near at hand. Oxford Street was like a prison ... the embarrassment of her enterprise came upon her suddenly; the gay going off was at an end; perhaps she might get away and back home alone up a side street. Amidst the shouting of women and the interwoven dark thick growlings of conversations she heard Mr. Mendizabal’s ironic snorting laugh not far behind her. Glancing round from the free space of darkness she had reached she saw him emerge shouldering from a group of women, short and square and upright and gleaming brilliantly with the remains of his laughter. A furious wrath flickered over her. He came forward with his eyes ahead unseeing, nearer, near, safe at her side, her little foreign Mr. Mendizabal, mild and homely.
Here is Ruscino’s mademoiselle, allons, we will go to Ruscino allons! Ruscino, in electric lights round the top of the little square portico, like the name of a play round the portico of a theatre, the sentry figure of the commissionaire, the passing glimpse of palm ferns standing in semi-darkness just inside the portico, the darkness beyond, suddenly became a place, separate and distinct from the vague confusion of it in her mind with the Oxford Music Hall; offering itself, open before her, claiming to range itself in her experience; open, with her inside and the mysteries of the portico behind ... continental London ahead of her, streaming towards her in mingled odours of continental food and wine, rich intoxicating odours in an air heavy and parched with the flavour of cigars, throbbing with the solid, filmy thrilling swing of music. It was a café! Mr. Mendizabal was evidently a habitué. She could be, by right of her happiness abroad. She was here as a foreigner, all her English friends calling her back from a spectacle she could not witness without contamination. Only Gerald knew the spectacle of Ruscino’s. “Lord, Ruscino’s; Lord”.... In a vast open space of light, set in a circle of balconied gloom, innumerable little tables held groups of people wreathed in a brilliancy of screened light, veiled in mist, clear in sharp spaces of light, clouded by drifting spirals of smoke. They sat down at right angles to each other at a little table under the central height. The confines of the room were invisible. All about them were worldly wicked happy people.