7
She could understand a life that spent all its leisure in a café; every day ending in warm brilliance, forgetfulness amongst strangers near and intimate, sharing the freedom and forgetfulness of the everlasting unchanging café, all together in a common life. It was like a sort of dance, everyone coming and going poised and buoyant, separate and free, united in freedom. It was a heaven, a man’s heaven, most of the women were there with men, somehow watchful and dependent, but even they were forced to be free from troublings and fussings whilst they were there ... the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest ... she was there as a man, a free man of the world, a continental, a cosmopolitan, a connoisseur of women. That old man sitting alone with a grey face and an extinguished eye was the end of it, but even now the café held him up; he would come till death came too near to allow him movement. He was horrible, but less horrible than he would be alone in a room; he had to keep the rules and manage to behave; as long as he could come he was still in life.... White muslin wings on a black straw hat, a well-cut check costume and a carriage, bust forward, an elegant carriage imposing secrets and manners.... Miriam turned to watch her proceeding with a vague group of people through the central light towards the outer gloom. Voilà une petite qui est jolie she remarked judicially.—Une jeune fille avec ses parents—rebuked Mr. Mendizabal. Even he, wicked fast little foreigner did not know how utterly meaningless his words were. He was here, in Ruscino’s quite simply. He sat at home, at the height of his happy foreign expansiveness. He had no sense of desperate wickedness. He gave no help to the sense of desperate wickedness; pouring like an inacceptable nimbus from his brilliant strong head was a tiresome homeliness. She flung forth to the music, the shining fronds of distant palm ferns; sipped her liqueur with downcast eyes and thought of an evening along the digue at Ostend, the balmy air, the telescoping brilliant interiors of the villas, the wild arm-linked masquerading stroll, Elsie had really looked like an unprincipled Bruxelloise ... foreigners were all innocent in their depravity.... To taste the joy of depravity one must be English.... Hah; Strelinsky! Ça va bien, hein? A figure had risen out of the earth at Mr. Mendizabal’s elbow and stood looking down at him; another foreigner. She glanced with an air of proprietorship; a slender man in a thin faded grey overcoat, a sharp greyish yellow profile and small thin head under a dingy grey felt hat. Strelinsky. Mr. Mendizabal stood sturdily up bowing with square outstretched hand, wrapped in the radiating beam of his smile. I present you Mr. Strelinsky. A musician. A composer of music. His social manner was upon him again; fatherliness, strong responsible hard-working kindliness. The face under the grey hat turned slowly towards her. She bowed and looked into eyes set far back in the thin mask of the face. Her eyes passed a question from the expressionless eyes to the motionless expressionless face. How could he be a composer; looking so ... vanishing? Strelinsky ... Morceau pour piano ... that must be he standing here; did you write this she said abruptly and hummed the beginning. It sounded shapeless and toneless, but there was a little tune just ahead. She broke off short of it not sure that he was attending; the world burst into laughter; his face turned slowly and stopped looking downwards across her, his eyes fixed in a dead repetition of the laughter in which she was drowning. He stood in space in a faded coat and hat, a colourless figure clothed by her feebleness in lively dignity and wisdom ... grouped inaccessibly beyond the vast space were solid tables filled with judges; dim figures stood in judgment in the amber light under the gallery where palms stood; she was drowning alone, surrounded by a distant circle of palms. Eleven. We must go miss stated Mr. Mendizabal cordially. Miriam rose. The tide of café life flowed all round her. She wandered blissfully out through the misty smoke-wreathed golden light, threading her way amongst the tables towards the black and gold of the streets. Far away behind her, staying in the evening, Strelinsky blocked the view, moving, fixed avertedly, with eyes in his shoulders along an endless narrowing distance of café.
CHAPTER VII
Miriam found her old prayer-book and scribbled her name on the flyleaf.... Bella de Castro writing from mother under her name in her bible ... feeling something, privately, not knowing that anyone would see it.... The sunlight pouring in on the thin bible page; the words written plumply with one of Bella’s blunt uncared-for pencils. Her thick ropy black plait, brilliant oily Italian eyes in her long fat handsome face; staring out of the window sullenly waiting for schooldays to be at an end; her handsome horrible brother on horseback; just the same; the high-water marks above her wrists when she washed her hands, and then, from mother, stubbed carefully, meaning.
The pencilled Miriam gave a false meaning to the prayer-book. There was no indiarubber, she would have to take it down as it was. It was a letter, written to Dr. von Heber, supposed to be written when she was a girl.... She carried the book downstairs. The Baileys were still sitting by the fire with their backs to Dr. von Heber standing alone in the twilight in the middle of the room. She came forward, handing the book stiffly and sat busily down to the piano again, angrily recording his quiet formal thanks and silent swift departure. She began playing where she had left off; telling Dr. von Heber as he went downstairs that he had come up and made a scene and interrupted her; that her chosen evening was to sit, with the Baileys, playing the piano; that she was not a church-goer.
He had come so suddenly; after so long; if she had not been so lost in the disappointing evening she would have been ready. If she had not suddenly been so prepared, so rushing forward and feeling after he had spoken as if the words had been long ago and they had been to church together and come back before all the world there would not have been in his voice the reproachful affronted anticipation of her stupidity.
Perhaps he had really suddenly thought downstairs that it would be nice to go to church, not knowing that that was one of the real effects of falling in love ... just thinking in the course of his worldly studies that there was church and he was in himself a church-goer and ought to go more often and coming up to borrow a prayer-book from the Baileys. No. Suddenly in the room, standing in the unknown drawing-room for the first time in his steady urbane confident way, waiting, a little turned towards the piano. The Baileys had neither spoken nor moved; they were afraid of him; but Mrs. Bailey would have made herself say, Well, doctor, to the amazing apparition. They simply waited, held off by his waiting manner. “I think this is a good evening to go to church.” What have you been doing all this time? Where do you go, going out so often? What are you doing sitting here playing? We ought to be going to church; we two. Here I am professing church-going and idiotically confessing myself come all the way from Canada without a prayer-book and making a pretence of borrowing your prayer-book because we must be in church together. Dr. Hurd’s impressions had had no effect upon him.... But now he had gone back into his own life not only thinking that she was not a church-goer, but feeling sure that her own private life of coming and going had no thoughts of him in it.
Dr. Hurd sitting on the omnibus with amusement carving deep lines on his brick-red face and splintering out of his eyes into the hot afternoon glare; the neat new bowler with the red hair coming down underneath it, the well-cut Montreal clothes on his tough neat figure; immovable, there for the afternoon. Forced to go on and on isolated with the brick-red grin and the splintering green eyes through the afternoon heat, in the midst of a glare of omnibus people, on their way to a brass band in the Albert Hall, thinking they were going to a concert. He did not know what made a concert. Sitting with the remains of his grin, waiting for the things he had been taught to admire, unable to find anything without his mother and sisters; missing Canadian ladies with opinions about everything; waiting all the time to be managed in the Canadian women’s way.... He must have told the others about it afterwards, his face crinkling at them and they listening and agreeing.
It had begun the moment after he had suggested the concert. I’ll get a new top hat before then. The awful demand for a jest. His way of waiting as if one were some queer being he was waiting to see say or do something anyone could understand was the same as the English way only more open. But English people like that did not care for music and did not have books read to them. Perhaps his parents belonged to the other sort of English and he had the stamp of it, promising seriousness and a love of beautiful things, and forced by life into the jesting way of worldly people who seemed to have no sacred patches at all. Quick words, bathed in laughter heaped up into a questioning of what the matter was. Men, demanding jests and amusement; women succeeding only by jesting satirically about everything.
Von Heber’s a man who’ll carve his way.... My. He’s great. Carve his way; one of those phrases that satisfy and worry you; short, and leaving out nearly everything; Dr. von Heber going through life with a chisel, intent on carving; everybody envying him; the von Heber not seen or realised; his way is carved, he is his way ... going ahead further and further away as one listened. His poverty and drudgery behind him, at Winnipeg, amongst the ice. Hoisting himself out of it, making himself into a doctor; a graduate of “McGill” ... standing out among the graduates with even the very manner of success more marked in him than in them with their money and ease; sailing to England steady-minded in the awful risk of borrowed money ... it’s wrong, insulting to him to think of it while he is still in the midst of the effort ... a sort of treachery to know the details at all ... the impossibility of not dwelling on them. But thinking disperses his general effect. In the strength and sunshine of him there is power. The things he has done are the power in him; no need to know the gossipy details; that was why the facts sounded so familiar; reproachful, as Dr. Hurd brought them out....
I knew all about him when I met his sunshine. I ought to have rushed away garlanded with hawthorn, with some woman, and waited till he came again. Dr. Hurd looks like an old woman; an old gossip. Old men are worse gossips than old women. They can’t keep their hands off. They make phrases. Dr. Hurd is a dead, dead old woman. Handling things like an old man. It was so natural to listen. ‘Natural’ things get you lost and astray ... kiss-in-the-ring ‘just a little harmless nonsense ... there’s no harm in a little gay nonsense chickie.’ There’s no such thing as harmless nonsense: Dissipation makes you forget everything. Secret sacred places. George and John faithful and steady can’t make those. They smile personally and the room or the landscape is immediately silly and tame....
“I never met a chap who could make so much of what he knows ... pick up ... and bring them out better than the chap could himself.” The four figures sitting in the little room round the lamp. Dr. Hurd talking his gynæcology simply; a relief, a clear clean place in the world of women’s doctors.... Dr. Winchester talking for Dr. von Heber, his brown beard and his frock-coat just for the time he was talking before Dr. von Heber had grasped it all, looking like a part of the professional world. Dr. Wayneflete’s white criminal face his little white mouth controlledly mouthing ... Wayneflete’s brilliant; but he’s not got von Heber’s strength nor his manner. He’s quiet though that chap ... he’d do well over here ... that spreads your thoughts about, painfully and wholesomely. Dr. Hurd spreads his thoughts about quite simply....
The moment was so surprising that I forgot it. I always forget the things that surprise me. She was hating me and hating everything. I must have told her I was going away. When I said you can have Bunnikin back she suddenly grew older than I. “Oh Bunnikin.” Their beloved Bunnikin, as smartly dressed as Mrs. Corrie, in the smart country house way and knowing how to gush and behave.... “Bunnikin’s too simple.” Sybil in her blue cotton overall in the amber light in the Louis Quinze drawing-room, one with me, wanting me because I was not simple.... I thought she hated me all the time because I was not worldly. I should not have known I was not simple unless she had told me; that child.
... Dear Mr. Bowdoin ... and I think I can promise you an audience.... I regret that I cannot come on Thursday and I am sincerely sorry that you should think I desired an audience ... the extraordinary pompous touchiness of men ... why didn’t he see I did not dream of suggesting he should come again just to see me. I’ve forgotten Mr. Bowdoin ... and the Museum ... everything.... I sit here ... playing to hide myself from the Baileys and he is away somewhere making people happy. “They do not care ... they see me, they shout Ah! Don Clement! I amuse them, I laugh, they think I am happy. Voilà tout, mademoiselle.... Il n’y a qu’une chose qui m’amuse.”