4
The new furniture peopled the room with clear reflections. The daylight was dimmed by the street, but it came in generously through the wide high window. And upon the polished surfaces of the little bureau, set down with its back to the curtain, and upon its image, filling the lower part of the full-length strip of mirror hung opposite against the wall, were bright plaques of open sky.
The bureau was experience; seen from any angle it was joy complete. Added to life and independent of it. A little thing that would keep its power through all accidents of mood and circumstance. The inlaid design enclosing the lock of the sloping lid formed a triangle with the small brass candlesticks at either end of the level top, and the brass handles of the three drawers hung below on either side, garlands, completing the decoration.
Pools of light rested on the squat moss-green crockery of the wash-table, set, flanked by clear wall and clear green floor, between the mirror and the end of the small bed which skirted the wall as far as the door opening on to the landing. The unencumbered floor made a green pathway to the window. It was refreshment merely to walk along it, between clean sightly objects. Squalor was banished. No more smell of dust. No more sleepless nights under a roof too hot to grow cool even in the hour before dawn. Here in the mornings there would always be beauty, the profiles of things growing clear on either side of the pathway of morning light, the profiles of flowers, set in a bowl between the sentinel candlesticks.
Miss Holland’s voice came unheralded, startlingly out of the silence. She must have come through from the back room in noiseless slippers. Miriam answered that she had forgotten about clothes, and proposed nails in the attic.
“It will be no trouble at all. I have lengths of bamboo and still some yards of green material. We will regard any provision of French wardrobes down here as franking me to use the attic for my charts and other impedimenta. You, I observe, have no débris.”
“Only a few books.”
“You have a goodly store of books. I shall look forward to a treat.”
“There’s a book I’m reading now—” she began walking up and down the linoleum path in the excitement of wondering whether Miss Holland could be brought to share the adventure.
“It is in a way the most wonderful I have met. The most real.”
“No doubt you are a connoisseur.”
“I’m not. But I’ve never got so much out of a novel before. I say, this stuff shows every mark.”
Miss Holland would get nothing from James. She would read patiently for a while and pronounce him “a little tedious.”
“It will at first. But you need not be concerned about that. I am at home all day, and it will be a very slight matter to keep things more or less in order. Perhaps we can make a little bargain. I for my part will willingly undertake the rooms and the marketing if you will save me from the palavering.”
“Will there be any?”
“Well, for example, the rent. The landlord is a most odious man. I abhor the thought of tackling him. You, I am sure, will manage anything of that sort better than I. Yes. Most certainly. You have an air.”
A few words weekly seemed a small price to pay for freedom from the mysteries of cleaning and catering, and Miriam agreed to pay the rent, to call next door and pay it; keeping Sheffield away from the house.
Miss Holland went on talking as if to herself. Expostulating. It was a mistake, she concluded, to drop domesticity. She preferred to keep her hand in, while safeguarding sufficient leisure for reading and so on.
Miriam saw her keeping house, dressmaking, and yet free to wander abroad in the sunlight, and to come home, full of the life and brightness of London, to rest and read, with her feet up, “to counteract the strain upon the heart, of the upright posture” following the example of “those sensible Americans who discuss business with their feet on the mantelshelf.” She judged unconventionalities according as they did or did not serve the cause of hygiene.
“Much” she finished hurriedly, as if to avoid further postponing anything Miriam might be going to say, “Much can be done with a damp duster.”
Miriam wondered whether, after all, housework might not hold some strange charm. Something that was lacking in a life lived altogether in the world of men; altogether on the surface of things. Always, in relation to household women, she felt herself a man. Felt that they included her with a half-contemptuous indulgence, in the world of men. Some of them, those to whom the man’s world was still an exciting mystery, were a little jealous and spiky.
As if encouraged by silence, Miss Holland pursued her theme.
“I have a horror of becoming an official woman. It is, I think, a most obnoxious type. It abounds. In London it is to be met wherever women are in positions of responsibility. Real or fancied. And it is on the increase. There have, of course, always been official women. Even in rural districts, where, most unfortunately, they have but one sphere of activity. We used to call them the curates-in-charge.”
Vicarage humour at first hand. Miriam laughed suitably; ensconced, an eavesdropper.
“Church workers.”
“They are the bane of a parish. Work, yes. That they most certainly do, to the accompaniment of loud complaints on the score of other people’s inactivity. Implying, of course, that they themselves hold a monopoly of intelligence and efficiency. Whereas the truth is to be found in their inability to attract helpers or to collaborate with those who really desire to take part in the work. These women are actuated solely by personal ambition, the desire to run the parish and to be openly recognised as doing so. Nothing less will content them. Nothing less. It is a most perturbing spectacle. And I, for one, have no hesitation in admitting that I am driven to the conclusion that authority is harmful to women. They grow so hard. So coldly self-important and dictatorial.”
Miriam knew she would want to run the parish, choose the music, edit the vicar’s mind, lecture the parishioners.
“In London many of them are social workers. They spend their time on committees. But not in service. They quell.”
She handled her statements as she had handled the pile of green material, pouncing, taking disdainful hold. Her sentences were sallies, each one leaving her voice halted on an interval of deprecating sounds. Her voice came from a height. She must be standing, poised, in her light way, for movement. Talking as if to herself, assuming a lack of interest. Yet the air was full of her shy desire for response.
“They must be holy terrors.”
“I fear,” chuckled Miss Holland, “that I am not completely convinced of their holiness.”
“I’ve never met any of these women. Avoid women on the whole. But I daresay I should be that type myself if I weren’t too lazy to achieve a position.”
“Believe me, you could never be official. You are much too artistic.”
Miriam was too disappointed to feel flattered. There was no illumination here. Exposing herself before the tribunal, she had been judged in a class of which the judge knew nothing. Compared to Miss Holland, she might perhaps be called artistic. But it was grievous to be supplied already with a false reputation. To be imagined as cultured in a way that was respected in vicarages.
She glanced around upon the poor things that already she loved with an immemorial love whose secret eluded her, whose going forth she knew to be blind and personal. Her eye was at once arrested by a small dark something upon the white coverlet of her bed. A ladybird. Too square. Perfectly square and motionless. Even as she called to Miss Holland to come through and observe, the sight of it thrilled her in every nerve.
A swish of the curtain and Miss Holland was at her side, bent and peering.
“Dear, dear, dear!” she moaned. “I feared, I feared. I’ll get the dustpan.”
The floor rocked with her swift departure. Miriam stood fascinated. The unspeakable thing had revealed itself, and she was not only calm but curious. A moment ago it had existed only in her mind, an ultimate she could not imagine herself seeing and surviving. It looked like a fragment of an autumn leaf. Miss Holland’s voice sounded in the further room. Miriam listened to the low tones for entertainment while she kept watch.
“I feared, I feared,” and then a swift ferretting, drowning the anxious monologue.
Weary of the scene that was holding up her installation, she turned away to the window, half expecting to be leapt upon from behind. She was vitalised by the incident; tingling from head to foot. It was strange that one could recognise at sight an unknown thing; but far stranger that within a moment of pure shock there should be life, the keen sense of living that stood away outside the bounds of everyday life.
What a set of circumstances were these that brought only vermin to give her the pang of immortality. Not a thing one could testify at a dinner-table. Why not?
When Miss Holland came back she would remind her that monkeys were timid, and fearful of small creeping things. Being a Protestant she probably revelled in Evolution—wouldn’t see that it left everything more spooky than before.
She was looking straight in at a window of the opposite house. The panes were clean and clear, the curtains on either side a dull dark green, hanging in straight folds. Sombre. Faintly, clearer as she made it out, a thick tall white candle rose in the midst of the gloom, just inside the window, changing the aspect of the curtains, making a picture. Just visible, right and left, were the shoulders of two high-backed chairs. She imagined them occupied, the beam of the thick white candle falling on two forms. But in this street what forms? It was clear that she and Miss Holland were not the only aliens. Perhaps “artistic” bachelor women who made a cult of their diggings, wore sage-green dresses and would emerge to become a spectacle known by heart, now both together, now one alone, crying cultured witticisms from the street to the window. Women standing critically aside from life, hugely amused by it. But would such have achieved that candle, at once a person and a piece of furniture? Lamps they would have, with art shades. Or if candles, still art shades. It might be an anchorite. But the company of such a candle was not solitude. Underneath the window was a cobbler’s shop.
“Just look here,” she cried to Miss Holland coming back preceded by her voice. The things in her own room seemed to greet, as she turned, the things in the room across the way. It was a man’s room. It had an air of waiting for an untimed return.
“I hope,” said Miss Holland, through a rapid scrunching of paper. “I trust, it was only those Church Army men.”
Miriam watched her go away, with the dustpan at arm’s length, still gravely expostulating.
“It’s dreadful,” she said to her returning form, “but also fearfully funny, to find the ultimate horror sitting contentedly, poor little thing, on the end of your bed.”
She tinkled and tinkled at that, woefully crying out through her laughter, repudiating and agreeing and contradicting.
“But I admire your spirit,” she wailed finally.
“Do look at this huge candle across the way.”
Miss Holland moved to her side and peered anxiously, frowning in anticipation.
“Very odd,” she said sceptically. “A ship’s candle, something of the kind.”
“Where did they get it? Besides, too tall, it would burn a cabin roof. Perhaps an altar candle.”
“Very eccentric.” She turned away, busily, skittishly. Pleased about something, but not interested in the candle.