8
“But you make tea with a charm! This is Nectar!”
Miriam stood with the teapot in her hand, looking forward to everlasting Sundays of making tea for Miss Holland and charming her with conversation. They had talked all the afternoon without weariness. The day stretched back long and eventful, full of talk and laughter, to the far-off episode of the morning. Filled with memories, the rooms had grown dear. And the evening lay ahead, secure, if they chose to remain shut up here together. Then a week apart. No evenings. Miss Holland coming home late and tired. There would be only the week-ends for the continuation of their talk.
“The fiancée came to tea yesterday,” she said, unawares and stopped. Miss Holland, surely, must be weary of her stories. “I must stop,” she said, “finish my tea and absolutely, really unpack.”
“By no means, mademoiselle, having uttered the fascinating word, you must continue.”
Forcing back a smile, Miriam went on with her story. Marvelling at a world that had left this woman to loneliness. Lonely as she was, she scanned life unenviously, placed herself at once sympathetically within the experience of anyone presented to her. It was as if she herself had had vast experience. Yet in her life there were only those two parts; the vicarage home until she was thirty-five and then the life in London. She had brought with her all the old-fashioned ideas, and yet, without being a socialist, had a forward-going mind, a surer certainty of social transformation than was to be found amongst the Lycurgans.
“I told her I hoped she knew she was marrying the best man in the world.”
“Delightful. You made her very happy.”
“Although extremely strong-minded and in the midst of a successful career, she is a girl, the English girl in the midst of the divine illusion.”
“Why Divine illusion? So contradictory.”
“Well, illusion because its picture of what life with the beloved will be is mistaken. Divine because it reveals to both the best in themselves and each other, what they really are, without knowing it until then.”
“Y ... es,” said Miss Holland, clasping the edge of the table and gazing out through the window. “It is unfortunate that it is so frequently doomed to die and inevitably to change.”
“Never. In women, absolutely never, once it’s there.”
“She’s an amazing person. Can fall out of a moving cab without being hurt. She said, of course, that she knew. But wanted to hear all about him.”
“You were able to render her a charming service.”
“No. It frightened me for her sake that she wanted to talk about him. Of course, she thought me tongue-tied. I was. But only because feeling that her best realisation was just that moment with me. If we had talked, there would have been a wilderness of detail, and the moment gone without taking its full effect.”
“Yet it is most natural that she should have wished to talk of him.”
“It frightened me. She had a charming white hat.”
Though she went on for a while humouring Miss Holland’s desire for pictures and stories, she now framed her discourse in ready-made phrases, and was interested in seeing the way they made effects such as she herself had often gathered up from heard conversations, and in discovering how they fitted a shape of thought about life and led on automatically to other phrases, little touches that finished them off; till she began to believe that life was expressible in these forms of thought which yet she knew left everything untouched.
But the centre of her interest, the thing that was making her talk grow absent and careless, and consist more and more of sounds in response to Miss Holland’s lingering consideration of all that had pleased her, was the way that unawares during their long sitting the room had come to life. Nothing now looked dingy. There was a warm brightness; within the air.
When their talk had drifted to a pause and she was alone, she ruefully regarded the day’s interchange. Shadowless only by being an excursion into a world she had long ago ceased to inhabit. By using only materials that would make common ground, she had woven a fabric of false impressions.
Again and again as they talked the set of circumstances that were the zest of her personal life had risen before her, in terms such as Miss Holland would use in describing them, and made a preoccupation that had kept her a bright and interesting talker. Yet Miss Holland was aware. Though in her eagerness for every word she had shown only awareness of a different reach and different perceptions, she knew, without recognising its nature, that between them there was a gulf.
To keep back even half-accepted points of view was not fair play. Brought uneasiness. Yet why tell her of things that might not happen?