10
... “You looked extraordinarily pretty....”
“You have come through it all remarkably well” ... remarkable had a k in it in English, and German, merkwürdig, and perhaps in Scandinavian languages; but not in other languages; it was one of the things that separated England from the south ... remarkable ... hard and chilly.
“You know you’re awfully good stuff. You’ve had an extraordinary variety of experience; you’ve got your freedom; you ought to write.”
“That is what a palmist told me at Newlands. It was at a big afternoon ‘at home’; there was a palmist in a little dark room sitting near a lamp; she looked at nothing but your hands; she kept saying whatever you do, write. If you haven’t written yet, write, if you don’t succeed go on writing.”
“Just so, have you written?”
“Ah, but she also told me my self-confidence had been broken; that I used to be self-confident and was so no longer. It’s true.”
“Have you written anything?”
“I once sent in a thing to Home Notes. They sent it back but asked me to write something else and suggested a few things.”
“If they had taken your stuff you would have gone on and learnt to turn out stuff bad enough for Home Notes and gone on doing it for the rest of your life.”
“But then an artist, a woman who had a studio in Bond Street and knew Leighton, saw some things I had tried to paint and said I ought to make any sacrifice to learn painting, and a musician said the same about music.”
“You could work in writing quite well with your present work.”
... “Pieces of short prose; anything; a description of an old woman sitting in an omnibus ... anything. There’s plenty of room for good work. There’s the Academy always ready to consider well-written pieces of short prose. Write something and send it to me.”
Nearing London shivering and exhausted she recalled Sunday morning and the strangeness of it being just as it had promised to be. Happy waking with a clear refreshed brain in a tired drowsy body, like the feeling after a dance; making the next morning part of the dance, your mind full of pictures and thoughts and the evening coming up again and again, one great clear picture in the foreground of your mind. The evening in the room as you sat propped on your pillows drinking the clear pale curiously refreshing tea left by the maid on a little wooden tray by your bedside; its fragrance drew you to sip at once, without adding milk and sugar. It was delicious; it steamed aromatically up your nostrils and went straight to your brain; potent without being bitter. Perhaps it was “China” tea; it must be. The two biscuits on the little plate disappeared rapidly, and she poured in milk and added much sugar to her remaining tea to appease her hunger. The evening stayed during her deliberately perfunctory toilet; she wanted only to be down. It began again unbroken with the first cigarette after breakfast, when a nimble remark thrown out from the excited gravity of her happiness made Mr. Wilson laugh. She was learning how to do it. It stayed on through the day, adding the day to itself in a chain, a morning of talk, a visit to Mr. Wilson’s study—the curious glimpses of pinewood from the windows; pinewood looking strange and far-away—there were people in Weybridge to whom those woods were real woods where they walked and perhaps had the thoughts that woods bring; here they were like woods in a picture book; not real, just a curious painted background for Mr. Wilson’s talk ... all those books in fifty years’ time burnt up by the air; he did not seem to think it an awful idea ... you can do anything with English ... and then the names of authors who had done some of these things with English ... making it sing and dance and march, making it like granite or like film and foam. Other languages were more simple and single in texture; less flexible.... Gazing out at the exciting silent pines—so dark and still, waiting, not knowing about the wonders of English—Miriam recalled her impressions of those of the authors she knew. It was true that those were their effects and the great differences between them. How did he come to know all about it and to put it into words? Did the authors know when they did it? She passionately hoped not. If they did, it was a trick and spoilt books. Rows and rows of “fine” books; nothing but men sitting in studies doing something cleverly, being very important, “men of letters”; and looking out for approbation. If writing meant that, it was not worth doing. English a great flexible language; more than any other in the world. But German was the same? Only the inflections filled the sentences up with bits. English was flexible and beautiful. Funny. Foreigners did not think so. Many English people thought foreign literature the best. Perhaps Mr. Wilson did not know much foreign literature. But he wanted to; or he would not have those translations of Ibsen and Björnsen. German poetry marched and sang and did all sorts of things. Anyhow it was wonderful about English—but if books were written like that, sitting down and doing it cleverly and knowing just what you were doing and just how somebody else had done it, there was something wrong, some mannish cleverness that was only half right. To write books, knowing all about style would be to become like a man. Women who wrote books and learned these things would be absurd and would make men absurd. There was something wrong. It was in all those books upstairs. “Good stuff” was wrong, a clever trick, not worth doing. And yet everybody seemed to want to write.
The rest of the day—secret and wonderful. Sitting about, taken for one of the Wilson kind of people, someone who was writing or going to write, by the two Scotch professors; sitting about listening to their quiet easy eager unconcerned talk, seeing them “all round” as Mr. Wilson saw them, the limits of professorship and teaching, the silly net and trick of examinations, their simplicity and their helplessness; playing the lovely accompaniment like quiet waves, of Schubert’s Ave Maria, the sudden, jolly, sentimental voice of Professor Ewings, his nice attentions ... if it had been Wimpole Street or anywhere in society he would not have seen me....
It would be wrong to try and write just because Mr. Wilson had said one ought.... The reasons he had given for writing were the wrong ones ... but it would be impossible to go down again without doing some writing.... Impossible not to go down again.... They knew one was “different”; and liked it and thought it a good thing; a sort of distinction. No one had thought that before. It made them a home and a refuge. The only refuge there was except being by oneself ... only their kind of difference was not the same. They thought nearly everyone “futile” and “dull”—everyone who did not see things in their way was that. Presently they would find that one was not different in the same way. He had spoken of people who grow “dull” as you get to know them. Awful ... perhaps already, he meant——
“It’s all very well ... people read Matthew Arnold’s simple profundities; er—simple profundities; and learn his little trick; and go about—hcna, hcna,—arm in arm with this swell ... hcna ... puffing with illumination. All about nothing. It’s all, my dear Miss Henderson, about absolutely nothing.”
The train stopped. Better not to go down again. There was something all wrong in it. Wrong about everything. The Pinners and the big man were right ... but there was something dreadful in them, the something that is in all simple right sort of people, who just go on, never thinking about anything. Were they good and right? It did not enter their heads to think that they were wrong in associating with him.... Here in London it seemed wrong ... she hurried wearily with aching head up the long platform. The Wimpole Street people would certainly think it wrong; if they knew about the marriage. They knew he was a coming great man; the great new “critic”; a new kind of critic ... they knew everybody was beginning to talk about him. But if they knew they would not approve. They would never understand his way of seeing things. Impossible to convey anything to them of what the visit had been.
11
The hall clock said half-past nine. The hall and the large rooms had shrunk. Everything looked shabby and homely. The house was perfectly quiet. Passing quietly and quickly into her room she found the table empty. The door into the den was shut and no sound came from behind it. No one but James had seen her. The holiday was still there. Perhaps there would be time to take hold in the new way before anyone discovered her and made demands. Perhaps they were all three wanting her at this moment. But the house was so still, there was nothing urgent. Perhaps she would never feel nervous at Wimpole Street again. It was really all so easy. There was nothing she could not manage if only she could get a fair start and get everything in order and up to date. Her mind tried to encircle the book-keeping. There must be a plan for it all; so much work on the accounts to keep the whole ledger-full sent out to date, so much on the address books, and so much on the monthly cash books—a little of all these things every day in addition to the day’s work, whatever happened; that would do it. Then there would be no muddle and nothing to worry about and perhaps time to write. They must be told that she would use any spare time there was on other things.... They would be quite ready for that provided the books were always up to date and the surgeries always in order. That is what a Wilson would have done from the first.