17
When Miriam entered his room at half past six Mr. Hancock was switching off the lights about the chair. A single light shone over his desk. The fire was nearly out.
“Still here?”
“Yes” said Miriam switching on a light over the instrument cabinet.
“I should leave those things tonight if I were you.”
“It isn’t very late.”
She could go on, indefinitely, in this confident silence, preparing for the next day. He sat making up his day-book and would presently come upon Mrs. Hermann’s letter. As long as he was there the day lingered. Its light had left the room. The room was colourless and dark except where the two little brilliant circles of light made bright patches of winter evening. Their two figures quietly at work meant the quiet and peace of the practice; the full, ended day, to begin again to-morrow in broad daylight in this same room. The room was full of their quiet continuous companionship. It was getting very cold. He would be going soon.
He stood up, switching off his light. “That will do excellently” he said with an amused smile, placing Mrs. Hermann’s letter on the flap of the instrument cabinet and wandering into the gloomy spaces.
“Well. I’ll say good night.”
“Good night” murmured Miriam.
Leaving the dried instruments in a heap with a wash leather flung over them she gathered up the books switched the room into darkness, felt its promise of welcome and trotted downstairs through the quiet house. The front door shut quietly on Mr. Hancock as she reached the hall. She flew to get away. In five minutes the books were in the safe and everything locked up. The little mirror on the wall, scarcely lit by the single globe over the desk just directed the angle of her hat and showed the dim strange eager outline of her unknown face. She fled down the hall past Mr. Leyton’s room and the opening to the forgotten basement, between the heavy closed door of Mr. Orly’s room and the quiet scrolled end of the balustrade and past the angle of the high dark clock staring with its unlit face down the length of the hall, between the high oak chest and the flat oak coffer confronting each other in the glooms thrown by Mrs. Orly’s tall narrow striped Oriental curtains; she saw them standing in straight folds, the beautiful height and straightness of their many coloured stripes, as they must have been before the outside stripe of each had been cut and used as a tie-up; and was out beyond the curtains in the brightly lit square facing the door. The light fell on the rich edge of the Turkey carpet and the groove of the bicycle stand. In the corner stood the blue and white pipe, empty of umbrellas. Her hand grasped the machine-turned edge of the small flat circular knob that released the door ... brahma; that was the word, at last.... The door opened and closed with its familiar heavy wooden firmness, neatly, with a little rattle of its chain. Her day scrolled up behind her. She halted, trusted and responsible, for a long second in the light flooding the steps from behind the door.
The pavement was under her feet and the sparsely lamplit night all round her. She restrained her eager steps to a walk. The dark houses and the blackness between the lamps were elastic about her.