5
The carpet is awful, faded and worn almost to bits. But it is right, in this room.... This is the furnished room; one room. I have come to it. “You could get a furnished room at about seven shillings rental.” The awful feeling, no tennis, no dancing, no house to move in, no society. The relief at first when Bennett found those people ... maddening endless roads of little houses in the east wind ... their kind way of giving more than they had undertaken, and smiling and waiting for smiles and dying all the time in some dark way without knowing it. Filling the rooms and the piano and the fern on the serge table cloth and the broken soap dish in the bath room until it was impossible to read or think or play because of them, the feeling of them stronger and stronger till there was nothing but crying over the trays of meals and wanting to scream. The thought of the five turnings to the station, all into long little roads looking alike and making you forget which was which and lose your way, was still full of pain ... the relief of moving to Granville Place still a relief, though it felt a mistake from the first. Mrs. Corrie’s old teacher liking only certain sorts of people knew it was a mistake, with her peevish silky old face and her antique brooch. But it had been the beginning of London.... Bond Street that Sunday morning in the thick fog; these sudden pictures gleaming in a window, filmy ... von Hier. Adelina Compayne, hanging out silk stockings on the top balustrade. “I love cawfy” ... that was the only real thing that had been said downstairs. There was no need to have been frightened of these two women in black silk evening dresses. None of these clever things were real. They said young Asquith is a really able man to hide their thoughts. The American Academy pupils talked together to keep everybody off, except when they made their clever jokes ... “if anyone takes that top bit there’ll be murder Miss Spink.” When they went out of the room they looked silly. The young man was real somewhere else.
The little man talking about the wonders of the linotype in the smoking room.... How did I get into the smoking room? Someone probably told Miss Spink I talked to him in the smoking room and smoked a cigarette. Perhaps his wife. If they could have seen. It was so surprising to hear anybody suddenly talking. Perhaps he began in the hall and ushered me into the smoking room. There was no one there and I can’t remember anything about the linotype, only the quiet and the talking face and suddenly feeling in the heart of London. But it was soon after that they all began being stand-offish; before Mr. Chamberlayne came; before Adela began playing Esther Summerson at the Kennington. They approved of my going down to fetch her until he began coming too. The shock of seeing her clumsy heavy movements on the stage and her face looking as though it were covered with starch.... I can think about it all, here, and not mind.