Deadlock: Pilgrimage, Volume 6

by Dorothy M. Richardson

After that she watched him from afar, set apart from his boyhood, alone with her twenty-five years on the borders of middle-age. There was the secret of the youthful untested look that showed in certain poses of his mature studious head. His beard and his courtly manner and the grave balanced intelligence of his eyes might have belonged to a man of forty. Perhaps the Paris visit had been some time ago. No; he had come through France for the first time on his way to England.... She followed him, growing weary with envy, through his excursions in Paris with his father; went at last to the Louvre, mysterious grey building, heavy above a row of shops, shutting in works of “art,” in some extraordinary way understood, and known to be “good”; and woke to astonishment to find him sitting alone, his father impatiently gone back to the hotel, for an hour in motionless contemplation of the Venus, having wept at the first sight of her in the distance. The impression of the Frenchman’s lecture was driven away. All the things she had heard of on these two evenings were in the past.

He was in England now, through all the wonders of his continental life, England had beckoned him. Paris had been just a stage on his confident journey; and the first event of his London life would be Saturday’s visit to the British Museum. His eager foreign interest would carry the visit off .... and she remembered, growing in the thought suddenly animated towards his continued discourse, that she could show him the Elgin Marbles.

The next evening, going down to the drawing-room at the appointed time, Miriam found it empty and lit only by the reflection from the street. Standing in the dim blue light she knew so well, she passed through a moment of wondering whether she had ever really sat talking in this room with Mr. Shatov. It seemed so long ago. His mere presence there had been strange enough; youth and knowledge and prosperity where for so long there had been nothing but the occasional presence of people who were in mysterious disgraceful difficulties, and no speech but the so quickly acrimonious interchange of those who are trying to carry things off. Perhaps he was only late. She lit the gas and leaving the door wide sat down to the piano. The loose flatly vibrating shallow tones restored her conviction that once more the house was as before, its usual intermittent set of boarders, coming punctually to meals, enduring each other downstairs in the warmth until bedtime, disappearing one by one up the unlighted stairs, having tea up here on Sundays, and for her, the freedom of the great dark house, the daily oblivion of moving about in it, the approach up the quiet endlessly dreaming old grey street in the afternoon, late at night, under all the changes of season and of weather; the empty drawing-room that was hers every Sunday morning with its piano, and always there at night within its open door, inviting her into its blue-lit stillness; her room upstairs, alive now and again under some chance spell of the weather, or some book which made her feel that any life in London would be endurable for ever that secured her room with its evening solitude, now and again the sense of strange fresh invisibly founded beginnings; often a cell of torturing mocking memories and apprehensions, driving her down into the house to hear the dreadful voices, giving out in unchanged accents, their unchanging words and phrases.

Someone had come into the room, bringing a glow of life. She clung to her playing; he need not know that she had been waiting for him. A figure was standing almost at her side; with that voice he would certainly be musical .... the sturdiness and the plaintiveness were like the Russian symphonies; he could go to the Queen’s Hall; his being late for the lesson had introduced music.... She broke off and turned to see Sissie Bailey, waiting with sullen politeness to speak. Mr. Shatov was out. He had gone out early in the afternoon and had not been seen since. In Sissie’s sullenly worried expression Miriam read the Baileys’ fear that they had already lost hold of their helpless new boarder. She smiled her acceptance and suggested that he had met friends. Sissie remained grimly responseless and presently turned to go. Resuming her playing, Miriam wondered bitterly where he could have lingered, so easily dropping his lesson. What did it matter? Sooner or later he was bound to find interests; the sooner the better. But she could not go on playing; the room was cold and black; horribly empty and still.... Mrs. Bailey would know where he had set out to go this afternoon; she would have directed him. She played on zealously for a decent interval, closed the piano and went downstairs. In the dining-room was Sissie, alone, mending a table-cloth.

To account for her presence Miriam enquired whether Mrs. Bailey were out. “Mother’s lying down,” said Sissie sullenly, “she’s got one of her headaches.” Miriam sympathised. “I want her to have the doctor; it’s no use going on like this.” Miriam was drawn irresistibly towards Mrs. Bailey, prostrate in her room with her headache. She went down the hall feeling herself young and full of eager strength, sinking with every step deeper and deeper into her early self; back again by Eve’s bedside at home, able to control the paroxysms of pain by holding her small head grasped in both hands; she recalled the strange persistent strength she had felt, sitting with her at night, the happiness of the moments when the feverish pain seemed to run up her own arms and Eve relaxed in relief, the beautiful unfamiliar darkness of the midnight hours, the curious sharp savour of the incomprehensible book she had read lying on the floor by the little beam of the nightlight. She could surely do something for Mrs. Bailey; meeting her thus for the first time without the barrier of conversation; at least she could pit her presence and her sympathy against the pain. She tapped at the door of the little room at the end of the passage. Presently a muffled voice sounded and she went in. A sense of release enfolded her as she closed the door of the little room; it was as if she had stepped off the edge of her life, out into the wide spaces of the world. The room was lit feebly by a small lamp turned low within its smoky chimney. Its small space was so crowded that for a moment she could make out no recognisable bedroom shape; then a figure rose and she recognised Mr. Gunner standing by a low camp bedstead. It’s Miss Henderson he said quietly. There was a murmur from the bed and Miriam bending over it saw Mrs. Bailey’s drawn face, fever-flushed, with bright wild eyes. “We think she ought to have a doctor,” murmured Mr. Gunner. “M’m” said Miriam absently.

“Good of you,” murmured Mrs. Bailey thickly. Miriam sat down in the chair Mr. Gunner had left and felt for Mrs. Bailey’s hands. They were cold and trembling. She clasped them firmly and Mrs. Bailey sighed. “Perhaps you can persuade her,” murmured Mr. Gunner. “M’m” Miriam murmured. He crept away on tiptoe. Mrs. Bailey sighed more heavily. “Have you tried anything?” said Miriam dreamily, out into the crowded gloom.

The room was full of unsightly necessaries, all old and in various stages of dilapidation, the overflow of the materials that maintained in the rest of the house the semblance of ordered boarding-house life. But there was something vital, even cheerful in the atmosphere; conquering the oppression of the crowded space. The aversion with which she had contemplated, at a distance, the final privacies of the Baileys behind the scenes, was exorcised. In the house itself there was no life; but there was brave life battling in this room. Mrs. Bailey would have admitted her at any time, with laughing apologies. Now that her entry had been innocently achieved, she found herself rejoicing in the disorder, sharing the sense Mrs. Bailey must have, every time she retired to this lively centre, of keeping her enterprise going for yet one more day. She saw that to Mrs. Bailey the house must appear as anything but a failure and the lack of boarders nothing but unaccountable bad luck. “A compress, or hot fomentations, hot fomentations could not do harm and they might be very good.”

“Whatever you think my dear; good of you” murmured Mrs. Bailey feebly. “Not a bit” said Miriam looking about wondering how she should carry out, in her ignorance, this mysteriously suggested practical idea. There was a small fire in the little narrow fireplace, with a hob on either side. Standing up she caught sight of a circular willow pattern sink basin with a tap above it and a cupboard below set in an alcove behind a mound of odds and ends. The room was meant for a sort of kitchen or scullery; and it had been the doctors’ only sitting-room. How had the four big tall men, with their table and all their books, managed to crowd themselves in?

In the dining-room Sissie responded with unconcealed astonishment and gratitude to Miriam’s suggestions and bustled off for the needed materials, lingering, when she brought them, to make useful suggestions, affectionately controlling Mrs. Bailey’s feeble efforts to help in the arrangements, and staying to supply Miriam’s needs, a little compact approving presence.

As long as the hot bandages were held to her head Mrs. Bailey seemed to find relief and presently began to murmur complaints of the trouble she was giving. Miriam, longing to sing, threatened to withdraw unless she would remain untroubled until she was better, or weary of the treatment. At ten o’clock she was free from pain, but her feet and limbs were cold.