LONDON
DUCKWORTH & CO.
3 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN
First Published 1921
CHAPTER I
Miriam ran upstairs narrowly ahead of her thoughts. In the small enclosure of her room they surged about her, gathering power from the familiar objects silently waiting to share her astounded contemplation of the fresh material. She swept joyfully about the room ducking and doubling to avoid arrest until she should have discovered some engrossing occupation. But in the instant’s pause at each eagerly opened drawer and cupboard, her mind threw up images. It was useless. There was no escape up here. Pelted from within and without, she paused in laughter with clasped restraining hands ..... the rest of the evening must be spent with people ... the nearest; the Baileys; she would go down into the dining-room and be charming with the Baileys until to-morrow’s busy thoughtless hours were in sight. Half-way downstairs she remembered that the forms waiting below, for so long unnoticed and unpondered, might be surprised, perhaps affronted by her sudden interested reappearance. She rushed on. She could break through that barrier. Mrs. Bailey’s quiet withholding dignity would end in delight over a shared gay acknowledgment that her house was looking up.
She opened the dining-room door, facing in advance the family gathered at needlework under the gaslight, an island group in the waste of dreary increasing shabbiness .... she would ask some question, apologising for disturbing them. The room seemed empty; the gas was turned dismally low. Only one light was on, the once new, drearily hopeful incandescent burner. Its broken mantle shed a ghastly bluish-white glare over the dead fern in the centre of the table and left the further parts of the room in obscurity. But there was someone there; a man, sitting perched on the sofa-head, and beyond him someone sitting on the sofa. She came forward into silence. They made no movement; boarders, people she did not know, stupefied by their endurance of the dreariness of the room. She crossed to the fireside and stood looking at the clock-face. The clock was not going. “Are you wanting the real Greenwich, Miss Henderson?” She turned, ashamed of her mean revival of interest in a world from which she had turned away, to observe the woman who had found possible a friendly relationship with Mr. Gunner. “Oh yes I do,” she answered hurriedly, carefully avoiding the meeting of eyes that would call forth his numb clucking laughter. But she was looking into the eyes of Mrs. Bailey..... Sitting tucked neatly into the sofa corner, with clasped hands, her shabbiness veiled by the dim light, she appeared to be smiling a far-away welcome from a face that shone rounded and rosy in the gloom. She was neither vexed nor pleased. She was far away, and Mr. Gunner went on conducting the interview. He was speaking again, with his watch in his hand. He, having evidently become a sort of intimate of the Baileys, was of course despising her for her aloofness during the bad period. She paid no heed to his words, remaining engrossed in Mrs. Bailey’s curious still manner, her strange unwonted air of having no part in what was going on.
She sought about for some question to justify her presence and perhaps break the spell, and recovered a memory of the kind of enquiry used by boarders to sustain their times of association with Mrs. Bailey. In reply to her announcement that she had come down to ask the best way of getting to Covent Garden early in the morning Mrs. Bailey sat forward as if for conversation. The spell was partly broken, but Miriam hardly recognised the smooth dreamy voice in which Mrs. Bailey echoed the question, and moved about the room enlarging on her imaginary enterprise, struggling against the humiliation of being aware of Mr. Gunner’s watchfulness, trying to recover the mood in which she had come down and to drive the message of its gaiety through Mrs. Bailey’s detachment. She found herself at the end of her tirade, standing once more facing the group on the sofa; startled by their united appearance of kindly, smiling, patient, almost patronising tolerance. Lurking behind it was some kind of amusement. She had been an awkward fool, rushing in, seeing nothing. They had been discussing business together, the eternal difficulties of the house. Mr. Gunner was behind it all now, intimate and helpful and she had come selfishly in, interrupting. Mrs. Bailey had the right to display indifference to her assumption that anything she chose to present should receive her undivided attention; and she had not displayed indifference. If Mr. Gunner had not been there she would have been her old self. There they sat, together, frustrating her. Angered by the pressure of her desire for reinstatement she crashed against their quietly smiling resistance. “Have I been interrupting you?”
“No, young lady; certainly not,” said Mrs. Bailey in her usual manner, brushing at her skirt.
“I believe I have,” smiled Miriam obstinately.
Mr. Gunner smiled serenely back at her. There was something extraordinary in such a smile coming from him. His stupid raillery was there, but behind it was a modest confidence.