Immersing herself in her corner she saw nothing more until Eve’s face appeared in the crowd waiting upon the seaside platform. Eve beamed welcome and eager wordless communications and turned at once to lead the way through the throng. They hurried, separated by Miriam’s hand-luggage, silenced by the din of the traffic rattling over the cobblestones, meeting and parting amongst the thronging pedestrians, down the steep slope of the narrow street until Eve turned, with a piloting backward glance, and led the way along the cobbled pavement of a side-street, still narrower and sloping even more steeply downhill. It was deserted, and as they went single-file along the narrow pavement, Miriam caught in the distance, the unwonted sound of the winter sea. She had not thought of the sea as part of her visit, and lost herself in the faint familiar roll and flump of the south-coast tide. It was enough. The holiday came and passed in the imagined sight of the waves tumbling in over the grey beach, and the breaking of the brilliant seaside light upon the varying house-fronts behind the promenade; she returned restored; the prize of far-off London renewed already, keenly, within her hands, to find Eve standing still just ahead, turned towards her; smiling too breathlessly for speech. They were in front of a tiny shop-front, slanting with the steep slant of the little road. The window was full of things set close to the panes on narrow shelves. Miriam stood back, pouring out her appreciation. It was perfect; just as she had imagined it; exactly the little shop she had dreamed of keeping when she was a child. She felt a pang of envy.
“Mine” said Eve blissfully “my own.” Eve had property; fragile delicate Eve, the problem of the family. This was her triumph. Miriam hurried, lest her thoughts should become visible, to glance up and down the street and exclaim the perfection of the situation.
“I know” said Eve with dreamy tenderness, “and it’s all my own; the shop and the house; all mine.” Miriam’s eyes rose fearfully. Above the shop, a narrow strip of bright white plaster house shot up, two storeys high; charming, in the way it was complete, a house, and yet the whole of it, with a strip of sky above, and the small neat pavement below, in your eye at once, and beside it right and left, the irregular heights and widths of the small houses, close-built and flush with the edge of the little pavement, up and down the hill. But the thought of the number of rooms inside the little building brought, together with her longing to see them, a sense of the burden of possessions, and her envy disappeared. While she cried you’ve got a house, she wondered, scanning Eve’s radiant slender form, whence she drew with all her apparent helplessness, the strength to face such formidable things.
“I’ve let the two rooms over the shop. I live at the top.” As she exclaimed on the implied wealth, Miriam found her envy wandering back in the thought of the two rooms under the sky, well away from the shop in another world, the rest of the house securely cared for by other people. She moved to the window. “All the right things” she murmured, from her shocked survey of the rows of light green bottles filled with sweets, the boxes of soap, cigarettes, clay pipes, bootlaces, jewellery pinned to cards, crackers and tightly packed pink and white muslin Christmas stockings. Between the shelves she saw the crowded interior of the little shop, a strip of counter, a man with rolled up shirt sleeves, busily twisting a small screw of paper.... Gerald.
“Come inside” said Eve from the door.
“Hullo, Mirry, what d’you think of the emporium?” Gerald, his old easy manner, his smooth polished gentle voice, his neat, iron handshake across the mean little counter, gave Eve’s enterprise the approval of all the world. “I’ve done up enough screws of tea to last you the whole blessed evening” he went on from the midst of Miriam’s exclamations “and at least twenty people have been in since you left.” A little door flew open in the wall just behind him and Harriett, in an overall, stood at the top of a short flight of stairs, leaping up and down in the doorway. Miriam ran round behind the counter, freely, Eve’s shop, their shop, behind her. “Hulloh old silly” beamed Harriett kissing and shaking her “I just rushed down, can’t stay a minute, I’m in the middle of nine dinners, they’re all leaving to-morrow and you’re to come and sleep with us.” She fled down the steps, out through the shop and away up the hill, with a rousing attack on Gerald as she passed him leaning with Eve over the till. Miriam was welcomed. The fact of her visit was more to Harriett than her lodgers. She collected her belongings and carried them up the steps past a small dark flight of stairs into a dark little room. A small fire was burning in a tiny kitchen range; a candle guttered on the mantelpiece in the draught from the shop; there was no window and the air of the room was close with the combined odours of the things crowded into the small space. She went back into the bright familiar shop. Gerald was leaving; see you to-morrow he called from the door with his smile.
“Now; I’ll light the lamp and we’ll be cosy” said Eve leading the way back into the little room. Miriam waited impatiently for the lamp to make a live centre in the crowded gloom. The little black kitchen fire was intolerable as president of Eve’s leisure. But the dim lamp, standing low on a little table, made the room gloomier and Eve was back in the shop with a customer. Only the dingy little table, a battered tray bearing the remains of a hasty, shabby tea, the fall below it of a faded ugly fringed tablecloth and a patch of threadbare carpet, were clearly visible..... She could not remove her attention from them.
Lying sleepless by Eve’s side late that night, she watched the pictures that crowded the darkness. Her first moments in the little back room were far away. The small dark bedroom was full of the last picture of Eve, in her nightgown, quietly relentless after explaining that she always kept the window shut because plenty of air came in, taking a heavy string of large blue beads out of her top drawer, to put them in readiness with to-morrow’s dress. No; I don’t think that a bit; and if I were a savage, I should hang myself all over with beads and love it. She had spoken with such conviction...... Up here, with her things arranged round her as she had had them at home and in her bedroom at the Greens’, she kept her life as it had always been. She was still her unchanged self, but her freedom was giving her the strength to be sure of her opinions. It was as if she had been saying all the evening with long accumulating preparedness, holding her poise throughout the interruptions of customers and down into the details of the story of her adventures, Yes I know your opinions, I have heard them all my life, and now I’m out in the world myself and can meet everybody as an equal, and say what I think, without wondering whether it suits my part as the Greens’ governess. She had got her strength from the things she had done. It was amazing to think of her summoning courage to break again with the Greens and borrowing from them to start in business, Mr. Green ‘setting his heart’ on the success of the little shop and meaning to come down and see how it was getting on. How awful it would be if it did not get on.... But it was getting on...... How terrifying it must have been at first not knowing the price of anything in the shop or what to buy for it ... and then, customers telling her the prices of things and where they were kept, and travellers being kind; respectful and friendly and ready to go out of their way to do anything .... that was the other side of Maupassant’s “hourrah pour la petite difference” commis voyageurs .... and well-to-do people in the neighbourhood rushing in for some little thing, taken aback to find a lady behind the counter, and coming again for all sorts of things.... Eve would become like one of those middle-aged women shopkeepers in books, in the country, with a kind heart and a sarcastic tongue, seeing through everybody and having the same manner for the vicar and a ploughman, or a rather nicer manner for a ploughman. No. Eve was still sentimental....
Those wonderful letters were a bridge; a promise for the future.... They were the letters of a boy; that was the struggling impression she had not been able to convey. She could start the day well by telling Eve that in the morning. They were the letters of a youth in love for the first time in his life ... and he had fifteen grandchildren. “So wonderful when you think of that old, old man” had not expressed it at all. They were wonderful for anybody. Page after page, all breathing out the way things shine when the sense of someone who is not there, is there all the time. Eve knew what it had meant to him; “age makes no difference.” Then might life suddenly shine like that at any moment, right up to the end.... And it made Eve so wonderful; having no idea, all those years, and thinking him just a very kind old man to come, driving, almost from his death-bed, with a little rose-tree in the carriage for her. It was so perfect that he wrote only after she had gone, and he knew he was dying; a youth in love for the first time. If there were a future life he would be watching, for Eve to walk gently in crowned with song and making everything sing all round her.... But what of the wife, and of Eve’s future husband? In Heaven there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage .... but Kingsley said, then that has nothing to do with me and my wife. Perhaps that was an example of the things he suddenly thought of, walking quickly up and down the garden with a friend, and introduced by saying “I have always thought” ..... But perhaps the things that occur to you suddenly for the first time in conversation are the things you have always thought, without knowing it .... that was one of the good things in talking to Michael Shatov, finding out thoughts, looking at them when they were expressed and deciding to change them, or think them more decidedly than ever .. she could explain all that to Eve in the morning as an introduction to him. Or perhaps she could again say, having Eve’s attention free of the shop, “I have two pounds to spend on chocolate. Isn’t it extraordinary. I must, I am on my honour,” and then go on. It was horrible that Eve had hardly noticed such a startling remark.... She turned impatiently; the morning would never come; she would never sleep in this stagnant shut-in motionless air. To-morrow night she would be in a room by herself at Harry’s; but not quite so near to the sea. How could Eve shut out life and the sound of the sea? She puffed her annoyance, hardly caring if Eve were disturbed, ready to ask her if she could not smell the smell of the house and the shop and the little back room. But that was not true. She was imagining it because the motionless air was getting on her nerves. If she could not forget it she would have no sleep until she dozed with exhaustion in the morning. And to-morrow was Christmas Day. She lay still, straining her ears to catch the sound of the sea.
The next night the air poured in at an open window, silently lifting long light muslin curtains and waving them about the little narrow room filled as with moonlight by the soft blue light from the street-lamp below. The sound of the sea drowned the present in the sense of sea-side summers; bringing back moments of chance wakenings on sea-side holidays, when the high blaze of yesterday and to-morrow were together in the darkness. Miriam slept at once and woke refreshed and careless in the frosty sunrise. Her room was blazing with golden light. She lay motionless, contemplating it. There was no sound in the house. She could watch the sunlight till something happened. Harry would see that she got up in time for breakfast. There would be sunlight at breakfast in the room below; and Harry and Gerald and the remains of Christmas leisure..... “We only keep going because of Elspeth.” How could she have gone off to sleep last night without recalling that? If Harry and Gerald found marriage a failure, it was a failure. Perhaps it was a passing phase and they would think differently later on. But they had spoken so simply, as if it were a commonplace fact known to everybody ... they had met so many people by this time. Nearly all their lodgers had been married, and unhappy. Perhaps that was because they were nearly all theatrical people? If Harry had stayed in London and not had to work for a living would she have been happier? No; she was gayer down here; even more herself. It amused her to have rushes, and turn out three rooms after ten o’clock at night. They both seemed to run the house as a sort of joke, and remained absolutely themselves. Perhaps that was just in talking about it, at Christmas, to her. It certainly must be horrible in the season, as Harry said, the best part of the house packed with selfish strangers for the very best part of the year; so much to do for them all day that there was never even time to run down to the sea...... Visitors did not think of that. If they considered their landlady it would spoil their one fortnight of being free. Landladies ought to be old; not minding about working all day for other people and never seeing the sea. Harry was too young to be a landlady ...... the gently moving curtains were flat against the window again for a moment, a veil of thin muslin screening the brilliant gold, making it an even tone all over the room; a little oblong of misty golden light. Even for Harry’s sake she could not let any tinge of sadness invade it... That was being exactly like the summer visitors...