“A miracle,” breathed Mrs. Craven, glancing round the circle. Evidently he did not usually come in.
Mr. Corrie came quietly into the room with empty hands; in the clear light he looked older than he had done in the dining-room, fuller in the face; grey threads showed in his hair. Everyone turned towards him. He looked at no one. His loose little smile had gone. The straight chair into which he dropped with a dreamy careless preoccupied air was set a little back from the fireside circle. No one moved.
“Absorbed the evidence, m’lud?” squeaked Mr. Craven.
“Ah-m,” growled his host, clearing his throat.
Why can’t they let him alone, Miriam asked herself, and leave him to me, added her mind swiftly. She sat glaring into the fire; the room had resumed its strange magic.
9
“Do you think it is wrong to teach children things you don’t believe yourself?...” said Miriam, and her thoughts rushed on. “You’re an unbeliever and I’m an unbeliever and both of us despise the thoughts and opinions of ‘people’; you’re a successful wealthy man and can amuse yourself and forget; I must teach and presently die, teach till I die. It doesn’t matter. I can be happy for a while teaching your children, but you know, knowing me a little what a task that must be; you know I know nothing and that I know that nobody knows anything; comfort me....”
She seemed to traverse a great loop of time waiting for the answer to her hurried question. Mr. Corrie had come into the drawing-room dressed for dinner and sat down near her with a half-smile as she closed the book she was reading and laid it on her knee and looked up with sentences from “A Human Document” ringing through her, and by the time her question was out she knew it was unnecessary. But she had flung it out and it had reached him and he had read the rush of thoughts that followed it. She might as well have been silent; better. She had missed some sort of opportunity. What would have happened if she had been quite silent? His answer was swift, but in the interval they had said all they would ever have to say to each other. “Not in the least,” he said, with a gentle decisiveness.
She flashed thanks at him and sighed her relief. He did not mind about religion. But how far did he understand? She had made him think she was earnest about the teaching children something. He would be very serious about their being “decently turned out.” She was utterly incapable of turning them out for the lives they would have to lead. She envied and pitied and despised those lives. Envied the ease and despised the ignorance, the awful cruel struggle of society that they were growing up for—no joy, a career and sport for the boy, clubs, the weary dyspeptic life of the blasé man, and for the girl lonely cold hard bitter everlasting “social” life. She envied the ease. Mr. Corrie must know she envied the ease. Did he know that she tried to hide her incapacity in order to go on sharing the beauty and ease?
“It is so difficult,” she pursued helplessly, and saw him wonder why she went on with the subject and try to read the title of her book. She did not mean to tell him that. That would lead them away; just nowhere. If only she could tell him everything and get him to understand. But that would mean admitting that she was letting the children’s education slide; and he was sitting there, confidently, so beautifully dressed for dinner, paying her forty pounds a year not to let the children’s education slide.... “It’s an opportunity; he’s come in here, and sat down to talk to me. I ought to tell him; I’m cheating.” But he had looked for the title of her book, and would have talked, about anything, if she could have talked. He had a little air of deference, quiet kind indulgent deference. His neat little shoulders, bent as he sat turned towards her, were kind. “I’m too young,” she cried in her mind. If only she could say aloud, “I’m too young—I can’t do it,” and leave everything to him.