Interim: Pilgrimage, Volume 5

by Dorothy M. Richardson

Still talking, Mr. Bowdoin went up the rubbish-strewn steps and opened the dusty blistered door with his latchkey. Miriam followed him into a dark bare passage and down carpetless stairs into a large chilly twilit basement room. Nothing was visible but a long kitchen table lit by a low barred window at the far end of the room. I will light a lamp for you in a moment he murmured in his formal cockney monotone; my friends will be arriving soon and before they come I should like to show you my sketches. Miriam sat down silently. The feeling of the neighbourhood was in the room. A heavy blankness lay over everything. She felt nowhere. It had been difficult to take part in conversation walking along the Farringdon Road. It was strange enough to know that anyone lived in a road almost in the city; and paying a visit there was like stepping out of the world.

With his slow even speech Mr. Bowdoin rebuked her here even more strongly for her outbreak of excited talk and loud laughter about Devonshire. He had not felt that they were walking along, outside London, in blank space, free, and exactly alike in their thoughts. He had not had that moment when they turned into the strange dead road east of Bloomsbury, nowhere, and he had seemed like herself at her side and he ought to have laughed and laughed. His sudden searching look, are you mad or intoxicated, with your sudden Billingsgate manners, had said that Farringdon Road was in the world and that he intended to conduct himself in the usual manner of a gentleman escorting a lady. As he lit a little lamp on the corner of the table she glanced at the back of his hair and imagined him sitting at a typewriter with it in curl-papers, and determined to be at ease. What a jolly room she exclaimed with strained animation as the lamplight wavered up and then sat looking at her hands. It would be cruel to look about the room. She had seen kitchen chairs standing sparsely about in the spaces unoccupied by the table, a cottage piano standing at right angles with the low window and one picture over the piano. There was nothing else in the room. The floor was covered with strips of coarse worn oil-cloth and there was nothing above the empty mantelpiece. It is quite bohemian said Mr. Bowdoin lighting the piano candles. Let me take your cloak. Miriam slipped off her golf-cape and he disappeared between curtains at the end of the room opposite the window.

This was Bohemia! She glanced about. It was the explanation of the room. But it was impossible to imagine Trilby’s milk-call sounding at the door.... It was Bohemia; the table and chairs were bohemian. Perhaps a big room like this would be even cheaper than a garret in St. Pancras. The neighbourhood did not matter. A bohemian room could hold its own anywhere. No furniture but chairs and a table, saying when you brought people in I am a Bohemian and having no one but Bohemians for friends. There must be a special way of behaving in English Bohemia. Perhaps when the friends came she would find it out. I have the sketches in a drawer here said Mr. Bowdoin coming back through the curtains and turning up an end of the table-cloth.... Ah! C’est le pied de Trilby. Wee. D’après nature? Nong. De mémoire, alors? ... où rien ne troublera, Trilby, qui dorrr-mira, thought Miriam. She took the little water-colour sketches one by one and listened carefully to Mr. Bowdoin’s descriptions of the subjects, trying to think of something to say. It was wonderful that he should take so much trouble on a holiday. The words in his descriptions brought Devonshire scenes alive into her mind, and she could imagine how he felt as he looked at them ... plats d’épinards ... it was like the difference between the French and English Bohemia. But the true thing in it was that he had wanted to do them. That gave him his right to call himself a Bohemian. He would have tried to write if he wanted to and have gone to live in a garret in Fleet Street. Why don’t you put them about the room she asked insincerely. It was false and cruel; a criticism of the room which was beginning to show its real character; not interfering; plain and clear for things to happen and shine out in it in their full strength. And it was a flattery of the pictures which were nothing. Well, they’re just beginnings. Hardly worthy of exhibition. I hope to attain to something better in the future. Where did he find all his calm words and self-confidence. Perhaps it was the result of having a room to invite friends to and talk about things in. But how could anybody do anything with people coming and going, confusing everything by perpetually saying things? She stared obediently at sketch after sketch until her eyes ached. It was going on too long. Her strength was ebbing out and the evening was still to come. He liked showing his sketches and thought she was entertained. Even in Bohemia people thought it was necessary to always be doing some definite thing. There was a knocking at the front door upstairs. Mr. Bowdoin went quickly up and came down with a tall lady. He introduced her and she bowed and at once took off her outdoor things. While he was putting them away behind the curtains she sat briskly down on a chair at the far end of the room in a line with Miriam and arranged her hair and her dress with easy unconcerned movements. She did not look in the least bohemian. She sat drawn up in her chair very tall and thin in a clumsy dress with a high stiff collarband. Her head and hair above her thin dingy neck were—common. Undoubtedly. She looked like a post-office young lady. She was quite old, twenty-seven or twenty-eight. While the other people came in she sat very still and self-possessed, as if nothing were happening. Was that dignity? Not attempting to hide your peculiarities and defects, but just keeping perfectly still and calm whatever happened? There were two men and another woman. They stood about in the gloom near the door while Mr. Bowdoin carried away their things and came back and murmured Miss Rogers and Miss Henderson, and then sat down in a row on the kitchen chairs in line near the piano. Their faces were above the reach of the lamplight. Their bodies had the subdued manner of the less important sitters in a parish church. Mr. Bowdoin was putting the little lamp on the top of the piano. The light ran up the wall. The picture was a large portrait of Paderewski. It was amongst Miriam’s records of Queen’s Hall posters, coming and going amongst other posters of musicians, passed by with a hurried glance, soon obliterated by the oncoming of the blazing flower-baskets as she hurried down Langham Place sore with her effort to forget the reminders of music beyond her reach. Looking at it now she felt as if all she had missed were suddenly brought to her; her sense of thwarting and loss was swept away. She sat up relieved, bathed in sunshine. The room was full of life and warmth and golden light. She eagerly searched the features until Mr. Bowdoin took the lamp off the piano and sat down murmuring I will give you a sonata of Bytoven. The outline of the face shone down through the gloom. She could recall each feature in perfect distinctness. All the soft weakness of the musical temperament was there, the thing that made people call musicians a soft weak lot. But there was something else; perhaps it was in all musicians who were such great executors as to be almost composers. The curious conscious half-pleading sensitive weakness of the mouth and chin were dreadful; a sort of nakedness as if a whole weak nature were escaping there for everyone to see; and then suddenly reined in; held in and back by the pose of the reined-in head. The great aureole of fluffy hair was shaped and held in shape by the same power. The whole head, soft and weak in all its details, was resolute and strong.... If the face were raised to look outwards it would be weak, pained and suffering and almost querulously sorrowful; but in its own right pose it was happy and strong. The pose of the head gave it its grip on the features and the hair and made beauty. The pose of listening. The eyes saw nothing. The reined-in face was listening, intently, from a burning bush.... There was some reason not yet understood why musicians and artists wore long hair.

The long sonata came to an end while Miriam was still revolving amongst her thoughts. When Mr. Bowdoin sat back from the piano she returned to the point where she had begun and determined to stop her halting circular progress from group to group of interesting reflections and to listen to the next thing he might play. She was aware he was playing on his own piano better than he had done at Tansley Street but also more carefully and less self-forgetfully. Perhaps that was why she had not listened. She could not remember ever before having thoughts, about definite things while music was going on, and felt afraid lest she was ceasing to care for music. She found it would be quite easy to speak coolly, with an assumption of great appreciation and ask him to play some definite thing. Just as she was about to break into the silence with a remark, one of the big curtains was suddenly drawn aside by a little old lady bearing a tray of steaming cups. She stood just inside the curtains, her delicate white-haired lace-capped head bowing from side to side of the room graciously, a gentle keen smile on her delicately shrivelled face. My mother, murmured Mr. Bowdoin as he went down the room for the tray. Slender and short as he was, she was invisible behind him as he bent for the tray and when he turned with it to the room she had disappeared. Miriam gazed at the dark curtains hoping for her return and dreading it. Nothing suitable to an enthusiastic bohemian evening could be said in a courtly manner.... She accepted a cup of coffee without a word as if Mr. Bowdoin had been a waiter, and sat flaring over it. She felt as if nothing could be said until there had been some reference to the vision. She hoped everyone had bowed and remembered with shame that she had only stared. Everyone seemed to be stirring; but the beginnings of speech went forward as if the little old lady had never appeared. Mr. Bowdoin had sat down with the men on the other side of the room and the woman had crossed over to a chair near Miss Rogers and was in eager conversation with her. Miss Rogers has only lately joined musical circles she heard Mr. Bowdoin say in an affectionate indulgent tone. That accounted for the way she deferred to him and sat in a sort of complacent exclusive rapture, keeping her manner unchanged before the onslaught of the eagerly talking woman. The woman was in the circle and did not seem to think it strange that Miss Rogers should be a candidate. She was talking about some orchestra somewhere ... of something she wanted to play, he conducting, she finished in a tone of worship. Her voice was refined and she talked easily, but she also had the common uneducated look ... and she was talking about Camberwell. Mr. Bowdoin was a conductor of an orchestra. Those people played in orchestras, or wanted to. The three men were talking in eager happy sentences and laughing happily and not noisily. There was something here that was lacking in Miss Szigmondy’s prosperous musical people, something that kept them apart from the world where they made their living.... They worked hard in two worlds ... when Mr. Bowdoin was at the piano again they all sat easy and at home, in easy attitudes, affectionately listening. The room seemed somehow less dark and their forms much more visible and bigger. The empty white coffee cups standing about on the table caught the light. Miriam’s stood alone at the end of the table. Mr. Bowdoin had taken it from her but without entering into conversation and she was left with her prepared remark about the piano and her plea for a performance of the Tannhäuser overture going unsaid round and round in her mind. She sat ashamed before the restrained impersonal enthusiasm that filled the room. Even Miss Rogers was sitting less stiffly. Her own stiffness must make it obvious that she was not in a musical circle. Musical circles had a worldly savoir-faire of their own, the thing that was to be found everywhere in the world. To be in one would mean having to talk like that eager worshipping woman or to be calm and easily supercilious and secret like Miss Rogers. Even here the men were apart from the women; to join the men would be easy enough, to say exactly what one thought and talk about all sorts of things and laugh. But the women would hate that and one would have to be intimate with the women, and rave about music and musicians. Mr. Bowdoin had probably thought she would talk to those women. But after talking to them how could one listen to music? Their very presence made it almost impossible. She was unable to lose herself in the Wagner overture. It sounded out thinly into the room. Paderewski was looking away to where there was nothing but music sounding in a wooden room just inside an immense forest somewhere in Europe. She began thinking secretly of the world waiting for her outside and felt that she was affronting everyone in the room; treacherously and not visibly as before. She had got away from them but they did not know it. Mr. Bowdoin passed from the overture which was vociferously applauded and went on and on till she ceased altogether to try to listen and he became a stranger, sitting there playing seriously and laboriously alone at his piano.... She wished he would play a waltz—and she suddenly blushed to find herself sitting there at all....

They all seemed to get up to go at the same moment and when they drifted out into the street seemed all to be going the same way. Miriam found herself walking along the Farringdon Road between Mr. Bowdoin and the shorter of the two other men, longing for solitude and to be free to wander slowly along the new addition to her map of London at night. Even with Bohemians evenings did not end when they ended, but led to the forced companionship of walking home. The tall man and the two women were marching along ahead at a tremendous pace and she was obliged to hasten her steps to keep up with her companions’ evident intention of keeping them in view. Perhaps at the top of the road they would all separate. We will escort Miss Henderson to her home and then I’ll come on with you to Highgate. To Highgate—exclaimed Miriam almost stopping. Are you going to walk to Highgate to-night? They both laughed. Oh yes said Mr. Bowdoin that’s nothing. Highgate. The mere thought of its northern remoteness seemed to be an insult to London. No wonder she had found herself a stranger with these people. Walking out to Highgate at night and getting up as usual the next morning. Magnificent strong hard thing to do. Horrible. Walking out to Highgate, “talking all the time” ... they could never have a minute to realise anything at all; rushing along saying things that covered everything and never stopping to realise, talking about people and things and never being or knowing anything, and perpetually coming to the blank emptiness of Highgate ... their unconsciousness of everything made them the right sort of people to have the trouble of living in Highgate. They probably walked about with knapsacks on Sunday. But to them even the real country could not be country. All ‘circles’ must be like that in some way; doing things by agreement. The men talking confidently about them, completely ignorant of any sort of reality.... She came out of her musings when they turned into the Euston Road and ironically watched the men keeping up their talk across the continual breaking up of the group by passing pedestrians. You’ll have to walk back she interrupted, suddenly turning to Mr. Bowdoin; the buses will have stopped. I never ride in omnibuses frowned Mr. Bowdoin. I shall be back by two.... Miriam waited a moment inside the door at Tansley Street listening for silence. The evening fell away from her with the departing footsteps of the two men. She opened the door upon the high quiet empty blue-lit street and moved out into a tranquil immensity. It was everywhere. Into her consciousness of the unpredictable incidents of to-morrow’s Wimpole Street day, over the sure excitement of Eve’s arrival in the evening flowed the light-footed leaping sense of a day new begun, an inexhaustible blissfulness, everything melted away into it. It seemed to smite her, calling for some spoken acknowledgment of its presence, alive and real in the heart of the London darkness. It was not her fault that Eve was not coming to stay at Tansley Street. It came out of the way life arranged itself as long as you did not try to interfere. Roaming along in the twilight she lost consciousness of everything but the passage of dark silent buildings, the drawing away under her feet of the varying flags of the pavement, the waxing and waning along the pavement of the streams of lamplight, the distant murmuring tide of sound passing through her from wide thoroughfares, the gradual approach of a thoroughfare, the rising of the murmuring tide to a happy symphony of recognisable noises, the sudden glare of yellow shop-light under her feet, the wide black road, the joy of the need for the understanding sweeping glance from right to left as she moved across it, the sense of being swept across in an easy curve drawn by the kindly calculable swing of the traffic, of being a permitted co-operating part of the traffic, the coming of the friendly curb and the strip of yellow pavement, carrying her on again into the lamplit greyness leading along to Donizetti’s.

CHAPTER VI

1

Miriam came forward seeing nothing but the golden gaslight pouring over the white table-cloth. She sat down near Mrs. Bailey within the edge of its radiance. The depths of the light still held unchanged the welcome that had been there when she had come in and found Emile laying the table. There was no change and no disappointment. The smeary mirrors and unpolished furniture were bright in the gaslight, showing distances of interior and gleaming passages of light. In the spaces between the pictures the walls sent back sheeny reflections of the glow on the table. People coming in one by one saying good evening in different intonations and sitting down sending out waves of enquiry, left her undisturbed. There were five or six forms about the table besides Sissie sitting at the far end opposite her mother. They made sudden statements about the weather one after the other. They were waiting to have their daily experience of the meal changed by something she might do or say. Emile was handing round plates of soup. Presently they would all be talking and would have forgotten her. Then she could see them all one by one and get away unseen, having had dinner only with Mrs. Bailey. Mrs. Bailey was standing up carving the joint. When the sounds she made were all that was to be heard, she responded to the last remark about the weather or asked some fresh question about it as if no one had spoken at all. When she was not speaking every movement of her battle with the joint expressed her triumphant affectionate sense of Miriam’s presence. She had made no introductions. She was saying secretly there you are young lady. I told you so. Now you’re in your right place. It’s quite easy you see. The joint was already partly distributed. Emile was handing three piled dishes of vegetables. A generous plateful of well-browned meat and gravy appeared before Miriam with Mrs. Bailey’s strong small toil-disfigured hand firmly grasping its edge. She took it to pass it on. Everything was hurrying on.... That’s yorce my child said Mrs. Bailey. The low murmur was audible round the silent table. Asserting her independence with a sullen formality Miriam thanked her and looked about for condiments without raising her eyes to the range of those other eyes, all taking photographs now that she was forced into movements. Mrs. Bailey placed a cruet near her plate. Yorce she pondered getting angrily away into thought. Mrs. Bailey could not know that it might be said to be more correct than yourz. It was an affectation. She had picked it up somewhere from one of those people who carefully say off-ten instead of awfen and it gave her satisfaction to use it, linked rebukingly up with the complacent motherly patronage of which she had boasted to the whole table. The first of Emile’s dishes appeared over her left shoulder and she saw as she turned unprepared, raised heads turned towards her end of the table. She scooped her vegetables quickly and clumsily out of the dishes. In her awkward movements and her unprotected raised face she felt, and felt all the observers seeing, the marks of her disgrace. They saw her looking like Eve nervously helping herself to vegetables in the horrible stony cold dark restaurant of the hostel. They saw that she resented Mrs. Bailey’s public familiarity and could do nothing. She tried to look bored and murmured thank you when she had taken her third vegetable. It sounded out like a proclamation in the intense silence and she turned angrily to her plate trying to remember whether she had heard anyone else thank Emile for vegetables.... After all she was paying for the meal and her politeness to Emile was her own affair. Abroad people bowed or raised their hats going in and out of shops and said Monsieur to policemen. Her efforts to eat abstractedly and to appear plunged in thought made her feel more and more like a poor relation. The details of her meeting with Eve kept appearing in and out of her attempt to get back her sense of Mrs. Bailey’s house as a secret warmth and brightness added to the many resources of her life. Mrs. Bailey knew that her house had been transformed by the meeting with Eve and was trying to tell her that she was not as independent as she thought.

What were the exact things she had told Mrs. Bailey? She had talked excitedly and scrappily and all the time Mrs. Bailey had been gathering information and drawing her own conclusions about the Hendersons. Mrs. Bailey saw Eve’s arrival at the station and her weary resentment of having everything done for her in the London manner, her revenge in the cab, sitting back and making the little abstracted patronising sounds in response to everything that was said to her, taking no interest, and at last saying how you run on. She saw something of the hostel....

Where’s Mr. Mendizzable? demanded Sissie.... The Girls’ Friendly; that was the name of that other thing. But that was for servants. The Young Women’s Bible Association was the worst disgrace that could happen to a gentlewoman.... Eve had liked it. She had suddenly begun going about with an interested revived face eagerly doing what she was told. She was there now, it was her only home, and she must have all her meals there for cheapness; there would be no outside life for her. Her life was imprisoned by those women, consciously goody conscientious servants with flat caps, dominating everything, revelling in the goody atmosphere; the young women in the sitting-room all looking raw, as if they washed very early in the morning in cold water and did their shabby hair with cold hands; the superintendent, the watchful official expression on her large well-fed elderly high-school-girl face, the way she sat on a footstool with her arms round her knees pretending to be easy and jolly while she recited that it was a privilege and a joy for sisters to be so near to each other ... as if she were daring us to deny it. I shan’t see very much of Eve. She won’t want me to. She will strike up a friendship with one of those young women.... Miriam found herself glancing up the table towards the centre of a conflict. They were all joined in conflict over some common theme. No one was outside it; the whole table was in an uproar of voices and laughter.... It was nothing but Miss Scott saying things about Mr. Mendizabal and everyone watching and throwing in remarks.... Miss Scott was neighing across the table at something that had been said and was preparing to speak again without breaking into her laughter. All faces were turned her way. “What’s that Mr. Joe-anzen says?” laughed Mrs. Bailey towards the last speaker. The invisible man opposite Miss Scott was not even Mr. Helsing; only the younger fainter Norwegian, and this side of him an extraordinary person ... an abruptly bulging coarse fringe, a coarse-grained cheek bulging from under an almost invisible deep-sunken eye, and abruptly shelving bust under a coarse serge bodice.