“I don’t see how I can get out of it. It’s rather a big function; as an officer I ought to be there.”
“Oh never mind; you’d better come.”
Mr. Orly called from the stairs.
“All right darling” she said in anxious cheerful level tones hurrying to the door. “You must come Ley, you can manage somehow.”
Miriam sat feeling wretchedly about in her mind. Mr. Leyton was busily finishing his lunch. In a moment Mr. Hancock would re-assert himself by some irrelevant insincerity. She found courage to plunge into speech, on the subject of her two lessons at the school. Her story strove strangely against the echoes and fell, impeded. It was an attempt to create a quiet diversion.... It should have been done violently ... how many times had she seen it done, the speaker violently pushing off what had gone before and protruding his diversion, in brisk animated deliberately detached tones. But it was never really any good. There was always a break and a wound, something left unhealed, something standing unlearned ... something that can only grow clear in silence....
“You’ll never learn cycling like that” said Mr. Leyton with the superior chuckle of the owner of a secret, as he snatched up a biscuit and made off. She clung fearfully to his cheerful harassed departing form. There was nothing left now in the room but the echoes. Mr. Hancock sat munching his biscuits and cheese with a look of determined steely preoccupation in his eyes that were not raised above the level of the spread of disarray along the table; but she could hear the busy circulation of his thoughts. If now she could endure for a moment. But her mind flung hither and thither seeking with a loathed servility some alien neutral topic. She knew anything she might say with the consciousness of his thoughts in her mind would be resented and slain. To get up and go quietly away with some murmured remark about her work would be to leave him with his judgment upon him. What he wanted was to give her an instruction about something in a detached professional voice and get rid of her, believing that she had gone unknowing, and remaining in his circle of reasonable thoughts. She hit out with all her force, coming against the buttress of silent angry forehead with random speech.
“I can’t believe that it’s less than two months to the longest day.”
“Time flies” responded Mr. Hancock grimly. She recoiled exhausted by her effort and quailed under the pang in the midday gaslit room of realisation of the meaning of her words. Her eye swept over the grey-clad form and the blunted features seeking some power that would stay the inexorable consumption of the bright passing days.
“‘Tempus fugit’ I suppose one ought to say” he said with a little laugh getting up.
“Oui,” said Miriam angrily, “le temps s’envole; die Zeit vergeht, in other words.”