Last night, as I was reading in bed—a habit acquired at the age of twelve and adhered to ever since—I remembered this and wondered what the walls would exhale on me. The paper has a trailing design of roses on it, very ugly and evidently old. I wondered if the roses had bloomed round tragedy or comedy, or just that fluctuation between the two which makes up the lives of most of us—an alternate rise and fall, soaring upward to a height, dropping downward to a hollow.
Five years ago mine dropped to its hollow, and ever since has been struggling up to the dead level where it is now—the place where things come without joy or pain, the edge off everything. Thirty-three and the high throb of expectancy over, the big possibilities left behind. The hiring of two rooms, the hanging of a curtain, the placing of a vase—these are the things that for me must take the place that love and home and children take in other women’s lives.
I got this far and stopped. No, I wouldn’t. I came back from Europe to get away from that. I put out the light and cuddled down in the new bed. Quite a good bed if it is a divan, and the room is going to be fairly quiet. Muffled by walls I could hear the clanging passage of cars. And then far away it seemed, though it couldn’t have been, a gramophone, the Caruso record of La Donna e Mobile. What a fine swaggering song and what an outrageous falsehood! Woman is changeable—is she? That’s the man’s privilege. We, poor fools, haven’t the sense to do anything but cling, if not to actualities to memories. I felt tears coming—that hasn’t happened for years. My memories don’t bring them, they only bring a sort of weary bitterness. It was the new surroundings, the loneliness, that did it. I stopped them and listened to the gramophone, and the wretched thing had begun on a new record, Una Lagrima Furtiva—a furtive tear!
With my own furtive tears, wet on the pillow, I couldn’t help laughing.
II
There is one thing in the front room I must get rid of—the rug. It is a nightmare with a crimson ground on which are displayed broken white particles that look like animalcula in a magnified drop of water. I had just made up my mind that it must be removed when Mrs. Bushey opportunely came in.
Mrs. Bushey lives next door (she has two houses under her wing) and when not landladying, teaches physical culture. I believe there is no Mr. Bushey, though whether death or divorce has snatched him from her I haven’t heard. She is a stout dark person somewhere from twenty-eight to forty-eight—I can’t tell age. I am thirty-three and have wrinkles round my eyes. She has none. It may be temperament, or fat, or the bony structure of the skull, or an absence of furtive tears.
She talks much and rapidly which ought to tend to a good combination between us, as listening is one of the things I do best. From our conversation, or perhaps I ought to say our monologue, I got an impressionistic effect of my fellow lodgers past and present. The lady who lived here before me was a writer and very close about money. It was difficult to collect her rent, also she showed symptoms of inebriety. I gathered from Mrs. Bushey’s remarks and expression that she expected me to be shocked, and I tried not to disappoint her, but I couldn’t do much with a monosyllable, which was all she allowed me.
A series of rapid sketches of the present inmates followed. Something like this:
“Mrs. Phillips, the trained nurse, and her aunt, in the basement are terrible cranks, always complaining about the plumbing and the little boys who will stop on their way home from school and write bad words on the flags. They think they own the back garden, but they don’t. We all do, but what’s the use of fighting? I never do, I’ll stand anything rather than have words with anybody.”