Miriam sat with her mother near the bandstand. They faced the length of the esplanade with the row of houses that held their lodging to their right and the sea away to the left. She had found that it was better to sit facing a moving vista; forms passing by too near to be looked at and people moving in the distance too far away to suggest anything. The bandstand had filled. The town-clock struck eleven. Presently the band would begin to play. Any minute now. It had begun. The introduction to its dreamiest waltz was murmuring in a conversational undertone. The stare of the esplanade rippled and broke. The idling visitors became vivid blottings. The house-rows stood out in lines and angles. The short solemn symphony was over. Full and soft and ripe the euphonium began the beat of the waltz. It beat gently within the wooden kiosk. The fluted melody went out across the sea. The sparkling
ripples rocked gently against the melody. A rousing theme would have been more welcome to the suffering at her side. She waited for the loud gay jerky tripping of the second movement. When it crashed brassily out the scene grew vivid. The air seemed to move; freshness of air and sea coming from the busy noise of the kiosk. The restless fingers ceased straying and plucking. The suffering had shifted. The night was over. When the waltz was over they would be able to talk a little. There would be something ... a goat-chaise; a pug with a solemn injured face. Until the waltz came to an end she turned towards the sea, wandering out over the gleaming ripples, hearing their soft sound, snuffing freshness, seeing the water just below her eyes, transparent green and blue and mauve, salt-filmed.
2
The big old woman’s voice grated on about Poole’s Miriorama. She had been a seven-mile walk before lunch and meant to go to Poole’s Miriorama. She knew everything there was in it and went to it every summer and for long walks and washed lace in her room and borrowed an iron from Miss Meldrum. No one listened and
her deep voice drowned all the sounds at the table. She only stopped at the beginning of a mouthful or to clear her throat with a long harsh grating sound. She did not know that there was nothing wonderful about Poole’s Miriorama or about walking every morning to the end of the parade and back. She did not know that there were wonderful things. She was like her father ... she was mad. Miss Meldrum listened and answered without attending. The other people sat politely round the table and passed things with a great deal of stiff politeness. One or two of them talked suddenly, with raised voices. The others exclaimed. They were all in agreement ... “a young woman with a baritone voice” ... a frog, white, keeping alive in coal for hundreds of years ... my cousin has crossed the Atlantic six times.... Nothing of any kind would ever stop them. They would never wait to know they were alive. They were mad. They would die mad. Of diseases with names. Even Miss Meldrum did not quite know. When she talked she was as mad as they were. When she was alone in her room and not thinking about ways and means she read books of devotion and cried. If she had had a home and a family she would have
urged her sons and daughters to get on and beat other people.... But she knew mother was different. All of them knew it in some way. They spoke to her now and again with deference, their faces flickering with beauty. They knew she was beautiful. Sunny and sweet and good, sitting there in her faded dress, her face shining with exhaustion.
3
They walked down the length of the pier through the stiff breeze arm in arm. The pavilion was gaslit, ready for the entertainment.
“Would you rather stay outside this afternoon?”
“No. Perhaps the entertainment may cheer me.”
There was a pink paper with their tickets—“The South Coast Entertainment Company” ... that was better than the usual concert. The inside of the pavilion was like the lunch, table ... the same people. But there was a yellow curtain across the platform. Mother could look at that. It was quite near them. It would take off the effect of the audience of people she envied. The cool sound of the waves flumping and washing against the pier came in
through the open doors with a hollow echo. They were settled and safe for the afternoon. For two hours there would be nothing but the things behind the curtain. Then there would be tea. Mother had felt the yellow curtain. She was holding the pink programme at a distance trying to read it. Miriam glanced. The sight of the cheap black printing on the thin pink paper threatened the spell of the yellow curtain. She must manage to avoid reading it. She crossed her knees and stared at the curtain, yawning and scolding with an affected manliness about the forgotten spectacles. They squabbled and laughed. The flump-wash of the waves had a cheerful sunlit sound. Mrs. Henderson made a brisk little movement of settling herself to attend. The doors were being closed. The sound of the waves was muffled. They were beating and washing outside in the sunlight. The gaslit interior was a pier pavilion. It was like the inside of a bathing-machine, gloomy, cool, sodden with sea-damp, a happy caravan. Outside was the blaze of the open day, pale and blinding. When they went out into it it would be a bright unlimited jewel, getting brighter and brighter, all its colours fresher and deeper until it turned to clear deep
live opal and softened down and down to darkness dotted with little pinlike jewellings of light along the esplanade; the dark luminous waves washing against the black beach until dawn.... The curtain was drawing away from a spring scene ... the fresh green of trees feathered up into a blue sky. There were boughs of apple-blossom. Bright green grass sprouted along the edge of a pathway. A woman floundered in from the side in a pink silk evening dress. She stood in the centre of the scene preparing to sing, rearing her gold-wigged head and smiling at the audience. Perhaps the players were not ready. It was a solo. She would get through it and then the play would begin. She smiled promisingly. She had bright large teeth and the kind of mouth that would say chahld for child. The orchestra played a few bars. She took a deep breath. “Bring back—the yahs—that are—dead!”—she screamed violently.
She was followed by two men in shabby tennis flannels with little hard glazed tarpaulin hats who asked each other riddles. Their jerky broken voices fell into cold space and echoed about the shabby pavilion. The scattered audience sat silent and still, listening for the voices ... cabmen wrangling in a gutter. The green scene stared
stiffly—harsh cardboard, thin harsh paint. The imagined scene moving and flowing in front of it was going on somewhere out in the world. The muffled waves sounded near and clear. The sunlight was dancing on them. When the men had scrambled away and the applause had died down, the sound of the waves brought dancing gliding figures across the stage, waving balancing arms and unconscious feet gliding and dreaming. A man was standing in the middle of the platform with a roll of music—bald-headed and grave and important. The orchestra played the overture to “The Harbour Bar.” But whilst he unrolled his music and cleared his throat his angry voice filled the pavilion: “it’s all your own fault ... you get talking and gossiping and filling yer head with a lot of nonsense ... now you needn’t begin it all over again twisting and turning everything I say.” And no sound in the room but the sound of eating. His singing was pompous anger, appetite. Shame shone from his rim of hair. He was ashamed, but did not know that he showed it.
4
They could always walk home along the smooth grey warm esplanade to tea in an easy silence.
The light blossoming from the horizon behind them was enough. Everything ahead dreamed in it, at peace. Visitors were streaming homewards along the parade lit like flowers. Along the edge of the tide the town children were paddling and shouting. After tea they would come out into the sheltering twilight at peace, and stroll up and down until it was time to go to the flying performance of The Pawnbroker’s Daughter.
5
They were late for tea and had it by themselves at a table in the window of the little smoking-room looking out on the garden. Miss Meldrum called cheerily down through the house to tell them when they came in. They went into the little unknown room and the cook brought up a small silver tea-pot and a bright cosy. Outside was the stretch of lawn where the group had been taken in the morning a year ago. It had been a seaside town lawn, shabby and brown, with the town behind it; unnoticed because the fresh open sea and sky were waiting on the other side of the house ... seaside town gardens were not gardens ... the small squares of greenery were helpless against the bright sea
... and even against shabby rooms, when the sun came into the rooms off the sea ... sea-rooms.... The little smoking-room was screened by the shade of a tree against whose solid trunk half of the French window was thrown back.
When the cook shut the door of the little room the house disappeared. The front rooms bathed in bright light and hot with the afternoon heat, the wide afterglow along the front, the vast open lid of the sky, were in another world.... Miriam pushed back the other half of the window and they sat down in a green twilight on the edge of the garden. If others had been there Mrs. Henderson would have remarked on the pleasantness of the situation and tried to respond to it and been dreadfully downcast at her failure and brave. Miriam held her breath as they settled themselves. No remark came. The secret was safe. When she lifted the cosy the little tea-pot shone silver-white in the strange light. A thick grey screen of sky must be there, above the trees, for the garden was an intensity of deep brilliance, deep bright green and calceolarias and geraniums and lobelias, shining in a brilliant gloom. It was not a seaside garden ... it was a garden ... all gardens. They took
their meal quietly and slowly, speaking in low tones. The silent motionless brilliance was a guest at their feast. The meal-time, so terrible in the hopelessness of home, such an effort in the mocking glare of the boarding-house was a great adventure. Mrs. Henderson ate almost half as much as Miriam, serenely. Miriam felt that a new world might be opening.
6
“The storm has cleared the air wonderfully.”
“Yes; isn’t it a blessing.”
“Perhaps I shan’t want the beef-tea to-night.” Miriam hung up her dress in the cupboard, listening to the serene tone. The dreadful candle was flickering in the night-filled room, but mother was quietly making a supreme effort.
“I don’t expect you will”; she said casually from the cupboard, “it’s ready if you should want it. But you won’t want it.”
“It is jolly and fresh,” she said a moment later from the window, holding back the blind. Perhaps in a few days it would be the real jolly seaside and she would be young again, staying there alone with mother, just ridiculous and
absurd and frantically happy, mother getting better and better, turning into the fat happy little thing she ought to be, and they would get to know people and mother would have to look after her and love her high spirits and admire and scold her and be shocked as she used to be. They might even bathe. It would be heavenly to be really at the seaside with just mother. They would be idiotic.
Mrs. Henderson lay very still as Miriam painted the acid above the unseen nerve centres and composed herself afterwards quietly without speaking. The air was fresh in the room. The fumes of the acid did not seem so dreadful to-night.
The Pawnbroker’s daughter was with them in the room, cheering them. The gay young man had found out somehow through her that “goodness and truth” were the heart of his life. She had not told him. It was he who had found it out. He had found the words and she did not want him to say them. But it was a new life for them both, a new life for him and happiness for her even if he did not come back, if she could forget the words.
Putting out the candle at her bedside suddenly
and quietly with the match-box to avoid the dreadful puff that would tell her mother of night, Miriam lay down. The extinguished light splintered in the darkness before her eyes. The room seemed suddenly hot. Her limbs ached, her nerves blazed with fatigue. She had never felt this kind of tiredness before. She lay still in the darkness with open eyes. Mrs. Henderson was breathing quietly as if in a heavy sleep. She was not asleep but she was trying to sleep. Miriam lay watching the pawnbroker’s daughter in the little room at the back of the shop, in the shop, back again in the little room, coming and going. There was a shining on her face and on her hair. Miriam watched until she fell asleep.
7
She dreamed she was in the small music-room in the old Putney school, hovering invisible. Lilla was practising alone at the piano. Sounds of the girls playing rounders came up from the garden. Lilla was sitting in her brown merino dress, her black curls shut down like a little cowl over her head and neck. Her bent profile was stern and manly, her eyes and her bare white forehead manly and unconscious. Her lissome brown
hands played steadily and vigorously. Miriam listened incredulous at the certainty with which she played out her sadness and her belief. It shocked her that Lilla should know so deeply and express her lonely knowledge so ardently. Her gold-flecked brown eyes that commonly laughed at everything, except the problem of free-will, and refused questions, had as much sorrow and certainty as she had herself. She and Lilla were one person, the same person. Deep down in everyone was sorrow and certainty. A faint resentment filled her. She turned away to go down into the garden. The scene slid into the large music-room. It was full of seated forms. Lilla was at the piano, her foot on the low pedal, her hands raised for a crashing chord. They came down, collapsing faintly on a blur of wrong notes. Miriam rejoiced in her heart. What a fiend I am ... what a fiend, she murmured, her heart hammering condemnation. Someone was sighing harshly; to be heard; in the darkness; not far off; fully conscious she glanced at the blind. It was dark. The moon was not round. It was about midnight. Her face and eyes felt thick with sleep. The air was rich with sleep. Her body was heavy with a richness of
sleep and fatigue. In a moment she could be gone again.... “Shall I get the beef-tea, mother?” ... she heard herself say in a thin wideawake voice. “Oh no my dear,” sounded another voice patiently. Rearing her numb consciousness against a delicious tide of oncoming sleep she threw off the bed-clothes and stumbled to the floor. “You can’t go on like this night after night, my dear.” “Yes I can,” said Miriam in a tremulous faint tone. The sleepless even voice reverberated again in the unbroken sleeplessness of the room. “It’s no use ... I am cumbering the ground.” The words struck sending a heat of anger and resentment through Miriam’s shivering form. She spoke sharply, groping for the matches.
8
Hurrying across the cold stone floor of the kitchen she lit the gas from her candle. Beetles ran away into corners, crackling sickeningly under the fender. A mouse darted along the dresser. She braced herself to the sight of the familiar saucepan, Miss Meldrum’s good beef-tea brown against the white enamel—helpless ... waiting for the beef-tea to get hot
she ate a biscuit. There was help somewhere. All those people sleeping quietly upstairs. If she asked them to they would be surprised and kind. They would suggest rousing her and getting her to make efforts. They would speak in rallying voices, like Dr. Ryman and Mrs. Skrine. For a day or two it would be better and then much worse and she would have to go away. Where? It would be the same everywhere. There was no one in the world who could help. There was something ... if she could leave off worrying. But that had been Pater’s advice all his life and it had not helped. It was something more than leaving off ... it was something real. It was not affection and sympathy. Eve gave them; so easily, but they were not big enough. They did not come near enough. There was something, crafty and worldly about them. They made a sort of prison. There was something true and real somewhere. Mother knew it. She had learned how useless even the good kind people were and was alone, battling to get at something. If only she could get at it and rest in it. It was there, everywhere. It was here in the kitchen, in the steam rising from the hot beef-tea. A moon-ray came through the barred window as she turned
down the gas. It was clear in the eye of the moon-ray; a real thing.
Some instinct led away from the New Testament. It seemed impossible to-night. Without consulting her listener Miriam read a psalm. Mrs. Henderson put down her cup and asked her to read it again. She read and fluttered pages quietly to tell the listener that in a moment there would be some more. Mrs. Henderson waited saying nothing. She always sighed regretfully over the gospels and Saint Paul, though she asked for them and seemed to think she ought to read them. They were so dreadful; the gospels full of social incidents and reproachfulness. They seemed to reproach everyone and to hint at a secret that no one possessed ... the epistles did nothing but nag and threaten and probe. St. Paul rhapsodised sometimes ... but in a superior way ... patronising; as if no one but himself knew anything....
“How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of those who bring” she read evenly and slowly. Mrs. Henderson sighed quietly.... “That’s Isaiah mother.... Isaiah is a beautiful name.” ... She read on. Something had shifted. There was something in the room....
If she could go droning on and on in an even tone it would be there more and more. She read on till the words flowed together and her droning voice was thick with sleep. The town clock struck two. A quiet voice from the other bed brought the reading to an end. Sleep was in the room now. She felt sure of it. She lay down leaving the candle alight and holding her eyes open. As long as the candle was alight the substance of her reading remained. When it was out there would be the challenge of silence again in the darkness ... perhaps not; perhaps it would still be there when the little hot point of light had gone. There was a soft sound somewhere ... the sea. The tide was up, washing softly. That would do. The sound of it would be clearer when the light was out ... drowsy, lazy, just moving, washing the edge of the beach ... cool, fresh. Leaning over she dabbed the candle noiselessly and sank back asleep before her head reached the pillow.
9
In the room yellow with daylight a voice was muttering rapidly, rapid words and chuckling laughter and stillness. Miriam grasped the
bedclothes and lay rigid. Something in her fled out and away, refusing. But from end to end of the world there was no help against this. It was a truth; triumphing over everything. “I know,” said a high clear voice. “I know ... I don’t deceive myself” ... rapid low muttering and laughter.... It was a conversation. Somewhere within it was the answer. Nowhere else in the world. Forcing herself to be still she accepted the sounds, pitting herself against the sense of destruction. The sound of violent lurching brought her panic. There was something there that would strike. Hardly knowing what she did she pretended to wake with a long loud yawn. Her body shivered, bathed in perspiration. “What a lovely morning” she said dreamily, “what a perfect morning.” Not daring to sit up she reached for her watch. Five o’clock. Three more hours before the day began. The other bed was still. “It’s going to be a magnificent day” she murmured pretending to stretch and yawn again. A sigh reached her. The stillness went on and she lay for an hour tense and listening. Something must be done to-day. Someone else must know.... At the end of an hour a descending darkness took her
suddenly. She woke from it to the sound of violent language, furniture being roughly moved, a swift angry splashing of water ... something breaking out, breaking through the confinements of this little furniture-filled room ... the best gentlest thing she knew in the world openly despairing at last.
10
The old hom?opathist at the other end of the town talked quietly on ... the afternoon light shone on his long white hair ... the principle of health, God-given health, governing life. To be well one must trust in it absolutely. One must practise trusting in God every day.... The patient grew calm, quietly listening and accepting everything he said, agreeing again and again. Miriam sat wondering impatiently why they could not stay. Here in this quiet place with this quiet old man, the only place in the world where anyone had seemed partly to understand, mother might get better. He could help. He knew what the world was like and that nobody understood. He must know that he ought to keep her. But he did not seem to want to do anything but advise them and send them away. She hated him, his serene white-haired pink-faced old age. He
told them he was seventy-nine and had never taken a dose in his life. Leaving his patient to sip a glass of water into which he had measured drops of tincture he took Miriam to look at the greenhouse behind his consulting room. As soon as they were alone he told her speaking quickly and without benevolence and in the voice of a younger man that she must summon help, a trained attendant. There ought to be someone for night and day. He seemed to know exactly the way in which she had been taxed and spoke of her youth. It is very wrong for you to be alone with her he added gravely.
Vaguely, burning with shame at the confession she explained that it could not be afforded. He listened attentively and repeated that it was absolutely necessary. She felt angrily for words to explain the uselessness of attendants. She was sure he must know this and wanted to demand that he should help, then and there at once, with his quiet house and his knowledge. Her eye covered him. He was only a pious old man with artificial teeth making him speak with a sort of sibilant woolliness. Perhaps he too knew that in the end even this would fail. He made her promise to write for help and refused
a fee. She hesitated helplessly, feeling the burden settle. He indicated that he had said his say and they went back.
On the way home they talked of the old man. “He is right; but it is too late” said Mrs. Henderson with clear quiet bitterness, “God has deserted me.” They walked on, tiny figures in a world of huge grey-stone houses. “He will not let me sleep. He does not want me to sleep.... He does not care.”
A thought touched Miriam, touched and flashed. She grasped at it to hold and speak it, but it passed off into the world of grey houses. Her cheeks felt hollow, her feet heavy. She summoned her strength, but her body seemed outside her, empty, pacing forward in a world full of perfect unanswering silence.
11
The bony old woman held Miriam clasped closely in her arms. “You must never, as long as you live, blame yourself my gurl.” She went away. Miriam had not heard her come in. The pressure of her arms and her huge body came from far away. Miriam clasped her hands together. She could not feel them. Perhaps
she had dreamed that the old woman had come in and said that. Everything was dream; the world. I shall not have any life. I can never have any life; all my days. There were cold tears running into her mouth. They had no salt. Cold water. They stopped. Moving her body with slow difficulty against the unsupporting air she looked slowly about. It was so difficult to move. Everything was airy and transparent. Her heavy hot light impalpable body was the only solid thing in the world, weighing tons; and like a lifeless feather. There was a tray of plates of fish and fruit on the table. She looked at it, heaving with sickness and looking at it. I am hungry. Sitting down near it she tried to pull the tray. It would not move. I must eat the food. Go on eating food, till the end of my life. Plates of food like these plates of food.... I am in eternity ... where their worm dieth not and their fire is not quenched.
The End