CHAPTER IX

But the next evening when Mr. Corrie came down for the week-end with a party of guests, Mrs. Corrie appeared with swift suddenness in Miriam’s room and glanced at her morning dress.

“I say, missy, you’ll have to hurry up.”

“Oh, I didn’t dress ... the house is full of strangers.”

“No, it isn’t; there’s Mélie and Tom ... Tommy and Mélie.”

“Yes, but I know there are crowds.”

She did not want to meet the Cravens again, and the strangers would turn out to be some sort of people saying certain sorts of things over and over again, and if she went down she would not be able to get away as soon as she knew all about them. She would be fixed; obliged to listen. When anyone spoke to her, grimacing as the patronised governess or saying what she thought and being hated for it.

“Crowds,” she repeated, as Mrs. Corrie placed a large lump in the centre of the blaze.

They had her here, in this beautiful room and looked after her comfort as if she were a guest.

“Nonsensy-nonsense. You must come down and see the fun.” Miriam glanced at her empty table. In the drawer hidden underneath the table-cover were her block and paints. Presently she could, if she held firm, be alone, in a grey space inside this alien room, cold and lonely and with the beginning of something ... dark painful beginning of something that could not come if people were there.... Downstairs, warmth and revelry.

“You must come down and see the fun,” said Mrs. Corrie, getting up from the fire and trailing across the room with bent head. “A nun—a nun in amber satin,” thought Miriam, surveying her back.

“Want you to come down,” said Mrs. Corrie plaintively from the door. Cold air came in from the landing; the warmth of the room stirred to a strange vitality, the light glowed clearer within its ruby globe. The silvery clatter of entrée dishes came up from the hall.

“All right,” said Miriam, turning exultantly to the chest of drawers.

“A victory over myself or some sort of treachery?” ... The long drawer which held her evening things seemed full of wonders. She dragged out a little home-made smocked blouse of pale blue nun’s veiling that had seemed too dowdy for Newlands and put it on over her morning skirt. It shone upon her. Rapidly washing her hands, away from the glamour of the looking-glass, she mentally took stock of her hair, untouched since the morning, the amateur blouse, its crude clear blue hard against the harsh black skirt. Back again at the dressing-table as she dried her hands she found the miracle renewed. The figure that confronted her in the mirror was wrapped in some strange harmonising radiance. She looked at it for a moment as she would have looked at an unknown picture, in tranquil disinterested contemplation. The sound of the gong came softly into the room, bringing her no apprehensive contraction of nerves. She wove its lingering note into the imagined tinkling of an old melody from a wooden musical box. Opening the door before turning out her gas she found a small bunch of hothouse lilies of
the valley lying on the writing-table.... Mrs. Corrie—“you must come.”
2

Tucking them into her belt she went slowly downstairs, confused by a picture coming between her and her surroundings like a filmy lantern slide, of Portland Bill lying on a smooth sea in a clear afterglow....

“Quite a madonna,” said Mrs. Staple-Craven querulously. She sat low in her chair, her round gold head on its short stalk standing firmly up from billowy frills of green silk ... “a fat water-lily,” mused Miriam, and went wandering through the great steamy glass-houses at Kew, while the names that had been murmured during the introductions echoed irrelevantly in her brain.

“She must wear her host’s colours sometimes,” said Mr. Corrie quickly and gently.

Miriam glanced her surprise and smiled shyly in response to his shy smile. It was as if the faint radiance that she felt all round her had been outlined by a flashing blade. Mrs. Craven might go on resenting it; she could not touch it again. It steadied and concentrated; flowing from some inexhaustible
inner centre, it did not get beyond the circle outlined by the flashing blade, but flowed back on her and out again and back until it seemed as if it must lift her to her feet. Her eyes caught the clear brow and smooth innocently sleeked dark hair of a man at the other end of the table—under the fine level brows was a loudly talking, busily eating face—all the noise of the world, and the brooding grieving unconscious brow above it. Everyone was talking. She glanced. The women showed no foreheads; but their faces were not noisy; they were like the brows of the men, except Mrs. Craven’s. Her silent face was mouthing and complaining aloud all the time.
3

“Old Felix has secured himself the best partner,” Miriam heard someone mutter as she made her fluke, a resounding little cannon and pocket in one stroke. Wandering after her ball she fought against the suggesting voice. It had come from one of the men moving about in the gloom surrounding the radiance cast by the green-shaded lamps upon the long green table. Faces moving in the upper darkness were indistinguishable.
The white patch of Mrs. Corrie’s face gleamed from the settee as she sat bent forward with her hands clasped in front of her knees. Beyond her, sitting back under the shadow of the mantelpiece and the marking board was Mrs. Craven, a faint mass of soft green and mealy white. All the other forms were standing or moving in the gloom; standing watchful and silent, the gleaming stems of their cues held in rest, shifting and moving and strolling with uncolliding ordered movements and little murmurs of commentary after the little drama—the sudden snap of the stroke breaking the stillness, the faint thundering roll of the single ball, the click of the concussion, the gentle angular explosion of pieces into a new relation and the breaking of the varying triangle as a ball rolled to its hidden destination held by all the eyes in the room until its rumbling pilgrimage ended out of sight in a soft thud. It was pure joy to Miriam to wander round the table after her ball, sheltered in the gloom, through an endless “grand chain” of undifferentiated figures that passed and repassed without awkwardness or the need for forced exchange; held together and separated by the ceremony of the game. Comments came
after each stroke, words and sentences sped and smoothed and polished by the gloom like the easy talking of friends in a deep twilight; but between each stroke were vast intervals of untroubled silent intercourse. The competition of the men, the sense of the desire to win, that rose and strained in the room could not spoil this communion. After a stroke, pondering the balls while the room and the radiance and the darkness moved and flowed and the dim figures settled to a fresh miracle of grouping, it was joy to lean along the board to her ball, keeping punctual appointment with her partner whose jaunty little figure would appear in supporting opposition under the bright light, drawing at his cigarette with a puckering half-smile, awaiting her suggestion and ready with counsel. Doing her best to measure angles and regulate the force of her blow she struck careless little lifting strokes that made her feel as if she danced, and managed three more cannons and a pocket before her little break came to an end.
4

“It must be jolly to smoke in the in-between times,” said Miriam, standing about at a loss during a long break by one of her opponents.

“Yes, you ought to learn to smoke,” responded Mr. Corrie judicially. The quiet smile—the serene offer of companionship, the whole room troubled with the sense of the two parties, the men with whom she was linked in the joyous forward going strife of the game and the women on the sofa, suddenly grown monstrous in their opposition of clothes and kindliness and the fuss of distracting personal insincerities of voice and speech attempting to judge and condemn the roomful of quiet players, shouting aloud to her that she was a fool to be drawn in to talking to men seriously on their own level, a fool to parade about as if she really enjoyed their silly game. “I hate women and they’ve got to know it,” she retorted with all her strength, hitting blindly out towards the sofa, feeling all the contrivances of toilet and coiffure fall in meaningless horrible detail under her blows.

“I do smoke,” she said, leaving her partner’s side and going boldly to the sofa corner. “Ragbags, bundles of pretence,” she thought, as she confronted the women. They glanced up with cunning eyes. They looked small and cringing. She rushed on, sweeping them aside.... Who
had made them so small and cheated, and for all their smiles so angry? What was it they wanted? What was it women wanted that always made them so angry?

“Would you mind if I smoked?” she asked in a clear gay tone, cutting herself from Mrs. Corrie with a wrench as she faced her glittering frightened eyes.

“Of course not, my dear lady—I don’t mind, if you don’t,” she said, tweaking affectionately at Miriam’s skirt. “Ain’t she a gay dog, Mélie, ain’t she a gay dog!”
5

“It’s a pleasure to see you smoke,” murmured Mr. Corrie fervently, “you’re the first woman I’ve seen smoke con amore.”

Contemplating the little screwed-up appreciative smile on the features of her partner, bunched to the lighting of his own cigarette, Miriam discharged a double stream of smoke violently through her nostrils—breaking out at last a public defiance of the freemasonry of women. “I suppose I’m a new woman—I’ve said I am now, anyhow,” she reflected, wondering in the background of her determination how she would
reconcile the r?le with her work as a children’s governess. “I’m not in their crowd, anyhow; I despise their silly secret,” she pursued, feeling out ahead towards some lonely solution of her difficulty that seemed to come shapelessly towards her, but surely—the happy weariness of conquest gave her a sense of some unknown strength in her.

For the rest of the evening the group in the sofa-corner presented her a frontage of fawning and flattery.
6

Coming down with the children to lunch the next day, Miriam found the room dark and chill in the bright midday. It was as if it were empty. But if it had been empty it would have been beautiful in the still light and tranquil. There was a dark cruel tide in the room, she sought in vain for a foothold. A loud busy voice was talking from Mr. Corrie’s place at the head of the table. Mr. Staple-Craven, busy with cold words to hide the truth. He paused as the nursery trio came in and settled at the table and then shouted softly and suddenly at Mrs. Corrie, “What’s Corrie having?”

“Biscuits,” chirped Mrs. Corrie eagerly, “biscuits
and sally in the study.” She sat forward, gathering herself to disperse the gloom. But Mrs. Craven’s deep voice drowned her unspoken gaieties ... ah—he’s not gone away, thought Miriam rapidly, he’s in the house....

“Best thing for biliousness,” gonged Mrs. Craven, and Mr. Craven busily resumed.

“It’s only the fisherman who knows anything, anything whatever about the silver stream. Necessarily. Necessarily. It is the—the concentration, the—the absorption of the passion that enables him to see. Er, the fisherman, the poet-tantamount; exchangeable terms. Fishing is, indeed one might say——”

The men of the party were devouring their food with the air of people just about to separate to fulfil urgent engagements. They bent and gobbled busily and cast smouldering glances about the table, as if with their eyes they would suggest important mysteries brooding above their animated muzzles.

Miriam’s stricken eyes sought their foreheads for relief. Smooth brows and neatly brushed hair above; but the smooth motionless brows were ramparts of hate; pure murderous hate. That’s men, she said, with a sudden flash of certainty,
that’s men as they are, when they are opposed, when they are real. All the rest is pretence. Her thoughts flashed forward to a final clear issue of opposition, with a husband. Just a cold blank hating forehead and neatly brushed hair above it. If a man doesn’t understand or doesn’t agree he’s just a blank bony conceitedly thinking, absolutely condemning forehead, a face below, going on eating—and going off somewhere. Men are all hard angry bones; always thinking something, only one thing at a time and unless that is agreed to, they murder. My husband shan’t kill me.... I’ll shatter his conceited brow—make him see ... two sides to every question ... a million sides ... no questions, only sides ... always changing. Men argue, think they prove things; their foreheads recover—cool and calm. Damn them all—all men.
7

“Fee ought to be out here,” said Mrs. Corrie, moving her basket chair to face away from the sun.

The garden blazed in the fresh warm air. But there was no happiness in it. Everything was lost and astray. The house-party had dispersed
and disappeared. Mrs. Corrie sat and strolled about the garden, joyless, as if weighed down by some immovable oppression. If Mr. Corrie were to come out, and sit there too it would be worse. It was curious to think that the garden was his at all. He would come feebly out, looking ill and they would all sit, uneasy and afraid. But Mrs. Corrie wanted him to come out, knew he ought to be there. It was she who had thought of it. It was intolerable to think of his coming. Yet he had been “crazy mad” about her for five years. Five years and then this. Whose fault was it? His or hers? Or was marriage always like that? Perhaps that was why she and Mrs. Craven had laughed when they were asked whether marriage was a failure. Mrs. Craven had no children. Nothing to think about but stars and spirits and her food and baths and little silk dresses and Mr. Craven treated her as if she were a child he had got tired of petting. She did not even go fishing with him. She was lying down in her room and tea would be taken up to her. At least she thought of herself and seemed to enjoy life. But she was getting fatter and fatter. Mrs. Corrie did not want anything for herself, except for the fun of getting things. She cared
only for the children and when they grew up they would have nothing to talk to her about. Sybil would have thoughts behind her ugly strong face. She would tell them to no one. The boy would adore her, until his wife whom he would adore came between them. So there was nothing for women in marriage and children. Because they had no thoughts. Their husbands grew to hate them because they had no thoughts. But if a woman had thoughts a man would not be “silly” about her for five years. And Mrs. Corrie had her garden. She would always have that, when he was not there.

“If you were to go and ask him,” said Mrs. Corrie, brushing out her dress with her hands, “he’d come out.”

“Me!” said Miriam in amazement.

“Yes, go on, my dear, you see; he’ll come.”

“But perhaps he doesn’t want to,” said Miriam, suddenly feeling that she was playing a familiar part in a novel and wanting to feel quite sure she was reading her r?le aright.

“You go and try,” laughed Mrs. Corrie gently. “Make him come out.”

“I’ll tell him you wish him to come,” said
Miriam gravely, getting to her feet. “All right,” she thought, “if I have more influence over him than you it’s not my fault, not anybody’s fault, but how horrid you must feel.”
8

Miriam’s trembling fingers gave a frightened fumbling tap at the study door. “Come in,” said Mr. Corrie officially, and coughed a loose, wheezy cough. He was sitting by the fire in one of the huge armchairs and didn’t look up as she entered. She stood with the door half closed behind her, fighting against her fear and the cold heavy impression of his dull grey dressing-gown and the grey rug over his knees.

“It’s so lovely in the garden,” she said, fervently fixing her eyes on the small white face, a little puffy under its grizzled hair. He looked stiffly in her direction.

“The sun is so warm,” she went on hurriedly. “Mrs. Corrie thought——” she stopped. Of course the man was too ill to be worried. For, an eternity she stood, waiting. Mr. Corrie coughed his little cough and turned again to the fire. If only she could sit down in the other chair, saying nothing and just be there. He looked so
unspeakably desolate. He hated being there, not able to play or work.

“I hate being ill,” she said at last, “it always seems such waste of time.” She knew she had borrowed that from someone and that it would only increase the man’s impatience. “I always have to act and play parts,” she thought angrily—and called impatiently to her everyday vision of him to dispel the obstructive figure in the armchair.

“Umph,” said Mr. Corrie judicially.

“You could have a chair,” she ventured, “and just sit quietly.”

“No thanks, I’m not coming out.” He turned a kind face in her direction without meeting her eyes.

“You have such a nice room,” said Miriam vaguely, getting to the door.

“Do you like it?” It was his everyday voice, and Miriam stopped at the door without turning.

“It’s so absolutely your own,” she said.

Mr. Corrie laughed. “That’s a strange definition of charm.”

“I didn’t say charming. I said your own.”

Mr. Corrie laughed out. “Because it’s mine it’s nice, but it is, for the same reason, not charming.”

“You’re tying me up into something I haven’t said. There’s a fallacy in what you have just said, somewhere.”

“You’ll never be tied up in anything, mademoiselle—you’ll tie other people up. But there was no fallacy.”

“No verbal fallacy,” said Miriam eagerly, “a fallacy of intention, deliberate misreading.”

“No wonder you think the sun would do me good.”

“How do you mean?”

“I’m such a miscreant.”

“Oh no, you’re not,” said Miriam comfortingly, turning round. “I don’t want you to come out”—she advanced boldly and stirred the fire. “I always like to be alone when I’m ill.”

“That’s better,” said Mr. Corrie.

“Good-bye,” breathed Miriam, getting rapidly to the door ... poor wretched man ... wanting quiet kindness.

“Thank you; good-bye,” said Mr. Corrie gently.
9

“Then you’d say, Corrie,” said Mr. Staple-Craven, as they all sat down to dinner on Sunday, evening ... now comes flattery, thought
Miriam calmly—nothing mattered, the curtains were back, the light not yet gone from the garden and birds were fluting and chirruping out there on the lawn where she had played tennis all the afternoon—at home there was the same light in the little garden and Sarah and Harriett were there in happiness, she would see them soon and meantime, the wonder, the fresh rosebuds, this year’s, under the clear soft lamplight.

“You’d say that no one was to blame for the accident.”

“The cause of the accident was undoubtedly the signalman’s sudden attack of illness.”

Pause. “It sounds,” thought Miriam, “as if he were reading from the Book of Judgment. It isn’t true either. Perhaps a judgment can never be true.” She pondered to the singing of her blood.

“In other words,” said one of the younger men, in a narrow nasal sneering clever voice, “it was a purely accidental accident.”

“Purely,” gurgled Mr. Corrie, in a low, pleased tone.

“They think they’re really beginning,” mused Miriam, rousing herself.

“A genuine accident within the meaning of the act,” blared Mr. Craven.

“An actident,” murmured Mr. Corrie.

“In that case,” said another man, “I mean since the man was discovered ill, not drunk, by a doctor in his box, all the elaborate legal proceedings would appear to be rather—superfluous.”

“Not at all, not at all,” said Mr. Corrie testily.

Miriam listened gladly to the anger in his voice, watching the faint movement of the window curtains and waiting for the justification of the law.

“The thing must be subject to a detailed inquiry before the man can be cleared.”

“He might have felt ill before he took up his duties—you’d hardly get him to admit that.”

“Lawyers can get people to admit anything,” said Mr. Craven cheerfully, and broke the silence that followed his sally by a hooting monotonous recitative which he delivered, swaying right and left from his hips, “that is to say—they by beneficently pursuing unexpected—quite unexpected bypaths—suddenly confront—their—their examinees—with the truth—the Truth.”

“It’s quite a good point to suggest that the
chap felt ill earlier in the day—that’s one of the things you’d have to find out. You’d have, at any rate, to know all the circumstances of the seizure.”

“Indigestible food,” said Miriam, “or badly cooked food.”

“Ah,” said Mr. Corrie, his face clearing, “that’s an excellent refinement.”

“In that case the cause of the accident would be the cook.”

Mr. Corrie laughed delightedly.

“I don’t say that because I’m interested, but because I wanted to take sides with him,” thought Miriam, “the others know that and resent it and now I’m interested.”

“Perhaps,” she said, feeling anxiously about the incriminated cook, “the real cause then would be a fault in her upbringing, I mean he may have lately married a young woman whose mother had not taught her cooking.”

“Oh, you can’t go back further than the cook,” said Mr. Corrie finally.

“But the cause,” she persisted, in a low, anxious voice, “is the sum total of all the circumstances.”

“No, no,” said Mr. Corrie impenetrably, with
a hard face—“you can’t take the thing back into the mists of the past.”

He dropped her and took up a lead coming from a man at the other end of the table.

“Oh,” thought Miriam coldly, appraising him with a glance, the slightly hollow temples, the small skull, a little flattened, the lack of height in the straight forehead, why had she not noticed that before?—the general stinginess of the head balancing the soft keen eyes and whimsical mouth—“that’s you; you won’t, you can’t look at anything from the point of view of life as a whole”—she shivered and drew away from the whole spectacle and pageant of Newlands’ life. It all had this behind it, a man, able to do and decide things who looked about like a ferret for small clever things, causes, immediate near causes that appeared to explain, and explained nothing and had nothing to do with anything. Her hot brain whirled back—signalmen, in bad little houses with bad cooking—tinned foods—they’re a link—they bring all sorts of things into their signal boxes. They ought to bring the fewest possible dangerous things. Something ought to be done.

Lawyers were quite happy, pleased with themselves
if they made some one person guilty—put their finger on him. “Can’t go back into the mists of the past ... you didn’t understand, you’re not capable of understanding any real movements of thought. I always knew it. You think—in propositions. Can’t go back. Of course you can go back, and round and up and everywhere. Things as a whole ... you understand nothing. We’ve done. That’s you. Mr. Corrie—a leading Q.C. Heavens.”

In that moment Miriam felt that she left Newlands for ever. She glanced at Mrs. Corrie and Mrs. Craven—bright beautiful coloured birds, fading slowly year by year in the stifling atmosphere, the hard brutal laughing complacent atmosphere of men’s minds ... men’s minds, staring at things, ignorantly, knowing “everything” in an irritating way and yet ignorant.