THE TUNNEL

VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES

POINTED ROOFS
BACKWATER
HONEYCOMB
THE TUNNEL
In preparation
INTERIM

THE TUNNEL

BY
DOROTHY M. RICHARDSON
AUTHOR OF “POINTED ROOFS,” ETC.

LONDON
DUCKWORTH & CO.
3 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN

First Published February, 1919
Second Impression March, 1919

All rights reserved

TO
M. K.

THE TUNNEL

CHAPTER I

1

Miriam paused with her heavy bag dragging at her arm. It was a disaster. But it was the last of Mornington Road. To explain about it would be to bring Mornington Road here.

“It doesn’t matter now” said Mrs. Bailey as she dropped her bag and fumbled for her purse.

“Oh, I’d better settle it at once or I shall forget about it. I’m so glad the things have come so soon.”

When Mrs. Bailey had taken the half-crown they stood smiling at each other. Mrs. Bailey looked exactly as she had done the first time. It was exactly the same; there was no disappointment. The light coming through the glass above the front door made her look more shabby and worn. Her hair was more metallic. But it was the same girlish figure and the same smile triumphing over the badly fitting teeth. Miriam felt like an inmate returning after an absence. The smeariness of the marble-topped hall table did not offend her. She held herself in. It was better to begin as she meant to go on. Behind Mrs. Bailey the staircase was beckoning. There was something waiting upstairs that would be gone if she stayed talking to Mrs. Bailey.

Assuring Mrs. Bailey that she remembered the way to the room she started at last on the journey up the many flights of stairs. The feeling of confidence that had come the first time she mounted them with Mrs. Bailey returned now. She could not remember noticing anything then but a large brown dinginess, one rich warm even tone everywhere in the house; a sharp contrast to the cold harshly lit little bedroom in Mornington Road. The day was cold. But this house did not seem cold and when she rounded the first flight and Mrs. Bailey was out of sight the welcome of the place fell upon her. She knew it well, better than any place she had known in all her wanderings—the faded umbers and browns of the stair carpet, the gloomy heights of wall, a patternless sheen where the staircase lights fell upon it and in the shadowed parts a blurred scrolling pattern in dull madder on a brown background; the dark landings with lofty ceilings and high dark polished doors surmounted by classical reliefs in grimed plaster, the high staircase windows screened by long smoke grimed lace curtains. On the top landing the ceiling came down nearly level with the tops of the doors. The light from above made the little grained doors stare brightly. Patches of fresh brown and buff shone here and there in the threadbare linoleum. The cracks of the flooring were filled with dust and dust lay along the rim of the skirting. Two large tin trunks standing one upon the other almost barred the passage way. It was like a landing in a small suburban lodging-house, a small silent afternoon brightness, shut in and smelling of dust. Silence flooded up from the lower darkness. The hall where she had stood with Mrs. Bailey was far away below and below that were basements deep in the earth. The outside of the house with its first-floor balcony, the broad shallow flight of steps leading to the dark green front door, the little steep flight running sharply down into the railed area seemed as far away as yesterday.

The little landing was a bright plateau, under the skylight, shut off by its brightness from the rest of the house, the rooms leading from it would be bright and flat and noisy with light compared with the rest of the house. From above came the tap-tap of a door swinging gently in a breeze and behind the sound was a soft faint continuous murmur. She ran up the short twisting flight of bare stairs into a blaze of light. Would her room be a bright suburban bedroom? Had it been a dull day when she first called? The skylight was blue and gold with light, its cracks threads of bright gold. Three little glaring yellow grained doors opened on to the small strip of uncovered dusty flooring; to the left the little box-loft, to the right the empty garret behind her own and in front of her her own door ajar; tapping in the breeze. The little brass knob rattled loosely in her hand and the hinge ran up the scale to a high squeak as she pushed open the door and down again as it closed behind her neatly with a light wooden sound. The room was half dark shadow and half brilliant light.

2

She closed the door and stood just inside it looking at the room. It was smaller than her memory of it. When she had stood in the middle of the floor with Mrs. Bailey she had looked at nothing but Mrs. Bailey, waiting for the moment to ask about the rent. Coming upstairs she had felt the room was hers and barely glanced at it when Mrs. Bailey opened the door. From the moment of waiting on the stone steps outside the front door everything had opened to the movement of her impulse. She was surprised now at her familiarity with the detail of the room ... that idea of visiting places in dreams. It was something more than that ... all the real part of your life has a real dream in it; some of the real dream part of you coming true. You know in advance when you are really following your life. These things are familiar because reality is here. Coming events cast light. It is like dropping everything and walking backwards to something you know is there. However far you go out you come back.... I am back now where I was before I began trying to do things like other people. I left home to get here. None of those things can touch me here. They are mine....

... The room asserted its chilliness. But the dark yellow graining of the wall-paper was warm. It shone warmly in the stream of light pouring through the barred lattice window. In the further part of the room darkened by the steep slope of the roof it gleamed like stained wood. The window space was a little square wooden room, the long low double lattice breaking the roof, the ceiling and walls warmly reflecting its oblong of bright light. Close against the window was a firm little deal table covered with a thin brightly coloured printed cotton tablecloth. When Miriam drew her eyes from its confusion of rich fresh tones the bedroom seemed very dark. The bed drawn in under the slope showed an expanse of greyish white counterpane, the carpet was colourless in the gloom. She opened the door. Silence came in from the landing. The blue and gold had gone from the skylight. Its sharp grey light shone in over the dim colours of the threadbare carpet and on to the black bars of the little grate and the little strip of tarnished yellow grained mantelpiece, running along to the bedhead where a small globeless gas bracket stuck out at an angle over the head of the bed. The sight of her luggage piled up on the other side of the fireplace drew her forward into the dimness. There was a small chest of drawers battered and almost paintless but with two long drawers and two small ones and a white cover on which stood a little looking glass framed in polished pine ... and a small yellow wardrobe with a deep drawer under the hanging part and a little drawer in the rickety little washstand and another above the dusty cupboard of the little mahogany sideboard. I’ll paint the bright part of the ceiling; scrolls of leaves.... Shutting the quiet door she went into the brilliance of the window space. The outside world appeared; a long row of dormer windows and the square tops of the larger windows below them, the windows black or sheeny grey in the light, cut out against the dinginess of smoke grimed walls. The long strip of roof sloping back from the dormers was a pure even dark grey. She bent to see the sky, clear soft heavy grey, striped by the bars of her window. Behind the top rim of the iron framework of the bars was a discoloured roll of window blind. Then the bars must move.... Shifting the table she pressed close to the barred window. It smelt strongly of rust and dust. Outside she saw grey tiles sloping steeply from the window to a cemented gutter beyond which was a little stone parapet about two feet high. A soft wash of madder lay along the grey tiles. There must be an afterglow somewhere, just out of sight. Her hands went through the bars and lifted the little rod which held the lattice half open. The little square four paned frame swung free and flattened itself back against the fixed panes, out of reach, its bar sticking out over the leads. Drawing back grimed fingers and wrists striped with grime she grasped the iron bars and pulled. The heavy framework left the window frame with a rusty creak and the sound of paint peeling and cracking. It was very heavy but it came up and up until her arms were straight above her head and looking up she saw a stout iron ring in a little trap door in the wooden ceiling and a hook in the centre of the endmost bar in the iron framework.

Kneeling on the table to raise the frame once more and fix it to the ceiling she saw the whole length of the top row of windows across the way and wide strips of grimy stucco placed across the house fronts between the windows.

The framework of the freed window was cracked and blistered but the little square panes were clean. There were four little windows in the row, each with four square panes. The outmost windows were immovable. The one next to the open one had lost its bar, but a push set it free and it swung wide. She leaned out holding back from the dusty sill and met a soft fresh breeze streaming straight in from the west. The distant murmur of traffic changed into the clear plonk plonk and rumble of swift vehicles. Right and left at the far end of the vista were glimpses of bare trees. The cheeping of birds came faintly from the distant squares and clear and sharp from neighbouring roofs. To the left the trees were black against pure grey, to the right they stood spread and bunched in front of the distant buildings blocking the vista. Running across the rose-washed façade of the central mass she could just make out “Edwards’s Family Hotel” in large black letters. That was the distant view of the courtyard of Euston Station.... In between that and the square of trees ran the Euston Road, by day and by night, her unsleeping guardian, the rim of the world beyond which lay the northern suburbs, banished.

From a window somewhere down the street out of sight came the sound of an unaccompanied violin, clearly attacking and dropping and attacking a passage of half a dozen bars. The music stood serene and undisturbed in the air of the quiet street. The man was following the phrase, listening; strengthening and clearing it, completely undisturbed and unconscious of his surroundings. ‘Good heavens’ she breathed quietly, feeling the extremity of relief, passing some boundary, emerging strong and equipped in a clear medium.... She turned back into the twilight of the room. Twenty-one and only one room to hold the richly renewed consciousness, and a living to earn, but the self that was with her in the room was the untouched tireless self of her seventeenth year and all the earlier time. The familiar light moved within the twilight, the old light.... She might as well wash the grime from her wrists and hands. There was a scrap of soap in the soap dish, dry and cracked and seamed with dirt. The washstand rocked as she washed her hands; the toilet things did not match, the towel-horse held one small thin face towel and fell sideways against the wardrobe as she drew off the towel. When the gas was on she would be visible from the opposite dormer window. Short skimpy faded Madras muslin curtains screened a few inches of the endmost windows and were caught back and tied up with tape. She untied the tape and disengaged with the curtains a strong smell of dust. The curtains would cut off some of the light. She tied them firmly back and pulled at the edge of the rolled up blind. The blind streaked and mottled with ironmould came down in a stifling cloud of dust. She rolled it up again and washed once more. She must ask for a bath towel and do something about the blind, sponge it or something; that was all.

3

A light had come in the dormer on the other side of the street. It remained unscreened. Watching carefully she could see only a dim figure moving amongst motionless shapes. No need to trouble about the blind. London could come freely in day and night through the unscreened happy little panes; light and darkness and darkness and light.

London, just outside all the time, coming in with the light, coming in with the darkness, always present in the depths of the air in the room.

4

The gas flared out into a wide bright flame. The dingy ceiling and counterpane turned white. The room was a square of bright light and had a rich brown glow, shut brightly in by the straight square of level white ceiling and thrown up by the oblong that sloped down, white, at the side of the big bed almost to the floor. She left her things half unpacked about the floor and settled herself on the bed under the gas jet with the Voyage of the Beagle. Unpacking had been a distraction from the glory, very nice, getting things straight. But there was no need to do anything or think about anything ... ever, here. No interruption, no one watching or speculating or treating one in some particular way that had to be met. Mrs. Bailey did not speculate. She knew, everything. Every evening here would have a glory, but not the same kind of glory. Reading would be more of a distraction than unpacking. She read a few lines. They had a fresh attractive meaning. Reading would be real. The dull adventures of the Beagle looked real, coming along through reality. She put the book on her knee and once more met the clear brown shock of her room.

5

The carpet is awful, faded and worn almost to bits. But it is right, in this room.... This is the furnished room; one room. I have come to it. “You could get a furnished room at about seven shillings rental.” The awful feeling, no tennis, no dancing, no house to move in, no society. The relief at first when Bennett found those people ... maddening endless roads of little houses in the east wind ... their kind way of giving more than they had undertaken, and smiling and waiting for smiles and dying all the time in some dark way without knowing it. Filling the rooms and the piano and the fern on the serge table cloth and the broken soap dish in the bath room until it was impossible to read or think or play because of them, the feeling of them stronger and stronger till there was nothing but crying over the trays of meals and wanting to scream. The thought of the five turnings to the station, all into long little roads looking alike and making you forget which was which and lose your way, was still full of pain ... the relief of moving to Granville Place still a relief, though it felt a mistake from the first. Mrs. Corrie’s old teacher liking only certain sorts of people knew it was a mistake, with her peevish silky old face and her antique brooch. But it had been the beginning of London.... Bond Street that Sunday morning in the thick fog; these sudden pictures gleaming in a window, filmy ... von Hier. Adelina Compayne, hanging out silk stockings on the top balustrade. “I love cawfy” ... that was the only real thing that had been said downstairs. There was no need to have been frightened of these two women in black silk evening dresses. None of these clever things were real. They said young Asquith is a really able man to hide their thoughts. The American Academy pupils talked together to keep everybody off, except when they made their clever jokes ... “if anyone takes that top bit there’ll be murder Miss Spink.” When they went out of the room they looked silly. The young man was real somewhere else.

The little man talking about the wonders of the linotype in the smoking room.... How did I get into the smoking room? Someone probably told Miss Spink I talked to him in the smoking room and smoked a cigarette. Perhaps his wife. If they could have seen. It was so surprising to hear anybody suddenly talking. Perhaps he began in the hall and ushered me into the smoking room. There was no one there and I can’t remember anything about the linotype, only the quiet and the talking face and suddenly feeling in the heart of London. But it was soon after that they all began being stand-offish; before Mr. Chamberlayne came; before Adela began playing Esther Summerson at the Kennington. They approved of my going down to fetch her until he began coming too. The shock of seeing her clumsy heavy movements on the stage and her face looking as though it were covered with starch.... I can think about it all, here, and not mind.

6

She was beautiful. It was happiness to sit and watch her smoking so badly, in bed, in the strip of room, her cloud of hair against the wall in the candlelight, two o’clock ... the Jesuit who had taught her chess ... and Michael Somebody, the little book “The Purple Pillar.” He was an author and he wanted to marry her and take her back to Ireland. Perhaps by now she was back from America and had gone, just out of kindness. She was strong and beautiful and good, sitting up in her chemise, smoking.... I’ve got that photograph of her as Marcia somewhere. I must put it up. Miss Spink was surprised that last week, the students getting me into their room ... the dark clean shining piano, the azaleas and the muslin shaded lamp, the way they all sat in their evening dresses, lounging and stiff with stiff clean polished hair.... “Miss Dust here’s going to be the highest soprano in the States.” ... “None of that Miss Thicker.” ... “When she caught that top note and the gold medal she went right up top, to stay there, that minute.”

She was surprised when Mrs. Potter took me to hear Melba. I heard Melba. I don’t remember hearing her. English opera houses are small; there are fine things all over the world. If you see them all you can compare one with the other; but then you don’t see or hear anything at all. It seems strange to be American and at the same time stout and middle-aged. It would have got more and more difficult with all those people. The dreadful way the Americans got intimate and then talked or hinted openly everywhere about intimate things. No one knew how intimate Miss O’Veagh was. I shall remember. There is something about being Irish Roman Catholic that makes happiness. She did not seem to think the George Street room awful. She was surprised when I talked about the hole in the wall and the cold and the imbecile servant and the smell of ether. “We are brought up from the first to understand that we must never believe anything a man says.” She came and sat and talked and wrote after she had gone ... “goodbye—sweet blessed little rose of Mary” ... she tried to make me think I was young and pretty. She was sorry for me without saying so.

I should never have gone to Mornington Road unless I had been nearly mad with sorrow ... if Miss Thomas disapproved of germs and persons who let apartments why did she come and take a room at George Street? She must have seen she drove me nearly mad with sorrow. The thought of Wales full of Welsh people like her, makes one mad with sorrow.... Did she think I could get to know her by hearing all her complaints? She’s somewhere now, sending someone mad.

I was mad already when I went to Mornington Road.

“You’ll be all right with Mrs. Swanson” ... the awful fringes, the horror of the ugly clean little room, the horror of Mrs. Swanson’s heavy old body moving slowly about the house, a heavy dark mountain, fringes, bulges, slow dead eyes, slow dead voice, slow grimacing evil smile ... housekeeper to the Duke of Something and now moving slowly about heavy with disapproval. She thought of me as a business young lady.

7

Following advice is certain to be wrong. When you don’t follow advice there may be awful things. But they are not arranged beforehand. And when they come you do not know that they are awful until you have half got hold of something else. Then they change into something that has not been awful. Things that remain awful are in some way not finished.... Those women are awful. They will get more and more awful, still disliking and disapproving till they die. I shall not see them again.... I will never again be at the mercy of such women or at all in the places where they are. That means keeping free of all groups. In groups sooner or later one of them appears, dead and sightless and bringing blindness and death ... although they seem to like brightness and children and the young people they approve of. I run away from them because I must. They kill me. The thought of their death is awful. Even in heaven no one could explain anything to them if they remain as they are. Wherever people advise you to go there is in the end one of those women....

8

When she turned out the gas the window spaces remained faintly alight with a soft light like moonlight. At the window she found a soft bluish radiance cast up from below upon the opposite walls and windows. It went up into the clear blue darkness of the sky.

When she lay down the bed smelt faintly of dust. The air about her head under the sharply sloping ceiling was still a little warm with the gas. It was full of her untrammelled thoughts. Her luggage was lying about, quite near. She thought of washing in the morning in the bright light on the other side of the room ... leaves crowding all round the lattice and here and there a pink rose ... several pink roses ... the lovely air chilling the water ... the basin quite up against the lattice ... dew splashing off the rose bushes in the little garden almost dark with trellises and trees, crowding with Harriett through the little damp stiff gate, the sudden lineny smell of Harriett’s pinafore and the thought of Harriett in it, feeling the same, sudden bright sunshine, two shouts, great cornfields going up and up with a little track between them ... up over Blewburton ... Whittenham Clumps. Before I saw Whittenham Clumps I had always known them. But we saw them before we knew they were called Whittenham Clumps. It was a surprise to know anybody who had seen them and that they had a name.

9

St. Pancras bells were clamouring in the room; rapid scales, beginning at the top, coming with a loud full thump on to the fourth note and finishing with a rush to the lowest which was hardly touched before the top note hung again in the air, sounding outdoors clean and clear while all the other notes still jangled together in her room. Nothing had changed. The night was like a moment added to the day; like years going backwards to the beginning; and in the brilliant sunshine the unchanging things began again, perfectly new. She leaped out of bed into the clamorous stillness and stood in the window rolling up the warm hair that felt like a shawl round her shoulders. A cup of tea and then the ’bus to Harriett’s. A ’bus somewhere just out there beyond the morning stillness of the street. What an adventure to go out and take a ’bus without having to face anybody. They were all out there, away somewhere, the very thought and sight of them, disapproving and deploring her surroundings. She listened. There they were. There were their very voices, coming plaintive and reproachful with a held-in indignation, intonations that she knew inside and out, coming on bells from somewhere beyond the squares—another church. She withdrew the coloured cover and set her spirit lamp on the inkstained table. Strong bright light was standing outside the window. The clamour of the bells had ceased. From far away down in the street a loud hoarse voice came thinly up. Referee—Lloyd’s—Sunday Times—People—pypa.... A front door opened with a loud crackle of paint. The voice dropped to speaking tones that echoed clearly down the street and came up clear and soft and confidential. Referee? Lloyd’s? The door closed with a large firm wooden sound and the harsh voice went on down the street.

St. Pancras bells burst forth again. Faintly interwoven with their bright headlong scale were the clear sweet delicate contralto of the more distant bells playing very swiftly and reproachfully a five finger exercise in a minor key. That must be a very high-Anglican church; with light coming through painted windows on to carvings and decorations.

10

As she began on her solid slice of bread and butter St. Pancras bells stopped again. In the stillness she could hear the sound of her own munching. She stared at the surface of the table that held her plate and cup. It was like sitting up to the nursery table. “How frightfully happy I am,” she thought with bent head. Happiness streamed along her arms and from her head. St. Pancras bells began playing a hymn tune in single firm beats with intervals between that left each note standing for a moment gently in the air. The first two lines were playing carefully through to the distant accompaniment of the rapid weaving and interweaving in a regular unbroken pattern of the five soft low contralto bells. The third line of the hymn ran through Miriam’s head a ding-dong to and fro from tone to semitone. The bells played it out, without the semitone, with a perfect satisfying falsity. Miriam sat hunched against the table listening for the ascending stages of the last line. The bells climbed gently up, made a faint flat dab at the last top note, left it in the air askew above the decorous little tune and rushed away down their scale as if to cover the impropriety. They clamoured recklessly mingling with Miriam’s shout of joy as they banged against the wooden walls of the window space.

CHAPTER II

1

“Been to church?” said Gerald digging his shoulders into his chair.

“No. Have you?”

“We’ve not been for weeks.... Everybody thinks us awful heathens.”

“P’raps you are.”

“It’s Curls. She says she’s hanged if she’s going any more.”

“I can’t stand the vicar” said Harriett. “He doesn’t believe a word he says.”

Fancy Harriett!...

“Besides, what’s the good?”

“Oh, there you are.”

“There’s nothing the matter with church once in a way to my way of thinking if it’s a decent high musical service.”

“Even Eve hardly ever goes now—and nobody could possibly be more goody than she is.”

This was disquieting. It was one thing to be the agnostic of the family—but Eve and Harriett. Miriam pondered resentfully while Gerald smoked and flicked his clothing and Harriett sat upright and pursed and untroubled in her great chair. She wondered whether she ought to say something about Unitarianism. But after all there might not be anything in it and they might not feel the relief of the way it cleared up the trouble about Christ. Besides there was no worry here in the room. A discussion would lead nowhere. They could all three look at each other if they wanted to and laugh everything off. In the middle of a sleepy Sunday afternoon with nothing to do sitting in three huge chairs and looking at each other they were all right. Harriett’s strength and scorn were directed against everything in the world but not against herself ... never against herself. Harriett often thought her grumpy and ill-tempered, but she approved of her. She was approving now.

“After all Frills it’s good form to go” Gerald said idly. “Go on. Smart people go to show their clothes.”

“Well, we’ve shown ours.”

Harriett flew out of her chair and daintily kicked him.

He grabbed and missed and sank back wailing, his face hidden in a cushion. Her dainty foot flew out once more and he smothered a shriek.

“Shut up” said Harriett curling herself up in her chair.

Gerald wailed on.

“Do we smoke in here?” said Miriam, wanting the scene to drop or change while it was perfect. She would tell them now about her change of lodgings.

“Yes” said Harriett absently with an eye on Gerald.

“I’ve changed my diggings” began Miriam formally, fumbling for her packet of cigarettes. Harriett was hurling a cushion. Gerald crumpled into the depths of his chair and sobbed aloud, beating with his arms.

“Stop it silly” piped Harriett blushing.

“I’ve changed my diggings” repeated Miriam uncomfortably. Harriett’s face flashed a response. Gerald’s loud wailings were broken by beseeching cries. Real, absolutely real and satisfying. Miriam answered them from some far deep in herself as if they were her own cries. Harry was embarrassed. Her bright strength was answering. She was ashamed at being seen answering.

Miriam got up conversationally and began looking about for matches in the soft curtained drawing-room light. There were swift movements and Harriett’s voice busily chiding. When she turned Gerald was sitting on the floor at Harriett’s knee beating it gently with his head.

“Got a match, G?” she said seeing in imagination the flare of the match in the soft greenish glare of the room. There was bright light all round the house and a glare of brightness in the garden, beyond the curtains. “Rather,” said Gerald, “dozens.” He sat up and handed out a box. Leaning back against Harriett’s knee he began intoning a little poem of appeal. There was a ring at the front door bell. Miriam got herself to the piano putting cigarettes and matches behind a vase on the mantelshelf. “That’s old Tremayne” said Gerald cheerfully, shooting his linen and glancing in the strip of mirror in the overmantel. The door opened admitting the light from the hall. The curtains at the open French windows swayed forward flooding the room with the bright garden light. Into the brightness stepped Mr. Tremayne, grey-clad and with a pink rose in his buttonhole.

Over tea they heard the story of his morning and how it had been interrupted by the man on the floor above who had come down in his dressing gown to tell him about a birthday party ... the two men sitting telling each other stories about drinks and people seeing each other home. After tea he settled back easily in his chair and went on with his stories. Miriam found it almost impossible to follow him. She grew weary of his bantering tone. It smeared over everything he touched and made him appear to be saying one thing over and over again in innuendo. Something he could not say out and would never get away from. He made little pauses and then it gleamed horribly about all his refinement of dress and bearing and Gerald laughed encouragingly and he went on, making a story that was like a play, that looked like life did when you looked at it, a maddening fussiness about nothing and people getting into states of mind. He went on into a story about business life ... people getting the better of each other. It made her feel sick with apprehension. Anybody in business might be ruined any minute unless he could be sure of getting the better of someone else. She had never realised that before.... It pressed on her breathing and made her feel that she had had too much tea.... She hated the exponent sitting there so coolly. It made the cool green-lit afternoon room an island amongst horrors. But it was that to him too ... he felt the need of something beyond the everlasting innuendo of social life and the everlasting smartness of business life. She felt it was true that he spent Sunday mornings picking out hymn tunes with one finger and liked “Sabbath music” and remembered the things his mother used to play to him. He wanted a home, something away from business life and away from social life. He saw her as a woman in a home, nicely dressed in a quiet drawing room, lit by softly screened clear fresh garden daylight.... “Business is business.” ... “Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart—’tis woman’s whole existence.” Tennyson did not know what he was saying when he wrote it in his calm patronising way. Mr. Tremayne would admire it as a “great truth”—thinking it like a man in the way Tennyson thought it. What a hopeless thing a man’s consciousness was. How awful to have nothing but a man’s consciousness. One could test it so easily if one were a little careful, and know exactly how it would behave....

Opening a volume of Mendelssohn she played from his point of view one of the Songs without Words quietly into the conversation. The room grew still. She felt herself and Mr. Tremayne as duplicates of Harriett and Gerald only that she was a very religious very womanly woman, the ideal wife and mother and he was a bad fast man who wanted to be saved. It was such an easy part to play. She could go on playing it to the end of her life, if he went on in business and made enough money, being a “gracious silence,” taking an interest in his affairs, ordering all things well, quietly training the servants, never losing her temper or raising her voice, making the home a sanctuary of rest and refreshment and religious aspiration, going to church.... She felt all these things expressing themselves in her bearing. At the end of her piece she was touched to the heart by the look of adoration in his eyes, the innocent youthfulness shining through his face. There was something in him she could have and guard and keep if she chose. Something that would die if there were no woman to keep it there. There was nothing in his life of business and music halls to keep it there, nothing but the memory of his mother and he joined her on to that memory. His mother and his wife were sacred ... apart from life. But he could not be really happy with a woman unless he could also despise her. Any interest in generalities, any argument or criticism or opposition would turn him into a towering bully. All men were like that in some way. They each had a set of notions and fought with each other about them whenever they were together and not eating or drinking. If a woman opposed them they went mad. He would like one or two more Mendelssohns and then supper. And if she kept out of the conversation and listened and smiled a little he would go away adoring. She played the Duetto; the chords made her think of Beethoven and play the last page carelessly and glance at Harriett. Harriett had felt her response to the chords and knew she was getting away from Mendelssohn. Mr. Tremayne had moved to a chair quite close to the piano, just behind her. She found the Beethoven and played the first movement of a sonata. It leapt about the piano breaking up her pose, using her body as the instrument of its gay wild shapeliness, spreading her arms inelegantly, swaying her, lifting her from the stool with the crash and vibration of its chords.... “Go on” said Harriett when it came to an end. The Largo came with a single voice deep and broad and quiet; the great truth behind the fuss of things. She felt her hearers grow weary of its reiterations and dashed on alone recklessly into the storm of the last movement. Through its tuneless raging she could hear the steady voice and see the steady shining of the broad clear light. Daylight and gaiety and night and storm and a great song and truth, the great truth that was bigger than anything. Beethoven. She got up, charged to the fingertips with a glow that transfigured all the inanimate things in the room. The party was wrecked ... a young lady who banged the piano till her hair nearly came down.... Mr. Tremayne had heard nothing but noise.... His eyes smiled and his uneasy mouth felt for compliments.

2

“Why didn’t you ask him to supper La Fée?”

“The Bollingdons are coming round, silly.”

“Well?”

“With one small chicken and a blancmange.”

“Heaven help us.”

When they sat down to play halfpenny nap after supper Miriam recovered her cigarette from its hiding place. She did not know the game. She sat at Harriett’s new card-table wrapped in the unbroken jesting of the Bollingdons and the Ducaynes, happily learning and smoking and feeling happily wicked. The Bollingdons taught her simply with a complete trustful friendliness, Mrs. Bollingdon leaning across in her pink satin blouse, her clear clean bulging cheeks and dark velvet hair like a full blown dark rose. Between the rounds they poured out anecdotes of earlier nap parties, all talking at once. The pauses at the fresh beginnings were full of the echoes of their laughter. Miriam in the character of the Honourable Miss Henderson had just accepted Lord Bollingdon’s invitation to join the Duke and Duchess of Ducayne and himself and Lady Bollingdon in an all-day party to Wembley Park in a break and four on Easter Monday and had lit a second cigarette and accepted a small whisky and soda when Mr. Grove was announced. Harriett’s face flushed jocular consternation.

When the party subsided after Mr. Grove’s spasmodic handshakings Miriam got herself into a chair in a far corner, smoking her cigarette with burning cheeks. Sitting isolated with her cigarette and her whisky while he twice sent his low harsh clearly murmuring voice into the suddenly empty air to say that he had been to evensong at the Carmelites and was on his way home, she examined the relief of his presence and the nature of her farewell. Mr. Bollingdon responded to him remarking each time on the splendour of the evening.

3

Strolling home towards midnight along the narrow pavement of Endsleigh Gardens Miriam felt as fresh and untroubled as if it were early morning. When she had got out of her Hammersmith omnibus into the Tottenham Court Road she had found that the street had lost its first terrifying impression and had become part of her home. It was the borderland of the part of London she had found for herself; the part where she was going to live, in freedom, hidden, on her pound a week. It was all she wanted. That was why she was young and glad; that was why fatigue had gone out of her life. There was nothing in the world that could come nearer to her than the curious half twilight half moonlight effect of lamplit Endsleigh Gardens opening out of Gower Place; its huge high trees, their sharp shadows on the little pavement running by the side of the railings, the neighbouring gloom of the Euston Road dimly lit by lamps standing high in the middle of the roadway at long intervals, the great high quiet porched houses, black and still, the shadow mass of St. Pancras church, the great dark open space in front of the church, a shadowy figure-haunted darkness with the vague stream of the Euston Road running to one side of it and the corridor of Woburn Place opening on the other. The harsh voice of an invisible woman sounded out from it as she turned off into her own street.... “Dressed up—he was—to the bloody death.” ... The words echoed about her as she strolled down the street controlling her impulse to flinch and hurry. The woman was there, there and real and that was what she had said. Resentment was lurking about the street. The woman’s harsh voice seemed close. Miriam pictured her glaring eyes. There was no pretence about her. She felt what she said. She belonged to the darkness about St. Pancras church ... people had been garrotted in that part of the Euston Road not so very long ago.... Tansley Street was a soft grey gloaming after the darkness. When she rattled her key into the keyhole of number seven she felt that her day was beginning. It would be perpetually beginning now. Nights and days were all one day; all hers, unlimited. Her life and work at Wimpole Street were something extra, thrown in with her own life of endless day. Sarah and Harriett, their lives and friends, her own friends, the Brooms, the girls in Kennett Street, all thrown in. She lit her table lamp and the gas and two candles, making her little brown room brilliant under a brilliant white ceiling and sat down eager to tell someone of her wealth and freedom.

4

Someone must know she was in London, free, earning her own living. Lilla? She would not see the extraordinary freedom; earning would seem strange and dreadful to her ... someone who would understand the extraordinary freedom.... Alma. Alma! Setting forth the London address in a heavy careless hand at the head of a postcard she wrote from the midst of her seventeenth year, “Dear A. Where are you?”

Walking home along the Upper Richmond Road; not liking to buy sweets; not enjoying anything to the full—always afraid of her refinements; always in a way wanting to be like her; wanting to share her mysterious knowledge of how things were done in the world and the things one had to do to get on in some clever world where people were doing things. Never really wanting it because the mere thought of that would take the beauty of the syringa and make it look sad. Never being able to explain why one did not want to do reasonable clever things in a clever brisk reasonable way; why one disliked the way she went behaving up and down the Upper Richmond Road with her pretty neat brisk bustling sidling walk, keeping her secret with a sort of prickly brightness. The Upper Richmond Road was heaven, pure heaven; smelling of syringa. She liked flowers but she did not seem to know.... Syringa. I had forgotten. That is one of the things I have always wanted to stop and remember.... What was it all about? What was she doing now? Anyhow the London post-card would be an answer. A letter, making her see Germany and bits of Newlands and what life was now would answer everything, all her snubs and cleverness and bring back the Upper Richmond Road and make it beautiful. She will know something of what it was to me then. Perhaps that was why she liked me even though she thought me vulgar and very lazy and stupid.

CHAPTER III

1

There was a carriage at the door. West-end people, after late nights, managing to keep nine o’clock appointments—in a north wind. Miriam pressed the bell urgently. The scrubbed chalky mosaic and the busy bright brass plate reproached her for her lateness during the long moment before the door was opened.... It must be someone for Mr. Orly; an appointment made since last night; that was the worst of his living in the house. He was in his surgery now, with the patient. The nine-fifteen patient would come almost at once. He would discover that his charts were not out before there was any chance of getting at his appointment book.... As the great door swung open she saw Mr. Hancock turn the corner of the street walking very rapidly before the north wind.... Mr. Orly’s voice was sounding impatiently from the back of the hall.... “Where’s Miss Hends.... Oh—here y’are Miss Hends, I say call up Chalk for me will ya, get him to come at once, I’ve got the patient waiting.” His huge frock-coated form swung round into his surgery without waiting for an answer. Miriam scurried through the hall past Mr. Leyton’s open surgery door and into her room. Mr. Leyton plunged out of his room as she was flinging down her things and came in briskly. “Morning, Pater got a gas case?”

“Mm”; said Miriam. “I’ve got to call up Chalk and I haven’t a second to do it.”

“Why Chalk?”

“Oh I don’t know. He said Chalk” said Miriam angrily, seizing the directory.

“I’ll call him up if you like.”

“You are a saint. Tell him to come at once—sooner,” said Miriam dabbing at her hair as she ran back through the hall and upstairs. As she passed the turn of the staircase Mr. Hancock was let in at the front door. She found his kettle furiously boiling on its wrought-iron stand near the chair. The stained glass window just behind it was dim with steam. She lowered the gas, put a tumbler in the socket of the spittoon, lit the gas burner on the bracket table and swiftly pulled open its drawers one by one. The instruments were all right ... the bottles—no chloroform, the carbolic bottle nearly empty and its label soaked and defaced. Gathering the two bottles in her hand she turned to the instrument cabinet, no serviettes, no rubber dam, clamps not up from the workshop. The top of the cabinet still to be dusted. Dust and scraps of amalgam were visible about the surfaces of the paper lining the instrument drawers. No saliva tubes in the basin. She swung round to the bureau and hurriedly read through the names of the morning’s patients. Mr. Hancock came quietly in as she was dusting the top of the instrument cabinet by pushing the boxes and bottles of materials that littered its surface to the backmost edge. They were all lightly coated with dust. It was everlasting and the long tubes and metal body of the little furnace were dull again. “Good morning,” they said simultaneously, in even tones. There were sounds of letters being opened and the turning of the pages of the appointment book. The chain of Mr. Hancock’s gold pencil case rattled softly as he made notes on the corners of the letters.

“Did you have a pleasant week-end?”

“Very” said Miriam emphatically.

There was a squeak at the side of the cabinet. “Yes” said Miriam down the speaking tube.... “Thank you. Will you please bring up some tubes and serviettes.”

“Mr. Wontner.”

“Thank you.” ... “Mrs. Hermann is ‘frightfully shocked’ at the amount of her account. What did we send it in for?”

“Seventy guineas. It’s a reduction, and it’s two years’ work for the whole family.” The bell sounded again.... “Lady Cazalet has bad toothache and can you see her at once.”

“Confound.... Will you go down and talk to her and see if you can get one of the others to see her.”

“She won’t.”

“Well then she must wait. I’ll have Mr. Wontner up.” Miriam rang. Mr. Hancock began busily washing his hands. The patient came in. He greeted him over his shoulder. Miriam gathered up the sheaf of annotated letters and the appointment book and ran down-stairs. “Has Mr. Leyton a patient Emma?” “Miss Jones just gone in, Miss.” “Oh, Emma, will you ask the workshop for Mr. Hancock’s rubber and clamps?” She rang through to Mr. Leyton’s room. “There’s a patient of Mr. Hancock’s in pain, can you see them if I can persuade them?” she murmured. “Right, in ten minutes” came the answering murmur. Mr. Hancock’s bell sounded from her room. She went to his tube in the hall. “Can I have my charts?” Running into her room she hunted out the first chart from a case full and ran upstairs with it. Mr. Hancock’s patient was sitting forward in the chair urging the adoption of the decimal system. Running down again she went into the waiting room. The dark Turkey carpeted oak furnished length seemed full of seated forms. Miriam peered and Lady Cazalet, with her hat already off rose from the deep arm-chair at her side. “Can he see me?” she said in a clear trembling undertone, her dark eyes wide upon Miriam’s. Miriam gazed deep into the limpid fear. What a privilege. How often Captain Cazalet must be beside himself with unworthiness. “Yes, if you can wait a little” she said dropping her eyes and standing with arms restrained. “I think it won’t be very long” she added lingering a moment as the little form relapsed into the chair.

“Lady Cazalet will wait until you can see her” she tubed up to Mr. Hancock.

“Can’t you make her see one of the others?”

“I’m afraid it’s impossible; I’ll tell you later.”

“Well I’ll see her as soon as I can. I’m afraid she’ll have to wait.”

Miriam went back to her room to sort out the remaining charts. On her table lay a broken denture in a faded morocco case; a strip of paper directed “five-thirty sharp” in Mr. Orly’s handwriting. Mr. Leyton’s door burst open. He came with flying coat-tails.

“Vi got to see that patient of Mr. Hancock’s” he asked breathlessly.

“No” said Miriam “she won’t.”

“Right” he said swinging back. “I’ll keep Miss Jones on.”

Mr. Hancock’s bell sounded again. Miriam flew to the tube.

“My clamps please.”

“Oh yes” she answered shocked, and hurried back to her room.

Gathering up the broken denture she ran down the stone steps leading to the basement. Her cheap unyielding shoes clattered on the unyielding stones. The gas was on in the lunch room, Mrs. Willis scrubbing the floor. The voices of the servants came from the kitchens in the unknown background. She passed the lunch room and the cellar and clamped on across the stone hall to the open door of the workshop.

2

Winthrop was standing at the small furnace in the box-lined passage way. It was roaring its loudest. Through its open door the red light fell sharply on his pink-flushed face and drooping fair moustache and poured down over his white apron. “Good ph-morning” he said pleasantly, his eye on the heart of the furnace, his foot briskly pumping the blower. From the body of the room came sounds of tapping and whistling ... the noise of the furnace prevented their knowing that anyone had come in.... Miriam drew near to the furnace, relieved at the shortness of her excursion. She stared at the tiny shape blazing red-gold at the heart of the glare. Winthrop gathered up a pair of tongs and drew the mould from the little square of light. The air hissed from the bellows and the roaring of the flames died down. In a moment he was standing free with hot face and hot patient ironic eyes, gently taking the denture from her hands. “Good morning” said Miriam, “Oh, Mr. Winthrop, it’s a repair for Mr. Orly. It’s urgent. Can you manage it?” “It’s ph—ph—sure to be urgent” said Winthrop examining the denture with a short-sighted frown. Miriam waited anxiously. The hammering and whistling had ceased. “It’ll be all right, Miss Ph-Henderson” said Winthrop encouragingly. She turned to the door. The clamps.... Gathering herself together she went down the passage and stood at the head of the two stone steps leading down into the body of the room. A swift scrubbing of emery paper on metal was going on at the end of the long bench, lit by a long sky-light, from which the four faces looked up at her with a chorus of good mornings in response to her greeting. “Are Mr. Hancock’s clamps ready?” she asked diffidently. “Jimmy ...” The figure nearest to her glanced down the row of seated forms. The small bullet-headed boy at the end of the bench scrubbed vigorously and ironically with his emery stick. “He won’t be a minute, Miss Henderson” said the near pupil comfortingly.

Miriam observed his spruce grey suit curiously masked by the mechanic’s apron, the quiet controlled amused face, and felt the burden of her little attack as part of the patient prolonged boredom of his pupillage. The second pupil, sitting next to him kept dog-like sympathetic eyes on her face, waiting for a glance. She passed him by, smiling gently in response without looking at him while her eyes rested upon the form of the junior mechanic whose head was turned in the direction of the scrubbing boy. The head was refined, thin and clear cut, thatched with glossy curls. Its expression was servile—the brain eagerly seeking some flowery phrase—something to decorate at once the occasion and the speaker, and to give relief to the mouth strained in an arrested obsequious smile. Nothing came and the clever meticulous hands were idle on the board. It seemed absurd to say that Mr. Hancock was waiting for the clamps while Jimmy was scrubbing so busily. But they had obviously been forgotten. She fidgeted.

“Will somebody send them up when they’re done?”

“Jimmy, you’re a miserable sinner, hurry up” said the senior pupil.

“They’re done” said Jimmy in a cracked bass voice. “Thank goodness” breathed Miriam, dimpling. Jimmy came round and scattered the clamps carefully into her outstretched hand, with down-cast eyes and a crisp dimpling smile.

“Rule Britannia,” remarked the junior pupil, resuming his work as Miriam turned away and hurried along the passage and through the door held open for her by Winthrop. She flew up to Mr. Hancock’s room three steps at a time, tapped gently at the door and went in. He came forward across the soft grey green carpet to take the clamps and murmured gently “Have you got my carbolic?”

3

Miriam looked out the remainder of the charts and went anxiously through the little pile of letters she had brought down from Mr. Hancock’s room. All but three were straight-forward appointments to be sent. One bore besides the pencilled day and date the word “Tape” ... she glanced through it—it was from a University settlement worker, asking for an appointment for the filling of two front teeth.... She would understand increasing by one thickness per day until there were five, to be completed two days before the appointment falls due so that any tenderness may have passed off. Mrs. Hermann’s letter bore no mark. She could make a rough summary in Mr. Hancock’s phraseology. The third letter enclosed a printed card of appointment with Mr. Hancock which she had sent without filling in the day and hour. She flushed. Mr. Hancock had pencilled in the missing words. Gathering the letters together she put them as far away as her hand would reach, leaving a space of shabby ink-stained morocco clear under her hands. She looked blindly out of the window; hand-painted, they are hand-painted, forget-me-nots and gold tendrils softly painted, not shining, on an unusual shape, a merry Christmas. Melly Klismas. In this countree heapee lain, chiney man lun home again, under a red and green paper umbrella in the pouring rain, that was not a hand-painted one, but better, in some strange way, close bright colours drawing everything in; a shock. I stayed in there. There was something. Chinee man lun home again. Her eye roamed over the table; everything but the newly-arrived letters shabby under the high wide uncurtained window. The table fitted the width of the window. There was something to be done before anything could be done. Everything would look different if something were done. The fresh letters could lie neatly on the centre of the table in the midst of something. They were on the address books, spoiled by them. It would take years to check the addresses one by one till the old books could be put away. If the day books were entered up to date, there would still be those, disfiguring everything. If everything were absolutely up to date, and all the cupboards in perfect order and the discounts and decimals always done in the depot-books to time there would be time to do something. She replaced the letters in the centre of the table and put them back again on the address books. His nine-forty-five patient was being let in at the front door. In a moment his bell would ring and something must be said about the appointment card. “Mr. Orly?” A big booming elderly voice, going on heavily murmuring into the waiting-room. She listened tensely to the movements of the servant. Was Mr. Orly in “the den” or in his surgery? She heard the maid ring through to the surgery and wait. No sound. The maid came through her room and tapped at the door leading from it. Come in sang a voice from within and Miriam heard the sound of a hammer on metal as the maid opened the door. She flew to the surgery. Amidst the stillness of heavy oak furniture and dark Turkey carpet floated the confirming smell. There it was all about the spittoon and the red velvet covered chair and the bracket table, a horrible confusion—and blood stains, blood blotted serviettes, forceps that made her feel sick and faint. Summoning up her strength she gathered up the serviettes and flung them into a basket behind the instrument cabinet. She was dabbing at the stains on the American cloth cover of the bracket when Mr. Orly came swinging in, putting on his grey frock-coat and humming Gunga Din as he came. “Regular field day” he said cheerfully. “I shan’t want those things—just pop ’em out of sight.” He turned up the cupboard gas and in a moment a stream of boiling water hissed down into the basin filling the room with steam. “I say, has this man got a chart? Don’t throw away those teeth. Just look at this—how’s that for twisted? Just look here.” He took up an object to which Miriam forced reluctant eyes, grotesquely formed fangs protruding from the enclosing blades of a huge forceps. “How’s that eh?” Miriam made a sympathetic sound. Gathering the many forceps he detached their contents putting the relic into a bottle of spirit and the rest into the hidden basket. The forceps went head first into a jar of carbolic and Miriam breathed more freely. “I’ll see to those. I say has this man got a chart?” “I’ll see” said Miriam eagerly making off with the appointment book. She returned with the chart. Mr. Orly hummed and looked. “Right. Tell ’em to send him in. I say, vi got any gold and tin?” Miriam consulted the box in a drawer in the cabinet. It was empty. “I’m afraid you haven’t” she said guiltily. “All right, I’ll let y’know. Send ’im in,” and he resumed Gunga Din over the wash-hand basin. Mr. Hancock’s bell was ringing in her room and she hurried off with a sign to the little maid waiting with raised eyebrows in the hall. Darting into her room she took the foils from the safe, laid them on a clean serviette amongst the litter on her table and ran upstairs. Mr. Leyton opened his door as she passed “I say, can you feed for me” he asked breathlessly, putting out an anxious head. “I’ll come down in a minute” promised Miriam from the stairs. Mr. Hancock was drying his hands. He sounded his bell as she came in. The maid answered. “I’m so sorry” began Miriam. “Show up Mr. Green” said Mr. Hancock down the speaking tube. “You remember there’s Lady Cazalet?” said Miriam relieved and feeling she was making good her carelessness in the matter of the appointment card.

“Oh confound.” He rang again hurriedly. “Show up Lady Cazalet.” Miriam swept from the bracket table the litter of used instruments and materials, disposing them rapidly on the cabinet, into the sterilising tray, the waste basket and the wash-hand basin, tore the uppermost leaf from the headrest pad, and detached the handpiece from the arm of the motor drill while the patient was being shown upstairs. Mr. Hancock had cleared the spittoon, set a fresh tumbler, filled the kettle and whisked the debris of amalgam and cement from the bracket table before he began the scrubbing and cleansing of his hands, and when the patient came in Miriam was in her corner reluctantly handling the instruments, wet with the solution that crinkled her fingertips and made her skin brittle and dry. Everything was in its worst state. The business of drying and cleansing, freeing fine points from minute closely adhering fragments, polishing instruments on the leather pad, repolishing them with the leather, scraping the many little burs with the fine wire brush, scraping the clamps, clearing the obstinate amalgam from slab and spatula, brought across her the ever-recurring circle. The things were begun, they were getting on, she had half-done ... the exasperating tediousness of holding herself to the long series of tiny careful attention-demanding movements ... the punctual emergence when the end was in sight of the hovering reflection, nagging and questioning, that another set of things was already getting ready for another cleansing process; the endless series to last as long as she stayed at Wimpole Street ... were there any sort of people who could do this kind of thing patiently, without minding? ... the evolution of dentistry was wonderful, but the more perfect it became the more and more of this sort of thing there would be ... the more drudgery workers, at fixed salaries ... it was only possible for people who were fine and nice ... there must be, everywhere, women doing this work for people who were not nice. They could not do it for the work’s sake. Did some of them do it cheerfully, as unto God. It was wrong to work unto man. But could God approve of this kind of thing ... was it right to spend life cleaning instruments ... the blank moment again of gazing about in vain for an alternative ... all work has drudgery. That is not the answer.... Blessèd be Drudgery, but that was housekeeping, not someone else’s drudgery.... As she put the things back in the drawers, every drawer offered tasks of tidying, replenishing, and repapering of small boxes and grooves and sections. She had remembered to bring up Lady Cazalet’s chart. It looked at her propped against the small furnace. Behind it were the other charts for the day complete. The drug bottles were full, there was plenty of amadou pulled soft and cut ready for use, a fair supply of both kinds of Japanese paper. None of the bottles and boxes of stopping materials were anywhere near running short and the gold drawer was filled. She examined the drawers that held the less frequently used fittings and materials, conducting her operations noiselessly without impeding Mr. Hancock’s perpetual movements to and fro between the chair and the instrument cabinet. Meanwhile the dressing of Lady Cazalet’s painful tooth went quietly on and Mr. Leyton was waiting, hoping for her assistance downstairs. There was no excuse for waiting upstairs any longer. She went to the writing table and hung over the appointment book.

4

It was a busy day. He would hardly have half an hour for lunch.... She examined the names carefully, one by one, and wrote against one “ask address,” underlined and against another “enquire for brother—ill.” Lady Cazalet drew a deep sigh ... she had been to other dentists. But perhaps they were good ones. Perhaps she was about thirty ... had she ever gone through a green baize door and seen a fat common little man with smooth sly eyes standing waiting for her in a dark stuffy room smelling of creosote? Even if she had always been to good ones they were not Mr. Hancock. They were dentists. Cheerful ordinary men with ordinary voices and laughs, thinking about all manner of things. Or apparently bland, with ingratiating manners. Perhaps a few of them, some of his friends and some of the young men he had trained were something like him. Interested in dentistry and the way it was all developing, some of them more enthusiastic and interested in certain special things than he was. But no one could be quite like him. No other patients had the lot of his patients. No other dentist was so completely conscious of the patient all the time, as if he were in the chair himself. No other dentist went on year after year remaining sensitive to everything the patient had to endure. No one else was so unsparing of himself ... children coming eagerly in for their dentistry, sitting in the chair with slack limbs and wide open mouths and tranquil eyes ... small bodies braced and tense, fat hands splayed out tightly on the too-big arms of the chair in determination to bear the moment of pain bravely for him.... She wandered to the corner cupboard and opened it and gazed idly in. But none of them knew what it cost.... “I think you won’t have any more pain with that; I’ll just put in a dressing for the present”—she was Lady Cazalet again, without tooth-ache, and that awful feeling that you know your body won’t last ... they did not know what it cost. What always doing the best for the patient meant. Perhaps they knew in a way; or knew something and did not know what it was ... there would be something different in Mr. Hancock’s expression, especially in the three quarters view when his face was turned away towards the instrument cabinet, if he saved his nerves and energy and money by doing things less considerately, not perpetually having the instruments sharpened and perpetually buying fresh outfits of sharp burs. The patient would suffer more pain ... a dentist at his best ought to be more delicately strong and fine than a doctor ... like a fine engraving ... a surgeon working amongst live nerves ... and he would look different himself. It was in him. It was keeping to that, all day, and every day, choosing the best difficult tiresome way in everything that kept that radiance about him when he was quietly at work ... I mustn’t stay here thinking these thoughts ... it’s that evil thing in me, keeping on and on, always thinking thoughts, nothing getting done ... going through life like—a stuck pig. If I went straight on things would come like that just the same in flashes—bang, bang, in your heart, everything breaking into light just in front of you, making you almost fall off the edge into the expanse coming up before you, flowers and light stretching out. Then you shut it down, letting it go through you with a leap that carries you to the moon—the sun, and makes you bump with life like the little boy bursting out of his too small clothes and go on choking with song to do the next thing deftly. That’s right. Perhaps that is what they all do? Perhaps that’s why they won’t stop to remember. Do you realise? Do you realise you’re in Brussels? Just look at the white houses there with the bright green trees against them in the light. It’s the air, the clearness. Sh—If they hear you, they’ll put up the rent. They were just Portsmouth and Gosport people, staying in Brussels and fussing about Portsmouth and Gosport and Aunt this and Mr. that.... I shan’t realise Brussels and Belgium for years because of that. They hated and killed me because I was like that.... I must be like that ... something comes along, golden, and presently there is a thought. I can’t be easy till I’ve said it in my mind, and I’m sad till I have said it somehow ... and sadder when I have said it. But nothing gets done. I must stop thinking, from now, and be fearfully efficient. Then people will understand and like me. They will hate me too, because I shall be absurd, I shan’t be really in it. Perhaps I shall. Perhaps I shall get in. The wonder is they don’t hate me more. There was a stirring in the chair and a gushing of fresh water into the tumbler. Why do I meet such nice people? One after another. “There” said Mr. Hancock, “I don’t think that will trouble you any more. We will make another appointment.” Miriam took the appointment book and a card to the chair-side and stayed upstairs to clear up.

5

When she reached the hall Mr. Orly’s door was standing wide. Going into the surgery she found the head parlourmaid rapidly wiping instruments with a soiled serviette. “Is it all right, James?” she said vaguely, glancing round the room.

“Yes miss,” answered James briskly emptying the half-filled tumbler and going on to dry and polish it with the soiled serviette ... the housemaid spirit ... the dry corner of a used serviette probably appeared to James much too good to wipe anything with. Telling her would not be any good. She would think it waste of time.... Besides, Mr. Orly himself would not really mind; and the things were “mechanikly clean” ... that was a good phrase of Mr. Leyton’s ... with his own things always soaking even his mallets, until there was no polish left on the handles; and his nailbrush in a bath of alcohol.... Mr. Orly came in, large and spruce. He looked at his hands and began combing his beard, standing before the overmantel. “Hancock busy?”

“Frightfully busy.”

Miriam looked judicially round the room. James hovered. The north wind howled. The little strip of sky above the outside wall that obscured the heavily stained glass of the window seemed hardly to light the room and the little light there was was absorbed by the heavy dull oak furniture and the dark heavy Turkey carpet and dado of dull red and tarnished gold.

“It is dark for April” murmured Miriam. “I’ll take away your gold and tin box if I may.”

“Thank ye” said Mr. Orly nervously, wheeling about with a harsh sigh to scan the chair and bracket-table; straightening his waistcoat and settling his tie. “I got through without it—used some of that new patent silicate stuff of Leyton’s. All right—show in the Countess.”

James disappeared. Miriam secured the little box and made off. On her table was a fresh pile of letters, annotated in Mr. Orly’s clear stiff upright rounded characters. She went hurriedly through them. Extricating her blotter she sat down and examined the inkstand. Of course one of her pens had been used and flung down still wet with its nib resting against the handle of the other pens.... Mr. Leyton ... his gold filling; she ought to go in and see if she could help ... perhaps he had finished by now. She wiped away the ink from the nib and the pen-handles.

Tapping at Mr. Leyton’s door she entered. He quickly turned a flushed face his feet scrabbling noisily against the bevelled base of the chair with the movement of his head. “Sawl right Miss Henderson. I’ve finished. ’V’you got any emery strips—mine are all worn out.”

6

Back once more in her room she heard two voices talking both at once excitedly in the den. Mrs. Orly had a morning visitor. She would probably stay to lunch. She peered into the little folding mirror hanging by the side of the small mantelpiece and saw a face flushed and animated so far. Her hair was as unsatisfactory as usual. As she looked she became conscious of its uncomfortable weight pinned to the back of her head and the unpleasant warm feeling of her thick fringe. By lunch-time her face would be strained and yellow with sitting at work in the cold room with her feet on the oil-cloth under the window. She glanced at the oil lamp standing in the little fireplace, its single flame glaring nakedly against the red-painted radiator. The telephone bell rang. Through the uproar of mechanical sounds that came to her ear from the receiver she heard a far off faint angry voice in incoherent reiteration. “Hullo, hullo” she answered encouragingly. The voice faded but the sounds went on punctuated by a sharp angry popping. Mr. Orly’s door opened and his swift heavy tread came through the hall. Miriam looked up apprehensively, saying “Hullo” at intervals into the angry din of the telephone. He came swiftly on humming in a soft light baritone, his broad forehead, bald rounded crown and bright fair beard shining in the gloom of the hall. A crumpled serviette swung with his right hand. Perhaps he was going to the workshop. The door of the den opened. Mrs. Orly appeared and made an inarticulate remark abstractedly and disappeared. “Hullo, hullo” repeated Miriam busily into the telephone. There was a loud report and the thin angry voice came clear from a surrounding silence. Mr. Orly came in on tiptoe, sighed impatiently and stood near her drumming noiselessly on the table at her side. “Wrong number” said Miriam, “will you please ring off?”

“What a lot of trouble they givya” said Mr. Orly. “I say, what’s the name of the American chap Hancock was talking about at lunch yesterday?”

Miriam frowned.

“Can y’remember? About sea-power.”

“Oh” said Miriam relieved. “Mahan.”

“Eh?”

“Mahan. May-ann.”

“That’s it. You’ve got it. Wonderful. Don’t forget to send off Major Moke’s case sharp will ye?”

Miriam’s eyes scanned the table and caught sight of a half hidden tin-box.

“No. I’ll get it off.”

“Right. It’s in a filthy state, but there’s no time to clean it.”

He strode back through the hall murmuring Mahan. Miriam drew the tin from its place of concealment. It contained a mass of dirty cotton-wool upon which lay a double denture coated with tartar and joined by tarnished gold springs. “Eleven thirty sharp” ran the instruction on an accompanying scrap of paper. No address. The name of the patient was unfamiliar. Mrs. Orly put her head through the door of the den.

“What did Ro want?”

Miriam turned towards the small sallow eager face and met the kind sweet intent blue glint of the eyes. She explained and Mrs. Orly’s anxious little face broke into a smile that dispelled the lines on the broad strip of low forehead leaving it smooth and sallow under the smoothly brushed brown hair.

“How funny” said Mrs. Orly hurriedly. “I was just comin’ out to ask you the name of that singer. You know. Mark something. Marksy....”

“Mar-kaysie” said Miriam.

“That’s it. I can’t think how you remember.” Mrs. Orly disappeared and the two voices broke out again in eager chorus. Miriam returned to her tin. Mastering her disgust she removed the plate from the box, shook the cotton-wool out into the paper-basket collected fresh wool, packing paper, sealing wax, candle and matches and set to work to make up the parcel. She would have to attack the workshop again and get them to take it out. Perhaps they would know the address. When the case was half packed she looked up the patient’s name in the ledger. Five entries in about as many years—either repairs or springs—how simple dentistry became when people had lost all their teeth. There were two addresses, a town and a country one written in a long time ago in ink; above them were two in pencil, one crossed out. The newest of the address books showed these two addresses, one in ink, neither crossed out. What had become of the card and letter that came with the case? In the den with Mrs. Orly and her guest....

Footsteps were coming neatly and heavily up the basement stairs. Winthrop. He came in smiling, still holding his long apron gathered up to free his knees. “Ph—Ph—Major Moke’s case ready?” he whispered cheerfully.

“Almost—but I don’t know the address.”

“It’s the ph—ph—Buckinam Palace Otel. It’s to go by hand.”

“Oh, thank goodness” laughed Miriam sweeping the scissors round the uneven edge of the wrapping paper.

“My word” said Winthrop, “What an eye you’ve got I couldn’t do that to ph-save melife and I’m supposed to be a ph-mechanic.”

“Have I,” said Miriam surprised, “I shan’t be two minutes; it’ll be ready by the time anybody’s ready to go. But the letters aren’t.”

“All right. I’ll send up for them when we go out to lunch,” said Winthrop consolingly, disappearing.

Miriam found a piece of fine glazed green twine in her string box and tied up the neat packet—sealing the ends of the string with a neat blob on the upper side of the packet and the folded paper at each end. She admired the two firmly flattened ends of string close together. Their free ends united by the firm red blob were a decorative substitute for a stamp on the white surface of the paper. She wrote in the address in an upright rounded hand with firm rotund little embellishments. Poring over the result she examined it at various distances. It was delightful. She wanted to show it to someone. It would be lost on Major Moke. He would tear open the paper to get at his dreadful teeth. Putting the stamps on the label, she regretfully resigned the packet and took up Mr. Orly’s day-book. It was in arrears—three, four days not entered in the ledger. Major Moke repair—one guinea, she wrote. Mr. Hancock’s showing out bell rang. She took up her packet and surveyed it upside down. The address looked like Chinese. It was really beautiful ... but handwriting was doomed ... short-hand and typewriting ... she ought to know them if she were ever to make more than a pound a week as a secretary ... awful. What a good thing Mr. Hancock thought them unprofessional ... yet there were already men in Wimpole Street who had their correspondence typed. What did he mean by saying that the art of conversation was doomed? He did not like conversation. Jimmy came in for the parcel and scuttled downstairs with it. Mr. Hancock’s patient was going out through the hall. He had not rung for her to go up. Perhaps there was very little to clear and he was doing it himself.

7

He was coming downstairs. Her hands went to the pile of letters and busily sorted them. Through the hall. In here. Leisurely. How are you getting on? Half amused. Half solicitous. The first weeks. The first day. She had only just come. Perhaps there would be the hand on the back of the chair again as before he discovered the stiffness like his own stiffness. He was coming right round to the side of the chair into the light, waiting, without having said anything. She seemed to sit through a long space waiting for him to speak, in a radiance that shaped and smoothed her face as she turned slowly and considered the blunted grave features, their curious light, and met the smiling grey eyes. They were not observing the confusion on the table. He had something to say that had nothing to do with the work. She waited startled into an overflowing of the curious radiance, deepening the light in which they were grouped. “Are you busy?” “No,” said Miriam in quiet abandonment. “I want your advice on a question of decoration” he pursued smiling down at her with the expression of a truant schoolboy and standing aside as she rose. “My patient’s put off” he added confidentially, holding the door wide for her. Miriam trotted incredulously upstairs in front of him and in at the open surgery door and stood contemplating the room from the middle of the great square of soft thick grey green carpet with her back to the great triple window and the littered remains of a long sitting.

Perhaps a question of decoration meant altering the positions of some of the pictures. She glanced about at them, enclosed in her daily unchanging unsatisfying impressions—the green landscape plumy with meadow-sweet, but not letting you through to wander in fields, the little soft bright coloury painting of the doorway of St. Mark’s—San Marco, painted by an Englishman, with a procession going in at the door and beggars round the doorway, blobby and shapeless like English peasants in Italian clothes ... bad ... and the man had worked and studied and gone to Italy and had a name and still worked and people bought his things ... an engraving very fine and small of a low bridge in a little town, quiet sharp cheering lines; and above it another engraving, a tiresome troubled girl, all a sharp film of fine woven lines and lights and shadows in a rich dark liny filmy interior, neither letting you through nor holding you up, the girl worrying there in the middle of the picture, not moving, an obstruction.... Maris ... the two little water colours of Devonshire, a boat with a brown sail and a small narrow piece of a street zig-zagging sharply up between crooked houses, by a Londoner—just to say how crooked everything was ... that thing in this month’s Studio was better than any of these ... her heart throbbed suddenly as she thought of it ... a narrow sandy pathway going off, frilled with sharp greenery, far into a green wood.... Had he seen it? The studios lay safely there on the polished table in the corner, the disturbing bowl of flowers from the country, the great pieces of pottery, friends, warm and sympathetic to touch, never letting you grow tired of their colour and design ... standing out against the soft dull gold of the dado and the bold soft green and buff of the wall paper. The oil painting of the cousin was looking on a little superciliously ... centuries of “fastidious refinement” looking forth from her child’s face. If she were here it would be she would be consulted about the decoration; but she was away somewhere in some house, moving about in a dignified way under her mass of gold hair, saying things when speech became a necessity in the refined fastidious half-contemptuous tone, hiding her sensitive desire for companionship, contemptuous of most things and most people. To-day she had an interested look, she was half jealously setting standards for him all the time.... Miriam set her aside. The Chinese figures staring down ferociously from the narrow shelf running along the base of the high white frieze were more real to her. They belonged to the daily life here, secure from censure.

8

From the brown paper wrappings emerged a large plaque of Oriental pottery. Mr. Hancock manœuvred it upright, holding it opposite to her on the floor, supported against his knees. “There—what do you think of that?” he murmured bending over it. Miriam’s eyes went from the veinings on his flushed forehead to the violent soft rich red and blue and dull green covering the huge concave disc from side to side. It appeared to represent a close thicket of palm fronds, thin flat fingers, superimposed and splaying out in all directions over the deep blue background. In the centre appeared the head and shoulders of an enormous tiger, coming sinuously forward, one great paw planted on the greenery near the foremost middle edge of the plaque.

“M’m,” said Miriam staring.

Mr. Hancock rubbed the surface of the plaque with his forefinger. Miriam came near and ran her finger down across the rich smooth reliefs.

“Where shall I put it?” said Mr. Hancock.

“I should have it somewhere on that side of the room, where the light falls on it.”

Mr. Hancock raised the plaque in his arms and walked with it to the wall raising it just above his head and holding it in place between the two pictures of Devonshire. They faded to a small muddled dinginess, and the buff and green patterning of the wall-paper showed shabby and dim.

“It looks somehow too big or too small or something.... I should have it down level with the eyes, so that you can look straight into it.”

Mr. Hancock carefully lowered it.

“Let me come and hold it so that you can look” said Miriam advancing.

“It’s too heavy for you” said Mr. Hancock straining his head back and moving it from side to side.

“I believe it would look best” said Miriam “across the corner of the room as you come in—where the corner cupboard is—I’m sure it would” she said eagerly and went back to the centre of the carpet.

Mr. Hancock smiled towards the small oak cupboard fixed low in the angle of the wall.

“We should have to move the cupboard,” he said dubiously and carried the heavy plate to the indicated place.

“That’s simply lovely” said Miriam in delight as he held the plaque in front of the long narrow façade of black oak.

Mr. Hancock lowered the plaque to the floor and propped it crosswise against the angle.

“It would be no end of a business fixing it up” he murmured crossing to her side. They stood looking at the beautiful surface blurred a little in the light by its backward tilt. They gazed fascinated as the plaque slid gently forward and fell heavily breaking into two pieces.

They regarded one another quietly and went forward to gather up the fragments. The broken sides gritted together as Miriam held hers steady for the other to be fitted to it. When they were joined the crack was hardly visible.

“That’ll be a nice piece of work for Messrs. Nikkoo” said Mr. Hancock with a little laugh, “we’d better get it in back behind the sofa for the present.” They spread the brown paper over the brilliant surfaces and stood up. Miriam’s perceptions raced happily along. How had he known that she cared for things? She was not sure that she did ... not in the way that he did.... How did he know that she had noticed any of his things? Because she had blurted out “Oh what a perfectly lovely picture” when he showed her the painting of his cousin? But that was because he admired his cousin and her brother had painted the picture and he admired them both and she had not known about this when she spoke.

“Did you see this month’s Studio?” she asked shyly.

He turned to the table and took up the uppermost of the pile.

“There’s a lovely green picture” said Miriam, “at least I like it.”

Mr. Hancock turned pages ruminatively.

“Those are good things” he said flattening the open page.

“Japanese flower Decorations” read Miriam looking at the reproduced squares of flowering branches arranged with a curious naturalness in strange flat dishes. They fascinated her at once—stiff and real, shooting straight up from the earth and branching out. They seemed coloured. She turned pages and gazed.

“How nice and queer.”

Mr. Hancock bent smiling. “They’ve got a whole science of this you know” he said; “it takes them years to learn it; they apprentice themselves and study for years....”

Miriam looked incredulously at the simple effects—just branches placed “artistically” in flat dishes and fixed somehow at the base amongst little heaps of stones.

“It looks easy enough.”

Mr. Hancock laughed. “Well—you try. We’ll get some broom or something, and you shall try your hand. You’d better read the article. Look here—they’ve got names for all the angles.... ‘Shin’—he read with amused admiring delight, ‘sho-shin’ ... there’s no end of it.”

Miriam fired and hesitated. “It’s like a sort of mathematics.... I’m no good at mathematics.”

“I expect you could get very good results ... we’ll try. They carry it to such extraordinary lengths because there’s all sorts of social etiquette mixed up with it—you can’t have a branch pointing at a guest for instance—it would be rude.”

“No wonder it takes them years” said Miriam.

They laughed together, moving vaguely about the room.

Mr. Hancock looked thoughtfully at the celluloid tray of hairpins on the mantelshelf, and blew the dust from it ... there was something she remembered in some paper, very forcibly written, about the falsity of introducing single specimens of Japanese art, the last results of centuries of an artistic discipline, that was it, that had grown from the life of a secluded people living isolated in a particular spot under certain social and natural conditions, into English household decoration.... “Gleanings in Buddha Fields” the sun on rice-fields ... and Fujiama—Fuji-no-San in the distance ... but he did not like Hearn—“there’s something in the chap that puts me off” ... puts off—what a good phrase ... “something sensuous in him” ... but you could never forget Buddha Fields. It made you know you were in Japan, in the picture of Japan ... and somebody had said that all good art, all great art, had a sensuous element ... it was dreadful, but probably true ... because the man had observed it and was not an artist, but somebody looking carefully on. Mr. Hancock, Englishman, was “put off” by sensuousness, by anybody taking a delight in the sun on rice fields and the gay colours of Japan ... perhaps one ought to be “put off” by Hearn ... but Mr. Hancock liked Japanese things and bought them and put them in with his English things, that looked funny and tame beside them. What he did not like was the expression of delight. It was queer and annoying somehow ... especially as he said that the way English women were trained to suppress their feelings was bad. He had theories and fixed preferences and yet always seemed to be puzzled about so many things.

“D’you think it right to try to introduce single pieces of Japanese art into English surroundings?” she said tartly, beginning on the instruments.

“East is East and West is West and never the twain can meet?”

“That’s a dreadful idea—I don’t believe it a bit.”

Mr. Hancock laughed. He believed in those awful final dreary-weary things ... some species are so widely differentiated that they cannot amalgamate—awful ... but if one said that he would laugh and say it was beyond him ... and he liked and disliked without understanding the curious differences between people—did not know why they were different—they put him off or did not put him off and he was just. He liked and reverenced Japanese art and there was an artist in his family. That was strange and fine.

“I suppose we ought to have some face-powder here,” mused Mr. Hancock.

“They’ll take longer than ever if we do.”

“I know—that’s the worst of it; but I commit such fearful depredations ... we want a dressing room ... if I had my way we’d have a proper dressing room downstairs. But I think we must get some powder and a puff.... Do you think you could get some...?” Miriam shrank. Once in a chemist’s shop, in a strong Burlington Arcade west-end mood buying some scent, she had seized and bought a little box.... La Dorine de Poche ... Dorin, Paris ... but that was different to asking openly for powder and a puff ... la Dorine de Dorin Paris was secret and wonderful.... “I’ll try” she said bravely and heard the familiar little sympathetic laugh.

9

Lunch would be ready in a few minutes and none of the letters were done. She glanced distastefully at the bold handwritings scrawling, under impressive stamped addresses with telephone numbers, and names of stations and telegraphic addresses, across the well-shaped sheets of expensive note-paper, to ask in long, fussy, badly-put sentences for expensive appointments. Several of the signatures were unfamiliar to her and must be looked up in the ledger in case titles might be attached. She glanced at the dates of the appointments—they could all go by the evening post. What a good thing Mr. Hancock had given up overlooking the correspondence. Mrs. Hermann’s letter he should see ... but that could not anyhow have been answered by return. The lunch-bell rang.... Mr. Orly’s letters! There was probably a telegram or some dreadful urgent thing about one or other of them that ought to have been dealt with. With beating heart she fumbled them through—each one bore the word answered in Mrs. Orly’s fine pointed hand. Thank goodness. Opening a drawer she crammed them into a crowded clip ... at least a week’s addresses to be checked or entered.... Mr. Hancock’s unanswered letters went into the same drawer, leaving her table fairly clear. Mr. Leyton’s door burst open, he clattered down the basement stairs. Miriam went into his room and washed her hands in the corner basin under the patent unleaking taps. Everything was splashed over with permanganate of potash. The smell of the room combined all the dental drugs with the odour of leather—a volunteer officer’s accoutrements lay in confusion all over on the secretaire. Beside them stood an open pot of leather polish. Mr. and Mrs. Orly passed the open door and went downstairs. They were alone. The guest had gone.

10

“Come and share the remains of the banquet Miss Hens’n.”

“Do have just a bit of somethin’, Ro darling, a bit of chicking or somethin’.”

“Feeling the effects?” remarked Mr. Leyton cheerfully munching, “I’ve got a patient at half past” he added nervously glancing up as if to justify his existence as well as his remark. Miriam hoped he would go on; perhaps it would occur to Mrs. Orly to ask him about the patient.

“You’d feel the effects my boy if you hadn’t had a wink the whole blessed night.”

“Hancock busy Miss Hens’?” Miriam glanced at the flushed forehead and hoped that Mr. Orly would remain with his elbows on the table and his face hidden in his hands. She was hungry and there would be no peace for anybody if he were roused.

“Too many whiskies?” enquired Mr. Leyton cheerfully, shovelling salad on to his plate.

“Too much whisking and frisking altogether sergeant,” said Mr. Orly incisively, raising his head.

Mrs. Orly flushed and frowned at Mr. Orly.

“Don’t be silly Ley—you know how father hates dinner parties.”

Mr. Orly sighed harshly, pulling himself up as Miriam began a dissertation on Mr. Hancock’s crowded day.

“Ze got someone with him now?” put in Mrs. Orly perfunctorily.

“Wonderful man” sighed Mr. Orly harshly, glancing at his son.

“Have a bit of chicking Ro.”

“No my love no not all the perfumes of Araby—not all the chickens of Cheshire. Have some paté Miss Hens’—No? You despise paté?”

A maid came briskly in and looked helpfully round.

“Who’s your half past one patient Ley?” asked Mrs. Orly nervously.

“Buck” rapped Mr. Leyton. “We going to wait for Mr. Hancock, Mater?”

“No, of course not. Keep some things hot Emma and bring in the sweets.”

“Have some more chicken Miss Hens’—Emma!” he indicated his son with a flourish of his serviette. “Wait upon Mr. Leyton, serve him speedily.”

Emma arrested looked helpfully about, smiled in brisk amusement, seized some dishes and went out.

Mrs. Orly’s pinched face expanded. “Silly you are, Ro.” Miriam grinned, watching dreamily. Mr. Leyton’s flushed face rose and dipped spasmodically over the remains of his salad.

“Bucking for Buck”—laughed Mr. Orly in a soft falsetto.

“Ro, you are silly, who’s Buck, Ley?”

“Don’t question the officer Nelly.”

“Ro, you are absurd,” laughed Mrs. Orly.

“Help the jellies dearest” shouted Mr. Orly in a frowning whisper. “Have some jelly, Miss Hens’. It’s all right Ley ... glad you so busy, my son. How many did you have this morning?” Mopping his brow and whisking his person with his serviette he glanced sidelong.

“Two” said Mr. Leyton, noisily spooning up jelly, “any more of that stuff mater, how about Hancock?”

“There’s plenty here” said Mrs. Orly helping him. Miriam laboured with her jelly and glanced at the dish. People wolfed their food. It would seem so conspicuous to begin again when the fuss had died down; with Mr. Orly watching as if feeding were a contemptible self-indulgence.

“Had a beastly gold case half the morning” rapped Mr. Leyton and drank, with a gulp.

“Get any help?” said Mr. Orly glancing at Miriam.

“No” said Mr. Leyton in a non-committal tone, reaching across the table for the cheese.

“Hancock too busy?” asked Mr. Orly. “Have some more jelly, Miss Hens’n.”

“No thank you” said Miriam.

“A bit of cheese; a fragment of giddy Gorgonzola.”

“No thanks.”

Mrs. Orly brushed busily at her bodice, peering down with indrawn chin. The room was close with gas. If Mr. Hancock would only come down and give her the excuse of attending to his room.

“What you doing s’aafnoon?” asked Mr. Leyton.

“I, my boy, I don’t know,” said Mr. Orly with a heavy sigh, “string myself up, I think.”

“You’d much better string yourself round the Outer Circle and take Lennard’s advice.”

“Good advice my boy—if we all took good advice ... eh Miss Hens’n? I’ve taken twenty grains of phenacetin this morning.”

“Well, you go and get a good walk,” said Mr. Leyton clattering to his feet. “S’cuse me, Mater.”

“Right my boy! Excellent! A Daniel come to judgment! All right Ley—get on with you. Buck up and see Buck. Oh-h-h my blooming head. Excuse my language Miss Hens’n. Ah! Here’s the great man. Good morning Hancock. How are you? D’they know you’re down?”

Mr. Hancock murmured his greetings and sat down opposite Miriam with a grave preoccupied air.

“Busy?” asked Mr. Orly turning to face his partner.

“Yes—fairly” said Mr. Hancock pleasantly.

“Wonderful man.... Ley’s gone off like a bee in a gale. D’they know Hancock’s down Nelly?”

Miriam glanced at Mr. Hancock wishing he could lunch in peace. He was tired. Did he too feel oppressed with the gas and the pale madder store cupboards? ... glaring muddy hot pink?

“I’ve got a blasted head on ... excuse my language. Twenty of ’em, twenty to dinner.”

“Oh yes?” said Mr. Hancock shifting in his chair and glancing about.

“Nelly! D’they know he’s down? Start on a paté, Hancock. The remains of the banquet.”

“Oh ... well, thanks.”

“You never get heads do ye?”

Mr. Hancock smiled and began a murmuring response as he busied himself with his paté.

“Poor Ro he’s got a most awful head.... How’s your uncle Mr. Hancock?”

“Oh—thank you.... I’m afraid he’s not very flourishing.”

“He’s better than he used to be, isn’t he?”

“Well—yes, I think perhaps on the whole he is.”

“You ought to have been there, Hancock. Cleave came. He was in no end of form. Told us some fine ones. Have a biscuit and butter Miss Hens’n.”

Miriam refused and excused herself.

On her way upstairs she strolled into Mr. Leyton’s room. He greeted her with a smile—polishing instruments busily.

“Mr. Hancock busy?” he asked briskly.

“M’m.”

“You busy? I say if I have Buck in will you finish up these things?”

“All right, if you like” said Miriam, regretting her sociable impulse. “Is Mr. Buck here?” She glanced at the appointment book.

“Yes, he’s waiting.”

“You haven’t got anybody else this afternoon” observed Miriam.

“I know. But I want to be down at Headquarters by five in full kit if I possibly can. Has the Pater got anybody?”

“No. The afternoon’s marked off—he’s going out, I think. Look here, I’ll clear up your things afterwards if you want to go out. Will you want all these for Mr. Buck?”

“Oh—all right, thanks; I dunno. I’ve got to finish him off this afternoon and make him pay up.”

“Why pay up? Isn’t he trustworthy?”

“Trustworthy? A man who’s just won three hundred pounds on a horse and chucked his job on the strength of it.”

“What a fearfully insane thing to do.”

“Lost his head.”

“Is he very young?”

“Oo—’bout twenty-five.”

“H’m. I spose he’ll begin the rake’s progress.”

“That’s about it. You’ve just about hit it” said Mr. Leyton with heavy significance.

Miriam lingered.

“I boil every blessed thing after he’s been ... if that’s any indication to you.”

“Boil them!” said Miriam vaguely distressed and pondering over Mr. Leyton standing active and aseptic between her and some horror ... something infectious ... it must be that awful mysterious thing ... how awful for Mr. Leyton to have to stop his teeth.

“Boil ’em” he chuckled knowingly.

“Why on earth?” she asked.

“Well—there you are” said Mr. Leyton—“that’s all I can tell you. I boil ’em.”

“Crikey” said Miriam half in response and half in comment on his falsetto laugh, as she made for the door. “Oh, but I say, I don’t understand your boiling apparatus, Mr. Leyton.”

“All right, don’t you worry. I’ll set it all going and shove the things in. You’ve only to turn off the gas and wipe ’em. I daresay I shall have time to do them myself.”