From 5d4c4e5f7c1c5520d2e8966f7ca51622fea9008b Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Alex Cabal Date: Wed, 6 Dec 2023 16:37:08 -0600 Subject: [PATCH] Semanticate --- src/epub/text/chapter-1.xhtml | 18 +++++++++--------- src/epub/text/chapter-10.xhtml | 4 ++-- src/epub/text/chapter-2.xhtml | 6 +++--- src/epub/text/chapter-3.xhtml | 6 +++--- src/epub/text/chapter-4.xhtml | 2 +- src/epub/text/chapter-5.xhtml | 6 +++--- src/epub/text/chapter-6.xhtml | 14 +++++++------- src/epub/text/chapter-7.xhtml | 4 ++-- src/epub/text/chapter-8.xhtml | 18 +++++++++--------- src/epub/text/chapter-9.xhtml | 18 +++++++++--------- 10 files changed, 48 insertions(+), 48 deletions(-) diff --git a/src/epub/text/chapter-1.xhtml b/src/epub/text/chapter-1.xhtml index aee210c..9f859e0 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/chapter-1.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/chapter-1.xhtml @@ -8,10 +8,10 @@

I

-

A swarthy turbaned face shone at Miriam from a tapestry screen standing between her and the ferns rising from a basket framework in the bow of the window. Consulting it at intervals as the afternoon wore on, she found that it made very light of the quiet propositions that were being elaborated within hearing of her inattentive ears. Looking beyond it she could catch glimpses between the crowded fernery, when a tram was not jingling by, of a close-set palisade just across the roadway and beyond the palisade of a green level ending at a row of Spanish poplars. The trams seemed very near and noisy. When they passed by the window, the speakers had to raise their voices. Otherwise the little drawing-room was very quiet, with a strange old-fashioned quietness. It was full of old things, like the Gobelin screen, and old thoughts like the thoughts of the ladies who were sitting and talking there. She and her mother had seemed quite modern, fussy, worldly people when they had first come into the room. From the moment the three ladies had come in and begun talking to her mother, the things in the room, and the view of the distant row of poplars had grown more and more peaceful, and now at the end of an hour she felt that she, and to some extent Mrs. Henderson too, belonged to the old-world room with its quiet green outlook shut in by the poplars. Only the trams were disturbing. They came busily by, with their strange jingle-jingle, plock-plock, and made her inattentive. Why were there so many people coming by in trams? Where were they going? Why were all the trams painted that hard, dingy blue?

+

A swarthy turbaned face shone at Miriam from a tapestry screen standing between her and the ferns rising from a basket framework in the bow of the window. Consulting it at intervals as the afternoon wore on, she found that it made very light of the quiet propositions that were being elaborated within hearing of her inattentive ears. Looking beyond it she could catch glimpses between the crowded fernery, when a tram was not jingling by, of a close-set palisade just across the roadway and beyond the palisade of a green level ending at a row of Spanish poplars. The trams seemed very near and noisy. When they passed by the window, the speakers had to raise their voices. Otherwise the little drawing-room was very quiet, with a strange old-fashioned quietness. It was full of old things, like the Gobelin screen, and old thoughts like the thoughts of the ladies who were sitting and talking there. She and her mother had seemed quite modern, fussy, worldly people when they had first come into the room. From the moment the three ladies had come in and begun talking to her mother, the things in the room, and the view of the distant row of poplars had grown more and more peaceful, and now at the end of an hour she felt that she, and to some extent Mrs. Henderson too, belonged to the old-world room with its quiet green outlook shut in by the poplars. Only the trams were disturbing. They came busily by, with their strange jingle-jingle, plock-plock, and made her inattentive. Why were there so many people coming by in trams? Where were they going? Why were all the trams painted that hard, dingy blue?

The sisters talked quietly, outlining their needs in smooth gentle voices, in small broken phrases, frequently interrupting and correcting each other. Miriam heard dreamily that they wanted help with the lower school, the children from six to eight years of age, in the mornings and afternoons, and in the evenings a general superintendence of the four boarders. They kept on saying that the work was very easy and simple; there were no naughty girls⁠—hardly a single naughty girl⁠—in the school; there should be no difficult superintendence, no exercise of authority would be required.

By the time they had reached the statement of these modifications Miriam felt that she knew them quite well. The shortest, who did most of the talking and who had twinkling eyes and crooked pince-nez and soft reddish cheeks and a little red-tipped nose, and whose small coil of sheeny grey hair was pinned askew on the top of her head⁠—stray loops standing out at curious angles⁠—was Miss Jenny, the middle one. The very tall one sitting opposite her, with a delicate wrinkled creamy face and coal-black eyes and a peak of ringletted smooth coal-black hair, was the eldest, Miss Deborah. The other sister, much younger, with neat smooth green-grey hair and a long sad greyish face and faded eyes, was Miss Haddie. They were all three dressed in thin fine black material and had tiny hands and little softly moving feet. What did they think of the trams?

-

“Do you think you could manage it, chickie?” said Mrs. Henderson suddenly.

+

“Do you think you could manage it, chickie?” said Mrs. Henderson suddenly.

“I think I could.”

“No doubt, my dear, oh, no doubt,” said Miss Jenny with a little sound of laughter as she tapped her knee with the pince-nez she had plucked from their rakish perch on the reddened bridge of her nose.

“I don’t think I could teach Scripture.”

@@ -41,7 +41,7 @@

“Mother, why did you pile it on?”

They would soon be down at the corner of Banbury Park where the tram lines ended and the Favorite omnibuses were standing in the muddy road under the shadow of the railway bridge. Through the jingling of the trams, the dop-dop of the hoofs of the tram-horses and the noise of a screaming train thundering over the bridge, Miriam made her voice heard, gazing through the spotted veil at her mother’s quivering features.

“They might have made me do all sorts of things I can’t do.”

-

Mrs. Henderson’s voice, breathless with walking, made a little sound of protest, a narrowed sound that told Miriam her amusement was half annoyance. The dark, noisy bridge, the clatter and rattle and the mud through which she must plunge to an omnibus exasperated her to the limit of her endurance.

+

Mrs. Henderson’s voice, breathless with walking, made a little sound of protest, a narrowed sound that told Miriam her amusement was half annoyance. The dark, noisy bridge, the clatter and rattle and the mud through which she must plunge to an omnibus exasperated her to the limit of her endurance.

“I’d got the post,” she said angrily; “you could see it was all settled and then you went saying those things.”

Glancing at the thin shrouded features she saw the faint lift of her mother’s eyebrows and the firmly speechless mouth.

“Piccadilly⁠—jump on, chickie.”

@@ -52,7 +52,7 @@

“No, chick, you sit there.”

Miriam screwed herself into the corner seat, crossing her knees and grazing the tips of her shoes.

“This is the only place on the top of a bus.”

-

Mrs. Henderson sat down at her side.

+

Mrs. Henderson sat down at her side.

“I always make Harriett come up here when we go up to the West End.”

“Of course it’s the only place,” she insisted in response to her mother’s amused laugh. “No one smoking or talking in front; you can see out in front and you can see the shops if there are any, and you’re not falling off all the time. The bus goes on the left side of the road and tilts to the left.”

The seats were filling up and the driver appeared clambering into his place.

@@ -64,7 +64,7 @@

“Yes, but wasn’t it awfully rum their liking us in that funny way?”

“I’m sure I don’t see why they should not.”

“Oh, mother, you know what I mean. I like them. I’m perfectly sure I shall like them. D’you remember the little one saying all girls ought to marry? Why did she say that?”

-

“They are dear funny little O.M.’s,” said Mrs. Henderson merrily. She was sitting with her knees crossed, the stuff of her brown canvas dress was dragged across them into an ugly fold by the weight of the velvet panel at the side of the skirt. She looked very small and resourceless. And there were the Pernes with their house and their school. They were old maids. Of course. What then?

+

“They are dear funny little O.M.’s,” said Mrs. Henderson merrily. She was sitting with her knees crossed, the stuff of her brown canvas dress was dragged across them into an ugly fold by the weight of the velvet panel at the side of the skirt. She looked very small and resourceless. And there were the Pernes with their house and their school. They were old maids. Of course. What then?

“I never dreamed of getting such a big salary.”

“Oh, my chickie, I’m afraid it isn’t much.”

“It is, mother, it’s lovely.”

@@ -80,7 +80,7 @@

The little shock sent her mind feeling out along the road they had just left. She considered its unbroken length, its shops, its treelessness. The wide thoroughfare, up which they now began to rumble, repeated it on a larger scale. The pavements were wide causeways reached from the roadway by stone steps, three deep. The people passing along them were unlike any she knew. There were no ladies, no gentlemen, no girls or young men such as she knew. They were all alike. They were⁠ ⁠… She could find no word for the strange impression they made. It coloured the whole of the district through which they had come. It was part of the new world to which she was pledged to go on September 18th. It was her world already; and she had no words for it. She would not be able to convey it to others. She felt sure her mother had not noticed it. She must deal with it alone. To try to speak about it, even with Eve, would sap her courage. It was her secret. A strange secret for all her life as Hanover had been. But Hanover was beautiful, with distant country through the Saal windows with its colours misty in the sunlight, the beautiful, happy town and the woodland villages so near. This new secret was shabby, ugly and shabby. The half-perceived something persisted unchanged when the causeways and shops disappeared and long rows of houses streamed by, their close ranks broken only by an occasional cross road. They were large, high, flat-fronted houses with flights of grey stone steps leading to their porchless doors. They had tiny railed-in front gardens crowded with shrubs. Here and there long narrow strips of garden pushed a row of houses back from the roadway. In these longer plots stood signboards and showcases. “Photographic Studio,” “Commercial College,” “Eye Treatment,” “Academy of Dancing.”⁠ ⁠… She read the announcements with growing disquietude.

Rows of shops reappeared and densely crowded pavements, and then more high straight houses.

-

She roused herself at last from her puzzled contemplation and turned to glance at her mother. Mrs. Henderson was looking out ahead. The exhausted face was ready, Miriam saw, with its faintly questioning eyebrows and tightly-held lips, for emotional response. She turned away uneasily to the spellbound streets.

+

She roused herself at last from her puzzled contemplation and turned to glance at her mother. Mrs. Henderson was looking out ahead. The exhausted face was ready, Miriam saw, with its faintly questioning eyebrows and tightly-held lips, for emotional response. She turned away uneasily to the spellbound streets.

“Useless to try to talk about anything.⁠ ⁠… Mother would be somehow violent. She would be overpowering. The strange new impressions would be dissolved.”

But she must do something, show some sign of companionship. She began humming softly. The air was so full of clamour that she could not hear her voice. The houses and shops had disappeared. Drab brick walls were passing slowly by on either side. A goods’ yard. She deepened her humming, accentuating her phrases so that the sound might reach her companion through the reverberations of the clangour of shunting trains.

@@ -106,7 +106,7 @@

“Well, you haven’t spoken to me.”

“No.”

“I shan’t take any of my summer things there,” said Miriam.

-

Mrs. Henderson’s face twitched.

+

Mrs. Henderson’s face twitched.

“Shall I?”

“I’m afraid you haven’t very much in the way of thick clothing.”

“I’ve only got my plaid dress for every day and my mixy grey for best and my dark blue summer skirt. My velveteen skirt and my nainsook blouse are too old.”

@@ -120,7 +120,7 @@

“That’s not the point.”

“Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill, my chick.”

“I’m not making anything. The simple fact is that the grey dresses are piggy.”

-

Mrs. Henderson flushed deeply, twining and untwining her silk-gloved fingers.

+

Mrs. Henderson flushed deeply, twining and untwining her silk-gloved fingers.

“She thinks that’s ‘gross exaggeration.’ That’s what she wants to say,” pondered Miriam wearily.

They turned into Langham Place.

She glanced to see whether her mother realised where they were.

@@ -140,7 +140,7 @@

“You’ll see our A.B.C. soon. You know. The one we go to after the Saturday pops. You’ve been to it. You came to it the day we came to Madame Schumann’s farewell. It’s just round here in Piccadilly. Here it is. Glorious. I must make the others come up once more before I die. I always have a scone. I don’t like the aryated bread. We go along the Burlington Arcade too. I don’t believe you’ve ever been along there. It’s simply perfect. Glove shops and fans and a smell of the most exquisite scent everywhere.”

“Dear me. It must be very captivating.”

“Now we shall pass the parks. Oh, isn’t the sun A1 copper bottom!”

-

Mrs. Henderson laughed wistfully.

+

Mrs. Henderson laughed wistfully.

“What delicious shade under those fine old trees. I almost wish I had brought my en-tout-cas.”

“Oh no, you don’t really want it. There will be more breeze presently. The bus always begins to go quicker along here. It’s the Green Park, that one. Those are clubs that side, the West End clubs. It’s fascinating all the way along here to Hyde Park Corner. You just see Park Lane going up at the side. Park Lane. It goes wiggling away, straight into heaven. We’ve never been up there. I always read the name at the corner.”

“You ridiculous chick⁠—ah, there is the Royal Academy of Arts.”

diff --git a/src/epub/text/chapter-10.xhtml b/src/epub/text/chapter-10.xhtml index 74f59c9..7bbdc22 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/chapter-10.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/chapter-10.xhtml @@ -52,7 +52,7 @@

Julia was not happy. She dreamed fearful dreams.⁠ ⁠… Why did she speak of them as if they were something that no one in this English world into which she had come would understand? She had her strange nights all to herself there across the landing; either lying awake or sleeping and moaning all the time. The girls in her room slept like rocks and did not know that she moaned. They knew she had nightmares and sometimes cried out and woke them. But passing the open door late at night one could hear her moaning softly on every breath with closed lips. That was Julia, her life, all laid bare, moaning.⁠ ⁠… She knows she is alive and that there is no escape from being alive. But it has never made her feel breathless with joy. She laughs all day, at everybody and everything, and at night when she is naked and alone she moans; moan, moan, moan, heartbroken; wind and rain alone in the dark in a great open space.

She sometimes hinted at things, those real unknown things that were her own life unshared by anybody; in a low soft terrible broken voice, with eyes dilated and quivering lips; quite suddenly, with hardly any words. And she would speak passionately about the sea, how she hated it and could not look at it or listen to it; and of woods, the horror of woods, the trees and the shadowiness, making her crisp her hands⁠—ah yes, les mains crispées, that was the word; and she had laughed when it was explained to her.

-

It was not that she had troubles at home. Those things she seemed to find odd and amusing, like a story of the life of some other person⁠—poverty and one of her sisters “very peculiar,” another engaged to a scamp and another going to be a shop-assistant, and two more, “doties” very young, being brought up in the country with an aunt. Everything that happened to people and all the things people did seemed to her funny and amusing, “tickled her to death.” Harriett’s engagement amused her really, though she pretended to be immensely interested and asked numbers of questions in a rich deep awestruck voice⁠ ⁠… blarney.⁠ ⁠… But she wanted to hear everything, and she never forgot anything she was told. And she had been splendid about the operation⁠—really anxious, quite conscious and awake across the landing that awful night and really making you feel she was glad afterwards. “Poor Mrs. Henderson⁠—I was never so glad in my life”⁠—and always seeming to know her without having her explained. She was real there, and so strange in telling the Pernes about it and making it all easy.

+

It was not that she had troubles at home. Those things she seemed to find odd and amusing, like a story of the life of some other person⁠—poverty and one of her sisters “very peculiar,” another engaged to a scamp and another going to be a shop-assistant, and two more, “doties” very young, being brought up in the country with an aunt. Everything that happened to people and all the things people did seemed to her funny and amusing, “tickled her to death.” Harriett’s engagement amused her really, though she pretended to be immensely interested and asked numbers of questions in a rich deep awestruck voice⁠ ⁠… blarney.⁠ ⁠… But she wanted to hear everything, and she never forgot anything she was told. And she had been splendid about the operation⁠—really anxious, quite conscious and awake across the landing that awful night and really making you feel she was glad afterwards. “Poor Mrs. Henderson⁠—I was never so glad in my life”⁠—and always seeming to know her without having her explained. She was real there, and so strange in telling the Pernes about it and making it all easy.

Miriam leaned upon Julia more and more as the term went on, hating and fearing her for her secret sorrow and wondering and wondering why she appeared to have such a curious admiration and respect for herself. She could understand her adoration for the Pernes; she saw them as they were and had a phrase which partly explained them, “no more knowledge of the world than babes”⁠—but what was it in herself that Julia seemed so fiercely and shyly to admire?

She knew she could not let Julia know how she enjoyed washing her hands, in several soapings, in the cold water, before dinner. They would go their favourite midday walk, down the long avenue in the park through the little windings of the shrubbery and into the chrysanthemum show, strolling about in the large greenhouse, all the girls glad of the escape from a set walk, reading over every day the strange names on the little wooden stakes, jokes and gigglings and tiresomenesses all kept within bounds by the happiness that there was, inside the great quiet steamy glasshouse, in the strange raw bitter scent of the great flowers, in the strange huge way they stood, and with all their differences of shape and colour staring quietly at you, all in the same way with one expression. They were startling, amongst their grey leaves; and they looked startled and held their heads as if they knew they were beautiful. The girls always hurried to get to the chrysanthemums and came away all of them walking in twos relieved and happy back through the cold park to dinner. But Julia, who loved the flowers, though she made fun of their names in certain moods and dropped them sotto voce into the general conversation at the dinner-table would have, Miriam felt sure, scorned her own feeling of satisfaction in the great hand-washing and the good dinner. And she detested pease pudding with the meat, and boiled suet pudding with treacle.

@@ -64,7 +64,7 @@

The news, the great great news, wonderful Sarah away somewhere in the background with her miracle⁠—telling it out to the table of women was a sort of public announcement that life was moving out on to wider levels. They all knew it, pinned there; and how dear and glad they were, for a moment, making it real, acknowledging by their looks how wonderful it was. Sarah, floating above them all, caught up out of the darkness of everyday life.⁠ ⁠… And then Julia’s eyes⁠—veiled for a moment while she politely stirred and curved her lips to a smile⁠—cutting through it all, seeming to say that nothing was really touched or changed. But when the table had turned to jealousy and resentment and it was time to pretend to hide the shaft of light and cease to listen to the music, Julia, cool and steady, covered everything up and made conversation.

And the thought of Julia was always a disturbance in going to tea with the Brooms. Grace Broom was the only girl in the school for whom she had an active aversion. She put one or two questions about them, “You really like going there?” “You’ll go on seeing them after you leave?” and concluded carelessly “that’s a mystery to me⁠—”

-

Sitting at tea shut in in the Brooms’ little dining room with the blinds down and the dark red rep curtains drawn and the gaslight and brilliant firelight shining on the brilliantly polished davenport in the window-space and the thick bevelled glass of the satsuma-laden mahogany sideboard, the dim cracked oil-painting of Shakespeare above the mantel-shelf, the dark old landscapes round the little walls, the new picture of Queen Victoria leaning on a stick and supported by Hindu servants, receiving a minister, the solid silver tea-service, the fine heavily edged linen table-cover, the gleaming, various, delicately filled dishes, the great bowl of flowers, the heavy, carven, unmoved, age-long dreaming faces of the three women with their living interested eyes, she would suddenly, in the midst of a deep, calm undisturbing silence become aware of Julia. Julia would not be impressed by the surroundings, the strange silent deeps of the room. She would discover only that she was with people who revered “our Queen” and despised “the working classes.” It would be no satisfaction to her to sit drinking from very exquisite old china, cup after cup of delicious very hot tea, laughing to tears over the story of the curate who knelt insecurely on a high kneeling stool at evening service in a country church and crashing suddenly down in the middle of a long prayer went on quietly intoning from the floor, or the madeira cake that leapt from the cake-dish on an at-home day and rolled under the sofa. She would laugh, but she would look from face to face, privately, and wonder. She would not really like the three rather dignified seated forms with the brilliant, tear-filled eyes, sitting on over tea, telling anecdotes, and tales of long strange illnesses suffered by strange hidden people in quiet houses, weddings, deaths, the stories of families separated for life by quarrels over money, stories of far-off holidays in the country; strange sloping rooms and farmhouse adventures; the cow that walked into the bank in a little country town.⁠ ⁠… Mrs. Philps’ first vision, as a bride, of the English Lakes, the tone of her voice as she talked about all these things.

+

Sitting at tea shut in in the Brooms’ little dining room with the blinds down and the dark red rep curtains drawn and the gaslight and brilliant firelight shining on the brilliantly polished davenport in the window-space and the thick bevelled glass of the satsuma-laden mahogany sideboard, the dim cracked oil-painting of Shakespeare above the mantel-shelf, the dark old landscapes round the little walls, the new picture of Queen Victoria leaning on a stick and supported by Hindu servants, receiving a minister, the solid silver tea-service, the fine heavily edged linen table-cover, the gleaming, various, delicately filled dishes, the great bowl of flowers, the heavy, carven, unmoved, age-long dreaming faces of the three women with their living interested eyes, she would suddenly, in the midst of a deep, calm undisturbing silence become aware of Julia. Julia would not be impressed by the surroundings, the strange silent deeps of the room. She would discover only that she was with people who revered “our Queen” and despised “the working classes.” It would be no satisfaction to her to sit drinking from very exquisite old china, cup after cup of delicious very hot tea, laughing to tears over the story of the curate who knelt insecurely on a high kneeling stool at evening service in a country church and crashing suddenly down in the middle of a long prayer went on quietly intoning from the floor, or the madeira cake that leapt from the cake-dish on an at-home day and rolled under the sofa. She would laugh, but she would look from face to face, privately, and wonder. She would not really like the three rather dignified seated forms with the brilliant, tear-filled eyes, sitting on over tea, telling anecdotes, and tales of long strange illnesses suffered by strange hidden people in quiet houses, weddings, deaths, the stories of families separated for life by quarrels over money, stories of far-off holidays in the country; strange sloping rooms and farmhouse adventures; the cow that walked into the bank in a little country town.⁠ ⁠… Mrs. Philps’ first vision, as a bride, of the English Lakes, the tone of her voice as she talked about all these things.

The getting together and sitting about and laughing in the little room would never be to her like being in a world that was independent of all the other worlds. She would not want to go again and again and sit, just the four women, at tea, talking. The silent, beautifully kept, experienced old furniture all over the house would not fill her with fear and delight and strength. It would be no satisfaction to her to put on her things in front of the huge plate glass of the enormous double-fronted wardrobe in the spare-room with its old Bruges ware and its faded photographs of the interiors of unknown churches, rows and rows of seats and a faded blur where the altar was, thorn-crowned heads and bold scrolly texts embroidered in crimson and gold silken mounted and oak-framed. And when she went home alone along the quiet, dark, narrow, tree-filled little roadways she would not feel gay and strong and full of personality.

On prize-giving day, Miriam’s last day, Julia seemed to disappear. For the first time since she had come to the school it was as if she were not there. She was neither talking nor watching nor steering anything at all. Again and again during the ceremonies Miriam looked at her sitting or moving about, pale and plain and shabby, one of the crowd of girls.

diff --git a/src/epub/text/chapter-2.xhtml b/src/epub/text/chapter-2.xhtml index 31e1ecd..b42cc66 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/chapter-2.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/chapter-2.xhtml @@ -15,7 +15,7 @@

“What shall I play?” said the guest.

“What have you there?”

“Gluck⁠ ⁠… Klassische Stücke⁠ ⁠… Cavatina.”

-

“Ah, Gluck,” said Mr. Henderson, smoothing his long knees with outspread fingers.

+

“Ah, Gluck,” said Mr. Henderson, smoothing his long knees with outspread fingers.

“Have you got that Beethoven thing?” asked Sarah.

“Not here, Sally.”

“I saw it⁠—on the piano⁠—with chords,” said Sarah excitedly.

@@ -144,7 +144,7 @@

“Oh, well, we won’t talk. We’ll go and arrange your chignon.”

“I’m going to have simply twists and perhaps a hair ornament.”

-

Miriam reached the conservatory from the garden door and set about opening the lid of the grand piano. She could see at the far end of the almost empty drawing-room a little ruddy thickset bearded man with a roll of music under his arm talking to her mother. He was standing very near to her, surrounding her with his eager presence. “Mother’s wonderful,” thought Miriam, with a moment’s adoration for Mrs. Henderson’s softly-smiling girlish tremulousness. Listening to the man’s hilarious expostulating narrative voice she fumbled hastily for her waltz amongst the scattered piles of music on the lid of the piano.

+

Miriam reached the conservatory from the garden door and set about opening the lid of the grand piano. She could see at the far end of the almost empty drawing-room a little ruddy thickset bearded man with a roll of music under his arm talking to her mother. He was standing very near to her, surrounding her with his eager presence. “Mother’s wonderful,” thought Miriam, with a moment’s adoration for Mrs. Henderson’s softly-smiling girlish tremulousness. Listening to the man’s hilarious expostulating narrative voice she fumbled hastily for her waltz amongst the scattered piles of music on the lid of the piano.

As she struck her opening chords she watched her mother gently quell the narrative and steer the sturdy form towards a group of people hesitating in the doorway. “Have they had coffee?” she wondered anxiously. “Is Mary driving them into the dining room properly?” Before she had reached the end of her second page everyone had disappeared. She paused a moment and looked down the brightly lit empty room⁠—the sight of the cold sheeny drugget filled her with despair. The hilarious voice resounded in the hall. There couldn’t be many there yet. Were they all looking after them properly? For a moment she was tempted to leave her piano and go and make some desperate attempt at geniality. Then the sound of the pervading voice back again in the room and brisk footsteps coming towards the conservatory drove her back to her music. The little man stepped quickly over the low moulding into the conservatory.

“Ah, Mariamne,” he blared gently.

“Oh, Bennett, you angel, how did you get here so early?” responded Miriam, playing with zealous emphasis.

@@ -271,7 +271,7 @@

She began to talk and laugh at random as they neared the lawn lit by the glaring uncurtained windows.

Consulting his scrutinising face as they danced easily in the as yet half-empty room, he humming the waltz which swung with their movement, she found narrow, glinting eyes looking into her own; strange eyes that knew all about a big business and were going to Paris and New York. His stranger’s face was going away, to be washed and shaved innumerable times, keeping its assurance in strange places she knew nothing about.

Here, just for these few hours, laughing at Ted. A phrase flashed through her brain, “He’s brought Ted to his senses.” She flushed and laughed vaguely and danced with a feeling of tireless strength and gaiety. She knew the phrase was not her own. It was one Nan Babington could have used. It excited her. It meant that real things were going to happen, she could bear herself proudly in the room. She rippled complacently at Max. The room was full of whirling forms, swelling and shrinking as they crossed and recrossed the line between the clear vision rimmed by her glasses and the surrounding bright confusion. Swift, rhythmic movement, unbroken and unjostled, told her how well they were dancing. She was secure, landed in life, dancing carelessly out and out to a life of her own.

-

“I go; I see you again in a year,” said Max suddenly, drawing up near the door where Mrs. Henderson stood sipping coffee with Sarah and Bennett.

+

“I go; I see you again in a year,” said Max suddenly, drawing up near the door where Mrs. Henderson stood sipping coffee with Sarah and Bennett.

“Where is Burton?” he asked in the midst of his thanks and leave-taking.

They all hesitated. Miriam suddenly found herself in the presence of a tribunal.

Bennett’s careless “Oh, he’s gone; couldn’t stay,” followed her as she flung upstairs to Meg Wedderburn’s empty room. Why had her mother looked so self-conscious and Sarah avoided her eye⁠ ⁠… standing there like a little group of conspirators.

diff --git a/src/epub/text/chapter-3.xhtml b/src/epub/text/chapter-3.xhtml index 01acea8..5d3b419 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/chapter-3.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/chapter-3.xhtml @@ -60,13 +60,13 @@

Miss Perne sat smilingly upright, her black eyes blinking rapidly at the far-off bookshelves.

“I did not speak to them⁠—”

“Eh, Deborah, why not?” scolded Miss Jenny as Miss Perne drew breath.

-

“I did not speak to them,” went on Miss Deborah, beaming delightedly at the bookcase, “for the very good reason that I was not sufficiently near to them. I was walking upon the asphalt pathway surrounding the lake and had just become engaged in conversation with Mrs. Brinkwell, who had stopped me for the purpose of giving me further details with regard to Constance’s prolonged absence from school, when I saw Polly and Eunice apparently chasing one another across the recreation ground in the condition I have described to you.”

+

“I did not speak to them,” went on Miss Deborah, beaming delightedly at the bookcase, “for the very good reason that I was not sufficiently near to them. I was walking upon the asphalt pathway surrounding the lake and had just become engaged in conversation with Mrs. Brinkwell, who had stopped me for the purpose of giving me further details with regard to Constance’s prolonged absence from school, when I saw Polly and Eunice apparently chasing one another across the recreation ground in the condition I have described to you.”

Miriam, who had felt Miss Haddie’s scorn-filled eyes playing watchfully over her, sat pressing the sharp edge of her high heel into her ankle.

“Eh, my dear, what a pity you couldn’t speak to them. They’ve no business at all in the recreation ground where the rough boys go.”

“Well, I have described to you the circumstances, my dear, and the impossibility of my undertaking any kind of intervention.”

“Eh, well, Deborah my dear, I think I should have done something. Don’t you think you ought? Eh? Called someone perhaps⁠—eh?⁠—or managed to get at the gels in some way⁠—dear, dear, what is to be done? You see it is hardly of any use to speak to them afterwards. You want to catch them red-handed and make them feel ashamed of themselves.”

-

“I am fully prepared to admit, my dear Jenny, the justice of all that you say. But I can only repeat that in the circumstances in which I found myself I was entirely unable to exercise any control whatever upon the doings of the gels. They were running; and long before I was free from Mrs. Brinkwell they were out of sight.”

-

Miss Perne spoke in a clear, high, narrative tone that seemed each moment on the point of delighted laughter, her delicate head held high, her finely wrinkled face puckering with restrained pleasure. Miriam saw vividly the picture in the park, the dreadful, mean, grubby lake, the sad asphalt pathway all round it, the shabby London greenery, the October wind rushing through it, Miss Perne’s high stylish arrowy figure fluttered by the wind, swaying in her response to Mrs. Brinkwell’s story, the dreadful asphalt playground away to the left, its gaunt swings and bars⁠—gallows.⁠ ⁠… Ingoldsby⁠—the girls rushing across it, and held herself sternly back from a vision of Miss Perne chasing the delinquents down the wind. Why did Miss Perne speak so triumphantly? As much as to say There, my dear Jenny, there’s a problem you can’t answer. She enjoyed telling the tale and was not really upset about the girls. She spoke exactly as if she were reading aloud from Robinson Crusoe. Miss Haddie was watching again, flashing her eyes about as she gently spooned up her bread and milk. Miriam wished she knew whether Miss Haddie knew how difficult it was to listen gravely. She was evidently angry and disgusted. But still she could watch.

+

“I am fully prepared to admit, my dear Jenny, the justice of all that you say. But I can only repeat that in the circumstances in which I found myself I was entirely unable to exercise any control whatever upon the doings of the gels. They were running; and long before I was free from Mrs. Brinkwell they were out of sight.”

+

Miss Perne spoke in a clear, high, narrative tone that seemed each moment on the point of delighted laughter, her delicate head held high, her finely wrinkled face puckering with restrained pleasure. Miriam saw vividly the picture in the park, the dreadful, mean, grubby lake, the sad asphalt pathway all round it, the shabby London greenery, the October wind rushing through it, Miss Perne’s high stylish arrowy figure fluttered by the wind, swaying in her response to Mrs. Brinkwell’s story, the dreadful asphalt playground away to the left, its gaunt swings and bars⁠—gallows.⁠ ⁠… Ingoldsby⁠—the girls rushing across it, and held herself sternly back from a vision of Miss Perne chasing the delinquents down the wind. Why did Miss Perne speak so triumphantly? As much as to say There, my dear Jenny, there’s a problem you can’t answer. She enjoyed telling the tale and was not really upset about the girls. She spoke exactly as if she were reading aloud from Robinson Crusoe. Miss Haddie was watching again, flashing her eyes about as she gently spooned up her bread and milk. Miriam wished she knew whether Miss Haddie knew how difficult it was to listen gravely. She was evidently angry and disgusted. But still she could watch.

“Did ye go that way at all afterwards⁠—the way the girls went?”

“I did not,” beamed Miss Perne, turning to Miss Jenny as if waiting for a judgment.

“Well, eh, I’m sure, really, it’s most diffikilt. What is one to do with these gels? Now, Miriam, here’s something for you to exercise your wits upon. What would ye do, eh?”

diff --git a/src/epub/text/chapter-4.xhtml b/src/epub/text/chapter-4.xhtml index c6630bf..9594682 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/chapter-4.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/chapter-4.xhtml @@ -94,7 +94,7 @@

“Oh well, I don’t know. I suppose I was wondering what it was all about.”

“I don’t think I quite understand ye.”

“Well, I mean⁠—what that old gentleman was in such a state of mind about.”

-

“D’ye mean Mr. La Trobe!”

+

“D’ye mean Mr. La Trobe!”

“Yes. Why do you laugh?”

“I don’t understand what ye mean.”

Miriam watched Miss Haddie’s thin fingers feeling for the pins in her black toque. “Of course not,” she thought, looking at the unveiled shrivelled cheek.⁠ ⁠… “thirty-five years of being a lady.”

diff --git a/src/epub/text/chapter-5.xhtml b/src/epub/text/chapter-5.xhtml index 0fef2af..85390b1 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/chapter-5.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/chapter-5.xhtml @@ -14,7 +14,7 @@

“I like being here,” she said hoarsely, looking down, and supported herself by putting two trembling fingers on the hall table. She was holding back from the gnawing of the despair that had made her sick with pain when she heard once more the jingle-jingle, plock-plock of the North London trams. This strong feeling of pride in Miss Perne was beating it down. “I’m very glad, my dear,” responded Miss Perne in a quivering gleeful falsetto. “If you can’t have what you like you must like what you have,” said Miriam over and over to herself as she went with heavy feet up the four flights of stairs.

A candle was already burning in the empty bedroom. “I’m back. I’m back. It’s all over,” she gasped as she shut the door. “And a jolly good thing too. This is my place. I can keep myself here and cost nothing and not interfere with anybody. It’s just as if I’d never been away. It’ll always be like that now. Short holidays, gone in a minute, and then the long term. Getting out of touch with everything, things happening, knowing nothing about them, going home like a visitor, and people talking to you about things that are only theirs, now and not wanting to hear about yours⁠ ⁠… not about the little real everyday things that give you an idea of anything but only the startling things that are not important. You have to think of them though to make people interested⁠—awful, awful, awful, really only putting people further away afterwards when you’ve told the thing and their interest dies down and you can’t think of anything else to say. ‘Miss Perne’s hair is perfectly black⁠—as black as coal, and she’s the eldest, just fancy.’ Then everybody looks up. ‘My room’s downstairs, the room where I teach, is in the basement. Directly breakfast is over⁠—’

-

“ ‘Basement? What a pity! Basement rooms are awfully bad,’ and by the time you have stopped them exclaiming and are just going to begin, you see that they are fidgetting and thinking about something else.”⁠ ⁠… Eve had listened a little; because she wanted to tell everything about her own place and had agreed that nobody really wanted to hear the details.⁠ ⁠… The landscapes from the windows of the big country house, all like pictures by Leader, the stables and laundry, a “laundry-maid” who was sixty-five, the eldest pupil with seven muslin dresses in the summer and being scolded because she swelled out after two helpings of meat and two of pie and cream, and the youngest almost square in her little covert coat and with a square face and large blue eyes and the puppies who went out in a boat in Weston-super-Mare and were seasick.⁠ ⁠… Eve did not seem to mind the family being common. Eve was changing. “They are so jolly and strong. They enjoy life. They’re like other people.”⁠ ⁠… “D’you think that’s jolly? Would you like to be like that⁠—like other people?” “Rather. I mean to be.” “Do you?” “Of course it can’t be done all at once. But it’s good for me to be there. It’s awfully jolly to be in a house with no worry about money and plenty of jolly food. Mrs. Green is so strong and clever. She can do anything. She’s good for me, she keeps me going.” “Would you like to be like her?” “Of course. They’re all so jolly⁠—even when they’re old. Her sister’s forty and she’s still pretty; not given up hope a bit.” “Eve!”

+

“ ‘Basement? What a pity! Basement rooms are awfully bad,’ and by the time you have stopped them exclaiming and are just going to begin, you see that they are fidgetting and thinking about something else.”⁠ ⁠… Eve had listened a little; because she wanted to tell everything about her own place and had agreed that nobody really wanted to hear the details.⁠ ⁠… The landscapes from the windows of the big country house, all like pictures by Leader, the stables and laundry, a “laundry-maid” who was sixty-five, the eldest pupil with seven muslin dresses in the summer and being scolded because she swelled out after two helpings of meat and two of pie and cream, and the youngest almost square in her little covert coat and with a square face and large blue eyes and the puppies who went out in a boat in Weston-super-Mare and were seasick.⁠ ⁠… Eve did not seem to mind the family being common. Eve was changing. “They are so jolly and strong. They enjoy life. They’re like other people.”⁠ ⁠… “D’you think that’s jolly? Would you like to be like that⁠—like other people?” “Rather. I mean to be.” “Do you?” “Of course it can’t be done all at once. But it’s good for me to be there. It’s awfully jolly to be in a house with no worry about money and plenty of jolly food. Mrs. Green is so strong and clever. She can do anything. She’s good for me, she keeps me going.” “Would you like to be like her?” “Of course. They’re all so jolly⁠—even when they’re old. Her sister’s forty and she’s still pretty; not given up hope a bit.” “Eve!”

Eve had listened; but not agreed about the teaching, about making the girls see how easy it was to get hold of the things and then letting them talk about other things. “I see how you do it, and I see why the girls obey you, of course.” Funny. Eve thought it was hard and inhuman. That’s what she really thought.

Two newly purchased lengths of spotted net veiling were lying at the top of her lightly packed trunk partly folded in uncrumpled tissue paper. She took the crisp dye-scented net very gently into her hands, getting, sitting alone on the floor by her trunk, the full satisfaction that had failed her in the shop with Harriett’s surprise at her sudden desire flowing over the counter and infecting the charm of baskets full of cheap stockings and common bright-bordered handkerchiefs some of which had borders so narrow and faint as really hardly to show when they were scrumpled up. “Veiling, moddom? Yes, moddom,” the assistant had retorted when she had asked for a veil. “Wot on earth fower?”⁠ ⁠… Without answering Harriett she had bought two. There was no need to have bought two. One could go back in the trunk as a store. They would be the beginning of gradually getting a “suitable outfit,” “things convenient for you.” She got up to put a veil in the little top drawer very carefully; trying it across her face first. It almost obliterated her features in the dim candlelight. It would be the greatest comfort on winter walks, warm and like a rampart. “You’ve no idea how warm it keeps you,” she could say if anybody said anything. She arranged her clothes very slowly and exactly in her half of the chest of drawers. “My appointments ought to be an influence in the room⁠—until all my things are perfectly refined I shan’t be able to influence the girls as I ought. I must begin it from now. At the end of the term I shall be stronger. From strength to strength.” She wished she could go to bed at once and prepare for tomorrow lying alone in the dark with the trams going up and down outside as they would do night by night for the rest of her life.

@@ -28,8 +28,8 @@

“You are not one to be easily happy. But that is no reason why you should say you pity anyone undertaking to pass through life at your side. Don’t let your thoughts and ideas allow you to miss happiness. Women are made to find and dispense happiness. Even intense women like yourself. But you won’t find it an easy matter to discover your mate.

“Have you ever thought of committing your ideas to paper? There’s a book called The Confessions of a Woman. It had a great sale and its composition occupied the authoress for only six weeks. You could write in your holidays.

“Think over what I’ve told you, my dear, dear girl. And don’t forget old Bob Greville’s address. You’re eighteen. He’s only eight; eight Adam Street. The old Adam. Waiting to hear from the new Eve⁠—whenever she’s unhappy.”

-

He would be there again, old flatterer, with his steely blue eyes and that strong little Dr. Conelly⁠—Conelly who held you like a vice and swung you round and kept putting you back from him to say things. “If only you knew the refreshment it is to dance with a girl who can talk sense and doesn’t giggle.⁠ ⁠… Yes yes yes, women are physically incapable of keeping a secret.⁠ ⁠… Meredith, he’s the man. He understands woman as no other writer⁠—” And the little dark man⁠—De Vigne⁠—who danced like a snake.⁠ ⁠… Tired? Divinely drowsy? That’s what I like. Don’t talk. Let yourself go. Little snail, Harriett called him. And that giant, Conelly’s friend, whirling you round the room like a gust, with his eyes fixed far away in the distance and dropping you with the chaperones at the end of the dance. If he had suddenly said “Let yourself go”⁠ ⁠… He too would have become a snail. God has made life ugly.

-

Dear Mr. Greville, dear Bob. Do you know anything about a writer called Meredith? If you have one of his books I should like to read it. No. Dear Bob, I’m simply wretched. I want to talk to you.

+

He would be there again, old flatterer, with his steely blue eyes and that strong little Dr. Conelly⁠—Conelly who held you like a vice and swung you round and kept putting you back from him to say things. “If only you knew the refreshment it is to dance with a girl who can talk sense and doesn’t giggle.⁠ ⁠… Yes yes yes, women are physically incapable of keeping a secret.⁠ ⁠… Meredith, he’s the man. He understands woman as no other writer⁠—” And the little dark man⁠—De Vigne⁠—who danced like a snake.⁠ ⁠… Tired? Divinely drowsy? That’s what I like. Don’t talk. Let yourself go. Little snail, Harriett called him. And that giant, Conelly’s friend, whirling you round the room like a gust, with his eyes fixed far away in the distance and dropping you with the chaperones at the end of the dance. If he had suddenly said “Let yourself go”⁠ ⁠… He too would have become a snail. God has made life ugly.

+

Dear Mr. Greville, dear Bob. Do you know anything about a writer called Meredith? If you have one of his books I should like to read it. No. Dear Bob, I’m simply wretched. I want to talk to you.

Footsteps sounded on the stairs⁠—the servants, coming upstairs to bed. No dancing for them. Work, caps and aprons. And those strange rooms upstairs to sleep in that nobody ever saw. Probably Miss Perne went up occasionally to look at them and see that they were all right; clean and tidy.⁠ ⁠… They had to go up every night, carrying little jugs of water and making no noise on the stairs, and come down every morning. They were the servants⁠—and there would never be any dancing. Nobody thought about them.⁠ ⁠… They could not get away from each other, and cook.⁠ ⁠…

To be a general servant would be very hard work. Perhaps impossible. But there would be two rooms, the kitchen at the bottom of the house, and a bedroom at the top, your own. It would not matter what the family was like. You would look after them, like children, and be alone to read and sleep.⁠ ⁠… Toothache. Cheap dentists; a red lamp “painless extractions”⁠ ⁠… having to go there before nine in the morning, and be alone in a cold room, the dentist doing what he thought best and coming back to your work crying with pain, your head wrapped up in a black shawl. Hospitals; being quite helpless and grateful for wrong treatment; coming back to work, ill. Sinks and slops⁠ ⁠… quinsey, all alone⁠ ⁠… growths⁠ ⁠… consumption.

diff --git a/src/epub/text/chapter-6.xhtml b/src/epub/text/chapter-6.xhtml index f2ed2ca..cf84298 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/chapter-6.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/chapter-6.xhtml @@ -10,7 +10,7 @@

VI

Piecemeal statements in her letter home brought Miriam now and again a momentary sense of developing activities, but she did not recognise the completeness of the change in her position at the school until halfway through her second term she found herself talking to the new pupil teacher. She had heard apathetically of her existence during supper-table conversations with the Misses Perne at the beginning of the term. She was an Irish girl of sixteen, one of a large family living on the outskirts of Dublin, and would be a boarder, attending the first class for English and earning pocket money by helping with the lower school. As the weeks went on and Miriam grew accustomed to hearing her name⁠—Julia Doyle⁠—she began to associate it with an idea of charm that brought her a sinking of heart. She knew her position in the esteem of the Pernes was secure. But this new young teacher would work strange miracles with the girls. She would do it quite easily and unconsciously. The girls would be easy with her and would laugh and one would have to hear them.

However, when at last her arrival was near and the three ladies discussed the difficulty of having her met, Miriam plied them until they reluctantly gave her permission to go, taking a workman’s train that would bring her to Euston station at seven o’clock in the morning.

-

At the end of an hour spent pacing the half-dark platform exhausted with cold and excitement and the monotonously reiterated effort to imagine the arrival of one of Mrs. Hungerford’s heroines from a train journey, Miriam, whose costume had been described in a letter to the girl’s mother, was startled wandering amidst the vociferous passengers at the luggage end of the newly arrived train by a liquid colourless intimate voice at her elbow. “I think I’ll be right to say how d’you do.”

+

At the end of an hour spent pacing the half-dark platform exhausted with cold and excitement and the monotonously reiterated effort to imagine the arrival of one of Mrs. Hungerford’s heroines from a train journey, Miriam, whose costume had been described in a letter to the girl’s mother, was startled wandering amidst the vociferous passengers at the luggage end of the newly arrived train by a liquid colourless intimate voice at her elbow. “I think I’ll be right to say how d’you do.”

She turned and saw a slender girl in a middle-aged toque and an ill-cut old-fashioned coat and skirt. What were they to say to each other, two dowdy struggling women both in the same box? She must get her to Banbury Park as quickly as possible. It was dreadful that they should be seen together there on the platform in their ragbag clothes. At any rate they must not talk. “Oh, I’m very pleased to see you. I’m glad you’ve come. I suppose the train must have been late,” she said eagerly.

“Ah, we’ll be late I dare venture. Haven’t an idea of the hour.”

“Oh, yes,” said Miriam emphatically, “I’m sure the train’s late.”

@@ -88,7 +88,7 @@

Early in May came a day of steady rain. Enveloped in a rain-cloak and sheltered under her lowered umbrella she ventured down the hill towards the shops. Near the railway arch the overshadowed street began to be crowded with jostling figures. People were pouring from the city trams at the terminus and coming out of the station entrance in a steady stream. Hard intent faces, clashing umbrellas, the harsh snarling monotone of the North London voice gave her the feeling of being an intruder. Everything seemed to wonder what she was doing down there instead of being at home in the schoolroom. A sudden angry eye above a coarse loudly talking mouth all but made her turn to go with instead of against the tide; but she pushed blindly on and through and presently found herself in a quiet side street just off the station road looking into a shop window.⁠ ⁠… “1 lb. super cream-laid boudoir note⁠—with envelopes⁠—1s.” Her eyes moved about the window from packet to packet, set askew and shining with freshness. If she had not brought so much notepaper from home she could have bought some. Perhaps she could buy a packet as a Christmas present for Eve and have it in her top drawer all the time. But there was plenty of notepaper at home. She half turned to go, and turning back fastened herself more closely against the window meaninglessly reading the inscription on each packet. Standing back at last she still lingered. A little blue-painted tin plate sticking out from the side of the window announced in white letters “Carter Paterson.” Miriam dimly wondered at the connection. Underneath it hung a cardboard printed in ink, “Circulating Library, 2d. weekly.” This was still more mysterious. She timidly approached the door and met the large pleasant eye of a man standing back in the doorway.

“Is there a library here?” she said with beating heart.

-

She stood so long reading and rereading half familiar titles, Cometh Up as a Flower, Not Like Other Girls, The Heir of Redcliffe, books that she and Harriett had read and books that she felt were of a similar type, that tea was already on the schoolroom table when she reached Wordsworth House with an unknown volume by Mrs. Hungerford under her arm. Hiding it upstairs, she came down to tea and sat recovering her composure over her paper-covered Cinq-Mars, a relic of the senior Oxford examination now grown suddenly rich and amazing. Today it could not hold her. The Madcap was upstairs, and beyond it an unlimited supply of twopenny volumes and Ouida. Red-bound volumes of Ouida on the bottom shelf had sent her eyes quickly back to the safety of the upper rows. Through the whole of teatime she was quietly aware of a discussion going on at the back of her mind as to who it was who had told her that Ouida’s books were bad; evil books. She remembered her father’s voice saying that Ouida was an extremely able woman, quite a politician. Then of course her books were all right, for grown-up people. It must have been someone at a dance who had made her curious about them, someone she had forgotten. In any case, whatever they were, there was no one now to prevent her reading them if she chose. She would read them if she chose. Write to Eve about it first. No. Certainly not. Eve might say “Better not, my dear. You will regret it if you do. You won’t be the same.” Eve was different. She must not be led by Eve in any case. She must leave off being led by Eve⁠—or anybody. The figures sitting round the table, bent over their books, quietly disinclined for conversation or mischief under the shrewd eye of Miss Haddie, suddenly looked exciting and mysterious. But perhaps the man in the shop would be shocked. It would be impossible to ask for them; unless she could pretend she did not know anything about them.

+

She stood so long reading and rereading half familiar titles, Cometh Up as a Flower, Not Like Other Girls, The Heir of Redcliffe, books that she and Harriett had read and books that she felt were of a similar type, that tea was already on the schoolroom table when she reached Wordsworth House with an unknown volume by Mrs. Hungerford under her arm. Hiding it upstairs, she came down to tea and sat recovering her composure over her paper-covered Cinq-Mars, a relic of the senior Oxford examination now grown suddenly rich and amazing. Today it could not hold her. The Madcap was upstairs, and beyond it an unlimited supply of twopenny volumes and Ouida. Red-bound volumes of Ouida on the bottom shelf had sent her eyes quickly back to the safety of the upper rows. Through the whole of teatime she was quietly aware of a discussion going on at the back of her mind as to who it was who had told her that Ouida’s books were bad; evil books. She remembered her father’s voice saying that Ouida was an extremely able woman, quite a politician. Then of course her books were all right, for grown-up people. It must have been someone at a dance who had made her curious about them, someone she had forgotten. In any case, whatever they were, there was no one now to prevent her reading them if she chose. She would read them if she chose. Write to Eve about it first. No. Certainly not. Eve might say “Better not, my dear. You will regret it if you do. You won’t be the same.” Eve was different. She must not be led by Eve in any case. She must leave off being led by Eve⁠—or anybody. The figures sitting round the table, bent over their books, quietly disinclined for conversation or mischief under the shrewd eye of Miss Haddie, suddenly looked exciting and mysterious. But perhaps the man in the shop would be shocked. It would be impossible to ask for them; unless she could pretend she did not know anything about them.

For the last six weeks of the summer term she sat up night after night propped against her upright pillow and bolster under the gas jet reading her twopenny books in her silent room. Almost every night she read until two o’clock. She felt at once that she was doing wrong; that the secret novel-reading was a thing she could not confess, even to Miss Haddie. She was spending hours of the time that was meant for sleep, for restful preparation for the next day’s work, in a “vicious circle” of self-indulgence. It was sin. She had read somewhere that sin promises a satisfaction that it is unable to fulfil. But she found when the house was still and the trams had ceased jingling up and down outside that she grew steady and cool and that she rediscovered the self she had known at home, where the refuge of silence and books was always open. Perhaps that self, leaving others to do the practical things, erecting a little wall of unapproachability between herself and her family that she might be free to dream alone in corners had always been wrong. But it was herself, the nearest most intimate self she had known. And the discovery that it was not dead, that her six months in the German school and the nine long months during which Banbury Park life had drawn a veil even over the little slices of holiday freedom, had not even touched it, brought her warm moments of reassurance. It was not perhaps a “good” self, but it was herself, her own familiar secretly happy and rejoicing self⁠—not dead. Her hands lying on the coverlet knew it. They were again at these moments her own old hands, holding very firmly to things that no one might touch or even approach too nearly, things, everything, the great thing that would some day communicate itself to someone through these secret hands with the strangely thrilling fingertips. Holding them up in the gaslight she dreamed over their wisdom. They knew everything and held their secret, even from her. She eyed them, communed with them, passionately trusted them. They were not “artistic” or “clever” hands. The fingers did not “taper” nor did the outstretched thumb curl back on itself like a frond⁠—like Nan Babington’s. They were long, the tips squarish and firmly padded, the palm square and bony and supple, and the large thumb joint stood away from the rest of the hand like the thumb joint of a man. The right hand was larger than the left, kindlier, friendlier, wiser. The expression of the left hand was less reassuring. It was a narrower, lighter hand, more flexible, less sensitive and more even in its touch⁠—more smooth and manageable in playing scales. It seemed to belong to her much less than the right; but when the two were firmly interlocked they made a pleasant curious whole, the right clasping more firmly, its thumb always uppermost, its fingers separated firmly over the back of the left palm, the left hand clinging, its fingers close together against the hard knuckles of the right.

It was only when she was alone and in the intervals of quiet reading that she came into possession of her hands. With others they oppressed her by their size and their lack of feminine expressiveness. No one could fall in love with such hands. Loving her, someone might come to tolerate them. They were utterly unlike Eve’s plump, white, inflexible little palms. But they were her strength. They came between her and the world of women. They would be her companions until the end. They would wither. But the bones would not change. The bones would be laid unchanged and wise, in her grave.

@@ -97,7 +97,7 @@

Now it had all changed. The quiet house and fireside, gravity, responsibility, a greying husband, his reading profile always dear, both of them going on towards heaven, “all tears wiped away,” tears and laughter of relief after death, still seemed desirable, but “women.”⁠ ⁠… Those awful, awful women, she murmured to herself stirring in bed. I never thought of all the awful women there would be in such a life. I only thought of myself and the house and the garden and the man. What an escape! Good God in heaven, what an escape! Far better to be alone and suffering and miserable here in the school, alive.⁠ ⁠…

Then there’ll be whole heaps of books, millions of books I can’t read⁠—perhaps nearly all the books. She took one more volume of Rosa, in hope, and haunted its deeps of domesticity. “I’ve gone too far.”⁠ ⁠… If Rosa Nouchette Carey knew me, she’d make me one of the bad characters who are turned out of the happy homes. I’m some sort of bad unsimple woman. Oh, damn, damn, she sighed. I don’t know. Her hands seemed to mock her, barring her way.

-

Then came a series of Mrs. Hungerford⁠—all the volumes she had not already read. She read them eagerly, inspirited. The gabled country houses, the sunlit twilit endless gardens, the deep orchards, the falling of dew, the mists of the summer mornings, masses of flowers in large rooms with carved oaken furniture, wide staircases with huge painted windows throwing down strange patches of light on shallow thickly carpetted stairs. These were the things she wanted; gay house-parties, people with beautiful wavering complexions and masses of shimmering hair catching the light, fragrant filmy diaphanous dresses; these were the people to whom she belonged⁠—a year or two of life like that, dancing and singing in and out the houses and gardens; and then marriage. Living alone, sadly estranged, in the house of a husband who loved her and with whom she was in love, both of them thinking that the other had married because they had lost their way in a thunderstorm or spent the night sitting up on a mountain-top or because of a clause in a will, and then one day both finding out the truth.⁠ ⁠… That is what is meant by happiness⁠ ⁠… happiness. But these things could only happen to people with money. She would never have even the smallest share of that sort of life. She might get into it as a governess⁠—some of Mrs. Hungerford’s heroines were governesses⁠—but they had clouds of hair and were pathetically slender and appealing in their deep mourning. She read volume after volume, forgetting the titles⁠—the single word “Hungerford” on a cover inflamed her. Her days became an irrelevance and her evenings a dreamy sunlit indulgence. Now and again she wondered what Julia Doyle would think if she knew what she was reading and how it affected her⁠—whether she would still watch her in the way she did as she went about her work pale and tired, whether she would go on guarding her so fiercely?

+

Then came a series of Mrs. Hungerford⁠—all the volumes she had not already read. She read them eagerly, inspirited. The gabled country houses, the sunlit twilit endless gardens, the deep orchards, the falling of dew, the mists of the summer mornings, masses of flowers in large rooms with carved oaken furniture, wide staircases with huge painted windows throwing down strange patches of light on shallow thickly carpetted stairs. These were the things she wanted; gay house-parties, people with beautiful wavering complexions and masses of shimmering hair catching the light, fragrant filmy diaphanous dresses; these were the people to whom she belonged⁠—a year or two of life like that, dancing and singing in and out the houses and gardens; and then marriage. Living alone, sadly estranged, in the house of a husband who loved her and with whom she was in love, both of them thinking that the other had married because they had lost their way in a thunderstorm or spent the night sitting up on a mountain-top or because of a clause in a will, and then one day both finding out the truth.⁠ ⁠… That is what is meant by happiness⁠ ⁠… happiness. But these things could only happen to people with money. She would never have even the smallest share of that sort of life. She might get into it as a governess⁠—some of Mrs. Hungerford’s heroines were governesses⁠—but they had clouds of hair and were pathetically slender and appealing in their deep mourning. She read volume after volume, forgetting the titles⁠—the single word “Hungerford” on a cover inflamed her. Her days became an irrelevance and her evenings a dreamy sunlit indulgence. Now and again she wondered what Julia Doyle would think if she knew what she was reading and how it affected her⁠—whether she would still watch her in the way she did as she went about her work pale and tired, whether she would go on guarding her so fiercely?

At last exasperated, tired of the mocking park, the mocking happy books, she went one day to the lower shelf, and saying very calmly, “I think I’ll take a Ouida,” drew out Under Two Flags with a trembling hand. The brown-eyed man seemed to take an interminable time noting the number of the book, and when at last she got into the air her limbs were heavy with sadness. That night she read until three o’clock and finished the volume the next night at the same hour, sitting upright when the last word was read, refreshed. From that moment the red-bound volumes became the centre of her life. She read Moths and In Maremma slowly word by word, with an increasing steadiness and certainty. The mere sitting with the text held before her eyes gave her the feeling of being strongly confronted. The strange currents which came whenever she was alone and at ease flowing to the tips of her fingers, seemed to flow into the book as she held it and to be met and satisfied. As soon as the door was shut and the gas alight, she would take the precious, solid trusty volume from her drawer and fling it on her bed, to have it under her eyes while she undressed. She ceased to read her Bible and to pray. Ouida, Ouida, she would muse with the book at last in her hands. I want bad things⁠—strong bad things.⁠ ⁠… It doesn’t matter, Italy, the sky, bright hot landscapes, things happening. I don’t care what people think or say. I am older than anyone here in this house. I am myself.

@@ -112,11 +112,11 @@

If they could all get up together now and sing, let their voices peal together up and up, throw all the books out of the window, they might go on together, forward into the sunshine, but they would not want to do that. Hardly any of them would want to do that. They would look at her with knowing eyes, and look at the door, and stay where they were.

The room was very close. Polly Allen and Eunice Dupont, sitting together at a little card-table in the darkest corner of the room, were whispering. With beating heart Miriam got up and went and stood before them. “You two are talking,” she said with her eyes on the thickness of Polly’s shoulders as she sat in profile to the room. Eunice, opposite her, against the wall, flashed up at her her beautiful fugitive grin as from the darkness of a wood. History, thought Miriam. What has Eunice to do with history, laws, Henry II, the English Constitution? “You don’t talk,” she said coldly, feeling as she watched her that Eunice’s pretty clothes were stripped away and she were stabbing at her soft rounded body, “at examinations. Can’t you see that?” Eunice’s pale face grew livid. “First because it isn’t fair and also because it disturbs other people.” You can tell all the people who cheat by their smile, she reflected on her way back. Eunice chuckled serenely two or three times. “What have these North London girls to do with studies?”⁠ ⁠… There was not a single girl like Eunice at Barnes. Even the very pretty girls were⁠ ⁠… refined.

-

That afternoon Miriam spent her hour of leisure in calling on the Brooms to enquire for Grace, who had been ill the whole of the term. She found the house after some difficulty in one of a maze of little rows and crescents just off the tram-filled main road. “She’s almost perfect⁠—almost perfection,” said Mrs. Philps, the Aunt Lucy Miriam had heard of and seen in church.

-

They had been together in the little drawing-room talking about Grace from the moment when Miriam was shown in to Mrs. Philps sitting darning a duster in a low chair by the closed conservatory door. The glazed closed door with the little strips of window on either side giving on to a crowded conservatory made the little room seem dark. To Miriam it seemed horribly remote. Her journey to it had been through immense distances. Threading the little sapling-planted asphalt-pavemented roadways between houses whose unbroken frontage was so near and so bare as to forbid scrutiny, she felt she had reached the centre, the home and secret of North London life. Off every tram-haunted main road, there must be a neighbourhood like this where lived the common-mouthed harsh-speaking people who filled the pavements and shops and walked in the parks. To enter one of the little houses and speak there to its inmates would be to be finally claimed and infected by the life these people lived, the thing that made them what they were. At Wordsworth House she was held up by the presence of the Pernes and Julia Doyle. Here she was helpless and alone. When she had discovered the number she sought and, crossing the little tiled pathway separated from the pathway next door by a single iron rail, had knocked with the lacquered knocker against the glazed and leaded door, her dreams for the future faded. They would never be realised. They were just a part of the radiance that shone now from the spacious houses she had lived in in the past. The things she had felt this morning in the examination room were that, too. They had nothing to do with the future. All the space was behind. Things would grow less and less.

+

That afternoon Miriam spent her hour of leisure in calling on the Brooms to enquire for Grace, who had been ill the whole of the term. She found the house after some difficulty in one of a maze of little rows and crescents just off the tram-filled main road. “She’s almost perfect⁠—almost perfection,” said Mrs. Philps, the Aunt Lucy Miriam had heard of and seen in church.

+

They had been together in the little drawing-room talking about Grace from the moment when Miriam was shown in to Mrs. Philps sitting darning a duster in a low chair by the closed conservatory door. The glazed closed door with the little strips of window on either side giving on to a crowded conservatory made the little room seem dark. To Miriam it seemed horribly remote. Her journey to it had been through immense distances. Threading the little sapling-planted asphalt-pavemented roadways between houses whose unbroken frontage was so near and so bare as to forbid scrutiny, she felt she had reached the centre, the home and secret of North London life. Off every tram-haunted main road, there must be a neighbourhood like this where lived the common-mouthed harsh-speaking people who filled the pavements and shops and walked in the parks. To enter one of the little houses and speak there to its inmates would be to be finally claimed and infected by the life these people lived, the thing that made them what they were. At Wordsworth House she was held up by the presence of the Pernes and Julia Doyle. Here she was helpless and alone. When she had discovered the number she sought and, crossing the little tiled pathway separated from the pathway next door by a single iron rail, had knocked with the lacquered knocker against the glazed and leaded door, her dreams for the future faded. They would never be realised. They were just a part of the radiance that shone now from the spacious houses she had lived in in the past. The things she had felt this morning in the examination room were that, too. They had nothing to do with the future. All the space was behind. Things would grow less and less.

-

Admitted to the dark narrowly echoing tiled passage, she stated her errand and was conducted past a closed door and the opening of a narrow staircase which shot steeply, carpeted with a narrow strip of surprisingly green velvet carpeting, up towards an unlit landing and admitted to Mrs. Philps.

-

“Wait a minute, Vashti,” said Mrs. Philps, holding Miriam’s hand as she murmured her errand. “You’ll stay tea? Well, if you’re sure you can’t I’ll not press you. Bring the biscuits and the sherry and two white wineglasses, Vashti. Get them now and bring them in at once. Sit down, Miss Henderson. She’s little better than a step-girl. They’re all the same.” Whilst she described her niece’s illness, Miriam wondered over the immense bundle of little even black sausage-shaped rolls of hair which stuck out, larger than her head and smoothed to a sphere by a tightly drawn net, at the back of her skull. She was short and stout and had bright red cheeks that shone in the gloom and rather prominent large blue eyes that roamed as she talked, allowing Miriam to snatch occasional glimpses of china-filled what-nots and beaded ottomans. Presently Vashti returned clumsily with the wine, making a great bumping and rattling round about the door. “You stupid thing, you’ve brought claret. Don’t you know sherry when you see it? It’s at the back⁠—behind the Harvest Burgundy.” “I shall have to go soon,” said Miriam, relieved at the sight of the red wine and longing to escape the sherry. Vashti put down the tray and stood with open mouth. Even with her very high heels she looked almost a dwarf. The room seemed less oppressive with the strange long-necked decanter and the silver biscuit box standing on a table in the curious greenish light. Mrs. Philps accepted the claret and returned busily to her story, whilst Miriam sipped and glanced at a large print in a heavy black frame leaning forward low over the small white marble mantelpiece. It represented a young knight in armour kneeling at an altar with joined and pointed hands held to his lips. An angel standing in midair was touching his shoulder with a sword. “Why doesn’t she kiss the top of his head,” thought Miriam as she sipped her wine. The distant aisles and pillars of the church made the room seem larger than it was. “I suppose they all look into that church when they want to get away from each other,” she mused as Mrs. Philps went on with her long sentences beginning “And Dr. Newman said⁠—” And there was a little mirror above a bulging chiffonier which was also an escape from the confined space. Looking into it, she met Mrs. Philps’s glowing face with the blue eyes widely staring and fixed upon her own, and heard her declare, with her bunched cherry-coloured lips, that Grace was “almost perfection.” “Is she?” she responded eagerly, and Mrs. Philps elaborated her theme. Grace, then, with her heavy body and strange hot voice, lying somewhere upstairs in a white bed, was the most important thing in this dark little house. “She was very near to death then,” Mrs. Philps was saying tearfully, “very near, and when she came round from her delirium, one of the first things she said to me as soon as she was strong enough to whisper, was that she was perfectly certain about there being another life.” Mrs. Philps’s voice faded and she sat with trembling lips and eyes downcast. “Did she!” Miriam almost shouted, half-rising from her seat and turning from contemplating Mrs. Philps in the mirror to look her full in the face. The dim green light streaming in from the conservatory seemed like a tide that made everything in the room rock slightly. A touch would sweep it all away and heaven would be there all round them. “Did she,” whispered Miriam in a faint voice that shook her chest. “ ‘Aunt,’ she said,” went on Mrs. Philps steadily, as the room grew firm round Miriam and the breath she drew seemed like an early morning breath, “ ‘I want to say something quickly,’ she said, ‘in case I die. It’s that I know⁠—for a positive fact, there is another life.’ ”

+

Admitted to the dark narrowly echoing tiled passage, she stated her errand and was conducted past a closed door and the opening of a narrow staircase which shot steeply, carpeted with a narrow strip of surprisingly green velvet carpeting, up towards an unlit landing and admitted to Mrs. Philps.

+

“Wait a minute, Vashti,” said Mrs. Philps, holding Miriam’s hand as she murmured her errand. “You’ll stay tea? Well, if you’re sure you can’t I’ll not press you. Bring the biscuits and the sherry and two white wineglasses, Vashti. Get them now and bring them in at once. Sit down, Miss Henderson. She’s little better than a step-girl. They’re all the same.” Whilst she described her niece’s illness, Miriam wondered over the immense bundle of little even black sausage-shaped rolls of hair which stuck out, larger than her head and smoothed to a sphere by a tightly drawn net, at the back of her skull. She was short and stout and had bright red cheeks that shone in the gloom and rather prominent large blue eyes that roamed as she talked, allowing Miriam to snatch occasional glimpses of china-filled what-nots and beaded ottomans. Presently Vashti returned clumsily with the wine, making a great bumping and rattling round about the door. “You stupid thing, you’ve brought claret. Don’t you know sherry when you see it? It’s at the back⁠—behind the Harvest Burgundy.” “I shall have to go soon,” said Miriam, relieved at the sight of the red wine and longing to escape the sherry. Vashti put down the tray and stood with open mouth. Even with her very high heels she looked almost a dwarf. The room seemed less oppressive with the strange long-necked decanter and the silver biscuit box standing on a table in the curious greenish light. Mrs. Philps accepted the claret and returned busily to her story, whilst Miriam sipped and glanced at a large print in a heavy black frame leaning forward low over the small white marble mantelpiece. It represented a young knight in armour kneeling at an altar with joined and pointed hands held to his lips. An angel standing in midair was touching his shoulder with a sword. “Why doesn’t she kiss the top of his head,” thought Miriam as she sipped her wine. The distant aisles and pillars of the church made the room seem larger than it was. “I suppose they all look into that church when they want to get away from each other,” she mused as Mrs. Philps went on with her long sentences beginning “And Dr. Newman said⁠—” And there was a little mirror above a bulging chiffonier which was also an escape from the confined space. Looking into it, she met Mrs. Philps’s glowing face with the blue eyes widely staring and fixed upon her own, and heard her declare, with her bunched cherry-coloured lips, that Grace was “almost perfection.” “Is she?” she responded eagerly, and Mrs. Philps elaborated her theme. Grace, then, with her heavy body and strange hot voice, lying somewhere upstairs in a white bed, was the most important thing in this dark little house. “She was very near to death then,” Mrs. Philps was saying tearfully, “very near, and when she came round from her delirium, one of the first things she said to me as soon as she was strong enough to whisper, was that she was perfectly certain about there being another life.” Mrs. Philps’s voice faded and she sat with trembling lips and eyes downcast. “Did she!” Miriam almost shouted, half-rising from her seat and turning from contemplating Mrs. Philps in the mirror to look her full in the face. The dim green light streaming in from the conservatory seemed like a tide that made everything in the room rock slightly. A touch would sweep it all away and heaven would be there all round them. “Did she,” whispered Miriam in a faint voice that shook her chest. “ ‘Aunt,’ she said,” went on Mrs. Philps steadily, as the room grew firm round Miriam and the breath she drew seemed like an early morning breath, “ ‘I want to say something quickly,’ she said, ‘in case I die. It’s that I know⁠—for a positive fact, there is another life.’ ”

“What a perfectly stupendous thing,” said Miriam. “It’s so important.”

“I was much impressed. Of course, I knew she was nearly perfect. But we’ve not been in the habit of talking about religion. I asked her if she would like to see the vicar. ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘there’s no need. He knows.’ I doubt if he knows as much as she does. But I didn’t make a point of it.”

“Oh, but it’s simply wonderful. It’s much more important than anything a vicar could say. It’s their business to say those things.”

diff --git a/src/epub/text/chapter-7.xhtml b/src/epub/text/chapter-7.xhtml index f0eedfe..fd9cbe9 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/chapter-7.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/chapter-7.xhtml @@ -21,7 +21,7 @@

The boat glided deliciously away upstream as Miriam, relinquishing her vision of Harriett sitting very upright in the stern in her white drill dress, and Gerald’s lawn-shirted back and long lean arms grasping the sculls, lay back on the bow cushions with her feet comfortably outstretched under the unoccupied seat in front of her. Six hours ago, shaking hands with a roomful of noisy home-going girls⁠—and now nothing to do but float dreamily out through the gateway of her six weeks’ holiday. The dust of the school was still upon her; the skin of her face felt strained and tired, her hands were tired and hot, her blouse dim with a week of school wear, and her black skirt oppressed her with its invisible burden of grime. But she was staring up at a clean blue sky fringed with treetops. She stretched herself out more luxuriously upon her cushions. The river smoothly moving and lapping underneath the boat was like a cradle. The soft fingers of the air caressed her temples and moved along the outlines of her face and neck. Forty-two days⁠ ⁠… like this. Tomorrow she would wake up a new person⁠ ⁠… sing, and shout with Harriett. She closed her eyes. The gently lifting water seemed to come nearer; the invading air closed in on her. She gave herself ecstatically to its touch; the muscles of her tired face relaxed and she believed that she could sleep; cry or sleep.

It was Gerald who had worked this miraculous first day for her. “Boating” hitherto had meant large made-up parties of tennis-club people, a fixed day, uneasy anticipations as to the weather, the carrying of hampers of provisions and crockery, spirit lamps and kettles, clumsy hired randans, or little fleets of stupidly competing canoes, lack of space, heavy loads to pull, the need for ceaseless chaff, the irritating triumphs of clever “knowing” girls in smart clothes, the Pooles, or really beautiful people, like Nan Babington and her cousin. Everything they said sounding wonderful and seeming to improve the scenery; the jokes of the men, even Ted always joked all the time, the misery of large noisy picnic teas on the grass, and in the end great weariness and disappointment, the beauty of the river and the trees only appearing the next day or perhaps long afterwards.

-

This boat was Gerald’s own private boat, a double-sculling skiff, slender and gold-brown, beautifully fitted and with a locker containing everything that was wanted for picnicking. They had arranged their expedition at lunchtime, trained to Richmond, bought fruit and cakes and got the boat’s water-keg filled by one of Redknap’s men. Gerald knew how to do things properly. He had always been accustomed to things like this boat. He would not care to have anything just anyhow. “Let’s do the thing decently, la reine.” He would keep on saying that at intervals until Harriett had learned too. How he had changed her since Easter when their engagement had been openly allowed. The clothes he had bought for her, especially this plain drill dress with its neat little coat. The long black tie fastened with the plain heavy cable broach pinned in lengthwise halfway down the ends of the tie, which reached almost to her black belt. That was Gerald. Her shoes, the number of pairs of light, expensive, beautifully made shoes. Her bearing, the change in her voice, a sort of roundness about her old Harryish hardness. But she was the same Harry, the Harry he had seen for the first time snorting with anger over Mr. Marth’s sentimental singing at the Assembly Rooms concert. “My hat, wasn’t la reine fuming!” He would forgive her all her ignorance. It was her triumph. What an extraordinary time Harry would have. Gerald was well-off. He had a private income behind his Canadian Pacific salary. His grandfather had been a diplomatist, living abroad nearly all the time, and his wealthy father and wealthy mother with a large fortune of her own had lived in a large house in Chelsea, giving dinner parties and going to the opera until nearly all the capital had gone, both dying just in time to leave enough to bring Gerald in a small income when he left Haileybury. And the wonderful thing was that Gerald liked mouching about and giggling. He liked looking for hours in shop windows and strolling on the Heath eating peppermints.

+

This boat was Gerald’s own private boat, a double-sculling skiff, slender and gold-brown, beautifully fitted and with a locker containing everything that was wanted for picnicking. They had arranged their expedition at lunchtime, trained to Richmond, bought fruit and cakes and got the boat’s water-keg filled by one of Redknap’s men. Gerald knew how to do things properly. He had always been accustomed to things like this boat. He would not care to have anything just anyhow. “Let’s do the thing decently, la reine.” He would keep on saying that at intervals until Harriett had learned too. How he had changed her since Easter when their engagement had been openly allowed. The clothes he had bought for her, especially this plain drill dress with its neat little coat. The long black tie fastened with the plain heavy cable broach pinned in lengthwise halfway down the ends of the tie, which reached almost to her black belt. That was Gerald. Her shoes, the number of pairs of light, expensive, beautifully made shoes. Her bearing, the change in her voice, a sort of roundness about her old Harryish hardness. But she was the same Harry, the Harry he had seen for the first time snorting with anger over Mr. Marth’s sentimental singing at the Assembly Rooms concert. “My hat, wasn’t la reine fuming!” He would forgive her all her ignorance. It was her triumph. What an extraordinary time Harry would have. Gerald was well-off. He had a private income behind his Canadian Pacific salary. His grandfather had been a diplomatist, living abroad nearly all the time, and his wealthy father and wealthy mother with a large fortune of her own had lived in a large house in Chelsea, giving dinner parties and going to the opera until nearly all the capital had gone, both dying just in time to leave enough to bring Gerald in a small income when he left Haileybury. And the wonderful thing was that Gerald liked mouching about and giggling. He liked looking for hours in shop windows and strolling on the Heath eating peppermints.

Everything had disappeared into a soft blackness; only on the water a faint light was left. It came and went; sometimes there was nothing but darkness and the soft air. The small paper lantern swinging at the bow made a little blot of light that was invisible from the stroke seat. The boat went swiftly and easily. Miriam felt she could go on pulling for hours at the top of her strength through the night. Leaning forward, breasting the featureless darkness, sweeping the sculls back at the full reach of her arms, leaning back and pressing her whole weight upwards from the footboard against the pull of the water, her body became an outstretched elastic system of muscles, rhythmically working against the smooth dragging resistance of the dark water. Her sleeves were rolled up, her collar-stud unfastened, her cool drowsy lids drooped over her cool eyes. Each time she leaned backwards against her stroke, pressing the footboard, the weight of her body dragged at a line of soreness where the sculls pressed her hands, and with the final fling of the water from the sculls a little stinging pain ran along the pads of her palms. Tomorrow there would be a row of happy blisters.

“You needn’t put more beef into it than you like, Mirry.” Gerald’s voice came so quietly out of the darkness that it scarcely disturbed Miriam’s ecstacy. She relaxed her swing, and letting the sculls skim and dip in short easy strokes, sat glowing.

@@ -57,7 +57,7 @@

“Yes we can, come on.” Running up over hillocks and stumbling through sandy gorse-grown hollows they sang a hunting song, Miriam leading with the short galloping phrases, Harriett’s thinner voice dropping in, broken and uncertain, with a strange brave sadness in it that went to Miriam’s heart.

“Eve, you look exactly like Dudley’s gracious lady in these things. Don’t you feel like it?” Eve stopped near the landing window and stood in her light green canvas dress with its pale green silk sleeves shedding herself over Miriam from under her rose-trimmed white chip hat. Miriam was carrying her light coat and all the small litter of her journey. “Go on up,” she said, “I want to talk,” and Eve hurried on, Miriam stumblingly following her, holding herself in, eyes and ears wide for the sight and sound of the slender figure flitting upstairs through the twilight. The twilight wavered and seemed to ebb and flow, suggesting silent dawn and full midday, and the house rang with a soundless music.

-

“It was Mrs. Wallace who suggested my wearing all my best things for the journey,” panted Eve; “they don’t get crushed with packing and they needn’t get dirty if you’re careful.”

+

“It was Mrs. Wallace who suggested my wearing all my best things for the journey,” panted Eve; “they don’t get crushed with packing and they needn’t get dirty if you’re careful.”

“You look exactly like Dudley’s gracious lady. You know you do. You know it perfectly well.”

“They do seem jolly now I’m back. They don’t seem anything down there. Just ordinary with everybody in much grander things.”

“How do you mean, grander? What sort of things?”

diff --git a/src/epub/text/chapter-8.xhtml b/src/epub/text/chapter-8.xhtml index dbfc6e1..cd3bd43 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/chapter-8.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/chapter-8.xhtml @@ -19,7 +19,7 @@

“I see. You simply run away from them,” she said scornfully; “go out for a walk or something.” A small Brixton sitting-room full of Brixton girls⁠—Gerald said that Brixton was something too chronic for words, just like Clapham, and there was that joke about the man who said he would not go to heaven even if he had the chance because of the strong Clapham contingent that would be there⁠—after all⁠ ⁠…

“I go and sit in my room.”

“Oh,” said Miriam brokenly, “in the winter? Without a fire?”

-

Mr. Parrow laughed. “I don’t mind about that. I wrap myself up and get a book.”

+

Mr. Parrow laughed. “I don’t mind about that. I wrap myself up and get a book.”

“What sort of book?”

“I’ve got a few books of my own; and there’s generally something worth reading in ‘Titbits.’ ”

How did he manage to look so refined and cultured? Those girls were quite good enough for him, probably too good. But he would go on despising them and one of them would marry him and give him beefsteak puddings. And here he was walking by the sea in the sunlight, confessing his suspicions and fears and going back to Brixton.

@@ -30,7 +30,7 @@

“Yes. I never have.”

Ovingdean had to be faced. They were going to look at Ovingdean and then walk back to the boardinghouse to tea. Now that she knew all about his homelife she would not be able to meet his eyes across the table. Two tired elm trees stood one on either side of the road at the entrance to the village. Here they all gathered and then went forward in a strolling party.

-

When they turned at last to walk home and fell again into couples as before, Miriam searched her empty mind for something to say about the dim, cool musty church, the strange silent deeps of it there amongst the great green downs, the waiting chairs, the cold empty pulpit and the little cold font, and the sunlit front of the old Grange where King Charles had taken refuge. Mr. Parrow would know she was speaking insincerely if she said anything about these things. There was a long, long walk ahead. For some time they walked in silence. “D’you know anything about architecture?” she said at last angrily⁠ ⁠… cruel silly question. Of course he didn’t. But men she walked with ought to know about architecture and be able to tell her things.

+

When they turned at last to walk home and fell again into couples as before, Miriam searched her empty mind for something to say about the dim, cool musty church, the strange silent deeps of it there amongst the great green downs, the waiting chairs, the cold empty pulpit and the little cold font, and the sunlit front of the old Grange where King Charles had taken refuge. Mr. Parrow would know she was speaking insincerely if she said anything about these things. There was a long, long walk ahead. For some time they walked in silence. “D’you know anything about architecture?” she said at last angrily⁠ ⁠… cruel silly question. Of course he didn’t. But men she walked with ought to know about architecture and be able to tell her things.

“No. That’s a subject I don’t know anything about.”

“D’you like churches?”

“I don’t know that I’ve ever thought about it.”

@@ -44,7 +44,7 @@

“Well, I generally stay in bed and have a rest.”

That dreadful room with the dreadful man hiding in it and reading “Titbits” and staying in bed in it on bright Sunday mornings.

How heavily they were treading on the orange and yellow faces of the Tom Thumbs scattered over the short green grass.

-

“How much do you think people could marry on?” said Mr. Parrow suddenly in a thin voice.

+

“How much do you think people could marry on?” said Mr. Parrow suddenly in a thin voice.

“Oh well, that depends on who they are.”

“I suppose it does do that.”

“And where they are going to live.”

@@ -55,14 +55,14 @@

The houses on the eastern ridges of Brighton came into sight in the distance and stood blazing in the sunlight. There was a high half broken-down piece of fencing at the edge of the cliff to their left a little ahead of them, splintered and sunlit.

“How much a week is a hundred and fifty a year?”

“Three pound.”

-

They gravitated towards the fence and stood vaguely near it looking out across the unruffled glare of the open sea. Why had she always thought that the bright blue and gold ripples seen from the beach and the promenade on jolly weekdays was the best of the sea? It was much more lovely up there, the great expanse in its quiet Sunday loneliness. You could see and think about far-off things instead of just dreaming on the drowsy hot sands, seeing nothing but the rippling stripes of bright blue and bright gold. She put her elbows on the upper bar. Mr. Parrow did the same and they stood gazing out across the open sea⁠—Mr. Parrow was probably wondering how long they were going to stand silently there and thinking about his tea⁠ ⁠… of course; let him stand⁠—until Eve’s voice sounded near them in a dimpling laugh. They walked home in a row, Eve and Mr. Green in the centre, asking riddles one against the other. Every time Miriam spoke Mr. Parrow laughed or made some little responsive sound.

+

They gravitated towards the fence and stood vaguely near it looking out across the unruffled glare of the open sea. Why had she always thought that the bright blue and gold ripples seen from the beach and the promenade on jolly weekdays was the best of the sea? It was much more lovely up there, the great expanse in its quiet Sunday loneliness. You could see and think about far-off things instead of just dreaming on the drowsy hot sands, seeing nothing but the rippling stripes of bright blue and bright gold. She put her elbows on the upper bar. Mr. Parrow did the same and they stood gazing out across the open sea⁠—Mr. Parrow was probably wondering how long they were going to stand silently there and thinking about his tea⁠ ⁠… of course; let him stand⁠—until Eve’s voice sounded near them in a dimpling laugh. They walked home in a row, Eve and Mr. Green in the centre, asking riddles one against the other. Every time Miriam spoke Mr. Parrow laughed or made some little responsive sound.

-

When Mr. Green and Mr. Parrow went back to London at the end of the week Eve and Miriam saw them off at the station. The four went off boldly together down the flight of white stone steps and made their way up into the town.

+

When Mr. Green and Mr. Parrow went back to London at the end of the week Eve and Miriam saw them off at the station. The four went off boldly together down the flight of white stone steps and made their way up into the town.

“Goodbye,” called Miss Meldrum affectionately from the doorway. “I shall send both of you a copy of the photograph.”

-

“It’s most generous of Miss Meldrum to go to all that expense to give us a pleasant memento,” said Mr. Green in his small ringing voice as they all swung out into the clean bare roadway. Miriam felt as if they were a bit of the photograph walking up the hill, and went freely and confidently along with a sense of being steered and guided by Miss Meldrum. Why had she had the group taken⁠—so odd and bold of her, having the photographer waiting in the garden for them before they had finished breakfast, and then laughing and talking and pushing them all about as if they were her dearest friends. It was whilst they were all out in the garden together, hanging about and being arranged, with the photographer’s voice like the voice of a ventriloquist, knocking them coldly about, that Gerald and Mr. Green had arranged about the evening at the Crystal Palace on the last day of Miriam’s holiday. Miriam had held back from the group, feeling nervous about her hair, there had been no time to go to their rooms, and had forced Eve to do the same. Harriett, with a cheerful shiny face, was sitting on the grass with Gerald in a line with the traveller from Robinson and Cleaver’s, and his thin-voiced sheeny-haired mocking fiancée. They all looked very small and bald. The fiancée kept clearing her throat and rearranging her smart feet and rattling her bangles. The traveller’s heavy waxed moustache was crooked and his slippery blue eyes looked like the eyes of an old man. Next to him were two newly arrived restively sneering young men, one on either side of the saintly-faced florist’s assistant from Wigmore Street, who sat in an easy pose with her skirt draping gracefully over her feet and her long white chin propped on her hands. She looked reproachfully about amongst the laughing and talking and seemed to feel that they were all in church.

-

Miss Meldrum and Miss Stringer, the two bald Scotch chemists who went out every evening to look for a comet, the pale frowning girl from Plaistow with her mad-eyed cousin whose grey curls bunched in a cherry-coloured velvet band seemed to say “death⁠—death” to Miriam more dreadfully out here amongst the greenery than when she suddenly caught sight of them at table, sat disconnectedly in chairs behind the squatters on the grass. At the last moment she and Eve were obliged to fall in at the back of the group with Mr. Green and Mr. Parrow, and now the four of them were walking in a row up the staring white hill with the evening at the Crystal Palace ahead of them in faraway London. It was quite right. They were being like “other people.” People met and made friends and arranged to meet again. And then things happened. It was quite right and ordinary and safe and warm. Of course Eve and Mr. Green must meet again. He was evidently quite determined that they should. That was what was carrying them all so confidently up the hill. Perhaps he would in the end turn into another Gerald. When they turned off into the unfamiliar Brighton streets Eve and Mr. Green went on ahead. Walking quickly in step along the narrow pavement amongst the unconcerned Brighton townspeople they looked so small and pitiful.

+

“It’s most generous of Miss Meldrum to go to all that expense to give us a pleasant memento,” said Mr. Green in his small ringing voice as they all swung out into the clean bare roadway. Miriam felt as if they were a bit of the photograph walking up the hill, and went freely and confidently along with a sense of being steered and guided by Miss Meldrum. Why had she had the group taken⁠—so odd and bold of her, having the photographer waiting in the garden for them before they had finished breakfast, and then laughing and talking and pushing them all about as if they were her dearest friends. It was whilst they were all out in the garden together, hanging about and being arranged, with the photographer’s voice like the voice of a ventriloquist, knocking them coldly about, that Gerald and Mr. Green had arranged about the evening at the Crystal Palace on the last day of Miriam’s holiday. Miriam had held back from the group, feeling nervous about her hair, there had been no time to go to their rooms, and had forced Eve to do the same. Harriett, with a cheerful shiny face, was sitting on the grass with Gerald in a line with the traveller from Robinson and Cleaver’s, and his thin-voiced sheeny-haired mocking fiancée. They all looked very small and bald. The fiancée kept clearing her throat and rearranging her smart feet and rattling her bangles. The traveller’s heavy waxed moustache was crooked and his slippery blue eyes looked like the eyes of an old man. Next to him were two newly arrived restively sneering young men, one on either side of the saintly-faced florist’s assistant from Wigmore Street, who sat in an easy pose with her skirt draping gracefully over her feet and her long white chin propped on her hands. She looked reproachfully about amongst the laughing and talking and seemed to feel that they were all in church.

+

Miss Meldrum and Miss Stringer, the two bald Scotch chemists who went out every evening to look for a comet, the pale frowning girl from Plaistow with her mad-eyed cousin whose grey curls bunched in a cherry-coloured velvet band seemed to say “death⁠—death” to Miriam more dreadfully out here amongst the greenery than when she suddenly caught sight of them at table, sat disconnectedly in chairs behind the squatters on the grass. At the last moment she and Eve were obliged to fall in at the back of the group with Mr. Green and Mr. Parrow, and now the four of them were walking in a row up the staring white hill with the evening at the Crystal Palace ahead of them in faraway London. It was quite right. They were being like “other people.” People met and made friends and arranged to meet again. And then things happened. It was quite right and ordinary and safe and warm. Of course Eve and Mr. Green must meet again. He was evidently quite determined that they should. That was what was carrying them all so confidently up the hill. Perhaps he would in the end turn into another Gerald. When they turned off into the unfamiliar Brighton streets Eve and Mr. Green went on ahead. Walking quickly in step along the narrow pavement amongst the unconcerned Brighton townspeople they looked so small and pitiful.

-

The brilliant sunlight showed up all the shabbiness of Mr. Green’s London suit. He looked even smaller than he did in his holiday tweed. Miriam wanted to call to them and stop them, stop Eve’s bright figure and her mop of thickly twisted brown hair and ask her what she was dreaming of, leave the two men there and go back, go out away alone with Eve down to the edge of the sea. She hesitated in her walking, not daring even to glance at her companion who was trudging along with bent head, carrying his large brown leather bag. The street was crowded and she manoeuvred so that everyone they met should pass between them. Perhaps they would be able to reach the station without being obliged to speak to each other. Parrow. It was either quite a nice name or pitiful; like a child trying to say sparrow. Did he know that to other people it was a strange, important sort of name, rounded like the padding in the shoulders of his coat and his blunted features?

+

The brilliant sunlight showed up all the shabbiness of Mr. Green’s London suit. He looked even smaller than he did in his holiday tweed. Miriam wanted to call to them and stop them, stop Eve’s bright figure and her mop of thickly twisted brown hair and ask her what she was dreaming of, leave the two men there and go back, go out away alone with Eve down to the edge of the sea. She hesitated in her walking, not daring even to glance at her companion who was trudging along with bent head, carrying his large brown leather bag. The street was crowded and she manoeuvred so that everyone they met should pass between them. Perhaps they would be able to reach the station without being obliged to speak to each other. Parrow. It was either quite a nice name or pitiful; like a child trying to say sparrow. Did he know that to other people it was a strange, important sort of name, rounded like the padding in the shoulders of his coat and his blunted features?

Nobody knew him at all well. Not a single person in the world. If he were run over and killed on the way to the station, nobody would ever have known anything about him.⁠ ⁠… People did die like that⁠ ⁠… probably most people; in a minute, alone and unknown; too late to speak.

Something was coming slowly down the middle of the roadway from amongst the confusion of the distant traffic; an elephant⁠—a large grey elephant. Firmly delicately undisturbed by the noise of the street, the huge crimson gold-braided howdah it carried on its back, and the strange, coloured things coming along behind it, the thickening of people on the pavement and the suddenly increased noise of the town, it came stepping. It was wonderful. “Wise and beautiful! Wise and beautiful!” cried a voice far away in Miriam’s brain. It’s a circus said another voice within her.⁠ ⁠… He doesn’t know he’s in a circus.⁠ ⁠… She hurried forward to reach Eve. Eve turned a flushed face. “I say; it’s a circus,” said Miriam bitingly. The blare of a band broke out farther up the street. People were jostled against them by a clown who came bounding and leaping his way along the crowded pavement crying incoherent words with a thrilling blatter of laughter. The elephant was close upon them alone in the road space cleared by its swinging walk.⁠ ⁠… If only everyone would be quiet they could hear the soft padding of its feet. Slowly, gently, modestly it went by followed by a crowd of smaller things; sad-eyed monkeys on horseback in gold coatlets, sullen caged beasts on trolleys drawn by beribboned unblinkered human-looking horses, tall white horses pacing singly by, bearing bobbing princesses and men in masks and cloaks.

@@ -76,7 +76,7 @@

But every day at breakfast over the eggs, bacon and tomatoes⁠—knowing voices began their day’s talking, the weary round of words and ugly laughter went steadily on, narrow horrible sounds that made you feel conscious of the insides of people’s throats and the backs of their noses⁠—as if they were not properly formed. The talk was like a silly sort of battle.⁠ ⁠… Innuendo, Miriam would say to herself, feeling that the word was too beautiful for what she wanted to express; double entendre was also unsatisfactory. These people were all enemies pretending to be friends. Why did they pretend? Why not keep quiet? Or all sing between their eating, different songs, it would not matter. She and Eve and Harriett and Gerald did sometimes hum the refrains of the nigger minstrels’ songs, or one of them would hum a scrap of a solo and all three sing the chorus. Then people were quiet, listening and smiling their evil smiles and Miss Meldrum was delighted. It seemed improper and halfhearted as no one else joined in; but after the first few days the four of them always sang between the courses at dinner. Gerald did not seem to mind the chaffy talk and the vulgar jokes, and would generally join in; and he said strange disturbing things about the boarders, as if he knew all about them. And he and Harriett talked to the niggers too and found out about them. It spoilt them when one knew that they belonged to small London musical halls, and had wives and families and illnesses and trouble. Gerald and Harriett did not seem to mind this. They did not seem to mind anything out of doors. They were free and hard and contemptuous of everyone except the niggers and a few very stylish-looking people who sailed along and took no notice of anybody. Gerald said extraordinary, disturbing things about the girls on the esplanade. Miriam and Eve were interested in some of the young men they saw. They talked about them and looked out for them. Sometimes they exchanged glances with them. Were she and Eve also “on show”; waiting to be given “half an inch”; would she or Eve be “perfectly awful in the dark”? Did the young men they specially favoured with their notice say things about them? When these thoughts buzzed about in Miriam’s brain she wanted to take a broom and sweep everybody into the sea.⁠ ⁠… She discovered that a single steady unexpected glance, meeting her own, from a man who had the right kind of bearing⁠—something right about the set of the shoulders⁠—could disperse all the vague trouble she felt at the perpetual spectacle of the strolling crowds, the stiffly waiting many-eyed houses, the strange stupid bathing-machines, and send her gaily forward in a glad world where there was no need to be alone in order to be happy. A second encounter was sad, shameful, ridiculous; the man became absurd and lost his dignity; the joyous sense of looking through him right out and away to an endless perspective, of being told that the endlessness was there and telling that the endlessness was there had gone; the eyes were eyes, solid and mocking and helpless⁠—to be avoided in future; and when they had gone, the sunset or the curious quivering line along the horizon were no longer gateways, but hard barriers, until by some chance one was tranquilly alone again⁠—when the horizon would beckon and lift and the pathway of gold across the sea at sunset call to your feet until they tingled and ached.

Life was ugly and cruel. The secret of the sea and of the evenings and mornings must be given up. It would fade more and more. What was life? Either playing a part all the time in order to be amongst people in the warm or standing alone with the strange true real feeling⁠—alone with a sort of edge of reality on everything; even on quite ugly common things⁠—cheap boardinghouses face towels and blistered window frames.

-

Since Mr. Green and Mr. Parrow had left, they had given up going to pier entertainments and had spent most of their time sitting in a close row and talking together, in the intervals of the black and white minstrel concerts and the performances of the town band. They had drifted into this way of spending their time; there was never any discussion or alteration of the day’s programme. It worked like a charm and there was no sign of the breaking of the charm. Miriam was sometimes half afraid just as they settled themselves down that someone, probably Gerald or Eve might say “Funny, isn’t it, how well we four get on,” and that strange power that held them together and kept everything away would be broken before the holiday came to an end. But no one did and they went on sitting together in the morning on the hot sand⁠—the moving living glinting sand that took the sting as soon as you touched it with your hand out of everything there might be in the latest letter from home⁠—hearing the niggers from ten to eleven, bathing from eleven to twelve, sitting afterwards fresh and tingling and drowsy in canopied chairs near the band until dinnertime, prowling and paddling in the afternoon and ranging themselves again in chairs for the evening.

+

Since Mr. Green and Mr. Parrow had left, they had given up going to pier entertainments and had spent most of their time sitting in a close row and talking together, in the intervals of the black and white minstrel concerts and the performances of the town band. They had drifted into this way of spending their time; there was never any discussion or alteration of the day’s programme. It worked like a charm and there was no sign of the breaking of the charm. Miriam was sometimes half afraid just as they settled themselves down that someone, probably Gerald or Eve might say “Funny, isn’t it, how well we four get on,” and that strange power that held them together and kept everything away would be broken before the holiday came to an end. But no one did and they went on sitting together in the morning on the hot sand⁠—the moving living glinting sand that took the sting as soon as you touched it with your hand out of everything there might be in the latest letter from home⁠—hearing the niggers from ten to eleven, bathing from eleven to twelve, sitting afterwards fresh and tingling and drowsy in canopied chairs near the band until dinnertime, prowling and paddling in the afternoon and ranging themselves again in chairs for the evening.

They said nothing until almost the end of their time about the passage of the days; but they looked at each other, each time they settled down, with conspiring smiles and then sat, side by side, less visible to each other than the great sunlit sea or the great clean salt darkness, stranded in a row with four easy idle laughing commenting voices, away alone and safe in the gaiety of the strong forgetful air⁠—talking things over. The faraway troublesome crooked things, all cramped and painful and puzzling came out one by one and were shaken and tossed away along the clean wind. And there was so much for Gerald to hear. He wanted to hear everything⁠—any little thing⁠—“Just like a girl; it’s awfully jolly for Harry he’s like that. She’ll never be lonely,” agreed Miriam and Eve privately.⁠ ⁠… “He’s a perfect dear.” One night towards the end of their time they talked of the future. It had begun to press on them. There seemed no more time for brooding even over Eve’s fascinating little pictures of life in the big country house, or Miriam’s stories and legends of Germany⁠—she said very little about Banbury Park fearing the amazement and disgust of the trio if anything of the reality of North London should reach them through her talk and guessing the impossibility of their realising the Pernes⁠—or Gerald’s rich memories of the opulence of his early home life, an atmosphere of spending and operas and banquets and receptions and distinguished people. During the evening, in a silent interval, just as the band was tuning up to begin its last tune, Gerald had said with quiet emphasis, “Well, anyhow, girls, you mark my words the old man won’t make any more money. Not another penny. You may as well make up your minds to that.” Then the band had broken into their favourite Hungarian dance. Three of them sat blissfully back in their deck chairs, but Miriam remained uncomfortably propped forward, eagerly thinking. The music rushed on, she saw dancers shining before her in wild groups, in the darkness, leaping and shouting, their feet scarcely touching the earth and a wild light darted about them as they shouted and leapt. “Set Mirry up in some sort of business,” quoted her mind from one of Gerald’s recent soliloquies. She knew that she did not want that. But the dancing forms told her of the absurdity of going back without protest to the long aching days of teaching in the little school amongst those dreadful voices which were going, whatever she did for them, to be dreadful all their lives. Nothing she could do would make any difference to them. They did not want her. They were quite happy. Her feelings and thoughts, her way of looking at things, her desire for space and beautiful things and music and quietude would never be their desire. Reverence for things⁠—had she reverence? She felt she must have because she knew they had not; even the old people; only superstition⁠ ⁠… North London would always be North London, hard, strong, sneering, moneymaking, noisy and trammy. Perhaps the difference between the north and the south and her own southwest of London was like the difference between the north and the south of England.⁠ ⁠… Green’s “History of the English People”⁠ ⁠… spinning-jennys began in the Danish north, hard and cold, with later sunsets. In the south was Somersetshire lace. North London meant twenty pounds a year and the need for resignation and determination every day. Eve had thirty-five pounds and a huge garden and new books and music⁠ ⁠… a book called “Music and Morals” and interesting people staying in the house. And Eve had not been to Germany and could not talk French. “You are an idiot to go on doing it. It’s wrong. Lazy,” laughed the dancers crowding and flinging all round her. “I ought,” she responded defiantly, “to stay on and make myself into a certificated teacher.” “Certificated?” they screamed wildly sweeping before her in strange lines of light. “If you do you will be like Miss Cramp. Certificates⁠—little conceited papers, and you dead. Certificates would finish you off⁠—Kill⁠—Kill⁠—Kill⁠—Kill⁠—Kill!!” Bang. The band stopped and Miriam felt the bar of her chair wounding her flesh. The trail of the dancers flickered away across the sea and her brain was busily dictating her letter to Miss Perne: “and therefore I am obliged, however reluctantly, to take this step, as it is absolutely necessary for me to earn a larger salary at once.”

diff --git a/src/epub/text/chapter-9.xhtml b/src/epub/text/chapter-9.xhtml index 3ebc979..e5045f9 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/chapter-9.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/chapter-9.xhtml @@ -8,10 +8,10 @@

IX

-

The Henderson party found Mr. Green and Mr. Parrow waiting in the dim plank-floored corridor leading from the station to the main building of the Crystal Palace. When the quiet greetings were over and they had arranged a meeting-place at the end of the evening in case any of the party should be lost, they all tramped on up the resounding corridor. Miriam found herself bringing up the rear with Mr. Parrow. They were going on up the corridor, through the Palace and out into the summer evening. They had all come to go out into the summer evening and see the fireworks. All but she had come meaning to get quite near to the “set pieces” and to look at them. She had not said anything about meaning to get as far away from the fireworks as possible. She had been trusting to Mr. Parrow for that. Now that she was with him she felt that perhaps it was not quite fair. He had come meaning to see the fireworks. He would be disappointed. She would be obliged to tell him presently, when they got out into the night. They were all tramping quickly up along the echoing corridor. No one seemed to be talking, just feet, tramp, tramp on the planking, rather quickly. It was like the sound of workmen’s feet on the inside scaffolding of a half-built house. The corridor was like something in the Hospital for Incurables⁠ ⁠… that strange old woman sitting in the hall with bent head laughing over her crochet, and Miss Garrett whom they had come to see sitting up in bed, a curtained bed in a ward, with a pleated mobcap all over the top of her head and halfway down her forehead, sitting back against large square pillows with her hands clasped on the neat bedclothes and a “sweet, patient” look on her face, coughing gently and spitting, spitting herself to death⁠ ⁠… rushing away out of the ward to wait for mother downstairs in the hall with the curious smells and the dreadful old woman.⁠ ⁠… What was it, chick?⁠ ⁠… Sick, mother, I felt sick, I couldn’t stay. It was rage; rage with that dreadful old woman. People probably told her she was patient and sweet, and she had got that trick of putting her head on one side. She was not sweet. She was one of the worst of those dreadful people who would always make people believe in a particular way, all the time. She had a great big frame. If she had done anything but sit as she sat, in that particular way, one could have stayed.

-

They were all standing looking at some wonderful sort of clock, a calendar-clock⁠—“a triumph of ingenuity,” said Mr. Green’s bright reedy voice. The building had opened out and rushed up, people were passing to and fro. “We don’t want to stay inside; let’s go out,” said Gerald. The group broke into couples again and passed on. Miriam found herself with Mr. Parrow once more. Of course she would be with him all the evening. She must tell him at once about the fireworks. She ought not to have come, if she did not mean to see the fireworks. It was mean and feeble to cheat him out of his evening. Why had she come; to wander about with him, not seeing the fireworks. What an idiotic and abominable thing. Now that she was here at his side it was quite clear that she must endure the fireworks. Anything else would be like asking him to wander about with her alone. She did not want to wander about with him alone. She took an opportunity of joining Eve for a moment. They had just walked through a winter garden and were standing at the door of a concert room, all quite silent and looking very shy. “Eve,” she said hurriedly in a low tone, “d’you want to see the beastly fireworks?”

-

“Beastly? Oh, of course, I do,” said Eve in a rather loud embarrassed tone. How dreadfully self-conscious they all were. Somebody seemed to be speaking. “What sticks my family are⁠—I had no idea,” muttered Miriam furiously into Eve’s face. Eve’s eyes filled with tears, but she stood perfectly still, saying nothing. Miriam wheeled round and stared into the empty concert room. It was filled with a faint bluish light and beyond the rows of waiting chairs and the empty platform a huge organ stood piled up towards the roof. The party were moving on. What a queer place the Crystal Palace is⁠ ⁠… what a perfectly horrible place for a concert⁠ ⁠… pianissimo passages and those feet on those boards tramping about outside.⁠ ⁠… What a silly muddle. Mr. Parrow was waiting for her to join the others. They straggled along past booths and stalls, meeting groups of people, silent and lost like themselves. Now they were passing some kind of stonework things, reliefs, antique, roped off like the seats in a church. Just in front of them a short man holding the red cord in his hands was looking at a group with some ladies. “Why,” he said suddenly in a loud cheerful voice, stretching an arm out across the rope and pointing to one of the reliefs, “it’s Auntie and Grandma!” Miriam stared at him as they passed, he was so short, shorter than any of the ladies he was with. “It’s the only way to see these things,” he said in the same loud harsh cheerful voice. Miriam laughed aloud. What a clever man.

-

“Do you like statues?” said Mr. Parrow in a low gentle tone.

+

The Henderson party found Mr. Green and Mr. Parrow waiting in the dim plank-floored corridor leading from the station to the main building of the Crystal Palace. When the quiet greetings were over and they had arranged a meeting-place at the end of the evening in case any of the party should be lost, they all tramped on up the resounding corridor. Miriam found herself bringing up the rear with Mr. Parrow. They were going on up the corridor, through the Palace and out into the summer evening. They had all come to go out into the summer evening and see the fireworks. All but she had come meaning to get quite near to the “set pieces” and to look at them. She had not said anything about meaning to get as far away from the fireworks as possible. She had been trusting to Mr. Parrow for that. Now that she was with him she felt that perhaps it was not quite fair. He had come meaning to see the fireworks. He would be disappointed. She would be obliged to tell him presently, when they got out into the night. They were all tramping quickly up along the echoing corridor. No one seemed to be talking, just feet, tramp, tramp on the planking, rather quickly. It was like the sound of workmen’s feet on the inside scaffolding of a half-built house. The corridor was like something in the Hospital for Incurables⁠ ⁠… that strange old woman sitting in the hall with bent head laughing over her crochet, and Miss Garrett whom they had come to see sitting up in bed, a curtained bed in a ward, with a pleated mobcap all over the top of her head and halfway down her forehead, sitting back against large square pillows with her hands clasped on the neat bedclothes and a “sweet, patient” look on her face, coughing gently and spitting, spitting herself to death⁠ ⁠… rushing away out of the ward to wait for mother downstairs in the hall with the curious smells and the dreadful old woman.⁠ ⁠… What was it, chick?⁠ ⁠… Sick, mother, I felt sick, I couldn’t stay. It was rage; rage with that dreadful old woman. People probably told her she was patient and sweet, and she had got that trick of putting her head on one side. She was not sweet. She was one of the worst of those dreadful people who would always make people believe in a particular way, all the time. She had a great big frame. If she had done anything but sit as she sat, in that particular way, one could have stayed.

+

They were all standing looking at some wonderful sort of clock, a calendar-clock⁠—“a triumph of ingenuity,” said Mr. Green’s bright reedy voice. The building had opened out and rushed up, people were passing to and fro. “We don’t want to stay inside; let’s go out,” said Gerald. The group broke into couples again and passed on. Miriam found herself with Mr. Parrow once more. Of course she would be with him all the evening. She must tell him at once about the fireworks. She ought not to have come, if she did not mean to see the fireworks. It was mean and feeble to cheat him out of his evening. Why had she come; to wander about with him, not seeing the fireworks. What an idiotic and abominable thing. Now that she was here at his side it was quite clear that she must endure the fireworks. Anything else would be like asking him to wander about with her alone. She did not want to wander about with him alone. She took an opportunity of joining Eve for a moment. They had just walked through a winter garden and were standing at the door of a concert room, all quite silent and looking very shy. “Eve,” she said hurriedly in a low tone, “d’you want to see the beastly fireworks?”

+

“Beastly? Oh, of course, I do,” said Eve in a rather loud embarrassed tone. How dreadfully self-conscious they all were. Somebody seemed to be speaking. “What sticks my family are⁠—I had no idea,” muttered Miriam furiously into Eve’s face. Eve’s eyes filled with tears, but she stood perfectly still, saying nothing. Miriam wheeled round and stared into the empty concert room. It was filled with a faint bluish light and beyond the rows of waiting chairs and the empty platform a huge organ stood piled up towards the roof. The party were moving on. What a queer place the Crystal Palace is⁠ ⁠… what a perfectly horrible place for a concert⁠ ⁠… pianissimo passages and those feet on those boards tramping about outside.⁠ ⁠… What a silly muddle. Mr. Parrow was waiting for her to join the others. They straggled along past booths and stalls, meeting groups of people, silent and lost like themselves. Now they were passing some kind of stonework things, reliefs, antique, roped off like the seats in a church. Just in front of them a short man holding the red cord in his hands was looking at a group with some ladies. “Why,” he said suddenly in a loud cheerful voice, stretching an arm out across the rope and pointing to one of the reliefs, “it’s Auntie and Grandma!” Miriam stared at him as they passed, he was so short, shorter than any of the ladies he was with. “It’s the only way to see these things,” he said in the same loud harsh cheerful voice. Miriam laughed aloud. What a clever man.

+

“Do you like statues?” said Mr. Parrow in a low gentle tone.

“I don’t know anything about them,” said Miriam.

“I can’t bear fireworks,” she said hurriedly.

They were in the open at last. In the deepening twilight many people were going to and fro. In the distance soft dark masses of trees stood out against the sky in every direction. Not far away the ghostly frames of the set pieces reared against the sky made the open evening seem as prison-like as the enclosure they had just left. Round about the scaffolding of these pieces dense little crowds were collecting.

@@ -19,7 +19,7 @@

“I want to get away from them.”

“All right, we’ll get lost at once.”

“It isn’t,” she explained a little breathlessly, in relief, suddenly respecting him, allowing him to thread a way for her through the increasing crowd towards the open evening, “that I don’t want to see the fireworks, but I simply can’t stand the noise.”

-

“I see,” laughed Mr. Parrow gently. They were making towards the open evening along a narrow gravel pathway, like a garden pathway. Miriam hurried a little, fearing that the fireworks might begin before they got to a safe distance.

+

“I see,” laughed Mr. Parrow gently. They were making towards the open evening along a narrow gravel pathway, like a garden pathway. Miriam hurried a little, fearing that the fireworks might begin before they got to a safe distance.

“I never have been able to stand a sudden noise. It’s torture to me to walk along a platform where a train may suddenly shriek.”

“I see. You’re afraid of the noise.”

“It isn’t fear⁠—I can’t describe it. It’s agony. It’s like pain. But much much worse than pain. It’s⁠—it’s⁠—annihilating.”

@@ -40,7 +40,7 @@

“What is it like?”

“It’s fine; you just rush down. We must try it.”

“Not for worlds.”

-

Mr. Parrow laughed. “Oh you must try the toboggan; there’s no noise about that.”

+

Mr. Parrow laughed. “Oh you must try the toboggan; there’s no noise about that.”

“I really couldn’t.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely. I mean it. Nothing under the sun would induce me to go on a toboggan.”

@@ -54,11 +54,11 @@

“No; it’s too dark.” What a plucky man. But the water looked cold. And perhaps he would be really stupid.

A solitary uniformed man was yawning and whistling at the top of the deserted toboggan run. The faint light of a lamp fell upon the square platform and the little sled standing in place at the top of a shiny slope which shot steeply down into blackness.

“We’d better get on,” said Miriam trembling.

-

“Well, you’re very graceful at giving in,” remarked Mr. Parrow, handing her into the sled and settling with the man.

+

“Well, you’re very graceful at giving in,” remarked Mr. Parrow, handing her into the sled and settling with the man.

He got that sentence out of a book, thought Miriam wildly as she heard the man behind them say “Ready? Off you go!”⁠ ⁠… Out of a book a book a book⁠—Oh⁠—ooooh⁠—how absolutely glorious, she yelled as they shot down through the darkness. Oh, she squealed into the face laughing and talking beside her. She turned away, shouting, for the final rush, they were flying⁠—involuntarily her hand flung out, they were tearing headlong into absolute darkness, and was met and firmly clasped. They shot slackening up a short incline and stood up still hand in hand, laughing incoherently.

-

“Let’s walk back and try again,” said Mr. Parrow.

+

“Let’s walk back and try again,” said Mr. Parrow.

“Oh no; I enjoyed it most frightfully; but we mustn’t go again. Besides, it must be fearfully late.”

-

She pulled at her hand. The man was too near and too big. His hand was not a bit uncertain like his speech, and for a moment she was glad that she pulled in vain. “Very well,” said Mr. Parrow, “but we must find our way off the grass and strike the pathway.” Drawing her gently along, he peered about for the track. “Let me go,” said her hand dragging gently at his. “No” said the firm enclosure, tightening “not yet.” What does it matter? flashed her mind. Why should I be such a prude? The hand gave her confidence. It was firm and strong and perfectly serious. It was a hand like her own hand and comfortingly strange and different. Gently and slowly he guided her over the dewy grass. The air that had rushed so wildly by them a few minutes ago was still and calm and friendly; the distant crowd harmless and insignificant. The fireworks were over. The pathway they had missed appeared under their feet and down it they walked soberly, well apart, but still hand in hand until they reached the borders of the dispersing crowd.

+

She pulled at her hand. The man was too near and too big. His hand was not a bit uncertain like his speech, and for a moment she was glad that she pulled in vain. “Very well,” said Mr. Parrow, “but we must find our way off the grass and strike the pathway.” Drawing her gently along, he peered about for the track. “Let me go,” said her hand dragging gently at his. “No” said the firm enclosure, tightening “not yet.” What does it matter? flashed her mind. Why should I be such a prude? The hand gave her confidence. It was firm and strong and perfectly serious. It was a hand like her own hand and comfortingly strange and different. Gently and slowly he guided her over the dewy grass. The air that had rushed so wildly by them a few minutes ago was still and calm and friendly; the distant crowd harmless and insignificant. The fireworks were over. The pathway they had missed appeared under their feet and down it they walked soberly, well apart, but still hand in hand until they reached the borders of the dispersing crowd.