The next morning there was a letter from Bob containing a page of description of his dull afternoon at his club within half a mile of her. “Let me know, my dear girl,” it went on, “whenever you escape from your gaolers, and do not suffer the thought of old Bob’s making himself responsible for all the telegrams you may send to cloud your joyous young independence.”
Miriam recoiled from the thought of a dull bored man looking to her for enlivenment of the moving coloured wonder of London and felt that Mr. and Mrs. Corrie were anything but gaolers. She was not sorry that she had missed the opportunity of seeing him. “Meanwhile write and tell me your thoughts,” was the only sentence that had appealed to her in the letter; but she was sure she could not whole-heartedly offer her thoughts as entertainment to a man who spent his time feeling dull in a club. He’s ...
blasé, that’s it, she reflected. Perhaps it would be better not to write again. He’s not my sort a bit, she pondered with a sudden dim sense of his view of her as a dear girl. But she knew she wanted to retain him to decorate her breakfast tray with letters.
2
The following day Mrs. Corrie decided that she did not want to keep the hats. She would spend the money intended for them on sketching lessons. An artist should come once a week and teach them all to paint from Nature. This decision excited Miriam deeply, putting everything else out of her mind. It promised the satisfaction of a desire she had cherished with bitter hopelessness ever since her schooldays when every Friday had brought the necessity of choking down her longing to join the little crowd of girls who took “extras” and filed carelessly in to spend a magic afternoon amongst easels and casts in the large room. The old longing came leaping back higher than it had ever done before, making a curious eager smouldering in her chest—as Mrs. Corrie talked. An old sketch-book was brought out and Mrs.
Corrie spent the morning making drawings of the heads of the children as they sat at lessons. The book was almost full of drawings of the children’s heads. Besides the heads there were rough sketches of people Miriam did not know. The first half-dozen pages were covered with small outlines, hands, feet, eyes, thumbs; a few lines suggesting a body. These pages seemed full of life. But the sketches of the children and the unknown people, sitting posed, in profile, looking up, looking down, full face, quarter face, three-quarters, depressed her. Learning to draw did not seem worth while if this was the result. The early pages haunted her memory as she sat over the children’s lessons. Feet, strange things stepping out, going through the world, running, dancing; the silent feet of people sitting in chairs pondering affairs of state. Eyes, looking at everything; looking at the astonishingness of everything.
3
“That’s the half-crown Mrs. Corrie gave me for the cabman, and the shilling for my tea,” said Miriam, handing the coins to her companion as they bowled over Waterloo Bridge. Seagulls were rising and dipping about the rim of the
bridge and the sunlight lay upon the water and shimmered and flashed along the forms of the seagulls as they hovered and wheeled in the clear air. Miriam glanced at them through the little side window of the hansom with a remote keen part of her consciousness ... light flashing from the moving wing of a seagull, the blue water, the brilliant sky, the bite of sun-scorched air upon her cheek, the sound about her like the sound of the sea.... As she turned back to the shaded enclosure of the hansom these things shrivelled and vanished and left her dumb, helplessly poised between two worlds. This shabby part of London and the seaside bridge could make no terms with the man at her side, his soft grey suit, his soft grey felt hat, the graceful crook of his crossed knees, his gleaming spats, the glitter of the light upon patent leather shoes. He was gazing out ahead, with the look with which he had looked across Australia in his gold-digging days, weary until he got back to the West End, not talking because the cab made such a noise crossing the bridge. It was stupid of her to peer out of her window and get away to her own world like that. Nothing that we can ever say to each other can possibly interest us,
she reflected. Why am I here? Her coins reassured her.
“Don’t think about pence, dear girl,” he said, in a voice that quavered a little against the noise of the cab, “when you’re with old Bob.” Without looking at her he gently closed her hand over the money.
“All right,” she shouted, “we’ll see, later on!”
The cab swept round into a street and the noise abated.
“When we’ve dropped those famous hats and rung the bell and run away we’ll go on to Bumpus’s and choose our book,” he said, as if asserting themselves and their errand against the confusion through which they were driving.
“Mrs. Caudle’s Curtain Lectures,” thought Miriam, glancing with loathing at the pointed corner of the collar that stuck out across the three firm little folds under the clean-shaven chin.... How funny I am. I suppose I shall get through the afternoon somehow. We shall go to the bookshop and then have tea and then it will be time to go back.
“The cabman is to take the hats into the shop and leave them. Isn’t it extraordinary?”
Bob laughed with a little fling of his head.
“The vagaries of the Fair, dear girl,” he said presently, in a soft blurred tone.
That’s one of his phrases, thought Miriam—that’s old-fashioned politeness; courtliness. Behind it he’s got some sort of mannish thought ... “the unaccountability of women” ... who can understand a woman—she doesn’t even understand herself—thought he’d given up trying to make out. He’s gone through life and got his own impressions; all utterly wrong ... talking about them with an air of wisdom to young men like Gerald ... my dear boy, a woman never knows her own mind. How utterly detestable mannishness is; so mighty and strong and comforting when you have been mewed up with women all your life, and then suddenly, in a second, far away, utterly imbecile and aggravating with a superior self-satisfied smile because a woman says one thing one minute and another the next. Men ought to be horsewhipped, all the grown men, all who have ever had that self-satisfied smile, all, all, horsewhipped until they apologise on their knees.
4
They sat in a curious oak settee, like a high-backed church pew. The waitress had cleared away the tea things and brought cigarettes, large flat Turkish cigarettes. Responding to her companion’s elaborate apologetic petition for permission to smoke it did not occur to Miriam to confess that she herself occasionally smoked. She forgot the fact in the completeness of her contentment. On the square oak table in front of them was a bowl of garden anemones, mauve and scarlet with black centres, flaring richly in the soft light coming through the green-tinted diamond panes of a little low square deep-silled window. On either side of the window short red curtains were drawn back and hung in straight, close folds ... scarlet geraniums ... against the creamy plaster wall. Bowls of flowers stood on other tables placed without crowding or confusion about the room and there was another green window with red curtains near a far-off corner. There were no other customers for the greater part of their time and when the waitress was not in the room it was still; a softly shaded stillness. Bob’s low blurred voice had gone on
and on undisturbingly, no questions about her life or her plans, just jokes, about the tea-service and everything they had had, making her laugh. Whenever she laughed, he laughed delightedly. All the time her eyes had wandered from the brilliant anemones across to the soft green window with its scarlet curtains.