And Salviati’s window. …
She must hold on to these things. Life without them would be impossible.
It was—Style … or something. Le style c’est l’homme. That meant something. It was the same with clothes. … Suburban people could be fashionable, never stylish. And manners. … They were fussily kind and nice to each other; as if life were pitiful … life … pitiful. They all pitied, and despised each other.
The night was vast with all the other things. No need to sleep. To lie happy and strong in the sense of them was better than sleep. In a few hours the little suburban day would come … everything gleaming with the light of the big things beyond. One could go through it in a drowse of strength, full of laughter … laughter to the brim, all one’s limbs strong and heavy with laughter.
Bob Greville had gone jingling down the road in a hansom—grey holland blinds and a pink rosebud in the driver’s buttonhole. Why had he come? Going in and out of the weddings a pale grey white-spatted guest, talking to everyone … a preoccupied piece of the West End. Large club windows looking out on sunlit Piccadilly; a glimpse of the haze of the Green Park. Weddings must be laughable to him with his “Mrs. Caudle’s Curtain Lectures” ideas. His wife was dead. She had been fearfully ill suddenly on their wedding tour … at “Lawzanne.” That was the wrong way to pronounce Lausanne. And that wrong way of pronouncing was somehow part of his way of thinking about her. He seemed to remember nothing but her getting ill and spoke with a sort of laughing, contemptuous fear. Men.
But in some way he was connected with that strange thing outside the everyday things.
How stupid of Eve to be vexed because she was told there was no need to scrawl the addresses of the little cake boxes right across the labels. Impossible now to ask her to come and play song accompaniments. Besides, she was tired. Eve was tired because she did not really know how glorious life was. In her life with the Greens in Wiltshire there was nothing besides the Greens but the beautiful landscape. And the landscape seen from the Greens’ windows must look commercial, in the end. Eve was evidently beginning to tire of it. And they had worked so hard all the morning cutting up the cake. Eve did not know that towards the end of the morning she had thought of singing after lunch … feeling so strong and wanting to make a noise. Bohm’s songs. It was better really to sing to one’s own accompaniment; only there was no one to listen. …
“Und wenn i dann mal wie‑ie‑d‑er komm.”
a German girl, her face strahlend mit Freude—radiant with joy … but strahlend was more than radiant … streaming—like sunlight—shafts of sunlight. German women were not self-conscious. They were full of joy and sorrow. Perhaps happier than any other women. Their mountains and woods and villages and towns were beautiful with joy. They did not care what men thought or said. They were happy in their beautiful country in their own way. Germany … all washed with poetry and music and song. “Freue dich des Lebens.” Freue … Freue dich … the words were like the rush of wings … the flutter of a fresh skirt round happy hurrying feet.
“What a melancholy ditty, chick.”
Miriam laughed and dropped into the accompaniment of Schubert’s “Ave Maria.” “Listen, mother … there was a monk who sang this so beautifully in a church that he had to be stopped.” She played through the “Ave Maria” and looked round. Mrs. Henderson was sitting stiffly in a stiff straight chair with her hands twisted in her lap. “Oh bother,” thought Miriam, “she’s feeling hysterical … and it’s my turn this time. What on earth shall I do?” The word had come up through the years. Sarah had seen “attacks of hysteria. …” Was she going to have one now … laugh and cry and say dreadful things and then be utterly exhausted? Good Lord, how fearful. And what was the good? She “couldn’t help it.” That was why you had to be firm with hysterical people. But there was no need, now. Everything was better. Two of them married; the boys ready to look after everything. It was simply irritating … and the sun just coming round into the green of the conservatory. …
She sat impatient, feeling young and strong and solid with joy on the piano stool. Couldn’t mother see her, sitting there in a sort of blaze of happy strength? She swung impatiently round to the keyboard and glanced at the open album. There was silence in the room. Her heart beat anxiously … some German printer had printed those notes … in pain and illness perhaps—but pain and illness in Germany, not in this dreadful little room where despair was shut in. … Comus, The Seven Ages of Man, The Arctic Regions, beautiful bindings on the little old inlaid table, things belonging to those sunny beginnings and ending with that awful agonised figure sitting there silent. She cleared her throat and stretched a hand out over the notes of a chord without striking it. Something was gaining on her. Something awful and horrible.
“Play something cheerful,
