“Don’t mind the dentist a scrap. I’m looking forward to it. I shall see Mélie tonight.”
She doesn’t like her, thought Miriam; people being together is awful; like the creaking of furniture.
Mélie arrived an hour before dinner time. Miriam heard Mrs. Corrie taking her into the room next to her own with laughter and many phrases. A panting, determined voice, like a voice out of a play, the thick, smooth, rather common voice of a fair-haired middle-aged lady in a play kept saying, “The pores, my dear. I must open my pores after the journey. I’m choked with it.”
Presently Mélie’s door closed and Mrs. Corrie tapped and put her head inside Miriam’s door. “She’s goin’ to have a steam bath on her floor, got an injarubber tent on the floor and a spirit lamp. She’s gettin’ inside it. Isn’t she an old cure!”
“She’s thinking more about her food than anything they’re saying; she doesn’t really care about them a bit,” thought Miriam at dinner, gazing again and again across at Mrs. Staple-Craven’s fat little shape seated opposite herself in a tightly fitting pale blue silk dress whose sleeves had tiny puffs instead of the fashionable large square sleeves. Watching her cross unconscious face, round and blue-eyed and all pure “milk and roses,” her large yellow head with a tiny twist of hair standing up like the handle of a jug, exactly on the top of the crown, her fat white hands with thick soft curly fingers and bright pink nails, the strange blue stare that went from thing to thing on the table, hearing her thick smooth heedless voice, with its irrelevant assertions and statements, Miriam wondered how she had come to be Mrs. Staple-Craven. She was no more Mrs. Staple-Craven than she was sitting at Mrs. Corrie’s table. She was not really there. She was just getting through, and neither Mrs. Corrie nor Joey really knew this. At the same time she was too stout and gluttonous to be still really a fairy in Devonshire. Where was she? What did she think? She went on and on because she was afraid someone might ask her that.
Although Joey had been to have her hair dyed and had not been to the dentist at all she was not pretending nearly so much. She was a little ashamed. Why had she said she was going to the dentist and come back with sheeny bronzy hair, ashamed? She had been worrying about her looks. Perhaps she was more than twenty-one. Nan Babington said no one need mind being twenty-one if they were engaged, but if not it was a frantic age to be. Joey was a poor worried thing, just like any other girl.
When they were safely ensconced round the drawing-room fire Mrs. Staple-Craven sat very upright in her chair with her plump little hands on either arm and her eyes fixed on the blaze. Joey pleading toothache had said good night and gone away with her coffee. There was a moment’s silence.
“You’d never think I’d been fairly banged to death by the spirits last night,” said Mrs. Staple-Craven in a thick flat reproachful narrative tone. It sounds like a housekeeper giving an order to a servant she knows won’t obey her, thought Miriam, swishing more comfortably into her chair. If Mrs. Craven would talk there would be no need to do anything.
“Ah-ha,” said Mrs. Craven, still looking at the fire, “something’s pleasing Miss Henderson.”
“Is she rejoicin’? Tell us about the spirits, Mélie. I’m deadly keen. Deadly. She mustn’t be too delighted. I’ve told her she’s not to get engaged.”
“Engaged?” enquired Mrs. Craven, of the fire.
“She’s promised,” said Mrs. Corrie, turning off the lights until only one heavily shaded lamp was left, throwing a rosy glow over Mélie’s compact form.
“She won’t, if she’s not under the star, to be sure.”
“Oh, she mustn’t think about stars. Why should she marry?”
Miriam looked a little anxiously from one to the other.
“You’ve shocked her, Julia,” said Mrs. Staple-Craven. “Never mind at all, my dear. You’ll marry if you’re under the star.”
“Star, star, beautiful star, a handsome one with twenty thousand a year,” sang Mrs. Corrie.
“I don’t think a man has any right to be handsome,” said Miriam desperately—she must manage to keep the topic going. These women were so terrible—they filled her with fear. She must make them take back what they had said.
“A handsome man’s much handsomer than a pretty woman,” said Mrs. Craven.
“It’s cash, cash, cash—that’s what it is,” chanted Mrs. Corrie softly.
“Oh, do you?” said Miriam. “I think a handsome man’s generally so weak.”
Mrs. Craven stared into the fire.
“You take the one who’s got the ooftish, my friend,” said Mrs. Corrie.
“But you say I’m not to marry.”
“You shall marry when my poor little old kiddies are grown up. We’ll find you a very nice one with plenty of money.”
“Then you don’t think marriage is a failure,” said Miriam, with immense relief.
Mrs. Corrie leaned towards her with laughter in her clear light eyes. It seemed to fill the room. “Have some more coffy-drink?”
“No, thanks,” said Miriam, shivering.
“Sing us something—she sings, Mélie—German songs. Isn’t she no end clever?”
“Does she?” said Mrs. Craven. “Yes. She’s got a singing chin. Sing us a pretty song, my dear.”
As she fluttered the leaves of her Schumann album she saw Mrs. Craven sit back with closed eyes, and Mrs. Corrie still sitting forward in her chair with her hands clasped on her knees gazing with a sad white face into the flames.
“Ich grolle nicht, und wenn das Herz auch bricht,” sang Miriam, and thought of Germany. Her listeners did not trouble her. They would not understand. No English person would quite understand—the need, that the Germans understood so well—the need to admit the beauty of things … the need of the strange expression of music, making the beautiful things more beautiful and of words when they were together in the beauty of the poems. Music and poetry told everything—whether you
