“I should like to be annihilated.”
“Shut up von Bohlen; you wouldn’t. But look here Miriam child, do you mean to say you think that as long as there is something that keeps on and on, fighting its way on in spite of everything one has, well, a right to exist?”
“Well, that may be the survival of the fittest which doesn’t mean the ethically fittest as Huxley had to admit. We kill the ethically fittest at present. We killed Christ. They go to Heaven. All of us who survive have things to learn down here in hell. Perhaps this is hell. There seems something, ahead.”
“Ourselves. Rising on the ashes of our dead selves. Lord, it’s midnight—”
The chill of the outside night, solitude and her cold empty room. …
“I’m going to bed.”
“So am I. We shall be in bed, Miriam, five minutes after you have gone.”
Jan went off for the hot water bottles.
“All right, I’m going—” Miriam bent for her shoes. The soles were dry, scorching; they scorched her feet as she forced on the shoes; one sole cracked across as she put her foot to the ground … she braced the muscles of her face and said nothing. It must be forgotten before she left the room that they were nearly new and her only pair; two horrid ideas, nagging and keeping things away.
Outside in the air daylight grew strong and clear in Miriam’s mind. Patches of day came in a bright sheen from the moonlit puddles, distributed over the square. She crossed the road to the narrow pathway shadowed by the trees that ran round the long oblong enclosure. From this dark pathway the brightness of the wet moonlit roadway was brighter and she could see façades that caught the moonlight. There was something trying to worry her, some little thing that did not matter at all, but that some part of her had put away to worry over and was now wanting to consider. Mag’s affairs … no she had decided about that. It might be true about blunted sensibilities; but she had meant for some reason to let that other man kiss her, and people never ask advice until they have made up their minds what they are going to do and Mag was Mag quite apart from anything that might happen. She would still be Mag if she were old … or mad. That was a firm settled real thing, real and absolute in the daylight of the moonlit square. She wandered slowly on humming a tune; every inch of the way would be lovely. The figure of a man in an overcoat and a bowler hat loomed towards her on the narrow pathway and stopped. The man raised his hat, and his face showed smiling with the moonlight on it. Miriam had a moment’s fear; but the man’s attitude was deprecating and there was her song; it was partly her own fault. But why, why … fierce anger at the recurrence of this kind of occurrence seized her. She wanted him out of the way and wanted him to know how angry she was at the interruption.
“Well,” she snapped angrily, coming to a standstill in the moonlit gap.
“Oh,” said the man a little breathlessly in a lame broken tone, “I thought you were going this way.”
“So I am,” retorted Miriam in a loud angry shaking tone, “obviously.”
The man stepped quickly into the gutter and walked quickly away across the road. St. Pancras church chimed the quarter.
Miriam marched angrily forward with shaking limbs that steadied themselves very quickly … the night had become suddenly cold; bitter and penetrating; a northeast wind, of course. It was frightfully cold after the warm room; the square was bleak and endless; the many façades were too far off to keep the wind away; the pavement was very cold under her right foot; that was it; the broken sole was the worry that had been trying to come up; she could walk with it; it would not matter if the weather kept dry … an upright gait, hurrying quickly away across the moonlit sheen; just the one she had summoned up anger and courage to challenge was not so bad as the others … they were not bad; that was not it; it was the way they got in the way … figures of men, dark, in dark clothes, presenting themselves, calling attention to themselves and the way they saw things, mean and suggestive, always just when things were loveliest. Couldn’t the man see the look of the square and the moonlight? … that afternoon at Hyde Park Corner … just when everything flashed out after the rain … the sudden words close to her ear … my beauty … my sweet … you sweet girl … the puffy pale old face, the puffs under the sharp brown eyes. A strange … conviction in the trembling old voice … it was deliberate; a sort of statement; done on purpose, something chosen that would please most. It was like the conviction and statement there had been in Bob Greville’s voice. Old men seemed to have some sort of understanding of things. If only they would talk with the same conviction about other things as there was in their tone when they said those personal things. But the things they said were worldly—generalisations, like the things one read in books that tired you out with trying to find the answer, and made books so awful … things that might look true about everybody at some time or other and were not really true about anybody—when you knew them. But people liked those things and thought them clever and smiled about them. All the things the old men said about life and themselves and other people, about everything but oneself, were sad; disappointed and sad with a glint of far off youth in their faces
