“Well my dear man you’ve got the Duke of Argyll to keep you company,” sighed Mr. Wilson with a smothered giggle, getting to his feet.
Miriam went from the sitting room she had entered in another age with the bedroom violets pinned against her collarette, stripped and cold and hungry into the cold of the brightly-lit little dining room. The gay cold dishes, the bright jellies and fruits, the brown nuts, the pretty Italian wine in thin white long-necked decanters … Chianti … Chianti … they all seemed familiar with the wine and the word; perhaps it was a familiar wine at the Wilson supper-parties; they spoke of it sitting at the little feast amongst the sternness of nothing but small drawings and engravings on walls that shone some clear light tone against the few pieces of unfamiliar grey-brown furniture like people clustering round a fire. But it was a feast of death; terrible because of their not knowing that it was a feast of death. The wife of the cockatoo had come in early enough to hear nearly the whole of the conversation and had sat listening to it with a quiet fresh talkative face under her fresh dark hair; the large deep furrow between her eyebrows was nothing to do with anything here, it was permanent, belonging to her life. She had brought her life in with her and kept it there, the freshness and the furrow; she seemed now, at supper to be out for the evening, to enjoy herself—at the Wilsons’ … coming to the Wilsons’ … for a jolly evening, just as anybody would go anywhere for a jolly evening. She did not know what was there, what it all meant. Perhaps because of the two little boys. She, with two little unseen boys and the big house so near, big and full of her and noise and things, and her freshness and the furrow of her thought about it prevented anything from going on; the dreadful thing had to be dropped where it was, leaving the big man who had fought to pretend to be interested and amused, leaving Mr. Wilson with the last word and his quiet smothered giggle.
Alma tried to answer Mrs. Pinner’s loud fresh talking in the way things had been answered earlier in the afternoon before the departure of all the other people. Everything she said was an attempt to beat things up. Every time she spoke Miriam was conscious of something in the room that would be there with them all if only Alma would leave off being funny; something there was in life that Alma had never yet known, something that belonged to an atmosphere she would call “dull.” Mr. Wilson knew that something … had it in him somewhere, but feared it and kept it out by trying to be bigger, by trying to be the biggest thing there was. Alma went on and on, sometimes uncomfortably failing, her thin voice sounding out like a corkscrew in a cork without any bottle behind it, now and again provoking a response which made things worse because it brought to the table the shamed sense of trying to keep something going. … The clever excitements would not come back. Mrs. Binkley would have helped her. … Miriam sat helpless and miserable between her admiration of Alma’s efforts and her longing for the thing Alma kept out. Her discomfiture at Alma’s resentment of her dullness and Alma’s longing for Mrs. Binkley was made endurable by her anger over Alma’s obstructiveness. Mr. Pinner and the big man were busily feeding. Mrs. Pinner laughed and now and again tried to imitate Alma; as if she had learned how it was done by many visits to the Wilsons’, and then forgot and talked in her own way, forgetting to try to say good things. Alma grew smaller as supper went on and Mr. and Mrs. Pinner larger and larger. Together they were too strong in their sense of some other life and some other way of looking at things to give the Wilson way a clear field. Mr. Wilson began monologues in favourable intervals, but they tailed off for lack of nourishing response. Miriam listened eagerly and suspiciously; lost in admiration and a silent, mentally wordless opposition. She felt the big man was on her side and that the Pinners would be if they could understand. They only saw the jokes … the—the, higher facetiousness … good phrase, that was the Chianti. And they were getting used to that; perhaps they were secretly a little tired of it.
After supper Mr. Pinner sang very neatly in a small clear tenor voice an English translation of “Es war ein König im Thule.” Miriam longed for the German words; Mr. Pinner cancelled even the small remainder of the German sentiment by his pronunciation of the English rendering; “there was a king of old tame,” he declared and so on throughout the song. Alma followed with a morsel of Chopin. The performance drove Miriam into a rage. Mr. Pinner had murdered his German ballad innocently, his little Oxford voice and his false vowels did not conceal the pleasure he took in singing his unimagined little song, Alma played her piece at her audience, every line of her face and body proclaiming it fine music, the right sort of music, and deprecating all the compositions that were not “music.” It was clear that her taste had become cultivated, that she knew now, that the scales had fallen from her eyes as they had fallen from Miriam’s eyes in Germany; but the result sent Miriam back with a rush to cheap music, sentimental “obvious” music, shapely waltzes, the demoralising chromatics
