The little man talking about the wonders of the linotype in the smoking room. … How did I get into the smoking room? Someone probably told Miss Spink I talked to him in the smoking room and smoked a cigarette. Perhaps his wife. If they could have seen. It was so surprising to hear anybody suddenly talking. Perhaps he began in the hall and ushered me into the smoking room. There was no one there and I can’t remember anything about the linotype, only the quiet and the talking face and suddenly feeling in the heart of London. But it was soon after that they all began being standoffish; before Mr. Chamberlayne came; before Adela began playing Esther Summerson at the Kennington. They approved of my going down to fetch her until he began coming too. The shock of seeing her clumsy heavy movements on the stage and her face looking as though it were covered with starch. … I can think about it all, here, and not mind.
She was beautiful. It was happiness to sit and watch her smoking so badly, in bed, in the strip of room, her cloud of hair against the wall in the candlelight, two o’clock … the Jesuit who had taught her chess … and Michael Somebody, the little book The Purple Pillar. He was an author and he wanted to marry her and take her back to Ireland. Perhaps by now she was back from America and had gone, just out of kindness. She was strong and beautiful and good, sitting up in her chemise, smoking. … I’ve got that photograph of her as Marcia somewhere. I must put it up. Miss Spink was surprised that last week, the students getting me into their room … the dark clean shining piano, the azaleas and the muslin shaded lamp, the way they all sat in their evening dresses, lounging and stiff with stiff clean polished hair. … “Miss Dust here’s going to be the highest soprano in the States.” … “None of that Miss Thicker.” … “When she caught that top note and the gold medal she went right up top, to stay there, that minute.”
She was surprised when Mrs. Potter took me to hear Melba. I heard Melba. I don’t remember hearing her. English opera houses are small; there are fine things all over the world. If you see them all you can compare one with the other; but then you don’t see or hear anything at all. It seems strange to be American and at the same time stout and middle-aged. It would have got more and more difficult with all those people. The dreadful way the Americans got intimate and then talked or hinted openly everywhere about intimate things. No one knew how intimate Miss O’Veagh was. I shall remember. There is something about being Irish Roman Catholic that makes happiness. She did not seem to think the George Street room awful. She was surprised when I talked about the hole in the wall and the cold and the imbecile servant and the smell of ether. “We are brought up from the first to understand that we must never believe anything a man says.” She came and sat and talked and wrote after she had gone … “goodbye—sweet blessed little rose of Mary” … she tried to make me think I was young and pretty. She was sorry for me without saying so.
I should never have gone to Mornington Road unless I had been nearly mad with sorrow … if Miss Thomas disapproved of germs and persons who let apartments why did she come and take a room at George Street? She must have seen she drove me nearly mad with sorrow. The thought of Wales full of Welsh people like her, makes one mad with sorrow. … Did she think I could get to know her by hearing all her complaints? She’s somewhere now, sending someone mad.
I was mad already when I went to Mornington Road.
“You’ll be all right with Mrs. Swanson” … the awful fringes, the horror of the ugly clean little room, the horror of Mrs. Swanson’s heavy old body moving slowly about the house, a heavy dark mountain, fringes, bulges, slow dead eyes, slow dead voice, slow grimacing evil smile … housekeeper to the Duke of Something and now moving slowly about heavy with disapproval. She thought of me as a business young lady.
Following advice is certain to be wrong. When you don’t follow advice there may be awful things. But they are not arranged beforehand. And when they come you do not know that they are awful until you have half got hold of something else. Then they change into something that has not been awful. Things that remain awful are in some way not finished. … Those women are awful. They will get more and more awful, still disliking and disapproving till they die. I shall not see them again. … I will never again be at the mercy of such women or at all in the places where they are. That means keeping free of all groups. In groups sooner or later one of them appears, dead and sightless and bringing blindness and death … although they seem to like brightness and children and the young people they approve of. I run
