How the fragrance of the cigarette stood out upon the fresh warm air … that was perique, that curious strong flavour. They were very strong, he had said so; but downstairs, talking like that they had had no particular flavour, just cigarettes, bringing the cigarette mood … no wonder he had been surprised, really surprised, at her smoking so many … but then he had been surprised at her eating a hard apple at midnight … the sitting room had suddenly looked familiar going into it alone while they were seeing out the Pinners and the big man. Strange unknown voices that perhaps she would not hear again, going out into the night … their voices jesting the last jests as the guests went down the garden, sounding in the hall, familiar and homely, well known to her, presently coming back into the sitting room; the fire burning brightly like any other fire, the exciting deep pinkness of the shaded lamplight like nothing else in the world. Alma knew it, rushing in … whirling about with Alma in that room with that afternoon left in it; the sounds of bolting and locking coming in from the hall.
… “You looked extraordinarily pretty. …”
“You have come through it all remarkably well” … remarkable had a k in it in English, and German, merkwürdig, and perhaps in Scandinavian languages; but not in other languages; it was one of the things that separated England from the south … remarkable … hard and chilly.
“You know you’re awfully good stuff. You’ve had an extraordinary variety of experience; you’ve got your freedom; you ought to write.”
“That is what a palmist told me at Newlands. It was at a big afternoon ‘at home’; there was a palmist in a little dark room sitting near a lamp; she looked at nothing but your hands; she kept saying whatever you do, write. If you haven’t written yet, write, if you don’t succeed go on writing.”
“Just so, have you written?”
“Ah, but she also told me my self-confidence had been broken; that I used to be self-confident and was so no longer. It’s true.”
“Have you written anything?”
“I once sent in a thing to Home Notes. They sent it back but asked me to write something else and suggested a few things.”
“If they had taken your stuff you would have gone on and learnt to turn out stuff bad enough for Home Notes and gone on doing it for the rest of your life.”
“But then an artist, a woman who had a studio in Bond Street and knew Leighton, saw some things I had tried to paint and said I ought to make any sacrifice to learn painting, and a musician said the same about music.”
“You could work in writing quite well with your present work.”
… “Pieces of short prose; anything; a description of an old woman sitting in an omnibus … anything. There’s plenty of room for good work. There’s the Academy always ready to consider well-written pieces of short prose. Write something and send it to me.”
Nearing London shivering and exhausted she recalled Sunday morning and the strangeness of it being just as it had promised to be. Happy waking with a clear refreshed brain in a tired drowsy body, like the feeling after a dance; making the next morning part of the dance, your mind full of pictures and thoughts and the evening coming up again and again, one great clear picture in the foreground of your mind. The evening in the room as you sat propped on your pillows drinking the clear pale curiously refreshing tea left by the maid on a little wooden tray by your bedside; its fragrance drew you to sip at once, without adding milk and sugar. It was delicious; it steamed aromatically up your nostrils and went straight to your brain; potent without being bitter. Perhaps it was “China” tea; it must be. The two biscuits on the little plate disappeared rapidly, and she poured in milk and added much sugar to her remaining tea to appease her hunger. The evening stayed during her deliberately perfunctory toilet; she wanted only to be down. It began again unbroken with the first cigarette after breakfast, when a nimble remark thrown out from the excited gravity of her happiness made Mr. Wilson laugh. She was learning how to do it. It stayed on through the day, adding the day to itself in a chain, a morning of talk, a visit to Mr. Wilson’s study—the curious glimpses of pinewood from the windows; pinewood looking strange and faraway—there were people in Weybridge to whom those woods were real woods where they walked and perhaps had the thoughts that woods bring; here they were like woods in a picture book; not real, just a curious painted background for Mr. Wilson’s talk … all those books in fifty years’ time burnt up by the air; he did not seem to think it an awful idea … you can do anything with English … and then the names of authors who had done some of these things with English … making it sing and dance and march, making it like granite or like film and foam. Other languages were more simple and single in texture; less flexible. … Gazing out at the exciting silent pines—so dark and still, waiting, not knowing about the wonders of English—Miriam recalled her impressions of those of the authors she knew. It was true that those were their effects and the great differences between them.
