Interim

It could not be God. It did not mind what you were or what you had done. It would be there if you had just murdered someone⁠ ⁠… it was only there when you had murdered everybody and everything and torn yourself away. Perhaps it was evil. One’s own evil genius. But how could it make you so blissful? What was one⁠—what had one done to bring the feeling of goodness and beauty and truth into the patch on the wall and presently make all the look of the distant world and everything in experience sound like music in a dream? She dropped her eyes. From the papered wall radiance still seemed to flow over her as she stood, defining her brow and hair, shedding a warmth in the cold room. Looking again she found the wall less bright; but within the radius of her motionless eyes everything in the brightly lit corner glowed happily; not drawing her but standing complete and serene, like someone standing at a little distance, expressing agreement.⁠ ⁠… Just in front of her a single neat warning tap sounded in the air, touching the quick of her mind.⁠ ⁠… St. Pancras clock⁠—striking down the chimney.⁠ ⁠… She ran across to the dark lattice and flung it open. In the air hung the echo of the first deep boom from Westminster. St. Pancras and the nearer clocks were telling themselves off against it. They would have finished long before Big Ben came to an end. Which was midnight? Let it be St. Pancras. She counted swiftly backwards; four strokes.⁠ ⁠… Out in the darkness the dark world was turning away from darkness. Within the spaces of the night the surface of a daylit landscape gleamed for an instant tilted lengthways across the sky.⁠ ⁠… Little sounds came snapping faintly up through the darkness from the street below, voices and the creaking open of doors. Windows were being pushed open up and down the street. The new year changed to a soft moonlit breath stealing through the darkness, brimming over the faces at the doors and windows, touching their brows with fingers of dawn, sending fresh soothing healing fingers in amongst their hair.⁠ ⁠… Eleven⁠ ⁠… twelve.⁠ ⁠… Across the rushing scale of St. Pancras bells came a fearful clangour. Bicycle bells, cab whistles, dinner bells the banging of tea-trays and gongs.⁠ ⁠… Of course⁠ ⁠… New Year⁠ ⁠… it must be a Bloomsbury custom. She had had her share in a Bloomsbury New Year. Rather jolly⁠ ⁠… rowdy; but jolly in that sort of way.⁠ ⁠… She could hear the Baileys laughing and talking on their doorstep. A smooth firm foreign voice flung out a shapely little fragment of song. Miriam watched its outline. It repeated itself in her mind with the foreign voice and personality of the singer. She drew back into her room.

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Her resolutions kept her at work on Saturday afternoon. A steady morning’s work disposed of the correspondence and the inrush of paid accounts. After lunch she worked in the surgeries until they were ready for Monday morning and made an attack on the mass of clerical work that remained from the old year. She sat working until she grew so cold that she knew if she stayed on in the cold window space she would have the beginning of a cold. Better to go, and have late evenings every day next week, cheered by the protests of the Orlys and ending with warm hours in the den. As she got up and felt the aching of her throat and the harsh hot chill running through her nerves she realised that anyhow she was in for a cold. There was no room to go to to get warm before going out. There seemed to be no warmth anywhere in the world. Torpid and stupid, miserably realising the increasing glow of her nose and the numb clumsiness of her feet she put away the ledgers and got into her outdoor things. She resented the sight of the bound volume of The Dental Cosmos that she had put aside to take home. Her interest in it was useless; as useless as everything else in the freezing world. Sounds of dancing and chanting came up the basement stairs. When their work was done they could laugh and sing in a warm room.

Turning northwards toward the Marylebone Road she met a bleak wind and turned back and down Devonshire Street and eastwards towards St. Pancras through a maze of side streets. The icy wind drove against her all the way. When she crossed a wide thoroughfare it was reinforced from the north. Eddies of colourless dust swirled about the pavements. At every crossing in the many little streets there was some big vehicle just upon her keeping her shrinking in the cold while it rumbled over the cobbles, overwhelming her with a harsh grating roar that filled the streets and the sky. Darkness was beginning; a hard black January darkness, utterly different to the friendly exciting twilights of the old year standing far far away with summer just behind them and Christmas ahead.⁠ ⁠…

Inside the house a cold grey twilight was blotting out the warm brownness. A door opened as she turned the stairhead on the second floor and a tall thin pale-faced young man in dark clothes and a light waistcoat flashed past her and leaped lightly downstairs. Miriam carried her impression up to her room, going hurriedly and stumbling on the stairs as she went.⁠ ⁠… Something hard, metallic, like a wire spring, cold and relentless. Belonging to a cold dreadful darkness and not knowing it; confident. He had whistled going downstairs, or sung. Had he? Perhaps he was the foreigner who had sung last night? Perfectly and awfully dreadful.⁠ ⁠… The whole house and even her own room had been changed in a twinkling. Coming in it had had a warmth, even in the cold twilight. Now it lay open and bleak, all its rooms naked and visible, a house “foreign young gentlemen” heard of and came to live in. He