Interim

other I don’t believe in unqualified assistants. That’s great he declared; that’s one of the greatest yarns I’ve heard. I shan’t forget it. He was not shocked and she had told the story as evenly and as much without emphasis as he would have done himself. She suddenly realised that this was the way to say things. It made no pause and did not disturb anything. She was learning from him every moment. He was utterly different to the men she knew. He did not resent her possession of the story nor attempt to cap it. You’ve got some very great men over here he said; some of the very greatest; and he began outlining the Canadian reputation of names that were amongst the pinnacles of Wimpole Street conversation. She learned exactly why Victor Horsley was great in the world and what it was that Dr. Barker did to fractured kneecaps. When Mrs. Bailey came up it was half-past twelve. He accepted his candle and thanked her gravely and gravely took his leave. Miriam and Mrs. Bailey were left confronted. Miriam laughed a social laugh, unintentionally, and listened happily to Mrs. Bailey’s kind brisk echo of it as she stood turning out the gas. They turned to each other in the hall and laughed goodnight. Mrs. Bailey was like a happy excited girl. She trotted busily and socially downstairs humming a tune towards a sociable waiting world, flouting difficulties with the sweep of the laughter in her voice.

Your Barker and your Horsley mused Miriam slackening her speed on the stairs; the sound of the low quiet glad confident voice steadying the aspect of the world and a strange new sense of the London medical world dotted by men who were world-famous, approached from afar, reverently, for specialist training, by already qualified medical men, competed together within her as she prepared for bed, going serenely through all the tiresome little processes. Something in the centre of life had steadied and clarified. It sent a radiance like sunlight through the endless processes of things; even a ragged toothbrush was a part of the sunlit scene; not unnoticed, or just dismal, but a part of the sunlit scene.

V

Still talking, Mr. Bowdoin went up the rubbish-strewn steps and opened the dusty blistered door with his latchkey. Miriam followed him into a dark bare passage and down carpetless stairs into a large chilly twilit basement room. Nothing was visible but a long kitchen table lit by a low barred window at the far end of the room. I will light a lamp for you in a moment he murmured in his formal cockney monotone; my friends will be arriving soon and before they come I should like to show you my sketches. Miriam sat down silently. The feeling of the neighbourhood was in the room. A heavy blankness lay over everything. She felt nowhere. It had been difficult to take part in conversation walking along the Farringdon Road. It was strange enough to know that anyone lived in a road almost in the city; and paying a visit there was like stepping out of the world.

With his slow even speech Mr. Bowdoin rebuked her here even more strongly for her outbreak of excited talk and loud laughter about Devonshire. He had not felt that they were walking along, outside London, in blank space, free, and exactly alike in their thoughts. He had not had that moment when they turned into the strange dead road east of Bloomsbury, nowhere, and he had seemed like herself at her side and he ought to have laughed and laughed. His sudden searching look, are you mad or intoxicated, with your sudden Billingsgate manners, had said that Farringdon Road was in the world and that he intended to conduct himself in the usual manner of a gentleman escorting a lady. As he lit a little lamp on the corner of the table she glanced at the back of his hair and imagined him sitting at a typewriter with it in curl-papers, and determined to be at ease. What a jolly room she exclaimed with strained animation as the lamplight wavered up and then sat looking at her hands. It would be cruel to look about the room. She had seen kitchen chairs standing sparsely about in the spaces unoccupied by the table, a cottage piano standing at right angles with the low window and one picture over the piano. There was nothing else in the room. The floor was covered with strips of coarse worn oilcloth and there was nothing above the empty mantelpiece. It is quite bohemian said Mr. Bowdoin lighting the piano candles. Let me take your cloak. Miriam slipped off her golf-cape and he disappeared between curtains at the end of the room opposite the window.

This was Bohemia! She glanced about. It was the explanation of the room. But it was impossible to imagine Trilby’s milk-call sounding at the door.⁠ ⁠… It was Bohemia; the table and chairs were bohemian. Perhaps a big room like this would be even cheaper than a garret in St. Pancras. The neighbourhood did not matter. A bohemian room could hold its own anywhere. No furniture but chairs and a table, saying when you brought people in I am a Bohemian and having no one but Bohemians for friends. There must be a special way of behaving in English Bohemia. Perhaps when the friends came she would find it out. I have the sketches in a drawer here said Mr. Bowdoin coming back through the curtains and turning up an end of the tablecloth.⁠ ⁠… Ah! C’est le pied de Trilby. Wee. D’après nature? Nong. De mémoire, alors?⁠ ⁠… où rien ne troublera, Trilby, qui dorrr-mira, thought Miriam. She took the little watercolour sketches one by one and listened carefully to Mr. Bowdoin’s descriptions of the subjects, trying to think of something to say. It was wonderful that he should take so much trouble on a holiday.