he, wicked fast little foreigner did not know how utterly meaningless his words were. He was here, in Ruscino’s quite simply. He sat at home, at the height of his happy foreign expansiveness. He had no sense of desperate wickedness. He gave no help to the sense of desperate wickedness; pouring like an inacceptable nimbus from his brilliant strong head was a tiresome homeliness. She flung forth to the music, the shining fronds of distant palm ferns; sipped her liqueur with downcast eyes and thought of an evening along the digue at Ostend, the balmy air, the telescoping brilliant interiors of the villas, the wild arm-linked masquerading stroll, Elsie had really looked like an unprincipled Bruxelloise … foreigners were all innocent in their depravity. … To taste the joy of depravity one must be English. … Hah; Strelinsky!
Ça va bien, hein? A figure had risen out of the earth at
Mr. Mendizabal’s elbow and stood looking down at him; another foreigner. She glanced with an air of proprietorship; a slender man in a thin faded grey overcoat, a sharp greyish yellow profile and small thin head under a dingy grey felt hat. Strelinsky.
Mr. Mendizabal stood sturdily up bowing with square outstretched hand, wrapped in the radiating beam of his smile. I present you
Mr. Strelinsky. A musician. A composer of music. His social manner was upon him again; fatherliness, strong responsible hardworking kindliness. The face under the grey hat turned slowly towards her. She bowed and looked into eyes set far back in the thin mask of the face. Her eyes passed a question from the expressionless eyes to the motionless expressionless face. How could he be a composer; looking so … vanishing? Strelinsky …
Morceau pour piano … that must be
he standing here; did you write this she said abruptly and hummed the beginning. It sounded shapeless and toneless, but there was a little tune just ahead. She broke off short of it not sure that he was attending; the world burst into laughter; his face turned slowly and stopped looking downwards across her, his eyes fixed in a dead repetition of the laughter in which she was drowning. He stood in space in a faded coat and hat, a colourless figure clothed by her feebleness in lively dignity and wisdom … grouped inaccessibly beyond the vast space were solid tables filled with judges; dim figures stood in judgment in the amber light under the gallery where palms stood; she was drowning alone, surrounded by a distant circle of palms. Eleven. We must go miss stated
Mr. Mendizabal cordially. Miriam rose. The tide of café life flowed all round her. She wandered blissfully out through the misty smoke-wreathed golden light, threading her way amongst the tables towards the black and gold of the streets. Far away behind her, staying in the evening, Strelinsky blocked the view, moving, fixed avertedly, with eyes in his shoulders along an endless narrowing distance of café.
VII
Miriam found her old prayerbook and scribbled her name on the flyleaf. … Bella de Castro writing from mother under her name in her bible … feeling something, privately, not knowing that anyone would see it. … The sunlight pouring in on the thin bible page; the words written plumply with one of Bella’s blunt uncared-for pencils. Her thick ropy black plait, brilliant oily Italian eyes in her long fat handsome face; staring out of the window sullenly waiting for schooldays to be at an end; her handsome horrible brother on horseback; just the same; the high-water marks above her wrists when she washed her hands, and then, from mother, stubbed carefully, meaning.
The pencilled Miriam gave a false meaning to the prayerbook. There was no indiarubber, she would have to take it down as it was. It was a letter, written to Dr. von Heber, supposed to be written when she was a girl. … She carried the book downstairs. The Baileys were still sitting by the fire with their backs to Dr. von Heber standing alone in the twilight in the middle of the room. She came forward, handing the book stiffly and sat busily down to the piano again, angrily recording his quiet formal thanks and silent swift departure. She began playing where she had left off; telling Dr. von Heber as he went downstairs that he had come up and made a scene and interrupted her; that her chosen evening was to sit, with the Baileys, playing the piano; that she was not a churchgoer.
He had come so suddenly; after so long; if she had not been so lost in the disappointing evening she would have been ready. If she had not suddenly been so prepared, so rushing forward and feeling after he had spoken as if the words had been long ago and they had been to church together and come back before all the world there would not have been in his voice the reproachful affronted anticipation of her stupidity.
Perhaps he had really suddenly thought downstairs that it would be nice to go to church, not knowing that that was one of the real effects of falling in love … just thinking in the course of his worldly studies that there was church and he was in himself a churchgoer and ought to go more often and coming up to borrow a prayerbook from the Baileys. No. Suddenly in the room, standing in the unknown drawing-room for the first time in his steady urbane confident way, waiting, a little turned towards the piano. The Baileys had neither spoken nor moved; they were afraid of him; but Mrs. Bailey would have made herself say, Well, doctor, to the amazing apparition. They simply waited, held off by his waiting manner. “I think this is a good evening to go to church.” What have you been doing all this time? Where do you go, going out so often? What are you doing sitting here playing? We ought to be going to church; we two. Here I
