… Dear Mr. Bowdoin … and I think I can promise you an audience. … I regret that I cannot come on Thursday and I am sincerely sorry that you should think I desired an audience … the extraordinary pompous touchiness of men … why didn’t he see I did not dream of suggesting he should come again just to see me. I’ve forgotten Mr. Bowdoin … and the Museum … everything. … I sit here … playing to hide myself from the Baileys and he is away somewhere making people happy. “They do not care … they see me, they shout Ah! Don Clement! I amuse them, I laugh, they think I am happy. Voilà tout, mademoiselle. … Il n’y a qu’une chose qui m’amuse.”
VIII
A day of blazing heat changed the season suddenly. Flat threatening sunlight travelled round the house. The shadowy sun-blinded flower-scented waiting-room held street-baked patients in its deep armchairs. Some of them were languid. But none of them suffered. They kept their freshness and freedom from exhaustion by living away from toil and grimy heat; in cool clothes, moving swiftly through moving air in carriages and holland-blinded hansoms; having ices in expensive shade; being waited on in the cool depths of west-end houses; their lives disturbed only by occasional dentistry. The lean dark patients were like lizards, lively and darting and active even in the sweltering heat.
Miriam’s sunless room was cool all day. Through her grey window she could see the sunlight pouring over the jutting windows of Mr. Leyton’s small room and reflected in the grimy sheen of the frosted windows of the den. Her day’s work was unreal, as easy as a dream. All about her were open sunlit days that her summer could not bring, and that yet were hers as she moved amongst them; a leaf dropped in the hall, the sight of a summer dress, summer light coming through wide-open windows took her out into them. Summer would never come again in the old way, but it set her free from cold, and let her move about unhampered in the summers of the past. Summer was happiness. … Individual things were straws on the stream of summer happiness.
At tea time in the den there was a darkening hush. It was like a guest, turning everyone’s attention to itself, abolishing differences, setting free unexpected sympathies. Everyone spoke of the coming storm and looked beautiful in speaking. The day’s work was discussed as if in the presence of an unseen guest.
She set out from the house of friends to meet the darkened daylight … perhaps the sudden tapping of thunder-drops upon her thin blouse. The street was a livid grey, brilliant with hidden sunlight.
The present can be judged by the part of the past it brings up. If the present brings up the happiness of the past, the present is happy.
Purgatory. The waters of Lethe and Eunoe “forgetfulness and sweet memory”; and then Heaven. The Catholics are right about expiation. If you are happy in the present something is being expiated. If life contains moments of paradise you must be in purgatory looking across the vale of Asphodel. You can’t be in hell. … Yet hell would not be hell without a knowledge of heaven. If once you’ve been in heaven you can never escape. Yet Dante believed in everlasting punishment.
Bathing in the waters of Lethe and Eunoe unworthily is drinking one’s own damnation. But happiness crops up before one can prevent it. Perhaps happiness is one long sin, piling up a bill. … It is my secret companion. Waiting at the end of every dark passage. I did not make myself. I can’t help it.
Brilliant … brilliant; and someone was seeing it. There was no thunderstorm, no clouds or pink edges on the brilliant copper grey. She wandered on down the road hemmed by flaring green. The invisible sun was everywhere. There was no air, nothing to hold her body separate from the scene. The grey brilliance of the sky was upon the pavement and in the green of the park, making mauve shadows between the trees and a mist of mauve amongst the further green. The high house fronts stood out against the grey, eastern-white, frilled below with new-made green, sprouting motionlessly as you looked … white plaster houses against the blue of the Mediterranean, grey mimosa trees, green-feathered lilac of wisteria. Between the houses and the park the road glared wooden grey, dark, baked grey, edged with the shadowless stone grey of the pavement. Summer. Eternity showing. …
The Euston Road was a narrow hot channel of noise and unbreathable odours, the dusty exhausting cruelty of the London summer, leading on to the feathery green floored woods of Endsleigh Gardens edged by grey house fronts, and ending in the cool stone of St. Pancras Church.
In the twilit dining-room one’s body was like a hot sun throbbing in cool dark air, ringed by cool walls holding darkness in far corners; coolness poured out through the wide-open windows towards the rain-cool grey façades of the opposite houses, cool and cool until the throbbing ceased.
All the forms seated round the table were beautiful; faraway and secret and separate, each oneself set in the coming of summer, unconscious. One soul. Summer is the soul of man. Through all the past months they had been the waiting guests of summer.
The pain of trying to get back into the moment of the first vision of spring, the perfect moment before the thought came that spring was going on in the country unseen, was over. The moment came back of itself … the green flush in the squares, the ripples of emerald fringed pink geraniums along the balconies of white houses.
After dinner Miriam left the dining-room, driven joyfully forth, remaining behind, floating and drifting happily about, united with everyone in the room as her feet carried her step by step without destination, going everywhere, up through the staircase twilight. …
The drawing-room was filled with saffron light, filtering in through the curtains
