Interim

hanging motionless before the high French windows. Within the air of the room, just inside the faint smell of dusty upholstery was the peace of the new found summer. Mrs. Bailey’s gift. There had been no peace of summer last year in her stifling garret. This year the summer was with her, in the house where she was. Far away within the peace of the room was the evening of a hot summer day at Waldstrasse, the girls sitting about, beautiful featureless forms together forever in the blissful twilight of the cool saal and sitting in its little summer house Ulrica, everybody, her dark delicate profile lifted towards the garden, her unconscious pearly beauty grouped against the undisturbing presence of Fraulein Pfaff. Miriam turned to the near window and peered through the thick mesh of the smoke-yellowed lace curtain. Behind it the French window stood ajar. Drawing aside the thick dust-smelling lace she stepped out and drew the door to behind her. There were shabby drawing-room chairs standing in an irregular row on the dirty grey stone, railed by a balustrade of dark maroon painted iron railings almost colourless with black grime. But the elastic outer air was there and away at the end of the street a great gold pink glow stood above and showed through the feathery upper branches of the trees in Endsleigh Gardens. A number of people must have been sitting out before dinner. That was part of their dinnertime happiness. Presently some of them would come back. She scanned the disposition of the chairs. The little comfortable circular velvet chair stood in the middle of the row, conversationally facing the high-backed wicker chair. The other chairs were the small stiff velvet-seated ones. The one at the north end of the balcony could be turned towards the glowing sky with its back to the rest of the balcony. She reached and turned it and sat down. The opposite houses with their balconies on which groups were already forming stood sideways, lost beyond the rim of her glasses. The balcony of the next house was empty; there was nothing between her and the vista of green feathering up into the intense gold-rose glow.⁠ ⁠… She could come here every night⁠ ⁠… filling her life with green peace; preparing for the stifling heat of the nights in her garret. This year, with dinner in the cool dining-room and the balcony for the evening, the summer would not be so unbearable. She sat still, lifted out into garden freshness.⁠ ⁠… Benediction.⁠ ⁠… People were stepping out on to the balcony behind her, remarking on the beauty of the evening, their voices new and small in the outer air.⁠ ⁠… If she never came out again this summer would be different. It had begun differently. She knew what lay ahead and could be prepared for it.

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She would find coolness at the heart of the swelter of London if she could keep a tranquil mind. The coolness at the heart of the central swelter was wonderful life, from moment to moment, pure life. To go forward now, from this moment, alive, keeping alive, through the London summer. Even to go away for holidays would be to break up the wonder, to snap the secret clue and lose the secret life.⁠ ⁠…

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The rosy gold was deepening and spreading.

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Miriam found herself rested as if by sleep. It seemed as if she had been sitting in the stillness for a time that was longer than the whole of the working day. To recover like this every day⁠ ⁠… to have at the end of every day a cool solid clear head and rested limbs and the feeling that the strain of work was so far away that it could never return. The tireless sense of morning and new day that came in moving from part to part of her London evenings, and strongest of all at the end of a long evening, going on from a lecture or a theatre to endless leisure, reading, the happy gaslight over her book under the sloping roof, always left her in the morning unwilling to get up, and made the beginning of the day horrible with languor and breakfast a scramble, taken to the accompaniment of guilty listening for the striking of nine o’clock from St. Pancras church, and the angry sense of Mr. Hancock already arriving cool and grey clad at the morning door of Wimpole Street. Tonight, going strong and steady to her hot room, sleep would be silvery cool. She would wake early and fresh, and surprise them all at Wimpole Street arriving early and serene after a leisurely breakfast.

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The rosy light shone into faraway scenes with distant friends. They came into her mind rapidly one by one, and stayed grouped in a radiance, sharper and clearer than in experience. She recalled scenes that had left a sting, something still to be answered. She saw where she had failed; her friends saw what she had meant, in some secret unconscious part of them that was turned away from the world; in their thoughts with themselves when they were alone. Her own judgments, sharply poised in memory upon the end of some small incident, reversed themselves, dropped meaningless, returned reinforced, went forward, towards some clearer understanding. Her friends drifted forward, coming too near, as if in competition for some central place. To every claim, she offered her evening sky as a full answer. The many forms remained, grouped, like an audience, confronted by the evening.

The gold was fading, a soft mistiness spreading through the deepening rose, making the leafage darker and more opaque. Presently the sky would be mother-of-pearl above a soft dark mass and then pure evening grey outlining the dark feathery tree tops of a London square turning to green below in the lamplight, sinking to sleep, deeply breathing out its freshness to meet the freshness pouring through the streets from the neighbouring squares. Freshness would steal over the outside walls of the houses already cool within. Only in the