“I shall spend the whole of my time in here, doing absolutely nothing.”
“You shall! You shall! Dear old Mira.” She was laughing again. “But you’ll come out and have tea. Sometimes. Won’t you, for instance, come out and have tea now? In a few minutes? There’ll be tea; in ever such a few minutes. Wouldn’t that be a bright idea?” How dainty she was; how pretty. A Dresden china shepherdess, without the simper; a sturdiness behind her sparkling mirth. If only she would stop trying to liven her up. It seemed always when they were alone, as if she were still brightly in the midst of people keeping things going. …
“Tea! Bright idea! Tea!” A little parting shake and a brisk whirling turn and she was sitting away on the side of the bed, meditatively, with both hands, using a small filmy handkerchief, having given up hope of galvanising; saying gravely, “Take off your things and tell me really how you are.”
“I’m at my last gasp,” said Miriam sinking into a chair. It was clear now that she would not be alone with the first expressiveness of the room. Returning later on she would find it changed. The first, already fading, wonderful moment would return, painfully, only when she was packing up to go. After all it was Alma’s home. But it was no use trying to fight this monstrous conviction that the things she liked of other people, were more hers than their own. The door opened again upon a servant with her pilgrim baskets.
“I nearly always am at my last gasp nowadays.” Clean, strong neatly cuffed hands setting the dusty London baskets down to rest in the quiet freshness.
Alma spoke formally; her voice a comment on expressiveness in the presence of the maid; and an obliteration of the expressiveness of the room; making it just a square enclosure set about with independent things, each telling, one against the other, a separate history. … When the maid was gone the air was parched with silence. Miriam felt suspended; impatient; eager to be out in whatever grouping Alma had come from, to recover there in the open the sense of life that had departed from the sheltering room.
“How is Sarah?” Alma felt the strain. But for her it was the difficulty of finding common ground for interchange with anyone whose life was lacking in brilliant features. She was behaving, kindly trying for topics; but also, partly, underlining the featurelessness, as a punishment for bad behaviour.
“Oh—flourishing—I think.” She rose, unpinning her stifling veil. She would have to brace herself to reach out to something with which to break into the questions Alma’s kind patience would one by one produce. A catechism leading her thoughts down into a wilderness of unexamined detail that would unfit her for the coming emergence.
“And Harriett?”
“Harriett’s simply splendid. You know, if she only had a little capital she could take another house. She’s sending people away all the time.”
“Oh yes?” Alma did not want to spend time over Harriett’s apartment house, unless it was brightly described. It was too soon for bright descriptions. The item had been dragged in and wasted, out of place. A single distasteful fact. The servants, hidden away beyond the velvet staircase, seemed to be hearing the unsuitable disclosure. She sought about in her mind for something that would hold its own; one of the points of conflict that had cleared, since she was last here, to single unanswerable statements. But Alma forestalled her, attacking the silence with her gayest voice. “Oh Miriam, what do you think. I saw a Speck; yesterday; on the Grand Esplanade. Do you remember the Specks?”
Miriam beamed and agreed, breathing in reminiscences. But they would be endless; and would not satisfy them, or bring them together. She could not, with Alma alone, pretend that those memories were merely amusing. It was a treachery. The mere mention of a name sent her back to the unbearable happiness of that last school summer, a sunlit flower-filled world opening before her, the feeling of being herself a flower, expanding in the sunlight. She could not regard it as a past. All that had happened since was a momentary straying aside, to be forgotten. To that other world she was still going forward. One day she would suddenly come upon it, as she did in her dreams. The flower-scented air of it was in her nostrils as she sat reluctantly rousing herself to take Alma’s cue. “There were millions of them.” It had never occurred to her that they were funny. Alma, even then, outside her set of grave romantic friendships, had seen almost everything as a comic spectacle and had no desire to go back. “Yes, weren’t they innumerable! And so large! It was a large one I saw. The very biggest Speck of all I think it must have been.”
“I expect it was Belinda.”
“Oh, my dear! Could you tell them apart?”
“Belinda was one of the middle ones. Absolutely square. I liked her for that and her deep bass voice and her silence.”
“Oh, but Miriam, such a heavy silence.”
“That was why. Perhaps because she made me feel sylph like and elegant. Me, Susan. … Or it might have been Mehetabel; the eldest of the younger ones. I once heard her answer in class. …”
“My dear! Could a Speck really speak?”
“Hetta did. In a boo; like the voice of the wind.”
She contemplated her thoughtless simile. It was exactly true. First a sound, breathy and resonant, and then words blown on it. … Alma’s amused laughter was tailing off into little snickers; repeated while
