“We’ll try the contralto laugh on the lady in the window-seat.”
The fear of missing the music in looking for his discovery. And then into the waiting stillness Bach. Of all people. He found a contralto laugh in Bach. There were no people, no women, in Bach. Looking for the phrase. Forgetting to look for it. The feeling of the twilight expanding within itself, too small. The oncoming vast of night held back, swirling, swept away by broad bright morning light running through forest tracery. Shining into a house. The clean cool poise of everyday morning. The sounds of work and voices, separate, united by surroundings greeted by everyone from within. The secret joy in everyone pouring through the close pattern of life, going on forever, the end in the first small phrase, every phrase a fresh end and a beginning. Going on when the last chord stood still on the air. … And if he liked Bach, how not believe in people? How not be certain of God? … And then remarks, breaking thinly against the vast nearness.
“What does the lady in the window think?”
“She’s asleep.” Miss Prout had really thought that. …
“Oh no she isn’t.”
Miss Prout looked up as she approached but kept on with her sewing and held her easy silence as she dropped into one of the low chairs. She was working a pattern of bright threads on a small strip of saffron-coloured silk … looking much older in the blaze of hard light. But far-off, not minding, sitting there as if enthroned, for the morning, placid and matronly and indifferent. The heavenly morning freshness was still here. But the remarks about the day had all been made on the lawn after breakfast. … She admired the close bright work. Miss Prout’s voice came at once, a little eagerly, explaining. She was really keen about her lovely work.
She was saying something about Paris. Miriam attended swiftly, not having grasped the beginning, only the fact that she was talking and the curious dry level of her voice. Beginning on something as everyone did, ignoring the present, leaving herself sitting there outside life. … She made a vague response, hoping to hear about Paris. Only to be startled by the tone and colour of her own voice. Miss Prout would imagine that her life had been full. In any case could not imagine. …
“How long are you staying?” The question shot across at her. She did not know as she answered whether she had seen the swift hot glance of the blue eyes, or heard it in the voice. But she had found the woman who wrote the searing scenes, the strange abrupt phrases that lashed out from the page.
“Tomorrow I shall be grilling in my flat,” went on Miss Prout. Alma’s laughter tinkled from above. She was coming this way. Miss Prout’s voice hurried on incisive, splitting the air, ending with a rush of low words as Alma appeared round the corner. Miriam watched their little scene, smooth, unbroken by a single pause or hesitation, saw them go away together, still talking.
“My hat,” she murmured to the thrilled surroundings, and again “My hat.” She clutched at the fading reverberations, marvelling at her own imperviousness, at the way the drama had turned, even while it touched her, to a painted scene, leaving her unmoved. Miss Prout’s little London eyrie. A distasteful refuge between visits. … Had it been a flattering appeal, or an insult?
She is like the characters in her book, direct, swift, ruthless, using any means. … She saw me as a fool, offered me the role of one of the negligible minor characters, there to be used by the successful ones. She is one with her work, with her picture of life. … But it is not a true picture. The glinting sea, all the influences pouring in from the garden denied its existence. It was just a fuss, the biggest drama in the world was a fuss in which people competed, gambling, everyone losing in the end. Dead, empty loss, on the whole, because there was always the commission to be paid. Life in the world is a vice; to which those who take it up gradually became accustomed. … Her eyes clung to the splinters of gold on the rippling blue sea. Dropped them, and she was confined in the hot little rooms of a London flat. If Miss Prout was not enviable, so feared her lonely independence, then no one was enviable.
“Hullo, Miriametta! All alone?”
“They’ve gone to look at an enormous book; too big to lift.”
“Yes. And what’s Miriam doing?”
“Isn’t it a perfect morning?”
“It’s a good day. It’ll be a corker later on. Very pleasant here till about lunch time. You camping here for the morning?” She looked up.
He was standing in profile, listening, with his head inclined; like a person suffering from deafness; and pointing towards her his upheld questioning finger; a German classmaster.
“I don’t know.”
“Then you will. That’s settled?” She murmured a speculative promise, lazily, a comment on his taut, strung-up bearing. What, to him, if she did or didn’t?
“That’s agreed then. You camp here,” he dropped neatly into the chair between hers and Miss Prout’s, his face hidden behind the frill of its canopy, “for the morning.” He looked out and round at her, flushed and grinning. “I want you to,” he murmured, “now don’t you go and forget.”
“All right,” she beamed … the hours he was wasting spinning out his mysterious drama … “wild horses shan’t move me.” He did not want her society. But it was miles more than wildly interesting enough that he wished to avoid being alone with Miss Prout. But then why not dump her as he always did guests he had run through, on to Alma? He left her a moment for reflections, wound
