“Oh,” she cried, listening to the pleasant bumping of the window as her body relaxed on the unyielding level of the new mattress and the low pillow fitted itself to her neck. “Oh, music that softlier on the spirit lies—”
“I hope you are not alluding to the window,” chuckled Miss Holland.
“Oh, my bed, my angelic little bed. I thought it might seem narrow, but it is so hard and flat that I feel as if I were lying on the plane of the ecliptic with no sides. And I seem so long. I can see myself like someone laid out.”
“What a very dismal idea!”
“Oh, no. I always think of it when I sleep in beds that don’t let you down. It doesn’t depress me a bit. You see, I have no imagination. But my bed at Tansley Street was all hummocks. There was only one way I could lie at all and I made no shape. Now I feel like a crusader on a tomb, and utterly comfortable. And the little light coming through the curtain from your side makes a quite perfect effect, a green twilight.”
“You shall enjoy the perfect effect for a few moments longer. I am going to wedge that abominable window.”
Something almost like fear took possession of Miriam. Protest was impossible. It was clear Miss Holland must not be tormented. Her mind clung to the wind sounds, whilst with small exasperated mutterings Miss Holland sought about for something to fit the gap. An immense discomfort settled upon her when the window was finally dumb. Its silence seemed to press upon the air. And though the window was open at the top, the room seemed close. It was as if Miss Holland had robbed her of a companion and as if far away the companion were reproaching her for yielding without protest to the world that keeps a suspicious eye on the doings of the weather, an attitude she hated like an infection. The room seemed now full of Miss Holland; rebuked by her into a dead stillness. That would be there on all the nights. Each one, dumb and dead. The prospect was unnerving. There was something of the atmosphere of the sickroom in this awful calm. Miss Holland’s candle was the nightlight, keeping going the hot pressure of the evening. Yet most people probably disliked a rattling window, the sound that made a stillness in the room and in the street. It was bad to be so different and to like being different.
How difficult to sleep in this consciously quiet enclosure. For it was not the quiet of a still night, the kind of night in which you listen to the expanse of space. It was a stillness filled with the coiling emanation of a humanity recognising only itself, intent only on its own circlings. The darkness when it presently came would be thick with the remainder of the continuous coiling and fret of all those people who live perpetually at war with everything that is not perfectly secure.
Miss Holland’s light was out. She was apparently sitting up in bed arranging draperies at great length.
“I have not locked the door,” she said, suddenly: Miriam despaired.
“I think for tonight it does not matter. We can make a point of remembering it in future.”
“I’m afraid,” said Miriam, “I should never remember it.”
“Have you not been in the habit of locking your door?”
“I never even thought of it.”
“Strange,” said Miss Holland. And Miriam began to suppose that it was strange. She ran over in her mind some of the odd people from time to time sharing her lonely top floor. Foreign waiters when Mrs. Bailey was doing well, or queer odd men who could not afford the downstairs rooms. She had never, at night, given them a single thought. But that was not the sort of thought Miss Holland meant, or not consciously. But all this was perfectly horrible. … Yet was it foolish, or perhaps unkind, never to have been aware? O’Laughlin, dear O’Laughlin. She had been aware of him. Sorry.
“There was,” she said, “a drunken Irish journalist who used to come blundering up the stairs at all hours of the night.”
“Horrible, horrible,” breathed Miss Holland.
“His door,” it occurred to her for the first time, “was at right angles to mine.” Miss Holland was gasping. “He used to stumble about on the landing, and sometimes, poor dear, be sick.”
“Dear, dear, dear! It was a most extraordinary establishment. But I think the oddest thing is that you should not have made fast the door.”
“I suppose so. But I would trust Tommy O’Laughlin drunk or sober, now I come to think of it. … He never paid his bills, poor dear, and he borrowed.”
“He must have been a worthless creature.”
“He was a gentleman, Tommy was, and a dear. Though he once embarrassed me frightfully. It was at dinner. Of course he was intoxicated, though not looking so. In the midst of a long tirade about Home Rule he burst into tears and said if he had only seen Miss Henderson earlier in his life he would have been a different fellow.”
“No doubt he admired you immensely!”
“I’d never spoken to him.”
Miss Holland laughed wisely, but a little scornfully. No châtelaine, of course, would boast of scalps.
“He was married!”
“Dear, dear!” breathed Miss Holland.
“Trying for a divorce.”
“Dear, dear, dear!”
Miriam awoke in the darkness abruptly. About her were the images that had filled her mind when Miss Holland’s candle had gone out. She regarded them sleepily, wondering what could so soon have called her back. What was calling her now, urgently, out from the thickness of sleep. She stirred and woke completely.
“Are you awake?” Miss Holland’s voice coming anxious and reproachful through the stillness was added to the minute unmistakable irritations.
“Yes, are you? I mean are you being devoured alive?”
“Indeed, indeed, I am,” wailed Miss Holland. “It is a
