“It’s weird,” said Miriam, lunging. “Where can they all come from? I’m going to get up.”
“Indeed, that is all we can do. Light candles and make instant warfare.”
“I’m so sleepy. I think I shall change in the dark.”
“I fear that will be useless,” groaned Miss Holland, striking a match. “I fear, I fear the worst.”
Out on the green floor and with the two candles cheerfully gleaming. … Alone such an adventure would have been misery.
She grew interested in following Miss Holland’s instructions, and was almost disappointed when the white expanse of her bed offered no further prey.
“Seven,” she announced.
“All drowned?” asked Miss Holland suspiciously.
“Mm, poor things.”
“I fear I do not share your solicitude,” chuckled Miss Holland.
“Well, perhaps I associate them with summer. In a London summer there are always one or two, having their little day. I’ve tried once or twice to keep still and endure.”
“And then?”
“I shake my nightgown out of the window, but always feel mean.”
“You are most tenderhearted.”
“I agree with the Frenchman, ‘ce n’est point la piqûre dont je me plains, c’est le promenade.’ ”
“You speak French delightfully, toote ah fay kom oon Parisienne.”
“Imitation; I can imitate any sound. But where do all these fleas come from?”
“The floor, the floor, I fear.”
“Heaven and earth! We must leave at once.”
“Well, I think perhaps with perchloride in the cracks …”
“Meantime?”
“We must do our best.”
“It goes from the brain to the toes.”
“To the toes. But only for the unfortunate possessors of thin skins. And them, the wretches seek. If there were in the universe only one flea, it would make straight for me.”
Her voice ended on a childish wail. Fleee, she had said, making it innocent and pretty.
“Do you mean to say there are people …”
“I do indeed. During my first period of training in the slums I was amazed at the complete insensibility of many of my fellow-workers. Amazed, and under the circumstances, envious.”
“Oh, I don’t envy them a bit. Those people with skins like felt; they miss everything.”
“I agree. At the same time, I think a moderately thick skin is a boon. I see no disadvantage in escaping intolerable discomforts. It is possible to have too thin a skin.”
“For survival, yes. Blond people are dying out, they say.”
“Blondes have not a monopoly of thin skins.”
“No. I have a friend who slums. She loathes the poor.”
“Dear, dear; a most unfortunate qualification for her work.”
“Not their poverty. Their sameness. She is one of the kindest people I know.”
“Strange. …”
“They ought to be pensioned.”
“The poor?”
“Everybody. I should love to be pensioned.”
“And remain in idleness and dependence? Oh, no.”
“Not dependence. Interdependence. No compulsion.”
“What would you do?”
“Spend several years staring; and then go round the world.”
“You are delightful! I am not sure that I approve of the years of staring. But to go round the world would, of course, be most enchanting.”
“Yes: but I should not want to improve my mind. I should still stare. If I went. Probably I shouldn’t go. Nothing short of dynamite will shift me. I am astounded to find myself shifted here.”
“I fear at the moment you must be wishing yourself safely back again.”
She had no realisation of the adventure it was to be anywhere at all. To her it was not a strange, strange adventure that their two voices should be sounding together in the night, a double thread of sound in a private darkness, making a pattern with all the other sounds in the world. But she had accepted the compliment. There was a vibration in her voice: joyful.
Again and again they were awakened for battle, until their slumber was too deep to be disturbed.
St. Pancras bells were cheerfully thumping the air when Miriam got up to wander about in the dark brilliance that filled the room like the presence of a guest, and was so exaggerated that it not only supplied a topic wherewith to start the morning, but an occupation engrossing enough to free her, even in thought, from descent into the detail of the day. It held everything off and yet kept her in happy communion with Miss Holland moving busily the other side of the curtain.
Yet the night had done its work. A host of statements were plucking at her mind: balancing the quality of life here and life at Tansley Street. At weekends. Behind them was a would-be disquieting assertion of the now complete remoteness of both her working life and the eventful leisure that had for so long ousted the old-time Tansley Street evenings. It was a bill of costs, flourished; demanding to know what she had done.
But it stood off, powerless to gain the centre of her attention, making no break in her sense of being nowhere; of inhabiting, within a shadowless brilliance, a living peace that held her immensely unoccupied, and ready, whenever things should once more present themselves in detail, to see them all in a fresh light.
For a while it seemed that they could never again so present themselves. The light as she gazed into it was endless, multiplying upon itself; drawing her away from all known things. Life henceforth would more fully attain her, lived as at this moment she knew it could be lived, uncalculating from the deeps of a masked splendour.
It would not last. Already the strange moments were linking themselves with kindred strange moments in the past. But like them it set itself while it lasted over against the rest of her experience, with a challenge.
It was growing steadily darker.
“It’s a thunderstorm.”
“I think so. The air is most oppressive.”
Miss Holland came and stood at her own half of the window so that they were side by side and visible to each other. Above the curtain screening the lower part of their window, they looked across to the white pillar of candle. A flash of bright daylight lit up the grey street, and soon the wheels of the storm rumbled high up across the sky. Heavy drops fell slowly, increasing until they came in a torrent.
“That will carry it off.”
“Sometimes I don’t mind storms. I don’t
