Though the air cleared as they mounted the stairs, it had now a new smell, meeting and mingling with the thinned odours coming up from below, the smell of long-lying London dust. A staircase window, fast shut, showed a grimy sky. On the first floor were two rooms standing open, their doorways close together at right angles. The window of the large front room gave a blurred view of the house-fronts over the way. The back room was a small square, with a square window. The sky here was flyblown, but less dim than from the staircase window, and there were trees, black-stemmed, bearing many-shaped masses of drying leaves. A short flight led up to the second floor. Here were the rooms, two; open doors at right angles as on the floor below. Windows wide, smells banished; clear clean height of air. It was the height of the rooms that made these narrow four-story houses look tall.
“Oh, they’re nice rooms,” she said.
“They’re nice old houses, they’ve been good houses,” he panted plaintively. “I live next door, with my mother. Come upstairs, Miss Henderson. I’m at work up there.”
He went on up the narrow flight leading to the attic. When his long form had disappeared, Miriam turned into the large room; a large oblong, its end wall, opposite the broad high window, broken by a door communicating with the back room. Going through it, she found the smaller room dark. There was a pale wash on the walls of the other room, but here a dark old paper absorbed the light without reflection. And the ceiling, of course, would be dark with grime. The ceiling seemed to have looked down at her long ago. Long she had stood, with life gathered richly about her, in the empty window-lit space where she now asked whether really she had seen up there while she welcomed this superfluous second room, the thing that lay reflected in her mind, growing dim, changing to a feeling, a part of the warm sense of life all about her.
“Won’t you come up, Miss Henderson? I’m at work up here.”
She had forgotten the man and the third room. At this moment, in order not to go up, she would have sacrificed the possession of the third room. On her way out she glanced at the ceiling. It was painted. Floating draped figures, garlanded, in dull crimsons, faded rose and blue and gold, dim with grime, set within a moulding shaped to fill the angles of the square and filmed to a yellowish brown.
“This is a nice room.”
The man, a good deal altered by a large white apron, was standing behind his buckets.
“My name’s Sheffield. I told Miss Holland. Perhaps she didn’t tell you?”
The room stated itself, competing with the voice. It was high and airy, its ceiling sloping on all four sides; in the front to a deep lattice, having a wide shelf underneath.
“She’s a very nice lady. Nice quiet lady. There’s not so many about nowadays.”
It was all coming back; the attitude towards life that had so tormented her when she listened unaided by thought. She knew now that it was blasphemy. It is blasphemy, she could say, if this man were equally armed, blasphemy to imagine that each next generation is plunging into an abyss.
“People don’t keep themselves to themselves like they did. There’s too much running about. Don’t you think so, Miss Henderson?”
She was looking out upon the rain-washed parapet a yard away from the window. “Nice to have a parrypidge in case of fire; plenty of roofs and chimley-pots to walk on.”
“Yes,” she said hastily. “People run about because they wonder who they are.”
“That’s it. Don’t know where they are. That’s the position of the L.C.C. Money to spend and must find something to spend it on. Public money. Pitched away. Not a hayputh o’ good out of it.”
The sudden presence in the room of the L.C.C. made him harmless.
“Officials are strange people. Being officials makes people strange.” She stood seeking something that had passed wordlessly through her mind while she snatched this borrowed thought. Something she ought to say, hidden because she was being insincere. It remained hidden, and she passed towards the door, his inferior, having nothing to offer half so good as his own mistaken convictions.
“You going down, Miss Henderson?”
She was at the top of the winding stair before she spoke the leave-taking that left the room empty, as it would be this afternoon.
Very gently she went down her stairs. In this clear upper light, angles and surfaces declared themselves intimately. The thing she loved was there. Light falling upon the shapes of things, reflected back, moving through the day, a steadfast friend, silent and understanding. She had loved it wherever she was, even in the midst of miseries; and always it had belonged to others. This time it was her own. The breath she held facing it was a cool stream, bringing strength; joy. Nothing could be better than this. None of the events, none of the passions of life, better than this sense of light quietly falling.
Coming back in the afternoon, she found Miss Holland installed, her half of the larger room fully furnished.
From a low camp-bed with a limply frilled Madras muslin cover, her eyes passed to a wicker washstand-table, decked with a strip of the same muslin and set with chilly, pimpled white crockery. At its side was a dulled old Windsor chair, and underneath it a battered zinc footbath propped against the wall. Above a small shabby chest of drawers a tiny square of mirror hung by a nail to the strip of wall next the window. No colour anywhere but in the limp muslin, washed almost colourless.
But over the whole of the floor, gleaming, without blemish, was the new linoleum. And soon the dividing curtain would hang between her and Miss Holland’s cheerless things. A length of cord hung ready, suspended in a deep loop from the top of the
