Faced alone, it appeared to him as bitterly sad, and the last disaster of an unhappy fate.
Faced in groups as he knew it best, it showed in his eyes only as material for comedy. It was of the comedy he was always trying to convince her. In life itself the bare fact of life, there seemed for him to be no splendour. For men there was ambition, hard work and kindly deeds by the way. And for women motherhood. Sacred. The way to it pure comedy; but once attained, life for the mother in a mansion of the spirit unknown to men, closed against them and forever inaccessible. The attainment of full womanhood was farewell, a lonely treading of a temple, surrounded by outcasts.
He stood, it was true, to some extent within the lives of women, but witnessed again and again the farewell, saw the man lessened, left behind forever on the threshold of magnificence, the woman left in a loneliness mitigated only by the fireside companionship.
The strange thing was that seeming to value her for what he called the intellectual heights that had kept her uncorrupted by petty social life, he yet wanted her to come down from them and join the crowd. That if even for one moment she could show any unguarded feeling, anything free from criticism, even deliberately freed from criticism, he was ready to become the gay priest of initiation into the comedy whose every dramatic possibility he knew by heart.
VI
The morning lays cool fingers on my heart and stands there an intensity of light all about me and there is no weight or tiredness. When I open my eyes there is a certain amount of light—much less than I felt before I opened them—and things that make, before I see them clearly, an interesting pattern of dark shapes; holding worlds and worlds, all the many lives ahead. And I lie wandering within them, a different person every moment. Until some small thing seen very clearly brings back the present life and I find a head too heavy to lift from the pillow and weariness in all my frame, that is unwilling to endure the burden of work to be done before the evening can come again bringing strength.
Yet what ease of mind I have now. What riches and criminal ease, exemptions and riches. Everything is done for me and I am petted and screened from details. Secretly she plans my comfort, saying nothing.
And at Wimpole Street it is the same. And there also it is the work of a woman. The fiancée, who has altered so many tiresome things, lifted off so many burdens.
“You ought not to carry those heavy ledgers up and down stairs. You are killing yourself.” Perhaps it was the heavy ledgers. Anyhow there is now always this fearful weariness side by side with the happiness.
Life flowed in a new way. Many of the old shadows were gone; apprehensions about the future had disappeared. Side by side with the weariness, and with nothing to explain its confidence, was the apprehension of joy.
Wearily she tumbled her happy self out of bed feeling as her feet touched the floor the thrill of the coming day send a small current of strength through her nerves. If only she could preserve it. But everything nowadays came headlong and smiling, everything and everybody. No enemies, no difficulties. With every hour glad tidings calling. Calling from yesterday. Crowding today so closely that much must be missed, joy scamped and missed and waiting and pouring over into tomorrow that would bring yet more things.
Why me? What have I done? Why is it that something seems to be looking after me?
One can’t change one’s nature, which is one’s fate. Yet there is a sense of guilt in finding everything so easy.
Perhaps I shall have an awful old age? No, from forty to sixty is the best of life. I shall go on getting happier and happier. Because it takes almost nothing to make me as happy as I can bear.
But there is this terrible tiredness. Densley may be right. But one can’t marry just to escape fatigue. “Have you noticed, dear girl, that we have spent a whole evening together without argument?”
“I never argue, bless you.”
“You give me your blessing?”
“What need have you?”
“My dear girl.”
“I’m neither dear nor in the least girlish.”
“You’re a girl, my dear, unspoiled by worldly women, the dearest I know—with a man’s mind.”
“It’s your fashionable patients, parasites, helpless parasites, I’m not blaming them, who make you think women are all cats.”
“My dear golden girl, all grace and charm if only she chose, when do I see you again?”
The milk boiled over and Miss Holland laughed from her bed. Again it had made a frightful mess on the oil-stove. Nearly every day Miss Holland had somehow to make that mess disappear. Yet she always laughed. Was now gaily getting up to the accompaniment of her usual jests on the catastrophe.
It seemed enough for her that she lived in a glow of another life. For that she seemed willing to pay any price in unseen labour.
“Did you speak to your friend about writing to the musician?”
“No.”
“Indeed?” What a strange, sharp note. …
“Not last night. I shall see him today probably, or tomorrow.”
Miriam could feel wrath coming through the curtain.
Miss Holland was speechless, her large frame, moving now impatiently about, a boiling wrath. Evidently she had undertaken; would now have to explain to these cherished friends. But what a turmoil! How easy to find words for them and carry them along a little. Was the whole world to be stopped for their letter?
She was glad she had spoken with serene indifference. Evidently her evening, the shape of
