The atmosphere incommoding the husband, who at a second glance seemed to call even pathetically for articulate opposition, was that of a successful house-party, its tone set by the only two in sight who were through and through of the authentic brand: the deep-voiced woman and the nice man. The invalid and his wife belonged to that inner circle. But they were a little shadowed by his malady.
It was an atmosphere in which the American and the Russian were ill at ease, one an impatient watchfulness for simpler, more lively behaviour and the other a bored detachment, heavily anchored, not so much by thoughts as by hard clear images left by things seen according to the current formula of whatever group of the European intelligentsia he belonged to.
He was speaking softly through the general conversation to the nice man, with slight deprecating gestures of eyebrows and shoulders, in his eyes a qualified gratitude. The nice man spoke carefully with head turned and bent, seeking his words. French, with English intonation. All these people, however fluently, would talk like that. All of them came from a world that counted mastery of a foreign tongue both wonderful and admirable—but ever so little infra dig.
“Won’t you come in heah for a bit?”
Drugged as she felt with weariness she turned joyfully into a room opening in the background of the hall whence the deep bass voice had sounded as she passed. A tiny salon, ugly; maroon and buff in a thick light. Plush sofa, plush cover on the round table in the centre, stiff buff-seated “drawing-room” chairs; a piano. It was from this dismal little room the Chopin had sounded out into the twilight.
There she was, alone, standing very thin and tall in a good, rather drearily elderly black dress beside a cheerless radiator, one elbow resting on its rim and a slender foot held towards it from beneath the hem of a slightly hitched skirt: an Englishwoman at a fireside.
“My name’s Harcourt, M’zz Harcourt,” she said at once.
Books were set star-wise in small graded piles about the centre of the table, the uppermost carrying upon their covers scrolls and garlands of untarnished gilt. The one she opened revealed short-lined poems set within yet more garlands, appealing; leaves and buds and birds lively and sweet about the jingling verse. Swiss joy in deep quiet valleys guarded by sunlit mountains. Joy of people living in beauty all their lives; enclosed. Yet making rooms like this.
But it held the woman at the radiator, knowing England and her sea, and whose smile looking up she met, watching, indulgent of her détour and, as too eagerly she moved forward, indulgent also of that. Here, if she would, was a friend, and, although middle-aged, a contemporary self-confessed by a note in her voice of impatience over waste of time in preliminaries.
But Mrs. Harcourt did not know how nimbly she could move, might think it strange when presently her voice must betray that she was already rejoicing—defying the note of warning that sounded far away within her—in a well-known presence, singing recklessly to it the song of new joy and life begun anew that all the way from England had been gathering within her.
The announcement of her own name made the woman again a stranger, so much was she a stranger to the life belonging to the name, and brought into sudden prominence the state of her gown, exposed now in its full length. She recounted the tragedy and saw Mrs. Harcourt’s smile change to real concern.
Here they were, alone together, seeming to have leapt rather than passed through the early stages.
Like love, but unobstructed. A balance of side-by-side, not of opposition. More open than love, yet as hidden and wonderful; rising from the same depth.
“Hold it in front of the waydiator. Vat’ll take ’em out a bit. Such a poo’hy gown.” She moved a little back from the row of pipes.
Going close to the radiator Miriam moved into a fathomless gentleness.
But it was also a demand, so powerful that it was drawing all her being to a point. All that she had brought with her into the room would be absorbed and scattered, leaving her robbed of things not yet fully her own.
The warning voice within was crying aloud now, urging her not only to escape before the treasures of arrival and of strangeness were lost beyond recovery, but to save also the past, disappeared round the corner yet not out of sight but drawn closely together in the distance, a swiftly moving adventure, lit from point to point by the light in which today she had bathed forgetful.
Even a little talk, a little answering of questions, would falsify the past. Set in her own and in this woman’s mind in a mould of verbal summarisings it would hamper and stain the brightness of tomorrow.
She found herself hardening, seeking generalisations that would cool and alienate, and was besieged by memories of women whom she had thus escaped. And of their swift revenge. But this woman was not of those who avenge themselves.
Hesitating before the sound of her own voice, or the other which would sound if this second’s silence were prolonged, she was seized by revolt: the determination at all costs to avoid hearing in advance, in idle words above the ceaseless intercourse of their spirits, about Oberland; even from one whose seeing might leave her own untouched.
To open the way for flight she remarked that it must be late.
“About nine. You’re dead beat, I can see. Ought to go to bed.”
“Not for worlds,” said Miriam involuntarily.
Mrs. Harcourt’s face, immediately alight for speech, expressed as she once more took possession of the radiator and looked down at it as into a fire, willingness to stand indefinitely by.
“Everyone’s gone to bed. Bein’ out all day in vis air makes you sleepy at night.”
Remembering that of course she would
