A valued friend, being introduced, recommended, put before himself. Warmth crept into his voice, and lively emphasis—compressed into a small note of distress. That note was his social utmost, for gravity and for joy; recalling Selina Holland—when she was deeply moved: a wailing tone, deprecating, but in his tone was more wistfulness, a suggestion too of anxiety. It had begun when he spoke of Pater’s Renaissance Studies, but had then merely sounded into the golden light, intensifying it. Now it seemed to flout the light, flout everything but his desire to express the absent friend.
“That was some years ago. Since then he has been a very busy man, saying to this one go and he goeth …” He smiled across as if asking her to share the strangeness of his friend’s metamorphosis.
“You’ve not seen him since?”
“Not since he bought his land.”
“He’s a landowner,” she said, and fell into sadness.
“He is indeed, on quite a big scale, and a very hardworking one.”
“A farmer,” murmured Miriam, “that’s not so bad.”
“It’s very arduous. He is always at his post. Never takes a holiday. For three winters I’ve tried to get him up here for a week.”
“Absolute property in land,” she said to the sunlit snow, “is a crime.”
Before her, side by side with a vision of Rent as a clutching monster astride upon civilisation, was a picture of herself, suddenly hitting out at these pleasant people, all, no doubt, landowners. It was only because the friend had been presented to her in the distance and with as it were all his land on his back that this one article of the Lycurgan faith of which she had no doubt, had at all reared itself in her mind. And as it came, dictating her words while she stood by counting the probable cost and wondering too over the great gulf between one’s most cherished opinions about life and one’s sense of life as it presents itself piecemeal embodied in people, she heard with relief his unchanged voice:
“Oh, please tell me why?”
And turned to see him flushed, smiling, pardoning her lapse, apologising for pardoning it, and altogether interested.
“It’s a whole immense subject and I’m not a specialist. But the theory of Rent has been worked out by those who are, by people sincerely trying to discover where it is that temporarily useful parts of the machinery of civilisation have got out of gear and become harmful. No one ought to have to pay for the right to sit down on the earth. No one ought to be so helplessly expropriated that another can buy him and use him up as he would never dream of using up more costly material—horses for instance.”
“You are a socialist?”
Into her answer came the sound of a child’s voice in plaintive recitative approaching from the hall.
“Daphne in trouble,” he said, “you’ll tell me more, I hope,”—and turned his pleading smile to meet people coming in at the door. They clumped to the small table nearer the further window and she caught a sideways glimpse before they sat down: a slender woman with red-gold hair carrying a bunchy little girl whose long legs dangled against her skirt—Mrs. Sneyde, the grass-widow, and, making for the far side of the table a big buoyant girlish young woman—uninteresting—the sister-in-law, Maud Hollebone.
The child’s “so bitter, bitter cold,” sounded clear through the morning greetings in which she took no part. Her voice was strange, low and clear, and full of a meditative sincerity. Amidst the interchange of talk between Vereker and the two women it prevailed again: a plaintive monologue addressed to the universe.
The grating of a chair and there she was confronting the talking Vereker, who was on his feet and just about to go. She stood gazing up, with her hands behind her back. A rounded face and head, cleanly revealed by the way the fine silky brown hair was strained back across the skull; bunchy serge dress and stiff white pinafore. Pausing, Vereker looked down at her.
“You going out, Vereker?”
“Not yet.”
“Your friend coming? Not telegraphed or anything?”
“He’s coming all right, Daphne. He’ll be here tonight. You’ll see him in the morning.”
“You’ll be writing your letters till you start?”
“I may.”
“Then I’ll come and sit in your room till my beecely walk.”
She rapped out her statements—immediately upon his replies, making him sound gentle and slow—from the childish, rounded face that was serenely thinking, full of quick, calm thought. Regardless talk was going forward at the other table to which, her business settled, she briskly returned.
The little wooden hall was like a summerhouse that was also a sports-pavilion. Against the wall that backed the dining-room stood bamboo chairs uncertain, as if, belonging elsewhere and having been told not to block the gangway by moving into the open, they did not know what they were for. The table to which they belonged stood boldly in the centre and held an ashtray. Between it and the front door from above which the antlered head of a chamois gazed down upon the small scene, the way was clear, but the rest of the floor space was invaded on all sides by toboggans propped against the wall or standing clear with boots lying upon them, slender boots gleaming with polish and fitted with skates that appeared to be nothing but a single brilliant blade. Against one wall was a pair of things like oars. Ski? But thought of as attached to a human foot they were impossibly long.
From a hidden region away beyond the angle of the staircase came servants’ voices in staccato, and abrupt sounds: the sounds of their morning campaign, giving an air of callous oblivion to the waiting implements of sport, and quenching, with the way they had of seeming to urge the residents forth upon their proper business outdoors, the hesitant invitation of the chairs.
Beyond the dining-room and this little hall,
