Backwater · Chapter 2 (2/3)

“You sh’d’ve seen Bevvy’s face. ‘Brother Tommy doesn’t object,’ I said. ‘He’s going to look after me!’ ‘Is he?’ said Bevvy in his most superior manner.”

“What a fearful scrunching you’re making,” said Harriett, pinching Miriam’s nose.

“Let’s go and dress,” said Miriam, rolling off the table.

“How many times has she met him?” asked Miriam as they went through the hall.

“I dunno. Not many.”

“I think it’s simply hateful.”

“Mimmy!” It was Nan’s insinuating voice.

“Coming,” called Miriam. “And, you know, Tommy needn’t think he can carry on with Meg in an alcove.”

“What would she think? Let’s go and tell Meg she must dress.”

“Mimmy!”

Miriam went back and put her head round the breakfast-room door.

“Let me see you when you’re dressed.”

“Why?”

“I want to kiss the back of your neck, my dear; love kissing people’s necks.”

Miriam smiled herself vaguely out of the room, putting away the unpleasant suggestion.

“I wish I’d got a dress like Nan’s,” she said, joining Harriett in the dark lobby.

“I say, somebody’s been using the ‘Financial Times’ to cut up flowers on. It’s all wet.” Harriett lifted the limp newspaper from the marble-topped coil of pipes and shook it.

“Hang it up somewhere.”

“Where? Everything’s cleared up.”

“Stick it out of the lavatory window and pull the window down on it.”

“Awri, you hold the door open.”

Miriam laughed as Harriett fell into the room.

“Blooming bootjack.”

“Is it all right in there? Are all the pegs clear? Is the washing-basin all right?”

A faint light came in as Harriett pushed up the frosted pane.

“Here’s a pair of boots all over the floor and your old Zulu hat hanging on a peg. The basin’s all right except a perfectly foul smell of nicotine. It’s pater’s old feather.”

“That doesn’t matter. The men won’t mind that. My old hat can stay. There are ten pegs out here and all the slab, and there’s hardly anything on the hall stand. That’s it. Don’t cram the window down so as to cut the paper. That’ll do. Come on.”

“I wish I had a really stunning dress,” remarked Miriam, as they tapped across the wide hall.

“You needn’t.”

The drawing-room door was open. They surveyed the sea of drugget, dark grey in the fading light. “Pong-pong-pong de doodle, pong-pong-pong de doodle,” murmured Miriam as they stood swaying on tiptoe in the doorway.

“Let’s have the gas and two candlesticks, Harry, on the dressing-table under the gas.”

“All right,” mouthed Harriett in a stage whisper, making for the stairs as the breakfast-room door opened.

It was Eve. “I say, Eve, I’m scared,” said Miriam, meeting her.

Eve giggled triumphantly.

“Look here. I shan’t come down at first. I’ll play the first dance. I’ll get them all started with ‘Bittersweet.’ ”

“Don’t worry, Mim.”

“My dear, I simply don’t know how to face the evening.”

“You do,” murmured Eve. “You are proud.”

“What of?”

“You know quite well.”

“What?”

“He’s the nicest boy we know.”

“But he’s not my boy. Of course not. You’re insane. Besides, I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“Oh, well, we won’t talk. We’ll go and arrange your chignon.”

“I’m going to have simply twists and perhaps a hair ornament.”

Miriam reached the conservatory from the garden door and set about opening the lid of the grand piano. She could see at the far end of the almost empty drawing-room a little ruddy thickset bearded man with a roll of music under his arm talking to her mother. He was standing very near to her, surrounding her with his eager presence. “Mother’s wonderful,” thought Miriam, with a moment’s adoration for Mrs. Henderson’s softly-smiling girlish tremulousness. Listening to the man’s hilarious expostulating narrative voice she fumbled hastily for her waltz amongst the scattered piles of music on the lid of the piano.

As she struck her opening chords she watched her mother gently quell the narrative and steer the sturdy form towards a group of people hesitating in the doorway. “Have they had coffee?” she wondered anxiously. “Is Mary driving them into the dining room properly?” Before she had reached the end of her second page everyone had disappeared. She paused a moment and looked down the brightly lit empty room⁠—the sight of the cold sheeny drugget filled her with despair. The hilarious voice resounded in the hall. There couldn’t be many there yet. Were they all looking after them properly? For a moment she was tempted to leave her piano and go and make some desperate attempt at geniality. Then the sound of the pervading voice back again in the room and brisk footsteps coming towards the conservatory drove her back to her music. The little man stepped quickly over the low moulding into the conservatory.

“Ah, Mariamne,” he blared gently.

“Oh, Bennett, you angel, how did you get here so early?” responded Miriam, playing with zealous emphasis.

“Got old Barrowgate to finish off the outpatients,” he said with a choke of amusement.

“I say, Mirry, don’t you play. Let me take it on. You go and ply the light fantastic.” He laid his hands upon her shoulders and burred the tune she was playing like a muted euphonium over the top of her head. “No. It’s all right. Go and get them dancing. Get over the awfulness⁠—you know.”

“Get over the awfulness, eh? Oh, I’ll get over the awfulness.”

“Ssh⁠—are there many there?”

They both looked round into the drawing-room.

Nan Babington was backing slowly up and down the room supported by the outstretched arms of Bevan Seymour, her black head thrown back level with his, the little scarlet knot in her hair hardly registering the smooth movements of her invisible feet.

“They seem to have begun,” shouted Bennett in a whisper as Harriett and her fiancé swung easily circling into the room and were followed by two more couples.

“Go and dance with Meg. She only knows Tommy Babington.”

“Like the lid up?”

Miriam’s rhythmic clangour doubled its resonance in the tiled conservatory as the great lid of the piano went up.

“Magnifique, Mirry, parfaitement magnifique,” intoned Tommy Babington, appearing in the doorway with Meg on his arm.

“Bonsoir, Tomasso.”

“You are like an expressive metronome.”

“Oh⁠—nom d’un pipe.”

“You would make a rhinoceros dance.”

Adjusting his pince-nez he dexterously seized tall Meg and swung her rapidly in amongst the dancers.

“Sarah’ll say he’s had a Turkish bath,” thought Miriam, recalling the unusual clear pallor of his rather overfed face. “Pleated shirt. That’s to impress Meg.”

She felt all at once that the air seemed cold. It was not like a summer night. How badly the ferns were arranged. Nearly all of them together on the staging behind the end of the piano; not enough visible from the drawing-room. Her muscles were somehow stiffening into the wrong mood. Presently she would be playing badly. She watched the forms circling past the gap in the curtains and slowed a little. The room seemed fairly full.

“That’s it⁠—perfect, Mim,” signalled Harriett’s partner, swinging her by. She held to the fresh rhythm and passing into a tender old waltz tune that she knew by heart gave herself to her playing. She need not watch the feet any longer. She could go on forever. She knew she was not playing altogether for the dancers. She was playing to two hearers. But she could not play that tune if they came. They would be late. But they must be here now. Where were they? Were they having coffee? Dancing? She flung a terrified glance at the room and met the cold eye of Bevan Seymour. She would not look again. The right feeling for the dreamy old tune came and went uncontrollably. Why did they not come? Presently she would be cold and sick and done for, for the evening. She played on, harking back to the memory of the kindly challenge in the eyes of her brother-in-law to be, dancing gravely with a grave Harriett⁠—fearing her⁠ ⁠… writing in her album:

“She was his life,

The ocean to the river of his thoughts⁠—

Which terminated all.”

… cold, calm little Harriett. Her waltz had swung soft and low and the dancers were hushed. Only Tommy Babington’s voice still threaded the little throng.

Someone held back the near curtain. A voice said quietly, “Here she is.”

Ted’s low, faintly-mocking voice filled the conservatory.

He was standing very near her, looking down at her with his back to the gay room. Yesterday’s dream had come more than true, at once, at the beginning of the evening. He had come straight to her with his friend, not dancing, not looking for a partner. They were in the little green enclosure with her. The separating curtains had fallen back into place.

Behind the friend who stood leaning against the far end of the piano, the massed fernery gleamed now with the glow of concealed fairy lamps. She had not noticed it before. The fragrance of fronds and moist warm clumps of maidenhair and scented geraniums inundated her as she glanced across at the light falling on hard sculptured waves of hair above a white handsome face.

Her music held them all, protecting the wordless meeting. Her last night’s extremity of content was reality, being lived by all three of them. It centred in herself. Ted stood within it, happy in it. The friend watched, witnessing Ted’s confession. Ted had said nothing to him about her, about any of them, in his usual way. But he was disguising nothing now that he had come.

At the end of her playing she stood up faintly dizzy, and held out towards Max Sonnenheim’s familiar strangeness hands heavy with happiness and quickened with the sense of Ted’s touch upon her arm. The swift crushing of the strange hands upon her own, steadied her as the curtains swung wide and a group of dancers crowded in.

“Don’t tell N. B. we’ve scrubbed the coffin, Miriorama⁠—she’ll sit there all the evening.”

“That was my sister and my future brother-in-law,” said Miriam to Max Sonnenheim as Harriett and Gerald ran down the steps and out into the dark garden.

“Your sister and brother-in-law,” he responded thoughtfully.

He was standing at her side at the top of the garden steps staring out into the garden and apparently not noticing the noisy passersby. If they stood there much longer, Ted, who had not been dancing, would join them. She did not want that. She would put off her dance with Ted until later. The next dance she would play herself and then perhaps dance again with Max. Once more from the strange security of his strongly swinging arms she would meet Ted’s eyes, watching and waiting. She must dance once more with Max. She had never really danced before. She would go to Ted at last and pass on the spirit of her dancing to him. But not yet.

“I will show you the front garden,” she said, running down the steps.

He joined her and they walked silently round the side of the house, through the kitchen yard and out into the deserted carriage drive. She thought she saw people on the front lawn and walked quickly, humming a little tune, on down the drive.

Max crunched silently along a little apart from her, singing to himself.

Both sides of the front gate were bolted back and their footsteps carried them straight out on to the asphalted avenue extending right and left, a dim tunnel of greenery, scarcely lit by the lamps out in the roadway. With a sudden sense of daring, Miriam determined to assume the deserted avenue as part of the garden.

The gate left behind, they made their way slowly along the high leafy tunnel.

They would walk to the end of the long avenue and back again. In a moment she would cease humming and make a remark. She tasted a new sense of ease, walking slowly along with this strange man without “making conversation.” He was taking her silence for granted. All her experience so far had been of companions whose uneasiness pressed unendurably for speech, and her talking had been done with an irritated sense of the injustice of aspersions on “women’s tongues,” while no man could endure a woman’s silence⁠ ⁠… even Ted, except when dancing; no woman could, except Minna, in Germany. Max must be foreign, of course, German⁠—of course. She could, if she liked, talk of the stars to him. He would neither make jokes nor talk science and want her to admire him, until all the magic was gone. Her mood expanded. He had come just at the right moment. She would keep him with her until she had to face Ted. He was like a big ship towing the little barque of her life to its harbour.

His vague humming rose to a little song. It was German. It was the “Lorelei.” For a moment she forgot everything but pride in her ability to take her share in both music and words.

“You understand German!” he cried.

They had reached the end of the avenue and the starlit roadway opened ahead, lined with meadows.

“Ach, wie schön,” breathed Max.

“Wie schön.” Miriam was startled by the gay sound of her own voice. It sounded as if she were alone, speaking to herself. She looked up at the spangled sky. The freshening air streamed towards them from the meadows.

“We must go back,” she said easily, turning in again under the trees.

The limes seemed heavily scented after their breath of the open. They strolled dreamily along keeping step with each other. They would make it a long quiet way to the gate. Miriam felt strangely invisible. It was as if in a moment a voice would come from the clustering lime trees or from the cluster of stars in the imagined sky.

“Wie süss,” murmured Max, “ist treue Liebe.”

“How dear,” she translated mentally, “is true love.” Yes, that was it, that was true, the German phrase. Ted was dear, dear. But so far away. Coming and going, far away.

“Is it?” she said with a vague, sweet intonation, to hear more.

“Wie süss, wie süss,” he repeated firmly, flinging his arm across her shoulders.

The wildly shimmering leafage rustled and seemed to sing. She walked on horrified, cradled, her elbow resting in her companion’s hand as in a cup. She laughed, and her laughter mingled with the subdued lilting of the voice close at her side. Ted was waiting somewhere in the night for her. Ted. Ted. Not this stranger. But why was he not bold like this? Primly and gently she disengaged herself.

She and Ted would walk along through the darkness and it would shout to them. Daytime colours seemed to be shining through the night.⁠ ⁠… She turned abruptly to her companion.

“Aren’t the lime trees jolly?” she said conversationally.

“You will dance again with me?”

“Yes, if you like.”

“I must go so early.”

“Must you?”

“Tomorrow morning early I go abroad.”

“Hullo!”

“Where were you all that last dance?”

Nan Babington’s voice startled her as they came into the bright hall through the open front door.

She smiled towards Nan, sitting drearily with a brilliant smile on her face watching the dancers from a long chair drawn up near the drawing-room door, and passed on into the room with her hand on her partner’s arm. They had missed a dance and an interval. It must have been a Lancers and now there was another waltz.

Several couples were whirling gravely about. Amongst them she noted Bevan Seymour, upright and slender, dancing with Harriett with an air of condescending vivacity, his bright teeth showing all the time. Her eyes were ready for Ted. She was going to meet his for the first time⁠—just one look, and then she would fly for her life anywhere, to anybody. And he would find her and make her look at him again. Ted. He was not there. People were glancing at her, curiously. She veiled her waiting eyes and felt their radiance stream through her, flooding her with strength from head to foot. How battered and ordinary everyone had looked, frail and sick, stamped with a pallor of sickness. How she pitied them all.