Backwater · Chapter 6 (3/3)

One day just before the end of the summer term, Miss Perne asked Miriam to preside over the large schoolroom for the morning. The first and second-class girls were settled there at their written examination in English history. Rounding the schoolroom door she stood for a moment in the doorway. The sunlight poured in through the wide bay window and the roomful of quiet girls seemed like a field. Jessie Wheeler’s voice broke the silence. “It’s the Hen,” she shouted gently. “It’s the blessed Hen! Oh, come on. You going to sit with us?”

“Yes. Be quiet,” said Miriam.

“Oh, thank goodness,” groaned Jessie, supported by groans and murmurs from all over the room.

“Be quiet, girls, and get on with your papers,” said Miriam in a tone of acid detachment from the top of her tide. She sat feeling that her arms were round the entire roomful, that each girl struggling alone with the list of questions was resting against her breast. “I’m going away from them. I must be going away from them,” ran her thoughts regretfully. “They can’t keep me. This is the utmost. I’ve won. There’ll never be anything more than this, here.” It would always be the same⁠—with different girls. Certainty. Even the sunlight paid a sort of homage to the fathomless certainty she felt. The sunlight in this little schoolroom was telling her of other sunlights, vast and unbroken, somewhere⁠—coming, her own sunlights, when she should have wrenched herself away. It was there; she glanced up again and again to watch it breaking and splashing all over the room. It would come again, but how differently. Quite soon. She might have spared herself all her agonising. The girls did not know where she belonged. They were holding her. But she would go away, to some huge open space. Leave them⁠—ah, it was unkind. But she had left them already in spirit.

If they could all get up together now and sing, let their voices peal together up and up, throw all the books out of the window, they might go on together, forward into the sunshine, but they would not want to do that. Hardly any of them would want to do that. They would look at her with knowing eyes, and look at the door, and stay where they were.

The room was very close. Polly Allen and Eunice Dupont, sitting together at a little card-table in the darkest corner of the room, were whispering. With beating heart Miriam got up and went and stood before them. “You two are talking,” she said with her eyes on the thickness of Polly’s shoulders as she sat in profile to the room. Eunice, opposite her, against the wall, flashed up at her her beautiful fugitive grin as from the darkness of a wood. History, thought Miriam. What has Eunice to do with history, laws, Henry II, the English Constitution? “You don’t talk,” she said coldly, feeling as she watched her that Eunice’s pretty clothes were stripped away and she were stabbing at her soft rounded body, “at examinations. Can’t you see that?” Eunice’s pale face grew livid. “First because it isn’t fair and also because it disturbs other people.” You can tell all the people who cheat by their smile, she reflected on her way back. Eunice chuckled serenely two or three times. “What have these North London girls to do with studies?”⁠ ⁠… There was not a single girl like Eunice at Barnes. Even the very pretty girls were⁠ ⁠… refined.

That afternoon Miriam spent her hour of leisure in calling on the Brooms to enquire for Grace, who had been ill the whole of the term. She found the house after some difficulty in one of a maze of little rows and crescents just off the tram-filled main road. “She’s almost perfect⁠—almost perfection,” said Mrs. Philps, the Aunt Lucy Miriam had heard of and seen in church.

They had been together in the little drawing-room talking about Grace from the moment when Miriam was shown in to Mrs. Philps sitting darning a duster in a low chair by the closed conservatory door. The glazed closed door with the little strips of window on either side giving on to a crowded conservatory made the little room seem dark. To Miriam it seemed horribly remote. Her journey to it had been through immense distances. Threading the little sapling-planted asphalt-pavemented roadways between houses whose unbroken frontage was so near and so bare as to forbid scrutiny, she felt she had reached the centre, the home and secret of North London life. Off every tram-haunted main road, there must be a neighbourhood like this where lived the common-mouthed harsh-speaking people who filled the pavements and shops and walked in the parks. To enter one of the little houses and speak there to its inmates would be to be finally claimed and infected by the life these people lived, the thing that made them what they were. At Wordsworth House she was held up by the presence of the Pernes and Julia Doyle. Here she was helpless and alone. When she had discovered the number she sought and, crossing the little tiled pathway separated from the pathway next door by a single iron rail, had knocked with the lacquered knocker against the glazed and leaded door, her dreams for the future faded. They would never be realised. They were just a part of the radiance that shone now from the spacious houses she had lived in in the past. The things she had felt this morning in the examination room were that, too. They had nothing to do with the future. All the space was behind. Things would grow less and less.

Admitted to the dark narrowly echoing tiled passage, she stated her errand and was conducted past a closed door and the opening of a narrow staircase which shot steeply, carpeted with a narrow strip of surprisingly green velvet carpeting, up towards an unlit landing and admitted to Mrs. Philps.

“Wait a minute, Vashti,” said Mrs. Philps, holding Miriam’s hand as she murmured her errand. “You’ll stay tea? Well, if you’re sure you can’t I’ll not press you. Bring the biscuits and the sherry and two white wineglasses, Vashti. Get them now and bring them in at once. Sit down, Miss Henderson. She’s little better than a step-girl. They’re all the same.” Whilst she described her niece’s illness, Miriam wondered over the immense bundle of little even black sausage-shaped rolls of hair which stuck out, larger than her head and smoothed to a sphere by a tightly drawn net, at the back of her skull. She was short and stout and had bright red cheeks that shone in the gloom and rather prominent large blue eyes that roamed as she talked, allowing Miriam to snatch occasional glimpses of china-filled what-nots and beaded ottomans. Presently Vashti returned clumsily with the wine, making a great bumping and rattling round about the door. “You stupid thing, you’ve brought claret. Don’t you know sherry when you see it? It’s at the back⁠—behind the Harvest Burgundy.” “I shall have to go soon,” said Miriam, relieved at the sight of the red wine and longing to escape the sherry. Vashti put down the tray and stood with open mouth. Even with her very high heels she looked almost a dwarf. The room seemed less oppressive with the strange long-necked decanter and the silver biscuit box standing on a table in the curious greenish light. Mrs. Philps accepted the claret and returned busily to her story, whilst Miriam sipped and glanced at a large print in a heavy black frame leaning forward low over the small white marble mantelpiece. It represented a young knight in armour kneeling at an altar with joined and pointed hands held to his lips. An angel standing in midair was touching his shoulder with a sword. “Why doesn’t she kiss the top of his head,” thought Miriam as she sipped her wine. The distant aisles and pillars of the church made the room seem larger than it was. “I suppose they all look into that church when they want to get away from each other,” she mused as Mrs. Philps went on with her long sentences beginning “And Dr. Newman said⁠—” And there was a little mirror above a bulging chiffonier which was also an escape from the confined space. Looking into it, she met Mrs. Philps’s glowing face with the blue eyes widely staring and fixed upon her own, and heard her declare, with her bunched cherry-coloured lips, that Grace was “almost perfection.” “Is she?” she responded eagerly, and Mrs. Philps elaborated her theme. Grace, then, with her heavy body and strange hot voice, lying somewhere upstairs in a white bed, was the most important thing in this dark little house. “She was very near to death then,” Mrs. Philps was saying tearfully, “very near, and when she came round from her delirium, one of the first things she said to me as soon as she was strong enough to whisper, was that she was perfectly certain about there being another life.” Mrs. Philps’s voice faded and she sat with trembling lips and eyes downcast. “Did she!” Miriam almost shouted, half-rising from her seat and turning from contemplating Mrs. Philps in the mirror to look her full in the face. The dim green light streaming in from the conservatory seemed like a tide that made everything in the room rock slightly. A touch would sweep it all away and heaven would be there all round them. “Did she,” whispered Miriam in a faint voice that shook her chest. “ ‘Aunt,’ she said,” went on Mrs. Philps steadily, as the room grew firm round Miriam and the breath she drew seemed like an early morning breath, “ ‘I want to say something quickly,’ she said, ‘in case I die. It’s that I know⁠—for a positive fact, there is another life.’ ”

“What a perfectly stupendous thing,” said Miriam. “It’s so important.”

“I was much impressed. Of course, I knew she was nearly perfect. But we’ve not been in the habit of talking about religion. I asked her if she would like to see the vicar. ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘there’s no need. He knows.’ I doubt if he knows as much as she does. But I didn’t make a point of it.”

“Oh, but it’s simply wonderful. It’s much more important than anything a vicar could say. It’s their business to say those things.”

“I don’t know about that. But she was so weak that I didn’t press it.”

“But it’s so important. What a wonderful thing to have in your family. Did she say anything more?”

“She hasn’t returned to the subject again. She’s very weak.”

Wild clutching thoughts shook at Miriam. If only Grace could suddenly appear in her nightgown, to be questioned. Or if she herself could stay on there creeping humbly about in this little house, watering the conservatory and darning dusters, being a relative of the Brooms, devoting herself to Grace, waiting on her, hearing all she had to say. What did it matter that the Brooms wore heavy mourning and gloated over funerals if Grace upstairs in her room had really seen the white light away in the distance far away beyond the noise of the world?