Backwater · Chapter 7 (1/2)

VII

Harriett’s ringed fingers had finished dipping and drying the blue and white tea-service. She sat for a moment staring ahead downstream. Sitting opposite her, Gerald watched her face with a half smile. Miriam waited sitting at her side. It was the first moment of silence since she had come home at midday. From the willow-curtained island against which they were moored came little crepitations and flittings. Ahead of them the river blazed gold and blue, hedged by high spacious trees. “Come-to-tea, come-to-tea, hurryup-dear,” said a bird suddenly from the island thicket.

“D’you know what bird that is, Gerald?” asked Miriam.

“Not from Adam,” breathed Gerald, swaying on his seat with a little laugh. “It’s a bird. That’s all I know.”

“We’d better unmoor, silly,” muttered Harriett briskly, gathering up the tiller ropes.

“Right, la reine.”

“Look here, let me do something this time, pull or something.”

“You sit still, my dear.”

“But I should simply love to.”

“You shall pull downstream if you like later on when the bally sun’s down. My advice to you now is to go and lounge in the bow.”

“Oh yes, Mim, you try it. Lie right down. It’s simply heavenly.”

The boat glided deliciously away upstream as Miriam, relinquishing her vision of Harriett sitting very upright in the stern in her white drill dress, and Gerald’s lawn-shirted back and long lean arms grasping the sculls, lay back on the bow cushions with her feet comfortably outstretched under the unoccupied seat in front of her. Six hours ago, shaking hands with a roomful of noisy home-going girls⁠—and now nothing to do but float dreamily out through the gateway of her six weeks’ holiday. The dust of the school was still upon her; the skin of her face felt strained and tired, her hands were tired and hot, her blouse dim with a week of school wear, and her black skirt oppressed her with its invisible burden of grime. But she was staring up at a clean blue sky fringed with treetops. She stretched herself out more luxuriously upon her cushions. The river smoothly moving and lapping underneath the boat was like a cradle. The soft fingers of the air caressed her temples and moved along the outlines of her face and neck. Forty-two days⁠ ⁠… like this. Tomorrow she would wake up a new person⁠ ⁠… sing, and shout with Harriett. She closed her eyes. The gently lifting water seemed to come nearer; the invading air closed in on her. She gave herself ecstatically to its touch; the muscles of her tired face relaxed and she believed that she could sleep; cry or sleep.

It was Gerald who had worked this miraculous first day for her. “Boating” hitherto had meant large made-up parties of tennis-club people, a fixed day, uneasy anticipations as to the weather, the carrying of hampers of provisions and crockery, spirit lamps and kettles, clumsy hired randans, or little fleets of stupidly competing canoes, lack of space, heavy loads to pull, the need for ceaseless chaff, the irritating triumphs of clever “knowing” girls in smart clothes, the Pooles, or really beautiful people, like Nan Babington and her cousin. Everything they said sounding wonderful and seeming to improve the scenery; the jokes of the men, even Ted always joked all the time, the misery of large noisy picnic teas on the grass, and in the end great weariness and disappointment, the beauty of the river and the trees only appearing the next day or perhaps long afterwards.

This boat was Gerald’s own private boat, a double-sculling skiff, slender and gold-brown, beautifully fitted and with a locker containing everything that was wanted for picnicking. They had arranged their expedition at lunchtime, trained to Richmond, bought fruit and cakes and got the boat’s water-keg filled by one of Redknap’s men. Gerald knew how to do things properly. He had always been accustomed to things like this boat. He would not care to have anything just anyhow. “Let’s do the thing decently, la reine.” He would keep on saying that at intervals until Harriett had learned too. How he had changed her since Easter when their engagement had been openly allowed. The clothes he had bought for her, especially this plain drill dress with its neat little coat. The long black tie fastened with the plain heavy cable broach pinned in lengthwise halfway down the ends of the tie, which reached almost to her black belt. That was Gerald. Her shoes, the number of pairs of light, expensive, beautifully made shoes. Her bearing, the change in her voice, a sort of roundness about her old Harryish hardness. But she was the same Harry, the Harry he had seen for the first time snorting with anger over Mr. Marth’s sentimental singing at the Assembly Rooms concert. “My hat, wasn’t la reine fuming!” He would forgive her all her ignorance. It was her triumph. What an extraordinary time Harry would have. Gerald was well-off. He had a private income behind his Canadian Pacific salary. His grandfather had been a diplomatist, living abroad nearly all the time, and his wealthy father and wealthy mother with a large fortune of her own had lived in a large house in Chelsea, giving dinner parties and going to the opera until nearly all the capital had gone, both dying just in time to leave enough to bring Gerald in a small income when he left Haileybury. And the wonderful thing was that Gerald liked mouching about and giggling. He liked looking for hours in shop windows and strolling on the Heath eating peppermints.

Everything had disappeared into a soft blackness; only on the water a faint light was left. It came and went; sometimes there was nothing but darkness and the soft air. The small paper lantern swinging at the bow made a little blot of light that was invisible from the stroke seat. The boat went swiftly and easily. Miriam felt she could go on pulling for hours at the top of her strength through the night. Leaning forward, breasting the featureless darkness, sweeping the sculls back at the full reach of her arms, leaning back and pressing her whole weight upwards from the footboard against the pull of the water, her body became an outstretched elastic system of muscles, rhythmically working against the smooth dragging resistance of the dark water. Her sleeves were rolled up, her collar-stud unfastened, her cool drowsy lids drooped over her cool eyes. Each time she leaned backwards against her stroke, pressing the footboard, the weight of her body dragged at a line of soreness where the sculls pressed her hands, and with the final fling of the water from the sculls a little stinging pain ran along the pads of her palms. Tomorrow there would be a row of happy blisters.

“You needn’t put more beef into it than you like, Mirry.” Gerald’s voice came so quietly out of the darkness that it scarcely disturbed Miriam’s ecstasy. She relaxed her swing, and letting the sculls skim and dip in short easy strokes, sat glowing.

“I’ve never pulled a boat alone before.”

“It shows you can’t be a bluestocking, thank the Lord,” laughed Gerald.

“Who said I was?”

“I’ve always understood you were a very wise lady, my dear.”

“Nobody told you she was a bluestocking, silly. You invented the word yourself.”

“I? I invented bluestocking?”

“Yes, you, silly. It’s like your saying women never date their letters just because your cousins don’t.”

“Vive la reine. The Lord deliver me from bluestockings, anyhow.”

“All right, what about it? There aren’t any here!”

“You’re not one, anyhow.”

The next day after tea Eve arrived home from Gloucestershire.

Miriam had spent the day with Harriett. After breakfast, bounding silently up and downstairs, they visited each room in turn, chased each other about the echoing rooms and passages of the basement and all over the garden. Miriam listened speechlessly to the sound of Harriett’s heels soft on the stair carpet, ringing on the stone floors of the basement, and the swish of her skirts as she flew over the lawn following surrounding responding to Miriam’s wild tour of the garden. Miriam listened and watched, her eyes and ears eagerly gathering and hoarding visions. It could not go on. Presently some claim would be made on Harriett and she would be alone. But when they had had their fill of silently rushing about, Harriett piloted her into the drawing-room and hastily began opening the piano. A pile of duets lay on the lid. She had evidently gathered them there in readiness. Wandering about the room, shifting the familiar ornaments, flinging herself into chair after chair, Miriam watched her and saw that her strange quiet little snub face was lit and shapely. Harriett, grown-up, serene and well-dressed and going to be married in the spring, was transported by this new coming together. When they had played the last of the duets that they knew well, Harriett fumbled at the pages of a bound volume of operas in obvious uncertainty. At any moment Miriam might get up and go off and bring their sitting together on the long cretonne-covered duet stool to an end. “Come on,” roared Miriam gently, “let’s try this”; and they attacked the difficult pages. Miriam counted the metre, whispered it intoned and sang it, carrying Harriett along with shouts “go on, go on” when they had lost each other. They smashed their way along by turns playing only a single note here and there into the framework of Miriam’s desperate counting, or banging out cheerful masses of discordant tones, anything to go on driving their way together through the pages while the sunlight streamed half seen into the conservatory and the flower-filled garden crowded up against the windows, anything to come out triumphantly together at the end and to stop satisfied, the sounds of the house, so long secretly known to them both, low now around them, heard by them together, punctuating their joy. The gong sounded for lunch. “Eve,” Miriam remembered suddenly, “Eve’s coming this afternoon.” The thought set gladness thundering through her as she rose from the piano. “Let’s go for a walk after lunch,” she muttered. Harriett blushed.

“Awri,” she responded tenderly.

The mile of gently rising roadway leading to the Heath was overarched by huge trees. Shadowy orchards, and the silent sunlit outlying meadows and park land of a large estate streamed gently by them beyond the trees as they strode along through the cool leaf-scented air. They strode speechlessly ahead as if on a pilgrimage, keeping step. Harriett’s stylish costume had a strange unreal look in the great lane, under the towering trees. Miriam wondered if she found it dull and was taking it so boldly because they were walking along it together. Obviously she did not want to talk. She walked along swiftly and erect, looking eagerly ahead as if, when they reached the top and the Heath and the windmill, they would find something they were both looking for. Miriam felt she could glance about unnoticed and looked freely, as she had done so many hundreds of times before, at the light on the distant meadows and lying along the patches of undergrowth between the trunks of the trees. They challenged and questioned her silently as they had always done and she them, in a sort of passionate sulkiness. They gave no answer, but the scents in the cool tree-filled air went on all the time offering steady assurance, and presently as walking became an unconscious rhythm and the question of talk or no talk had definitely decided itself, the challenge of the light was silenced and the shaded roadway led on to paradise. Was there anyone anywhere who saw it as she did? Anyone who looking along the alley of white road would want to sit down in the roadway or kneel amongst the undergrowth and shout and shout? In the north of London there were all those harsh street voices infesting the trees and the parks. No! they did not exist. There was no North London. Let them die. They did not know the meaning of far-reaching meadows, parkland, deer, the great silent Heath, the silent shoulders of the windmill against the far-off softness of the sky. Harsh streetiness⁠ ⁠… cunning, knowing⁠ ⁠… do you blame me?⁠ ⁠… or charwomanishness, smarmy; churchy or chapelish sentimentality. Sentimentality. No need to think about them.

“Never the time and the place and the loved one all together.” Who said that? Was it true? Dreadful. It couldn’t be. So many people had seen moonlit gardens, together. All the happy people who were sure of each other. “I say, Harriett,” she said at the top of her voice, bringing Harriett curvetting in the road just in front of her. “I say, listen.” Harriett ran up the remaining strips of road and out on to the Heath. It was ablaze with sunlight⁠—as the river and the trees had been yesterday⁠—a whole day of light and Eve on her way home, almost home. Harriett must not know how she was rushing to Eve; with what tingling fingers. “Oh, what I was going to ask you was whether you can see the moonlight like it is when you are alone, when Gerald is there.”

“… It isn’t the same as when you are alone,” said Harriett quietly, arranging the cuff of her glove.

“Do explain what you mean.”

“Well, it’s different.”

“I see. You don’t know how.”

“It’s quite different.”

“Does Gerald like the moonlight?”

“I dunno. I never asked him.”

“Fancy the Roehampton people living up here all the time.”

“There’s their old washing going flip-flap over there.”

Harriett was finding out that she was back in the house with Eve.

“Let’s rush to the windmill. Let’s sing.”

“Come on; only we can’t rush and sing too.”

“Yes we can, come on.” Running up over hillocks and stumbling through sandy gorse-grown hollows they sang a hunting song, Miriam leading with the short galloping phrases, Harriett’s thinner voice dropping in, broken and uncertain, with a strange brave sadness in it that went to Miriam’s heart.

“Eve, you look exactly like Dudley’s gracious lady in these things. Don’t you feel like it?” Eve stopped near the landing window and stood in her light green canvas dress with its pale green silk sleeves shedding herself over Miriam from under her rose-trimmed white chip hat. Miriam was carrying her light coat and all the small litter of her journey. “Go on up,” she said, “I want to talk,” and Eve hurried on, Miriam stumblingly following her, holding herself in, eyes and ears wide for the sight and sound of the slender figure flitting upstairs through the twilight. The twilight wavered and seemed to ebb and flow, suggesting silent dawn and full midday, and the house rang with a soundless music.

“It was Mrs. Wallace who suggested my wearing all my best things for the journey,” panted Eve; “they don’t get crushed with packing and they needn’t get dirty if you’re careful.”

“You look exactly like Dudley’s gracious lady. You know you do. You know it perfectly well.”

“They do seem jolly now I’m back. They don’t seem anything down there. Just ordinary with everybody in much grander things.”

“How do you mean, grander? What sort of things?”

“Oh, all sorts of lovely white dresses.”

“It is extraordinary about all those white dresses,” said Miriam emphatically, pushing her way after Eve into Sarah’s bedroom. “Can I come in? I’m coming in. Sarah says it’s because men like them and she gets simply sick of girls in white and cream dresses all over the place in the summer, and it’s a perfect relief to see anyone in a colour in the sun. They have red sunshades sometimes, but Sarah says that’s not enough; you want people in colours. I wonder if there’s anything in it?”

“Of course there is,” said Sarah, releasing the last strap of Eve’s trunk.

“They’d all put on coloured things if it weren’t for that.”

“Men tell them.”

“Do they?”

“The engaged men tell them⁠—or brothers.”

“I can’t think how you get to know these things, sober Sally.”

“Oh, you can tell.”

“Well, then, why do men like silly white and cream dresses, pasty, whitewashy clothes altogether?”

“It’s something they want; it looks different to them.”