Backwater · Chapter 7 (2/2)

“Sarah knows all sorts of things,” said Miriam excitedly, watching the confusion of the room from the windows. “She says she knows why the Pooles look down and smirk; their dimples and the line of their chins; that men admire them looking down like that. Isn’t it frightful. Disgusting. And men don’t seem to see through them.”

“It’s those kind of girls get on best.”

Miriam sighed.

“Oh well, don’t let’s think about them. Not tonight, anyhow,” cooed Eve.

“Sarah says there are much more awful reasons. I can’t think how she finds them all out. Sober Sally. I know she’s right. It’s too utterly sickening somehow, for words.”

“Mim.”

“Pooh⁠—barooo, baroooo.”

“Mim⁠—”

“Damnation.”

“Mimmy⁠—Jim.”

“I said damnation.”

“Oh, it’s all right. What have we got to do with horrid knowing people.”

“Well, they’re there, all the time. You can’t get away from them. They’re all over the place. Either the knowing ones or the simpering ones. It’s all the same in the end.”

Eve quietly began to unpack. “Oh well,” she smiled, “we’re all different when there are men about to when we’re by ourselves. We all make eyes in a way.”

“Eve! What a perfectly beastly thing to say.”

“It isn’t, my dear,” said Eve pensively. “You should see yourself; you do.”

“Sally, do I?”

“Of course you do,” giggled Eve quietly, “as much as anybody.”

“Then I’m the most crawling thing on the face of the earth,” thought Miriam, turning silently to the treetops looming softly just outside the window; “and the worst of it is I only know it at moments now and again.” The treetops serene with some happy secret cast her off, and left her standing with groping crisping fingers unable to lift the misery that pressed upon her heart. “God, what a filthy world! God what a filthy world!” she muttered. “Everyone hemmed and hemmed and hemmed into it.” Harriett came in and stepped up on to the high canopied bed. “Ullo,” she said in general, sitting herself up tailor-fashion in the middle of the bed so that the bright twilight fell full upon her head and the breast and shoulders of her light silk-sleeved dress. Humming shreds of a violin obligato, Eve rustled out layer after layer of paper-swathed garments, to be gathered up by Sarah moving solidly about between the wardrobe and the chest of drawers in her rather heavy boots. There would not be any talk. But silently the room filled and overflowed. Turning at last from her window, Miriam glanced at her sisters and let her thoughts drop into the flowing tide. Harry, sitting there sharp and upright in the fading light, coming in to them with her future life streaming out behind her spreading and shining and rippling, herself the radiant point of that wonderful life, actually there, neatly enthroned amongst them, one of them, drawing them all with her out towards its easy security; Eve, happy with her wardrobe of dainty things, going fearlessly forward to some unseen fate, not troubling about it. Sarah’s strange clean clear channel of wisdom. Where would it lead? It would always drive straight through everything.

All these things meant that the mere simple awfulness of things at home had changed. These three girls she had known so long as fellow-prisoners, and who still bore at moments in their eyes, their movements, the marks of the terrors and uncertainties amongst which they had all grown up, were going on, out into life, scored and scarred, but alive and changeable, able to become quite new. Memories of strange crises and the ageing deadening shifts they had invented to tide them over humiliating situations were here crowded in the room together with them all. But these memories were no longer as they had so often been, the principal thing in the room whenever they were all gathered silently together. If Eve and Harriett had got away from the past and now had happy eyes and mouths.⁠ ⁠… Sarah’s solid quiet cheerfulness, now grown so large and free that it seemed even when she was stillest to knock your mind about like something in a harlequinade.⁠ ⁠… Why had they not all known in the past that they would change? Why had they been so oppressed whenever they stopped to think?

Those American girls in Little Women and Good Wives made fun out of everything. But they had never had to face real horrors and hide them from everybody, mewed up.

When it was nearly dark Sarah lit the gas. Harriett had gone downstairs. Miriam lowered the Venetian blinds, shutting out the summer. Tomorrow it would be there again, waiting for them when they woke in the morning. In her own and Harriett’s room the daylight would be streaming in through the Madras muslin curtains, everything in the room very silent and distinct; nothing to be heard but the little flutterings of birds under the eaves. You could listen to it forever if you kept perfectly still. When you drew back the curtains the huge day would be standing outside clear with gold and blue and dense with trees and flowers.

Sarah’s face was uneasy. She seemed to avoid meeting anyone’s eyes. Presently she faced them, sitting on a low rocking chair with her tightly clasped hands stretched out beyond her knees. She glanced fearfully from one to the other and bit her lips. “What now,” thought Miriam. The anticipated holidays disappeared. Of course. She might have known they would. For a moment she felt sick, naked and weak. Then she braced herself to meet the shock. I must sit tight, I must sit tight and not show anything. Eve’s probably praying. Oh, make haste, Sally, and get it over.

“What’s the matter, Sally?” said Eve in a low voice.

“Oh, Eve and Mim, I’m awfully sorry.”

“You’d better tell us at once,” said Eve, crimsoning.

“Haven’t you noticed anything?”

Miriam looked at Sarah’s homely prosperous shape. It couldn’t be anything. It was a nightmare. She waited, pinching her wrist.

“What is it, Sally?” breathed Eve, tapping her green-clad knee. Clothes and furniture and pictures⁠ ⁠… houses full of things and people talking in the houses and having meals and pretending, talking and smiling and pretending.

“It’s mother.”

“What on earth do you mean, Sarah?” said Miriam angrily.

“She’s ill. Bennett took her to a specialist. There’s got to be⁠—she’s got to have an operation.”

Miriam drew up the blind with a noisy rattle, smiling at Eve frowning impatiently at the noise. Driving the heavy sash up as far as it would go, she leaned her head against the open frame. The garden did not seem to be there. The tepid night air was like a wall, a black wall. For a moment a splintered red light, like the light that comes from a violent blow on the forehead, flashed along it. Sarah and Eve were talking in strange voices, interrupting each other. It would be a relief to do something, faint or something selfish. But she must hear what they were saying; listen to both the voices cutting through the air of the hot room. Propped weak-limbed against the window open-mouthed for air she forced herself to hear, pressing her cold hands closely together. The gas light that had seemed so bright hardly seemed to light the room at all. Everything looked small, even Grannie’s old Chippendale bedstead and the double-fronted wardrobe. The girls were little monkey ghosts babbling together beside Eve’s open trunk. Did they see that it was exactly like a grave?

The sun shone through the apple trees, making the small half-ripe apples look as though they were coated with enamel.

It was quite clear that if they did go away together, the four of them, she, Eve, Gerald and Harriett to Brighton or somewhere, they would be able to forget. You could tell that from the strange quiet easy tone of Harriett’s and Gerald’s voices. There would be the aquarium. She supposed they would go to the aquarium with its strange underground smell of stagnant sea air and stare into the depths of those strange green tanks and watch the fish flashing about like shadows or skimming by near the front of the tank with the light full on their softly tinted scales. Harriett sat steadily at her side on the overturned seed-box, middle-aged and responsible, quietly discussing the details of the plan with Gerald, cross-legged at their feet on the grass plot. They had not said anything about the reasons for going; but of course Gerald must know all that. He knew everything now, all about the money troubles, all the awful things, and it seemed to make no difference to him. He made light of it. It was humiliating to think that he had come just as things had reached their worst, the house going to be sold, Pater and mother and Sarah going into lodgings in September, and the maddening helpless worry about mother and all the money for that. And yet it was a good thing he had known them all in the old house and seen them there, even pretending to be prosperous. And yet the house and garden was nothing to him. Just a house and garden. Harriett’s house and garden, and he was going to take Harriett away. The house and garden did not matter.

She glanced at the sunlit fruit trees, the thickets of the familiar kitchen garden, the rising grass bank at the near end of the distant lawn, the eloquent back of the large red house. He could not see all the things there were there, all the long years, or know what it was to have that cut away and nothing ahead but Brighton aquarium with Harriett and Eve, and then the school again, and disgraceful lodgings in some strange place, no friends and everybody looking down on them. She met his eyes and they both smiled.

“Keep her perfectly quiet for the next few weeks, that’s the idea, and when it’s all over she’ll be better than she’s ever been in her life.”

“D’you think so?”

“I don’t think, I know she will; people always are. I’ve known scores of people have operations. It’s nothing nowadays. Ask Bennett.”

“Does he think she’ll be better?”

“Of course.”

“Did he say so?”

“Of course he did.”

“Well, I s’pose we’d really better go.”

“Of course, we’re going.”

“I’m going to look for a place in a family after next term. I shall give notice when I get back. You get more money in a family Eve says, and home life, and if you haven’t a home they’re only too glad to have you there in the holidays too.”

“You take my advice, my dear girl. Don’t go into a family. Eve’ll find it out before she’s much older.”

“I must have more money.”

“Mirry’s so silly. She insists on paying her share of Brighton. Isn’t she an owl?”

“Oh well, of course, if she’s going to make a point of spending her cash when she needn’t she’d better find a more paying job. That’s certain sure.”