Honeycomb · Chapter 3 (2/3)

These people sitting at his table were supposed to be friends. But they knew nothing about him. He made little quiet mocking jokes and laughed and kept things going. The Staple-Cravens knew nothing at all about him. Mrs. Staple-Craven did not care for anybody. She looked about and always spoke as if she were answering an accusation that nobody had made⁠—a dressmaker persuading you to have something and talking on and on in fat tones to prevent your asking the price.⁠ ⁠… Mr. Craven only cared for himself. He was weak and pompous and fussy with a silly elaborate chivalrous manner. There was a stillness round the table. Miriam felt that it centred in her and was somehow her fault. Never mind. She had successfully got through whitebait and a quail. She would write home about the quails and whitebait and the guests and say nothing about her own silence⁠—“Mr. Staple-Craven is a poet⁠ ⁠…”

“Give Mélie some more drink, Percy,” said Mrs. Corrie. “It’s all wrong you two sittin’ together.”

“She likes to sit near me, don’t you, my duck?” said Mr. Craven, looking about for the wine and bowing to and fro from his hips.

“You’ve been away so long,” murmured Mr. Corrie. “What sort of a place is Balone to stay in?”

“Oh, nothing of a place in itself, nothing of a place. Why do you call it Balone?”

“Isn’t that right? That’s right enough. Come.”

Miriam waited eagerly, her eyes on Mr. Craven’s pink face with the grizzled hair above and below it. How perfectly awful he must look in his nightshirt, she thought, and flushed violently. “Balloyne,” he was saying carefully, showing his red lips and two rows of unnaturally even teeth.⁠ ⁠… “Oh, Lord, they mean Bologne.” Both men were talking together. “Balloyne is perfectly correct; the correct pronunciation,” said Mr. Craven in a loud testy voice, with loose lips. Mrs. Craven gazed up⁠ ⁠… like a distressed fish⁠ ⁠… into his flushed face. Mrs. Corrie was throwing out her little wavering broken laughs. Keeping his angry voice Mr. Craven went on. Miriam sat eagerly up and glanced at Mr. Corrie. He was sitting with his lips drawn down and his eyebrows raised⁠ ⁠… his law-court face.⁠ ⁠… Suddenly his face relaxed and the dark boyish brown head with the clear thoughtful brow and the gentle kind eyes turned towards her. “Let’s ask Miss Henderson. She shall be umpire.”

Miriam carefully enunciated the word. The blood sang in her ears as everyone looked her way. The furniture and all the room mimicked her. What did it matter, after all, the right pronunciation? It did matter; not that Balone was wrong, but the awfulness of being able to miss the right sound if you had once heard it spoken. There was some awful meaning in the way English people missed the right sound; all the names in India, all the Eastern words. How could an English traveller hear hahreem, and speak it hairum, Aswân and say Ass-ou-ann? It made them miss other things and think wrongly about them. “That’s more like it,” she heard Mr. Corrie say. There was sheeny braiding round the edges of his curious little coat. “Got you there, Craven, got you there,” he was saying somewhere in his mind⁠ ⁠… his mind went on by itself repeating things wearily. His small austere face shone a little with dining; the corners of his thin lips slackened. “I can read all your thoughts. None of you can disturb my enjoyment of this excellent dinner; none of you can enhance it”⁠ ⁠… but he was not quite conscious of his thoughts. Why did not the others read them? Perhaps they did. Perhaps they were too much occupied to notice what people were thinking. Perhaps in society people always were. The Staple-Cravens did not notice. But they were neither of them quite sure of themselves. Mrs. Corrie was busy all the time dancing and singing somewhere alone, wistfully. Joey kept throwing her smile at Mr. Corrie⁠—lounging a little, easily, over the table and saying in her mind, “I understand you, the others don’t, I do,” and he smiled at her, broadened the smile that had settled faintly all over his face, now and again in her direction. But she did not understand him. “Divine,” perhaps he was, or could be. But Joey did not know him. She only knew that he had a life of his own and no one else at the table had quite completely. She did not know that with all his worldly happiness and success and self-control he was miserable and lost and needing consolation⁠ ⁠… but neither did he. Perhaps he never would; would not find it out because he had so many thoughts and was always talking. So he thought he liked Joey. Because she smiled and responded. “Jabez Balfour,” he was saying slowly, savouring the words and smiling through his raised wineglass with half closed eyes. That was for Mr. Staple-Craven; there was some exciting secret in it. Presently they would be two men over their wine and nuts. Mr. Staple-Craven took this remark for himself at once, scorning the women with a thick polite insolence. His lips shot out. “Ah,” he said busily, “Jabez Balfour, Jabez Balfour; ah,” he swung from side to side from his waist. “Let me see, Jabez.⁠ ⁠…”

“The Liberator scheme,” said Mr. Corrie interestedly with a bright young eye. “They’ve got ’im this time; fairly got ’im on the hop.”

Jabez Balfour; what a beautiful name. He could not have done anything wrong. There was a soft glare of anger in Mr. Corrie’s eyes; as if he were accusing Mr. Staple-Craven of some crime, or everybody. Perhaps one would hear something about crime; crime. That’s crime⁠—somebody taking down a book and saying triumphantly, “that’s crime,” and people talking excitedly about it, in the warm, at dinners⁠ ⁠… like that moment at Richmond Park, the ragged man with panting mouth, running⁠ ⁠… the quiet grass, the scattered deer, the kindly trees, the gentlemen with triumphant faces, running after him; enough, enough, he had suffered enough⁠ ⁠… his poor face, their dreadful faces. He knew more than they did. Crime could not be allowed. People murdering you in your sleep. But criminals knew that⁠—the running man knew. He was running away from himself. He knew he had spoiled the grass and the trees and the deer. To have stopped him and hidden him and let him get over it. His poor face.⁠ ⁠… The awful moment of standing up trying to say or do something, feeling so weak, trembling at the knees, the man’s figure pelting along in the distance, the two gentlemen passing, their white waistcoats, homes, wives, bathrooms, stuffiness, indigestion.⁠ ⁠…

“It comes perfectly into line with Biblical records, my dear Corrie: a single couple, two cells originating the whole creation.”

“I’m maintaining that’s not the Darwinian idea at all. It was not a single couple, but several different ones.”

“We’re not descended from monkeys at all. It’s not natural,” said Mrs. Craven loudly, across the irritated voices of the men. Their faces were red. They filled the room with inaccurate phrases pausing politely between each and keeping up a show of being guest and host. How nice of them. But this was how cultured people with incomes talked about Darwin.

“The great thing Darwin did,” said Miriam abruptly, “was to point out the power of environment in evolving the different species⁠—selecting.”

“That’s it, that’s it!” sang Mrs. Corrie. “Let’s all select ourselves into the droin’-room.” “Now I’ve offended the men and the women too,” thought Miriam.

Mr. Staple-Craven joined the ladies almost at once. He came in leaving the door open behind him and took a chair in the centre of the fireside circle and sat giving little gasps and sighs of satisfaction, spreading his hands and making little remarks about the colours of the fire, and the shape of the coffee cups. There he was and he would have to be entertained, although he had nothing at all to say and was puzzling about himself and life all the time behind his involuntary movements and polite smiles and gestures. Perhaps he was uneasy because he knew there was someone saying all the time, “You’re a silly pompous old man and you think yourself much cleverer than you are.” But it was not altogether that; he was always uneasy, even when he was alone, unless he was rapidly preparing to go and be with people who did not know what he was. If he had been alone with the other three women he would have forgotten for a while and half-liked, half-despised them for their affability.

“The great man’s always at work, always at work,” he said suddenly, in a desperate sort of way. They were like some sort of needlework guild sitting round, just people, in the end; it made the surroundings seem quite ordinary. The room fell to pieces; one could imagine it being turned out, or all the things being sold up and dispersed.

“All work and no play,” scolded Mrs. Craven, “makes Jack.⁠ ⁠…”

Miriam heard the swish of the bead curtain at the end of the short passage.

“Heah he is,” smiled Joey.

“A miracle,” breathed Mrs. Craven, glancing round the circle. Evidently he did not usually come in.

Mr. Corrie came quietly into the room with empty hands; in the clear light he looked older than he had done in the dining-room, fuller in the face; grey threads showed in his hair. Everyone turned towards him. He looked at no one. His loose little smile had gone. The straight chair into which he dropped with a dreamy careless preoccupied air was set a little back from the fireside circle. No one moved.

“Absorbed the evidence, m’lud?” squeaked Mr. Craven.

“Ah‑m,” growled his host, clearing his throat.

Why can’t they let him alone, Miriam asked herself, and leave him to me, added her mind swiftly. She sat glaring into the fire; the room had resumed its strange magic.

“Do you think it is wrong to teach children things you don’t believe yourself?⁠ ⁠…” said Miriam, and her thoughts rushed on. “You’re an unbeliever and I’m an unbeliever and both of us despise the thoughts and opinions of ‘people’; you’re a successful wealthy man and can amuse yourself and forget; I must teach and presently die, teach till I die. It doesn’t matter. I can be happy for a while teaching your children, but you know, knowing me a little what a task that must be; you know I know nothing and that I know that nobody knows anything; comfort me.⁠ ⁠…”

She seemed to traverse a great loop of time waiting for the answer to her hurried question. Mr. Corrie had come into the drawing-room dressed for dinner and sat down near her with a half-smile as she closed the book she was reading and laid it on her knee and looked up with sentences from A Human Document ringing through her, and by the time her question was out she knew it was unnecessary. But she had flung it out and it had reached him and he had read the rush of thoughts that followed it. She might as well have been silent; better. She had missed some sort of opportunity. What would have happened if she had been quite silent? His answer was swift, but in the interval they had said all they would ever have to say to each other. “Not in the least,” he said, with a gentle decisiveness.

She flashed thanks at him and sighed her relief. He did not mind about religion. But how far did he understand? She had made him think she was earnest about the teaching children something. He would be very serious about their being “decently turned out.” She was utterly incapable of turning them out for the lives they would have to lead. She envied and pitied and despised those lives. Envied the ease and despised the ignorance, the awful cruel struggle of society that they were growing up for⁠—no joy, a career and sport for the boy, clubs, the weary dyspeptic life of the blasé man, and for the girl lonely cold hard bitter everlasting “social” life. She envied the ease. Mr. Corrie must know she envied the ease. Did he know that she tried to hide her incapacity in order to go on sharing the beauty and ease?

“It is so difficult,” she pursued helplessly, and saw him wonder why she went on with the subject and try to read the title of her book. She did not mean to tell him that. That would lead them away; just nowhere. If only she could tell him everything and get him to understand. But that would mean admitting that she was letting the children’s education slide; and he was sitting there, confidently, so beautifully dressed for dinner, paying her forty pounds a year not to let the children’s education slide.⁠ ⁠… “It’s an opportunity; he’s come in here, and sat down to talk to me. I ought to tell him; I’m cheating.” But he had looked for the title of her book, and would have talked, about anything, if she could have talked. He had a little air of deference, quiet kind indulgent deference. His neat little shoulders, bent as he sat turned towards her, were kind. “I’m too young,” she cried in her mind. If only she could say aloud, “I’m too young⁠—I can’t do it,” and leave everything to him.

Or leave the children out altogether and talk to him, man to man, about the book. She could not do that. Everything she said would hurt her, poisoned by the hidden sore of her incapability to do anything for his children. He ought to send them to school. But they would not go to a school where anything real was taught. Science, strange things about India and Ireland, the aesthetic movement, Ruskin; making things beautiful. How far away all that seemed, that sacred life of her old school⁠—forgotten. The thought of it was like a breath in the room. Did he know of these things? That sort of school would take the children away, out of this kind of society life. Make them think⁠—for themselves. He did not think or approve of thought. Even the hard Banbury Park people would be nearer to him than any of those things.⁠ ⁠… That was the world. Nearly everyone seemed to be in it. He was whimsically trying to read the title of her book with the little half-smile he shared with the boy.

People came in and they both rose. It was over. She sank back miserably into the offering of the moment, retiring into a lamplit corner with her book, enclosing herself in its promise.

She sat long that night over her fire dipping into the strange book, reading passages here and there; feeling them come nearer to her than anything she had read before. She knew at once that she did not want to read the book through; that it was what people called a tragedy, that the author had deliberately made it a tragedy; something black and twisted and painful, painful came to her out of every page; but seriously to read it right through and be excited about the tragic story seemed silly and pitiful. The thought of Mrs. Corrie and Joey doing this annoyed her and impatiently she wanted to tell them that there was nothing in it, nothing in the things the author wanted to make them believe; that was fraud, humbug⁠ ⁠… they missed everything. They could not see through it, they read through to the happy ending or the sad ending and took it all seriously.