The Tunnel · Chapter 1 (2/2)

The little man talking about the wonders of the linotype in the smoking room.⁠ ⁠… How did I get into the smoking room? Someone probably told Miss Spink I talked to him in the smoking room and smoked a cigarette. Perhaps his wife. If they could have seen. It was so surprising to hear anybody suddenly talking. Perhaps he began in the hall and ushered me into the smoking room. There was no one there and I can’t remember anything about the linotype, only the quiet and the talking face and suddenly feeling in the heart of London. But it was soon after that they all began being standoffish; before Mr. Chamberlayne came; before Adela began playing Esther Summerson at the Kennington. They approved of my going down to fetch her until he began coming too. The shock of seeing her clumsy heavy movements on the stage and her face looking as though it were covered with starch.⁠ ⁠… I can think about it all, here, and not mind.

She was beautiful. It was happiness to sit and watch her smoking so badly, in bed, in the strip of room, her cloud of hair against the wall in the candlelight, two o’clock⁠ ⁠… the Jesuit who had taught her chess⁠ ⁠… and Michael Somebody, the little book The Purple Pillar. He was an author and he wanted to marry her and take her back to Ireland. Perhaps by now she was back from America and had gone, just out of kindness. She was strong and beautiful and good, sitting up in her chemise, smoking.⁠ ⁠… I’ve got that photograph of her as Marcia somewhere. I must put it up. Miss Spink was surprised that last week, the students getting me into their room⁠ ⁠… the dark clean shining piano, the azaleas and the muslin shaded lamp, the way they all sat in their evening dresses, lounging and stiff with stiff clean polished hair.⁠ ⁠… “Miss Dust here’s going to be the highest soprano in the States.”⁠ ⁠… “None of that Miss Thicker.”⁠ ⁠… “When she caught that top note and the gold medal she went right up top, to stay there, that minute.”

She was surprised when Mrs. Potter took me to hear Melba. I heard Melba. I don’t remember hearing her. English opera houses are small; there are fine things all over the world. If you see them all you can compare one with the other; but then you don’t see or hear anything at all. It seems strange to be American and at the same time stout and middle-aged. It would have got more and more difficult with all those people. The dreadful way the Americans got intimate and then talked or hinted openly everywhere about intimate things. No one knew how intimate Miss O’Veagh was. I shall remember. There is something about being Irish Roman Catholic that makes happiness. She did not seem to think the George Street room awful. She was surprised when I talked about the hole in the wall and the cold and the imbecile servant and the smell of ether. “We are brought up from the first to understand that we must never believe anything a man says.” She came and sat and talked and wrote after she had gone⁠ ⁠… “goodbye⁠—sweet blessed little rose of Mary”⁠ ⁠… she tried to make me think I was young and pretty. She was sorry for me without saying so.

I should never have gone to Mornington Road unless I had been nearly mad with sorrow⁠ ⁠… if Miss Thomas disapproved of germs and persons who let apartments why did she come and take a room at George Street? She must have seen she drove me nearly mad with sorrow. The thought of Wales full of Welsh people like her, makes one mad with sorrow.⁠ ⁠… Did she think I could get to know her by hearing all her complaints? She’s somewhere now, sending someone mad.

I was mad already when I went to Mornington Road.

“You’ll be all right with Mrs. Swanson”⁠ ⁠… the awful fringes, the horror of the ugly clean little room, the horror of Mrs. Swanson’s heavy old body moving slowly about the house, a heavy dark mountain, fringes, bulges, slow dead eyes, slow dead voice, slow grimacing evil smile⁠ ⁠… housekeeper to the Duke of Something and now moving slowly about heavy with disapproval. She thought of me as a business young lady.

Following advice is certain to be wrong. When you don’t follow advice there may be awful things. But they are not arranged beforehand. And when they come you do not know that they are awful until you have half got hold of something else. Then they change into something that has not been awful. Things that remain awful are in some way not finished.⁠ ⁠… Those women are awful. They will get more and more awful, still disliking and disapproving till they die. I shall not see them again.⁠ ⁠… I will never again be at the mercy of such women or at all in the places where they are. That means keeping free of all groups. In groups sooner or later one of them appears, dead and sightless and bringing blindness and death⁠ ⁠… although they seem to like brightness and children and the young people they approve of. I run away from them because I must. They kill me. The thought of their death is awful. Even in heaven no one could explain anything to them if they remain as they are. Wherever people advise you to go there is in the end one of those women.⁠ ⁠…

When she turned out the gas the window spaces remained faintly alight with a soft light like moonlight. At the window she found a soft bluish radiance cast up from below upon the opposite walls and windows. It went up into the clear blue darkness of the sky.

When she lay down the bed smelt faintly of dust. The air about her head under the sharply sloping ceiling was still a little warm with the gas. It was full of her untrammelled thoughts. Her luggage was lying about, quite near. She thought of washing in the morning in the bright light on the other side of the room⁠ ⁠… leaves crowding all round the lattice and here and there a pink rose⁠ ⁠… several pink roses⁠ ⁠… the lovely air chilling the water⁠ ⁠… the basin quite up against the lattice⁠ ⁠… dew splashing off the rose bushes in the little garden almost dark with trellises and trees, crowding with Harriett through the little damp stiff gate, the sudden lineny smell of Harriett’s pinafore and the thought of Harriett in it, feeling the same, sudden bright sunshine, two shouts, great cornfields going up and up with a little track between them⁠ ⁠… up over Blewburton⁠ ⁠… Whittenham Clumps. Before I saw Whittenham Clumps I had always known them. But we saw them before we knew they were called Whittenham Clumps. It was a surprise to know anybody who had seen them and that they had a name.

St. Pancras bells were clamouring in the room; rapid scales, beginning at the top, coming with a loud full thump on to the fourth note and finishing with a rush to the lowest which was hardly touched before the top note hung again in the air, sounding outdoors clean and clear while all the other notes still jangled together in her room. Nothing had changed. The night was like a moment added to the day; like years going backwards to the beginning; and in the brilliant sunshine the unchanging things began again, perfectly new. She leaped out of bed into the clamorous stillness and stood in the window rolling up the warm hair that felt like a shawl round her shoulders. A cup of tea and then the bus to Harriett’s. A bus somewhere just out there beyond the morning stillness of the street. What an adventure to go out and take a bus without having to face anybody. They were all out there, away somewhere, the very thought and sight of them, disapproving and deploring her surroundings. She listened. There they were. There were their very voices, coming plaintive and reproachful with a held-in indignation, intonations that she knew inside and out, coming on bells from somewhere beyond the squares⁠—another church. She withdrew the coloured cover and set her spirit lamp on the ink-stained table. Strong bright light was standing outside the window. The clamour of the bells had ceased. From far away down in the street a loud hoarse voice came thinly up. Referee⁠—Lloyd’s⁠—Sunday Times⁠—People⁠—pypa.⁠ ⁠… A front door opened with a loud crackle of paint. The voice dropped to speaking tones that echoed clearly down the street and came up clear and soft and confidential. Referee? Lloyd’s? The door closed with a large firm wooden sound and the harsh voice went on down the street.

St. Pancras bells burst forth again. Faintly interwoven with their bright headlong scale were the clear sweet delicate contralto of the more distant bells playing very swiftly and reproachfully a five finger exercise in a minor key. That must be a very high-Anglican church; with light coming through painted windows on to carvings and decorations.

As she began on her solid slice of bread and butter St. Pancras bells stopped again. In the stillness she could hear the sound of her own munching. She stared at the surface of the table that held her plate and cup. It was like sitting up to the nursery table. “How frightfully happy I am,” she thought with bent head. Happiness streamed along her arms and from her head. St. Pancras bells began playing a hymn tune in single firm beats with intervals between that left each note standing for a moment gently in the air. The first two lines were playing carefully through to the distant accompaniment of the rapid weaving and interweaving in a regular unbroken pattern of the five soft low contralto bells. The third line of the hymn ran through Miriam’s head a ding-dong to and fro from tone to semitone. The bells played it out, without the semitone, with a perfect satisfying falsity. Miriam sat hunched against the table listening for the ascending stages of the last line. The bells climbed gently up, made a faint flat dab at the last top note, left it in the air askew above the decorous little tune and rushed away down their scale as if to cover the impropriety. They clamoured recklessly mingling with Miriam’s shout of joy as they banged against the wooden walls of the window space.