The Tunnel · Chapter 3 (3/6)

“Have I,” said Miriam surprised, “I shan’t be two minutes; it’ll be ready by the time anybody’s ready to go. But the letters aren’t.”

“All right. I’ll send up for them when we go out to lunch,” said Winthrop consolingly, disappearing.

Miriam found a piece of fine glazed green twine in her string box and tied up the neat packet⁠—sealing the ends of the string with a neat blob on the upper side of the packet and the folded paper at each end. She admired the two firmly flattened ends of string close together. Their free ends united by the firm red blob were a decorative substitute for a stamp on the white surface of the paper. She wrote in the address in an upright rounded hand with firm rotund little embellishments. Poring over the result she examined it at various distances. It was delightful. She wanted to show it to someone. It would be lost on Major Moke. He would tear open the paper to get at his dreadful teeth. Putting the stamps on the label, she regretfully resigned the packet and took up Mr. Orly’s daybook. It was in arrears⁠—three, four days not entered in the ledger. Major Moke repair⁠—one guinea, she wrote. Mr. Hancock’s showing out bell rang. She took up her packet and surveyed it upside down. The address looked like Chinese. It was really beautiful⁠ ⁠… but handwriting was doomed⁠ ⁠… shorthand and typewriting⁠ ⁠… she ought to know them if she were ever to make more than a pound a week as a secretary⁠ ⁠… awful. What a good thing Mr. Hancock thought them unprofessional⁠ ⁠… yet there were already men in Wimpole Street who had their correspondence typed. What did he mean by saying that the art of conversation was doomed? He did not like conversation. Jimmy came in for the parcel and scuttled downstairs with it. Mr. Hancock’s patient was going out through the hall. He had not rung for her to go up. Perhaps there was very little to clear and he was doing it himself.

He was coming downstairs. Her hands went to the pile of letters and busily sorted them. Through the hall. In here. Leisurely. How are you getting on? Half amused. Half solicitous. The first weeks. The first day. She had only just come. Perhaps there would be the hand on the back of the chair again as before he discovered the stiffness like his own stiffness. He was coming right round to the side of the chair into the light, waiting, without having said anything. She seemed to sit through a long space waiting for him to speak, in a radiance that shaped and smoothed her face as she turned slowly and considered the blunted grave features, their curious light, and met the smiling grey eyes. They were not observing the confusion on the table. He had something to say that had nothing to do with the work. She waited startled into an overflowing of the curious radiance, deepening the light in which they were grouped. “Are you busy?” “No,” said Miriam in quiet abandonment. “I want your advice on a question of decoration,” he pursued smiling down at her with the expression of a truant schoolboy and standing aside as she rose. “My patient’s put off,” he added confidentially, holding the door wide for her. Miriam trotted incredulously upstairs in front of him and in at the open surgery door and stood contemplating the room from the middle of the great square of soft thick grey green carpet with her back to the great triple window and the littered remains of a long sitting.

Perhaps a question of decoration meant altering the positions of some of the pictures. She glanced about at them, enclosed in her daily unchanging unsatisfying impressions⁠—the green landscape plumy with meadowsweet, but not letting you through to wander in fields, the little soft bright coloury painting of the doorway of St. Mark’s⁠—San Marco, painted by an Englishman, with a procession going in at the door and beggars round the doorway, blobby and shapeless like English peasants in Italian clothes⁠ ⁠… bad⁠ ⁠… and the man had worked and studied and gone to Italy and had a name and still worked and people bought his things⁠ ⁠… an engraving very fine and small of a low bridge in a little town, quiet sharp cheering lines; and above it another engraving, a tiresome troubled girl, all a sharp film of fine woven lines and lights and shadows in a rich dark liny filmy interior, neither letting you through nor holding you up, the girl worrying there in the middle of the picture, not moving, an obstruction.⁠ ⁠… Maris⁠ ⁠… the two little water colours of Devonshire, a boat with a brown sail and a small narrow piece of a street zigzagging sharply up between crooked houses, by a Londoner⁠—just to say how crooked everything was⁠ ⁠… that thing in this month’s Studio was better than any of these⁠ ⁠… her heart throbbed suddenly as she thought of it⁠ ⁠… a narrow sandy pathway going off, frilled with sharp greenery, far into a green wood.⁠ ⁠… Had he seen it? The studios lay safely there on the polished table in the corner, the disturbing bowl of flowers from the country, the great pieces of pottery, friends, warm and sympathetic to touch, never letting you grow tired of their colour and design⁠ ⁠… standing out against the soft dull gold of the dado and the bold soft green and buff of the wall paper. The oil painting of the cousin was looking on a little superciliously⁠ ⁠… centuries of “fastidious refinement” looking forth from her child’s face. If she were here it would be she would be consulted about the decoration; but she was away somewhere in some house, moving about in a dignified way under her mass of gold hair, saying things when speech became a necessity in the refined fastidious half-contemptuous tone, hiding her sensitive desire for companionship, contemptuous of most things and most people. Today she had an interested look, she was half jealously setting standards for him all the time.⁠ ⁠… Miriam set her aside. The Chinese figures staring down ferociously from the narrow shelf running along the base of the high white frieze were more real to her. They belonged to the daily life here, secure from censure.

From the brown paper wrappings emerged a large plaque of Oriental pottery. Mr. Hancock manoeuvred it upright, holding it opposite to her on the floor, supported against his knees. “There⁠—what do you think of that?” he murmured bending over it. Miriam’s eyes went from the veinings on his flushed forehead to the violent soft rich red and blue and dull green covering the huge concave disc from side to side. It appeared to represent a close thicket of palm fronds, thin flat fingers, superimposed and splaying out in all directions over the deep blue background. In the centre appeared the head and shoulders of an enormous tiger, coming sinuously forward, one great paw planted on the greenery near the foremost middle edge of the plaque.

“M’m,” said Miriam staring.

Mr. Hancock rubbed the surface of the plaque with his forefinger. Miriam came near and ran her finger down across the rich smooth reliefs.

“Where shall I put it?” said Mr. Hancock.

“I should have it somewhere on that side of the room, where the light falls on it.”

Mr. Hancock raised the plaque in his arms and walked with it to the wall raising it just above his head and holding it in place between the two pictures of Devonshire. They faded to a small muddled dinginess, and the buff and green patterning of the wallpaper showed shabby and dim.

“It looks somehow too big or too small or something.⁠ ⁠… I should have it down level with the eyes, so that you can look straight into it.”

Mr. Hancock carefully lowered it.

“Let me come and hold it so that you can look,” said Miriam advancing.

“It’s too heavy for you,” said Mr. Hancock straining his head back and moving it from side to side.

“I believe it would look best,” said Miriam, “across the corner of the room as you come in⁠—where the corner cupboard is⁠—I’m sure it would,” she said eagerly and went back to the centre of the carpet.

Mr. Hancock smiled towards the small oak cupboard fixed low in the angle of the wall.

“We should have to move the cupboard,” he said dubiously and carried the heavy plate to the indicated place.

“That’s simply lovely,” said Miriam in delight as he held the plaque in front of the long narrow façade of black oak.

Mr. Hancock lowered the plaque to the floor and propped it crosswise against the angle.

“It would be no end of a business fixing it up,” he murmured crossing to her side. They stood looking at the beautiful surface blurred a little in the light by its backward tilt. They gazed fascinated as the plaque slid gently forward and fell heavily breaking into two pieces.

They regarded one another quietly and went forward to gather up the fragments. The broken sides gritted together as Miriam held hers steady for the other to be fitted to it. When they were joined the crack was hardly visible.

“That’ll be a nice piece of work for Messrs. Nikkoo,” said Mr. Hancock with a little laugh, “we’d better get it in back behind the sofa for the present.” They spread the brown paper over the brilliant surfaces and stood up. Miriam’s perceptions raced happily along. How had he known that she cared for things? She was not sure that she did⁠ ⁠… not in the way that he did.⁠ ⁠… How did he know that she had noticed any of his things? Because she had blurted out “Oh what a perfectly lovely picture” when he showed her the painting of his cousin? But that was because he admired his cousin and her brother had painted the picture and he admired them both and she had not known about this when she spoke.

“Did you see this month’s Studio?” she asked shyly.

He turned to the table and took up the uppermost of the pile.

“There’s a lovely green picture,” said Miriam, “at least I like it.”

Mr. Hancock turned pages ruminatively.

“Those are good things,” he said flattening the open page.

“Japanese Flower Decorations,” read Miriam looking at the reproduced squares of flowering branches arranged with a curious naturalness in strange flat dishes. They fascinated her at once⁠—stiff and real, shooting straight up from the earth and branching out. They seemed coloured. She turned pages and gazed.

“How nice and queer.”

Mr. Hancock bent smiling. “They’ve got a whole science of this you know,” he said; “it takes them years to learn it; they apprentice themselves and study for years.⁠ ⁠…”

Miriam looked incredulously at the simple effects⁠—just branches placed “artistically” in flat dishes and fixed somehow at the base amongst little heaps of stones.

“It looks easy enough.”

Mr. Hancock laughed. “Well⁠—you try. We’ll get some broom or something, and you shall try your hand. You’d better read the article. Look here⁠—they’ve got names for all the angles.⁠ ⁠… ‘Shin’⁠—he read with amused admiring delight, ‘sho-shin’⁠ ⁠… there’s no end of it.”

Miriam fired and hesitated. “It’s like a sort of mathematics.⁠ ⁠… I’m no good at mathematics.”

“I expect you could get very good results⁠ ⁠… we’ll try. They carry it to such extraordinary lengths because there’s all sorts of social etiquette mixed up with it⁠—you can’t have a branch pointing at a guest for instance⁠—it would be rude.”

“No wonder it takes them years,” said Miriam.

They laughed together, moving vaguely about the room.

Mr. Hancock looked thoughtfully at the celluloid tray of hairpins on the mantelshelf, and blew the dust from it⁠ ⁠… there was something she remembered in some paper, very forcibly written, about the falsity of introducing single specimens of Japanese art, the last results of centuries of an artistic discipline, that was it, that had grown from the life of a secluded people living isolated in a particular spot under certain social and natural conditions, into English household decoration.⁠ ⁠… Gleanings in Buddha Fields the sun on rice-fields⁠ ⁠… and Fujiama⁠—Fuji-no-San in the distance⁠ ⁠… but he did not like Hearn⁠—“there’s something in the chap that puts me off”⁠ ⁠… puts off⁠—what a good phrase⁠ ⁠… “something sensuous in him”⁠ ⁠… but you could never forget Buddha Fields. It made you know you were in Japan, in the picture of Japan⁠ ⁠… and somebody had said that all good art, all great art, had a sensuous element⁠ ⁠… it was dreadful, but probably true⁠ ⁠… because the man had observed it and was not an artist, but somebody looking carefully on. Mr. Hancock, Englishman, was “put off” by sensuousness, by anybody taking a delight in the sun on rice fields and the gay colours of Japan⁠ ⁠… perhaps one ought to be “put off” by Hearn⁠ ⁠… but Mr. Hancock liked Japanese things and bought them and put them in with his English things, that looked funny and tame beside them. What he did not like was the expression of delight. It was queer and annoying somehow⁠ ⁠… especially as he said that the way English women were trained to suppress their feelings was bad. He had theories and fixed preferences and yet always seemed to be puzzled about so many things.

“D’you think it right to try to introduce single pieces of Japanese art into English surroundings?” she said tartly, beginning on the instruments.

“East is East and West is West and never the twain can meet?”

“That’s a dreadful idea⁠—I don’t believe it a bit.”

Mr. Hancock laughed. He believed in those awful final dreary-weary things⁠ ⁠… some species are so widely differentiated that they cannot amalgamate⁠—awful⁠ ⁠… but if one said that he would laugh and say it was beyond him⁠ ⁠… and he liked and disliked without understanding the curious differences between people⁠—did not know why they were different⁠—they put him off or did not put him off and he was just. He liked and reverenced Japanese art and there was an artist in his family. That was strange and fine.

“I suppose we ought to have some face-powder here,” mused Mr. Hancock.

“They’ll take longer than ever if we do.”

“I know⁠—that’s the worst of it; but I commit such fearful depredations⁠ ⁠… we want a dressing room⁠ ⁠… if I had my way we’d have a proper dressing room downstairs. But I think we must get some powder and a puff.⁠ ⁠… Do you think you could get some⁠ ⁠… ?” Miriam shrank. Once in a chemist’s shop, in a strong Burlington Arcade west-end mood buying some scent, she had seized and bought a little box.⁠ ⁠… La Dorine de Poche⁠ ⁠… Dorin, Paris⁠ ⁠… but that was different to asking openly for powder and a puff⁠ ⁠… la Dorine de Dorin Paris was secret and wonderful.⁠ ⁠… “I’ll try,” she said bravely and heard the familiar little sympathetic laugh.