The Tunnel · Chapter 6 (1/4)

VI

Miriam sat on a damp wooden seat at the station. Shivering with exhaustion, she looked across at the early morning distance, misty black and faint misty green.⁠ ⁠… Something had happened to it. It was not beautiful; or anything. It was not anything.⁠ ⁠… That was the punishment.⁠ ⁠… The landscape was dead. All that had come to an end. Her nimble lifeless mind noted the fact. There was dismay in it. Staring at the landscape she felt the lifelessness of her face; as if something had brushed across it and swept the life away, leaving her only sight. She could never feel any more.

Behind her fixed eyes something new seemed moving forward with a strange indifference. Suddenly the landscape unrolled. The rim of the horizon was no longer the edge of the world. She lost sight of it in the rolling out of the landscape in her mind, out and out, in a light easy stretch, showing towns and open country and towns again, seas and continents on and on; empty and still. Nothing. Everywhere in the world nothing. She drifted back to herself and clung, bracing herself. She was somebody. If she was somebody who was going to do something⁠ ⁠… not roll trolleys along a platform. The train swept busily into the landscape; the black engine, the brown, white-panelled carriages, warm and alive in the empty landscape. Her strained nerves relaxed. In a moment she would be inside it, being carried back into her own world. She felt eagerly forward towards it. Heartsease was there. She would be able to breathe again. But not in the same way; unless she could forget. There were other eyes looking at it. They were inside her; not caring for the things she had cared for, dragging her away from them.

They are not my sort of people. Alma does not care for me personally. Little cries and excitement and affection. She wants to; but she does not care for anyone personally. Neither of them do. They live in a world.⁠ ⁠… “Michelangelo” and “Stevenson” and “Hardy” and “Dürer” and that other man,⁠ ⁠… Alma⁠ ⁠… popping and sweeping gracefully about with little cries and clever sayings and laughter, trying to be real; in a bright outside way, showing all the inside things because she kept crushing them down. It was so tiring that one could not like being with her. She seemed to be carrying something off all the time; and to be as if she were afraid if the talk stopped for a moment, it would be revealed.

In the teashop with Alma alone it had been different; all the old schooldays coming back as she sat there. Her eager story. It was impossible to do anything but hold her hands and admire her bravery and say you did not care. But it was not quite real; it was too excited and it was wrong, certainly wrong, to go down not really caring. I need not go down again.

Cold and torpid she got up and stepped into an empty carriage. Both windows were shut and the dry stuffy air seemed almost warm after her exposure. She let one down a little; sheltered from the damp the little stream of outside air was welcome and refreshing. She breathed deeply, safe, shut in and moving on. With an unnecessarily vigorous swing of her arms she hoisted her pilgrim basket on to the rack. Of course, she murmured smiling, of course I shall go down again⁠ ⁠… rather.

That extraordinary ending of fear of the great man at the station. Alma and the little fair square man not much taller than herself looking like a grocer’s assistant with a curious kind confidential⁠ ⁠… unprejudiced eye⁠ ⁠… they had come, both of them, out of their house to the station to meet her⁠ ⁠… “this is Hypo” and the quiet shy walk to the house he asking questions by saying them⁠—statements. You caught the elusive three-fifteen. This is your bag. We can carry it off without waiting for the⁠ ⁠… British porter. You’ve done your journey brilliantly. We haven’t far to walk.

The strange shock of the bedroom, the strange new thing springing out from it⁠ ⁠… the clear soft bright tones, the bright white light streaming through the clear muslin, the freshness of the walls⁠ ⁠… the flattened dumpy shapes of dark green bedroom crockery gleaming in a corner; the little green bowl standing in the middle of the white spread of the dressing table cover⁠ ⁠… wild violets with green leaves and tendrils put there by somebody with each leaf and blossom standing separate⁠ ⁠… touching your heart; joy, looking from the speaking pale mauve little flowers to the curved rim of the green bowl and away to the green crockery in the corner; again and again the fresh shock of the violets⁠ ⁠… the little cold change in the room after the books, strange fresh bindings and fascinating odd shapes and sizes, gave out their names⁠ ⁠… The White Boat⁠—Praxiter⁠—King Chance⁠—Mrs. Prendergast’s Palings⁠ ⁠… the promise of them in their tilted wooden case by the bedside table from every part of the room, their unchanged names, the chill of the strange sentences inside⁠—like a sort of code written for people who understood, written at something, clever raised voices in a cold world. In Mrs. Prendergast’s Palings there were cockney conversations spelt as they were spoken. None of the books were about ordinary people⁠ ⁠… three men, seamen, alone, getting swamped in a boat in shallow water in sight of land⁠ ⁠… a man and a girl he had no right to be with wandering on the sands, the cold wash and sob of the sea; her sudden cold salt tears; the warmth of her shuddering body. Praxiter beginning without telling you anything, about the thoughts of an irritating contemptuous superior man, talking at the expense of everybody. Nothing in any of them about anything one knew or felt; casting you off⁠ ⁠… giving a chill ache to the room. To sit⁠ ⁠… alone, reading in the white light, amongst the fresh colours⁠—but not these books. To go downstairs was a sacrifice: coming back there would be the lighting of the copper candlestick, twisting beautifully up from its stout stem. What made it different to ordinary candlesticks? What? It was like⁠ ⁠… a gesture.

“You knew Susan at school.” The brown, tweed-covered arm of the little square figure handed a teacup. The high huskily hooting voice⁠ ⁠… what was the overwhelming impression? A common voice, with a cockney twang. Overwhelming. “What was Susan like at school?” The voice was saying two things; that was it; doing something deliberately; it was shy and determined and deliberate and expectant. Miriam glanced incredulously, summoning all her forces against her sense of strange direct attack, pushing through and out to some unknown place, dreading her first words, not taking in a further remark of the live voice. She could get up and go away forever; or speak and whatever she spoke would keep her there forever. Alma, sitting behind the tea-tray in a green Alma dress with small muslin cuffs and collars had betrayed her into this. Alma had been got by this and had brought her to the test of it. The brown walls, brown paper all over, like parcel paper and Japanese prints; nothing else, high-backed curious shaped wooden chairs all with gestures, like the candlestick, and the voice that was in the same difficult, different world as the books upstairs.⁠ ⁠… Alma had betrayed her, talking as if they were like other people and not saying anything about this strange cold difference. Alma had come to it and was playing some part she had taken up⁠ ⁠… there was some wrong hurried rush somewhere within the beautiful room. Stop, she wanted to say, you’re all wrong. You’ve dropped something you don’t know anything about deliberately. Alma ought to have told you. Hasn’t she told you?

“Alma hasn’t changed,” she said, desperately questioning the smooth soft movements of the smooth soft hands, the quiet controlled pose of the head. Alma had the same birdlike wide blink and flash of her limpid brown eyes, the same tight crinkle and snicker when she laughed, the same way of saying nothing or only the clever superficially true things men said. Alma had agreed with this man and had told him nothing or only things in the clever way he would admire.

He made little sounds into his handkerchief. He was nonplussed at a dull answer. It would be necessary to be brilliant and amusing to hold his attention⁠—in fact to tell lies. To get on here one would have to say clever things in a high bright voice.

The little man began making statements about Alma. Sitting back in his high-backed chair with his head bent and his small fine hands clasping his large handkerchief he made little short statements, each improving on the one before it and coming out of it, and little subdued snortings at the back of his nose in the pauses between his sentences as if he were afraid of being answered or interrupted before he developed the next thing. Alma accompanied his discourse with increasing snickerings. Miriam after eagerly watching the curious mouthing half hidden by the drooping straggle of moustache and the strange concentrated gleam of the grey blue eyes staring into space, laughed outright. But how could he speak so of her? He met the laughter with a minatory outstretched forefinger, and raised his voice to a soft squeal ending as he launched with a little throw of the hand his final jest, in a rotund crackle of high hysterical open-mouthed laughter. The door opened and two tall people were shown in; a woman with a narrow figure and a long dark-curtained sallow horse-like face, dressed in a black striped cream serge coat and skirt and a fair florid troubled fickle smiling man in a Norfolk tweed and pale blue tie. “Hullo,” said the little man propelling himself out of his chair with a neat swift gesture and standing small and square in the room making cordial sounds and moving his arms about as if to introduce and seat his guests without words and formalities. Alma’s thin excited hubbub and the clearly enunciated, obviously prepared facetiousnesses of the newcomers⁠—his large and tenor and florid⁠ ⁠… a less clever man than Mr. Wilson⁠ ⁠… and hers bass and crisp and contemptuous⁠ ⁠… nothing was hidden from her; she would like the queer odd people who went about at Tansley Street⁠—was broken into by the entry of three small young men, all three dark and a little grubby and shabby looking. The foremost stood with vivid eager eyes wide open as if he had been suddenly checked in the midst of imparting an important piece of news. Alma came forward to where they stood herded and silent just inside the door and made little faint encouraging maternal sounds at them as she shook hands.

As she did this Miriam figured them in a flash coming down the road to the house; their young men’s talk and arguments, their certainty of rightness and completeness, their sudden embarrassment and secret anger with their precipitate rescuer. Mr. Wilson was on his feet again, not looking at them nor breaking up the circle already made, but again making his sociable sounds and circular movements with his arms as if to introduce and distribute them about the room. The husband and wife kept on a dialogue in strained social voices as if they were bent on showing that their performance was not dependant on an audience. Miriam averted her eyes from them, overcome by painful visions of the two at breakfast or going home after social occasions. The three young men retreated to the window alcove behind the tea-table one of them becoming Miriam’s neighbour as she sat in the corner near the piano whither she had fled from the centre of the room when the husband and wife came in.

It was the young man with the important piece of news. He sat bent forward holding his cup and plate with outstretched arms. His headlong expression remained unchanged. Wisps of black hair stood eagerly out from his head and a heavy thatch fell nearly to his eyebrows. “Did anybody see anything of Mrs. Binks at the station?” asked Alma from her table. “Oh my dear,” she squealed gently as the maid ushered in a little lady in a straight dress of red flannel frilled with black chiffon at the neck and wrists, “we were all afraid you weren’t coming.” “Don’t anybody move”⁠—the deep reedy voice reverberated amongst the standing figures; the firm compact undulating figure came across the room to Alma. Its light-footed swiftness and easy certainty filled Miriam with envy. The envy evaporated during the embracing of Alma and the general handshaking. The low strong reedy voice went on saying things out into the silence of the room in a steady complete way. There was something behind it all that did not show, or showed in the brilliant ease, something that Miriam did not envy. She tried to discover what it was as the room settled, leaving Mrs. Binkley on a low chair near to Alma, taking tea and going on with her monologue, each of her pauses punctuated by soft appreciative sounds from Alma and little sounds from Mr. Wilson. She was popular with them. Mr. Wilson sat surveying her. Did they know how hard she was working? Perhaps they did and admired or even envied it. But what was it for? Surely she must feel the opposition in the room? Alma and Mr. Wilson approved and encouraged her exhibition. She was in their curious league for keeping going high-voiced clever sayings. So had the husband appeared to be at first. Now he sat silent with a kind polite expression about his head and figure. But his mouth was uneasy, he was afraid of something or somebody and was staring at Mrs. Binkley. The wife sat in a gloomy abstraction smoking a large cigarette⁠ ⁠… she was something like Mrs. Kronen in her way; only instead of belonging to South Africa she had been a hard featured English schoolgirl; she was still a hard-featured English schoolgirl, with the oldest eyes Miriam had ever seen.