Sitting down almost the moment Mr. Mendizabal brought him into the room and playing Wagner. With many wrong notes and stumbling phrases, but self-forgetfully, in the foreign way. Keeping bravely on, making the shape come even in the most difficult parts. He was hearing the Queen’s Hall Orchestra all the time, and he knew that anyone who knew it could hear it too. He was one of those people who stand in the arena and talk about the music and know that there are piano scores and get them and play them. It was amazing that there should be piano scores of Wagner. Did he play because he wanted to remember the orchestra; without thinking of the people who were listening. He did not know the Baileys and their boarders. He could not imagine how extraordinary it was to hear Wagner in the room, suddenly offered to the Baileys. They knew something important was going on; sitting close round the piano surprised and attentive, busily speculating, in scraps, hampered by the need to appear to be listening. Afterwards they would talk to him arching and laughing, Mr. Mendizabal’s friend. Perhaps he would come and play Wagner again; there would be music in the room undisturbed by their forced attention. This was only a beginning.

At the end of the overture he sat quite still, making no movement of turning towards the room. The group about the piano were taken by surprise, waiting for him to turn. When they began making exclamations his hands were on the piano again. The room was silenced by strange little sentences of music. He played short fragments, unfamiliar things with strange phrasing, difficult to trace, unmelodious, but haunted by suggested melody; a curious flattened wandering abrupt intimate message in their phrases; perhaps Russian or Brahms. Not Wagner writing down the world in sound nor Beethoven speaking to one person. Other foreign musicians, set apart, glancing, and listening to strange single things, speaking in pain, just out of clear hearing, their speech unfinished. Russian or Hungarian. Dvor-tchak. I will ask him. Perhaps he plays Chopin.

The Baileys were growing weary of listening. They were becoming strangers in their own dining-room, with a wonderful important evening going on all round them. Miriam consulted Sissie, probing enviously for the dark busy sulkily hidden thoughts going to and fro behind her attitude of listening. Her eyes were drawing pictures of Mr. Bowdoin’s back view and noting his movements. Mrs. Bailey was still smiling her pride. Her tired eyes were strained brightly towards the performance with the proper expression of delighted appreciation. But now and again they moved observantly across the slender shabby form and revealed her circling thoughts. When she looked at the back of the thatch of soft fine fair hair she was seeing that officeful of men painting posters, the first arrival of Mr. Mendizabal, their resentment of his quick work, the poster he thought of in the night, here, and worked out at the office in an hour, the musician playing so gravely not knowing that he was being seen as the man who was forced by Mr. Mendizabal to play a Beethoven Sonata on the typewriter with his hair in curl-papers. If Mrs. Bailey went too deeply into her speculations she would be too confused to ask him to come again. Perhaps Mr. Mendizabal would bring him anyhow. He was lounging back in his chair with his hands in his pockets. His face seemed to be laughing ironically behind a proud smile. He respected music. He admired Bowdoin for his talent. He was showing him off. It was charming ... like Trilby. Men laughing at each other and admiring each other...... She had left off listening. Mr. Bowdoin was sitting there at her side, separate from his music, sitting there English, a little altered by going out into foreign music. A sort of foreigner with an English expression. Her glance had shown her an English profile, a blunted irregular aquiline, a little defaced about the mouth and chin by the influence on the muscles of a common way of speaking. But the back of his head was foreign, the outline of his skull fine and delicate, a delicate arch at the top and the back flattened a little under the soft fall of hair. He was stopping. He sat still, facing the piano. There were stirrings and murmurs and uncertain attempts at applause. Mr. Mendizabal rose and stood over him, as if to smite him on the shoulder. What do you think about when you play Beethoven?—said Miriam hastily. His face came round and Mr. Mendizabal turned hilariously away to the room.—By-toven himself I think said Mr. Bowdoin quietly.—If I get a Beethoven’s Sonatas would you play one?—I will play one for you. But not this evening I think—He turned back to the piano and Miriam gazed at his indrawn profile. He was quite English and had all the English thoughts and feelings about the little group gathered behind him in the room. But there was something besides. He was a musician and that made him understand. He knew the room was impervious to music and was ill at ease after the first joy of playing, and could not convince his hearers by vitality and exuberance as a foreigner would do even with quite fragile subdued delicately controlled music. If you care about music he said towards the piano, will you come one evening and let me play to you on my own piano? I should like it more than anything said Miriam, quivering, and clenching her clasped hands. It will be an honour and a great pleasure to me if you will come he said in his quiet weary voice. I will take the liberty of writing to suggest an evening. Miriam’s abrupt rising and blind movement left her standing opposite the lady-help, who was standing with a foot on the fender and an elbow on the mantelpiece, on the other side of the hearthrug. After only two days in the house she seemed already more at home than the Baileys; talking derisively across at Mr. Mendizabal who was marching up and down the far side of the room with his hands in pockets shouting raillery and snorting. D’you like London Miss Scott? said Miriam uncontrollably to her averted talking face. Miss Scott completed her sally; the Baileys were talking to Mr. Bowdoin, just behind at the piano. Perhaps no one had witnessed her wild attack. But she could not take her eyes off Miss Scott’s face. It turned towards her still wearing its derisive smile. What was that you said Miss Henderson I beg your pardon, she stated encouragingly. She was not in the least impressed by being spoken to. Her swift amused glance was all she could manage without breaking into shouts of laughter. Her laughter-shaken person was the front of a barricade of derision. Miriam repeated her question, fearfully consulting the small sheeny satin dress, with the lace collar, the neat slipper on the fender, the heavy little fringe stopping abruptly at the hollow temples above high cheekbones and slightly hollow cheeks and leading back to a tiny knot at the top of the head. Perhaps she was a lady. Ye see so little of it unless yerra wealthy, she said in curious tonguey tones, standing upright on the hearthrug and flinging back her head with every other word; backing away with a balancing movement from foot to foot. She laughed on her last word and stood shaking with laughter, her elbow on the far corner of the mantelshelf and her foot once more on the fender. Perhaps she was still laughing at some jest of Mr. Mendizabal’s. Arrya fond of London Miss Henderson, she chuckled and went on without waiting for an answer, with rhythmically flinging head,—it’s ahl very well if ya can go out to theeaturras and consurruts and out and about; but when the season comes and the people are in the parruk and in thayre grand houses having parrties and gaities and yew’ve just got to do nothing I think its draydefle.—She laughed consumedly, throwing back her head. Miriam got herself across the room and outside the door. On the hall table lay a letter; from Eve; witnessing her discomfort; soothing, and reproaching...... Eve would have stayed and talked to the musician. Up in her cold room everything vanished into the picture of Eve, deciding away down in green Wiltshire, to leave off teaching; smiling, stretching out her firm small hands and taking hold of London. London changed as she read. She sat stupefied. It seemed impossible, terrifying, that Eve penniless, with her uncertain health should leave the wealthy comfort of the Greens after all these years. Too excited to read word by word she scanned the pages and learned that Madame Leroy a friend of Mrs. Green who had a flower shop in Bruton Street had engaged her....... I decorated the table for dinner each night when she was here at Christmas .... the Greens have been charming, quite excited about the plans .... coming up next week.... Miriam leapt to her feet and began hastily putting on her things. “Eve is coming to London for a six months’ course in floral decorations. She is putting up at a hostel.” She pulled on her cold sodden shoes. “Eve is going to be an assistant in a flower shop at fifteen shillings a week. She has taken a cubicle at a branch of the Young Women’s Bible Association.” By the time she was ready she felt she must have dreamed the news. Eve, not a governess, free, in London, just as she was herself. Another self, in London. Eve being led about and taught London, going about under the same skies, in the streets, feeling exactly as she felt. Nothing would have changed before she came. The rain gently thudding on the roof and rattling against the landing skylight was Eve’s rain. She was listening to it and hearing it in exactly the same way.....

The girls did not realise the news at all. They kept going off into questions about details until the fact of Eve’s coming disappeared altogether and only Eve’s point of view and Eve’s courage and her difficulties remained..... One had told it the wrong way. Better not to have given any facts at all but just to have said Eve’s coming to London; isn’t it weird? But then they would have said is she coming to London to see the Queen? The Queen. That would have been true. She was coming to London partly to see the Queen. Perhaps the trouble was that they had been cheated by not being told exactly how Eve was only just managing to come at all and how scraped everything would be. But at least they realised that one had people belonging to one who made up their minds and did definite things, like other people. It was amazing to decide to come to London and be a florist; Napoleon. They realised that and nothing else. She would be able to tell Mr. Hancock on Monday; first him, first thing in the morning and the Orlys during the day.

Mr. Hancock understood at once, making no response at all at first and then standing quietly about near her as she busied herself with her dusting really giving himself to taking in the simple stupendous fact; and really realising it before asking any questions and asking them in a tone that showed he knew what it meant and going on showing all day in his manner that he knew what it was that kept her so brisk about her work. He was divine; he was a divine person. She would never forget being able to say just anyhow, h’m, I’ve got a sister coming to London; and his immediate silent approach across the room, drying his hands...... Of course the Orlys immediately said Oh how nice for you, you won’t be so lonely. What did people mean about loneliness? It was always the people arranged in groups and seeming so lost and isolated and lonely who said that...... To-night she would begin turning out her room for Eve’s reception. No. It was the Dante lecture.... The day Eve came she would buy some flowers. She understood now why people wanted to put flowers in their rooms when people were coming. She would be a hostess. Some people bought flowers and carried them home when they were alone.... It must be like inviting a guest to keep you company. Like saying you were alone and not liking being alone and putting flowers about to tell you all the time that you did not want to be alone but were. People talked about these things. “I always buy flowers when I am alone.” Like suddenly taking off all their things and showing that they had a crooked body. If they were really miserable about being alone they would be too miserable to buy flowers. If they really wanted the flowers enough to buy them they were already not alone. If they bought the flowers in that fussy excited thoughtless way people seemed to do things they were neither really ever alone or ever really with people .... they were in that sort of state that made social life a talkative nothingness sliding about on nothing....

At the end of the afternoon she wandered forgetfully into the warmth of the empty waiting-room. The house was silent. Her footsteps made no sound along the carpeted hall and were lost in the thick Turkey carpeting of the waiting-room floor. The room was lit only by the firelight. From its wide clear core striped by black bars a broad rose-gold shaft glowed out across the room reaching the copper vessels on the black oak sideboard and the lower part of the long mirror between the windows where the midmost piece of copper gleamed in reflection. She stood still, holding the warm air in her nostrils, everything was blotted out and then restored to its place .... what place, why was it good, what was she trying to remember? .... In the familiar fire-lit winter darkness was a faint dry warm scent ..... mimosa. It was a repetition ..... It had been there last year, suddenly; drily fragrant in the winter darkness of the warm room preparing for the light and warmth of the evening. It had seemed then like some wealthy extravagance, bringing a sense of the freedom of wealth to have things out of season, and a keen sudden memory in the dark London room of the unspoken inexpressible beauty of Newlands ...... its soft-toned softly carpeted and curtained effect, fragrant with clusters of winter flowers, standing complete somewhere in the secret black spaces of her mind...... But now here it was again, just at the same moment, just before the winter darkness began to give way. Perhaps mimosa came at this time of year suddenly in the shops, before the spring flowers, and careful people like Mrs. Orly could buy it ... then in London mimosa was the sign of spring. It was like the powdery fragrance of a clear warm midsummer evening, like petal-dust; pollen-dust; the whole summer circling in the glow of firelight. Then Eve would not come this winter. The darkest secret winter-time of London was over again. It would come again in single moments and groups of days, but its time was gone. The moment of realisation of spring had come by surprise; there lay all the spring days ahead leading on to summer spread out for anyone to see, calling to Eve or to anyone who might have come into the room to whom one could have said doesn’t the smell of mimosa make you realise the winter is over; and here within, lit up as if by a suddenly switched on electric light was one’s own real realisation going back and back; in pictures that grew clearer, each time something happened that switched on a light within the black spaces of your mind. Things that no one could share, coming again and again just as some outside thing was beginning to interest you, as if to remind you that the inmost reality comes to you when you are alone...... The prospect of Eve’s coming was changed. The pang of the mimosa came nearer than anything she could bring. Perhaps it would be possible to tell her about this moment? Perhaps her coming had made it more real. Yet now it did not seem to matter so much whether she came or not. In a way it seemed as though the fact of her coming threatened something.

2

“Antoine Bowdoin.” If she had had a solemn letter from him first she would never have undertaken to go and hear him play. The formal courtly old-fashioned phrases had nothing to do with the hours of music. She had thought of nothing but the music on the good piano and now when she had forgotten all about it there was this awful result; the “few friends” gathered together in his room on a fixed date so that she might go and hear him play. She would have to sit, with a party, and afterwards find something to say.... An Englishman, solemn and polite, playing foreign music, with English friends politely and solemnly sitting round. There was no word of Mr. Mendizabal. He was not going. If he had been Mr. Bowdoin would not have said I will call at six-thirty for the purpose of escorting you to my rooms. He was like a gaoler. Perhaps the walk would be an opportunity of getting over nervousness. There would be music at once, no meal to get through. She would thank him very much for the great treat and when it was over there would only be Eve and the accomplishment of having heard a good piano played by a musician. He could be dropped.... He could be asked to come just once and play for Eve. That would be a great London evening for Eve...... The sense of a complex London life crowded with engagements made her pace in spite of her weariness up and down the platform at Gower Street. Its familiar sulphurous gloom, the platform lights shining murkily from the midst of slowly rolling clouds of grey smoke, the dark forms and phantom white faces of waiting passengers emerging suddenly as she threaded the darkness, revived her. By the time the train rolled slowly in behind its beloved black dumpy high-shouldered engine with its large unshrieking mushroom bell-whistle the journey had changed from being an expedition to a spot within five minutes’ walk of Sarah’s, unconfessed to Sarah, and had become a journey on the Metropolitan; going indeed outside the radius into blackness, but going so far only because the Dante lecture, wandered out of London was waiting there; and to be repeated at the end of the evening safely returning through increasing gloom until the climax of Gower Street was reached again...... Miss Scott was Scotch.

She reached the little hall in the suburban road in good time and sat in a forward row staring at the little platform where presently the educative voice would be standing. She was conscious of a stirring and buzzing all about her that had been absent in the London hall. The first series of lectures had not brought any sense of an audience. Here the many audible centres of culture, the eager discussions and sudden incisive remarks, the triumphant intensity on the faces of some of the women caught as she glanced now and then fearfully about, the curious happy briskness of the men, made her feel that the lecturer was superfluous. All these people were the cultured refined kind who did not trouble much about their clothes. There were no furs to be seen; the women wore large rather ugly coats or ulsters or capes and bashed muddly looking hats and had mufflers or long scarves. In the London audience herself and her clothes had been invisible, here they were just right, a sort of hall-mark. In her black dress with her clumsy golf-cape thrown back from her shoulders, her weather-worn felt hat softened perhaps to harmony with her head in the soft light she could perhaps pass for a cultured person. Bianchi and Neri whispered her neighbour eagerly in the midst of a long sentence addressed to a girl at her side. She was an Englishwoman. But her mind was so at home in the Middle Ages that she spoke the names and used the Italian pronunciation without a touch of pedantry, and as eagerly and interestedly as anyone else might say “they’re engaged!” The clergyman in the row in front would drawl out the words with an unctuous suggestion of superior knowledge. He would use them to crush someone. Most of the men present were a little like that, using their knowledge like a code or a weapon. But the women were really interested in it, they were like people who had climbed a hill and were eagerly intent on what they could see on the other side. It was refreshing and also in some way comforting to be with them. They represented something in life that was going to increase. Perhaps it would increase too much; they seemed so headlong and unaware of anything else. Did she want a world made up of women like this? If she spoke to them they would assume she was one of themselves and look busily at her with unseeing eyes, fixed only on all the things they thought about, until they perceived that she was a fraud. Long intercourse with them might make her able to talk like they did, but never to think in the way they did. Never to have the extraordinary busy assured appearance presented by their persons when you could not see their eager faces; a look that made them seem to be going very fast in some direction that completely satisfied them, so that if a fire broke out behind them suddenly they would regard it not as an adventure that might have been expected but as an annoying interruption, like tripping over a stone....

She could see that when he read the sonnets he forgot how learned he was. The little lecture had had its own fascination. But it was a lecture; something told by a specialist to an audience. This was Dante’s voice, and they all listened as they could; the lecturer as well. All his knowledge was put aside and he listened as he read. She sat listening, her shocked mind still condemning her for not having discovered for herself that it was wrong to have a post-office savings account and that betting and gambling and lotteries were wrong because they produced nothing. For a time she flashed about with the searchlight of the new definition of vice .... money can’t produce money ... then all trade was wrong in some way ... dissipation of value without production ..... there was some principle that all civilisation was breaking .... how did this man know that it was wrong to imagine affection if there was no affection in your life, that dreaming and brooding was a sort of beastliness ... love was actual and practical, moving all the spheres and informing the mind. That was true. That was the truth about everything. But who could attain to it? Dante knew it because he loved Beatrice. How could humanity become more loving? How could social life come to be founded on love? How can I become more loving? I do not know or love anyone but myself ... it did not mean being loved. It was not anything to do with marriage. Dante only saw Beatrice. But this is the awful truth; however one may sit as if one were not condemned and forget again. This is the difficult thing that everyone has to do. Not dogmas. This man believes that there is a God who loves and demands that man shall be loving. That is what will be asked. That is the judgment. It is true because it breaks into you and condemns you. Everything else is distraction and sham. The humble yearning devotion in the voice reading the lines made it a prayer, the very voice a prayer to a spirit waiting all round, present in himself, in every one listening, in the very atmosphere. It was there, to be had. It was like something left far behind one on a dark road and still there; to be had for the asking, to be had by merely turning towards it..... She looked into the eyes of Dante across the centuries as into the eyes of a friend. But then these people were the same. It was the truth about everybody “the goodwill in all of us” ......

She travelled back towards London in a dream. Her compartment was empty. All the people in the world, full of goodwill without troubling or even thinking about it were away somewhere else. Just as she had learned what people were there was nobody. There was no love in her nature. If there were any she would not have been sitting here alone. If a man love not his brother whom he hath seen how shall he love God whom he hath not seen? There was a catch in that like a riddle. Heads I win tails you lose.... If you keep quite quiet and gentle, asking for nothing, not being anything, not holding on to anything in your life, nor thinking about anything in your life there is something there .... behind you ... that must be God, the way to Christ; the edge of the way to Christ. Keeping quiet and coming to that you feel what you are and that you have never begun being anything but your evil natural self. You feel thick with evil .... oh .... that was prayer. One could become more loving. It is answered at once. Just turning towards that something, in a desire to be different, begins to change you! At Praed Street the carriage began to fill with seated forms. This was the beginning of new life.... Keeping perfectly still and looking at no one she realised the presence of her fellow-travellers, all just like herself, living from within by the contact with the edge of Christ .... all knowing the thing that to her was only a little flicker just dawning in a long life of evil. It made them kindly in the world and able to understand each other. Perhaps it was the explanation of all the fussing. Everyone in the world was bathed in the light of love except herself.... It was not certain that a whole lifetime of prayer and gentleness and self-control would destroy enough of the thick roots of evil in her to bring her through into the Paradiso.... But if prayer, just the turning away from all one knew begging to be destroyed and made loving brought such an immediate sense of the evil in oneself and the good in everyone else, there was no end to what it might do. Prayer was the work to do in life, nothing else. But the turning to the unseen God of love and giving up one’s self-will meant being changed in a way one could not control or foresee; dropping everything one had and cherished secretly and having things only in common with other people. It would mean going forward with nothing into an unknown world; always being agreeable, and agreeing. I love all these people she murmured in her mind and felt a glow that seemed to radiate out to all the corners of the compartment. It’s true. This is life. This is the only way in. It may be that I am so bad that I can only sit with all my evil visible silent amongst humanity for the rest of my life, learning to love them, and then die out completely because I am too bad to be quite new-born .... her eyes were drawn towards the face of the woman sitting opposite to her; a shapeless body, a thin ravaged face strained and sheeny with fatigue and wearing an expression of undaunted sweetness and patience. Children and housework and a selfish husband and nothing in life of her own. She was at the disposal of everyone for kind actions. She would be really sympathetic and shocked about an earthquake in China. Was that it? Was that being inside? Was that all there was? The woman did not see the wonderful gold brown light in the carriage; nor the beauty of the blackness outside. In her brain was the pain and pressure of everything she had to do. She was good and sweet; perfectly good and sweet. But there was something irritating about her .... her obliviousness of everything but “troubles,” other people’s as much as her own. Yet she would love a day in the country. The fields and the flowers would make her cry. It was her obliviousness that made one afraid of associating with her. Being in conversation with her or in any way associated with her life there would always be the dreadful imprisoned feeling of knowing she did not think.... Her glance slid over the other seated forms and fell, leaving her struggling between her desire to feel in loving union with them and her inability to ignore the revelations pouring from their bearing and shapes, their clothes and the way they held their belongings. They were terrible and hateful because all their thoughts were visible. The terrible maddening thing about them was the thoughts they did not think. It made them worse than the woman because to get on with them one would have to pretend to see life as they saw it. It would be so easy and deceitful with each one alone, knowing exactly what line to take. She wrenched herself back to her prayer .... instantly the thought came that all these people far away in themselves wanted to be more loving. She drew herself together and sat up staring out towards the darkness. That was an answer again! A state of mind that came from the state of prayer. But then one would need always to be in a state of prayer. It would be very difficult. It would be almost impossible even to remember it in the rush of life .... it would mean being a sort of fool .... having no judgments or opinions. It would spoil everything. There would be no time for anything. Nothing beyond one’s daily work and all the rest of the time being all things to all men. It meant that now at this moment one must give up the sense of the train going along in the darkness and the sense of the dark streets waiting lamplit under the dark sky and go out to the people in the carriage and then on to the people at Tansley Street .... she thought of people she knew who did this, appearing to see nothing in life but people, and recoiled. Places to them were nothing but people; there was something they missed out that could not be given up. Something goes if you lose yourself in humanity. You cannot find humanity by looking for God only there. Making up your mind that God is to be found in humanity is humanism.... It was Comte’s idea. Perhaps Unitarians are all Comtists. That is why they dress without style. They are more interested in social reform than the astoundingness of there being people anywhere. But to see God everywhere is pantheism. What is Christianity? Where are Christians? Evangelicals are humanitarians; rushing about in ulsters. Anglicans know all about the beauty of life and like comfort. But they are snobs and afraid of new ideas .... convents and monasteries stop your mind. But there is a God or a Christ, there is something always there to answer when you turn away to it from everything. Perhaps one would have to remain silent, for years, for a lifetime, and in the end begin to understand.

3

At Gower Street it was eleven o’clock. She was faint with hunger. She had had no dinner and there was nothing in her room. She wandered along the Euston Road hoping to meet a potato-man. The shopfronts were black. There was nothing to meet her need but the empty stretch of lamplit pavement leading on and on.... Rapid walking in the rain-freshened air relieved her faintness but she dreaded waking in the night with gnawing hunger to keep her awake and drag her up exhausted in the morning. A faint square of brighter light on the pavement ahead came like an accusation. Passing swiftly across it she glanced bitterly at the frosted door through which it came. Restaurant. Donizetti Brothers. The whole world had conspired to leave her alone with that mystery shut in and hidden every day the whole of her London time behind its closed frosted doors and forcing her now to admit that there was food there and she must go in or have the knowledge of being starved through fear. Her thoughts flashed painfully across a frosted door long ago in Baker Street and she saw the angry handsome face of the waiter who had shouted roll and butter and whisked away from the table the twisted cone of serviette and the knives and forks. That was in the middle of the day. It would be worse at night. Perhaps they would even refuse to serve her. Perhaps it was impossible to go into a restaurant late at night alone. She was coming back. There was nothing to be seen behind the steamy panes on either side of the door but plants standing on oil cloth mats. Behind them was again frosted glass. It was not so grand as Baker Street. There was no menu in a large brass frame with Schweppe’s at the top. She pushed open the glass door and was confronted by another glass door blankly frosted all over. Why were they so secret? Inside the second door she found herself at the beginning of a long aisle of linoleum. On either side people were dotted here and there on short velvet sofa seats behind marble topped tables. In the close air there was a strong smell made up of all kinds of meat dishes. A waiter flicking the crumbs from a table glanced sharply round at her and went off down the room. He had seen the shifts and miseries that haunted all her doings. They were apparent in the very hang of her cloak. She could not first swing down the restaurant making it wave for joy as it did when she walked across Trafalgar Square in the dark and then order a roll and butter. After this it would never wave for joy again. A short compact bald man in a white apron was hurrying down the aisle, towards her. He stopped just in front of her and stood bowing and indicating a near empty table with his short arm and stood silently hovering while she dragged herself into place on the velvet sofa. The waiter rushing up with a menu was gently waved away and the little man stood over the side of the table blocking out the fuller end of the restaurant. Hardly able to speak for the beating of her heart she looked up into a little firm round pallid face with a small snub nose and curious pale waxy blue eyes and said furiously oh please just a roll and butter and a cup of cocoa. The little man bowed low with a beaming face and went gently away. Miriam watched him go down the aisle bowing here and there right and left. The hovering waiter came forward questioningly to meet him and was again waved aside and she presently saw the little man at a speaking tube and heard him sing in a soft smooth high monotone, un-sho-co-lat. He brought her things and arranged them carefully about her and brought her an Illustrated London News from another table. She sipped and munched and looked at all the pictures. The people in the pictures were real people. She imagined them moving and talking in all manner of circumstances and suffered their characteristics gently, feeling as if some one were there gently half-reproachfully holding her hands tied behind her back. The waiter roamed up and down the aisle. People came in, sometimes two or three at a time. The little man was sitting writing with a stern bent face at a little table at the far end of the restaurant just in front of a marble counter holding huge urns and glass dishes piled with buns and slices of cake. He did not move again until she rose to go when he came once more hurrying down the aisle. Her bill was sixpence and he took the coin with a bow and waited while she extricated herself from the clinging velvet, and held the door wide for her to pass out. Good evening thank you very much she murmured hoping that he heard, in response to his polite farewell. She wandered slowly home through the drizzling rain warmed and fed and with a glow at her heart. Inside those frightful frosted doors was a home, a bit of her own London home.

4

The hall gas was out. The dining-room door was ajar showing a faint light and light was coming from the little room at the end of the passage. Miriam cautiously pushed open the dining-room door. Mrs. Bailey was sitting alone poised socially in a low armchair by the fire with the gas turned low. Miriam came dutifully forward in response to the entrancement of her smile and stood on the hearthrug enwrapped in her evening, invaded by the sense of beginning it anew with Mrs. Bailey. When had she seen Mrs. Bailey last? She could tell her now about Eve in great confidential detail and explain that she could not at present afford to come to Tansley Street. That would be a great sociable conversation and the engagement with Mr. Bowdoin would remain untouched. She stood in a glow of eloquence. Mrs. Bailey preened and bridled and made little cheerful affectionate remarks and waited silent a moment before asking if it rained. Miriam forgot Eve and gathered herself together for some tremendous communication. Was it raining? She glanced at the outside London world and was lost in interchanging scenes, her mind split up, pressing several ways at once. Mrs. Bailey saw all these scenes and felt and understood them exactly as she did. There was no need to answer the question. She glanced stonily towards her and saw the downcast held-in embarrassment of her waiting form. In a dry professional official voice she said gazing at the hearthrug with an air of judicial profundity, no, at least oh yes, I think it is raining and drifted helplessly towards the window. The challenge was behind her. She would have to face it again. A borrowed voice said briskly within her yes it’s pouring, I hope it will be fine to-morrow, what weather we have had; well goodnight Mrs. Bailey. I have been to a lecture she said in imagination standing by the window. It was what any other boarder would have said and then so fine, such a splendid lecturer and told the subject and his name and one idea out of the lecture and they would have agreed and gone cheerfully to bed, with no thoughts. To try and really tell anything about the lecture would be to plunge down into misrepresentations and misunderstandings and end with the lecture vanished. To say anything real about it would lead to living the rest of her life with the Baileys helping them with their plans .... she turned and came busily back. It’s very late she murmured. Mrs. Bailey smiled and yawned. At least not so very late, not quite to-morrow she pursued turning round to the clock and back again to consult the pictures and the wall paper. Just staying there was answering Mrs. Bailey’s question. Suddenly she laughed out and turned, laughing, as if she were about to communicate some mirthful memory. It’s too absurd she said distracted between the joy of her lingering laughter and the need for instantly inventing an explanation. Mrs. Bailey was laughing delightedly. There was a most absurd thing—chanted Miriam above her laughter; a gentle tap took Mrs. Bailey scurrying to the door. May I have a candle Mrs. Bailey murmured a low voice in a curious solidly curving intonation. Certainly doctor answered Mrs. Bailey’s voice in the hall. She scurried away downstairs. Miriam turned towards the window and stood listening to St. Pancras clock striking midnight. Then those men in the little back sitting-room were doctors. How pleased and proud Mrs. Bailey must be. How wonderful of her to say nothing about them. Can I have a candle missuz Bailey. Wrapped away in the suave strong courteous voice were the knowledge and the fineness of a world no one in the house knew anything about. Mrs. Bailey dimly knew, and screened it fearing to lose it. She had the wonderful voice all to herself. “Good evening.” The voice was in the room. Miriam turned instantly; a square strong-looking man a little over middle height with flat pale fair hair smooth on a squarish head above grave bluntly moulded features was moving easily forward from the door. They met at the end of the table standing one each side the angle of the fireside corner, smiling as if her murmured response to his greeting had been a speech in a play ready-made to bring them together. Miriam felt that if she had said oh I’m so glad he would have responded yes; so am I. My name’s von Heber he announced quietly, his restrained uncontrollably deepening smile sending out a radiance all round her. It was as if they had met before without the opportunity of speaking and here at last was the opportunity and they had first to smile out their recognition of its perfection. They stood in a radiant silence, his even tones making no break in their interchange. She felt a quality in him she had not met before; in the ease of his manner there was no trace of the complacent assumption of the man of the world. His deference was no mask worn to decorate himself. It was deliberate and yet genuine. It was the shape in which he presented to her, personally, set above and away from her ugly clothes and her weariness, the beam of delight which had been his inward greeting. The completeness and confidence of his delight, his own completeness and security revealed to her an unknown reading of life that she longed to hold and fathom. She offered in return as a measure of her qualification, the laughter she had laughed to Mrs. Bailey, hoping he had heard it. I find this custom of putting down the light at eleven very inconvenient he was saying. Miriam smiled and listened eagerly for more of the low even curiously curving intonations. I propose to take the London medical examination in July and I’ve a good deal of hard work to get through prior to that date. He had not been going to stop speaking but Miriam found an immense welcoming space for the word she summoned in vain desperately from far away Wimpole Street. The conjoint she declared at last eagerly, almost before the word reached her consciousness. The Conjoint he repeated and as his voice went on Miriam contemplated the accumulation they had gathered. She stood smiling, growing familiar with the quality of his voice, gathering the sense of a word here and there. Through his talk he smiled a quizzical pleased appreciation of this way of listening. She felt as if they were talking backwards, towards something already said and when she took in I’m taking the post-graduate course at your great hospital near here she tried in vain to resist the temptation of leading his talk down into detail. The way to preserve the charm unbroken would be to let him go on talking. She might even listen carefully, and learn the meaning of the post-graduate course and its place in the London medical world; the whole of the London medical world was being transformed by this man into something simple and joyful. But the eager words had escaped her—oh; that’s the one with the glorious yarn. Tell me the yarn he chuckled gently, showing a row of strong squarish flawless teeth. Well, she said the big surgeons were operating and the patient was collapsing and one said I think it is time we called in Divine aid. Nonsense said the other I don’t believe in unqualified assistants. That’s great he declared; that’s one of the greatest yarns I’ve heard. I shan’t forget it. He was not shocked and she had told the story as evenly and as much without emphasis as he would have done himself. She suddenly realised that this was the way to say things. It made no pause and did not disturb anything. She was learning from him every moment. He was utterly different to the men she knew. He did not resent her possession of the story nor attempt to cap it. You’ve got some very great men over here he said; some of the very greatest; and he began outlining the Canadian reputation of names that were amongst the pinnacles of Wimpole Street conversation. She learned exactly why Victor Horsley was great in the world and what it was that Dr. Barker did to fractured knee-caps. When Mrs. Bailey came up it was half-past twelve. He accepted his candle and thanked her gravely and gravely took his leave. Miriam and Mrs. Bailey were left confronted. Miriam laughed a social laugh, unintentionally, and listened happily to Mrs. Bailey’s kind brisk echo of it as she stood turning out the gas. They turned to each other in the hall and laughed goodnight. Mrs. Bailey was like a happy excited girl. She trotted busily and socially downstairs humming a tune towards a sociable waiting world, flouting difficulties with the sweep of the laughter in her voice.

Your Barker and your Horsley mused Miriam slackening her speed on the stairs; the sound of the low quiet glad confident voice steadying the aspect of the world and a strange new sense of the London medical world dotted by men who were world-famous, approached from afar, reverently, for specialist training, by already qualified medical men, competed together within her as she prepared for bed, going serenely through all the tiresome little processes. Something in the centre of life had steadied and clarified. It sent a radiance like sunlight through the endless processes of things; even a ragged tooth-brush was a part of the sunlit scene; not unnoticed, or just dismal, but a part of the sunlit scene.