“What a huge room?”

“Isn’t it a big room. Come in young lady.”

Miriam crossed to the fireplace through a warm faintly sweet atmosphere. A small fire was smoking and the gas was partly turned down but the room was warm with a friendly brown warmth. Something had made her linger in the hall until Mrs. Bailey had come to the dining-room door and stood there with the door wide open and something to communicate waiting behind her friendly greetings. As a rule there was nothing behind her friendly greetings but friendly approval and assurance. Miriam had never seen the dining-room door open before and sought distraction from the communicativeness by drifting towards it and peering in. Once in and sitting in the chair between the fireplace and Mrs. Bailey’s tumbled work-basket standing on the edge of the long table, bound to stay taking in the room until Mrs. Bailey returned, she regretted looking in. The hall and the stairs and her own room would be changed now she knew what this room was like. In her fatigue she looked about half taking in half recoiling from the contents of the room. “He stopped and got off his bicycle and I said you don’t seem very pleased to see me.” Already he knew that they were tiresome strangers to each other. “I can’t go dancing off to Bournemouth at a moment’s notice dear.” “Well, I strongly advise you to go as soon as you can.” “Of course I’m going, but I can’t just dance off.” “Don’t let him get into the habit of associating you with the idea of worry.” If she didn’t worry him and was always a little ill, and pretty ... “he says he can’t do without her. I’ve told him without reserve what the chances are and given them my blessing.” Did he really feel that suddenly sitting there in the consulting-room? If only she wouldn’t be so mysterious and important about nothing....

There was a hugeness in the room, radiating from the three-armed dim-globed chandelier, going up and up; to the high heavily-moulded smoke-grimed ceiling, spreading out right and left along the length of the room, a large enclosed quietness, flowing up to the two great windows, hovering up and down the dingy rep and dingy lace curtains and the drab coloured venetian blinds through whose chinks the street came in. Tansley Street was there, pressing its secret peace against the closed windows. Between the windows a long strip of mirror framed in tarnished gilt, reflected the peace of the room. Miriam glanced about peering for its secret; her eye running over the length of the faded patterned deep fringed table cover, the large cracked pink bowl in the centre, holding an aspidistra ... brown cracked leaves sticking out; the faded upholstery of the armchair opposite her, the rows of dining-room chairs across the way in line with the horsehair sofa; the piano in the space between the sofa and the window; the huge mirror in the battered tarnished gilt frame sweeping half way up the wall above the mantelpiece, reflecting the pictures and engravings hung rather high on the opposite wall, bought and liked long ago, the faded hearthrug under her feet, the more faded carpet disappearing under the long table, the dark stare of the fireplace, the heavy marble mantelpiece, the marble cased clock and opaque pink glass fat-bodied jugs scrolled with a dingy pattern, dusty lustres, curious objects in dull metal....

2

“It’ll give, my chicks a better chance. It isn’t fair on them—living in the kitchen and seeing nobody.” “And you mean to risk sending the lodgers away.”

“I’ve been thinking about it some time. When the dining-room left I thought I wouldn’t fill up again. Miss Campbell’s going too.”

“Miss Campbell?”

“The drawn-room and drawn-room bedroom ... my word ... had her rooms turned out every week, carpets up and all.”

“Every week!”

“Always talking about microbes. My word.”

“How awful. And all the other people?”

“I’ve written them” smiled Mrs. Bailey at her busily interlacing fingers.

“Oh.”

“For the 14th prox; they’re all weekly.”

“Then if they don’t stay as boarders they’ll have to trot out at once.”

“Well I thought if I was going to begin I’d better take the bull by the horns. I’ve heard of two. Norwegian young gentlemen. They’re coming next week and they both want large bedrooms.”

“I think it’s awfully plucky if you’ve had no experience.”

“Well, young lady, I see it like this. What others have done, I can. I feel I must do something for the children. Mrs. Reynolds has married three of her daughters to boarders. She’s giving up. Elsie is going into the typing.”

“You haven’t written to me.”

“You stay where you are, young lady.”

“Well—I think it’s awfully sweet of you Mrs. Bailey.”

“Don’t you think about that. It needn’t make any difference to you.”

“Well—of course—if you heard of a boarder——”

Mrs. Bailey made a little dab at Miriam’s knee. “You stay where you are my dear.”

“I do hope it will be a success. The house will be completely changed.”

“I know it’s a risk. But if you get on it pays better. There’s less work in it and you’ve got a house to live in. Nothing venture, nothing have. It’s no good to be backward in coming forward nowadays. We’ve got to march with the times.”

Miriam tried to see Mrs. Bailey presiding, the huge table lined with guests. She doubted. Those boarding-houses in Woburn Place, the open windows in the summer, the strange smart people, in evening dress, the shaded lamps, she would be lost. She could never hold her own. The quiet house would be utterly changed. There would be people going about, in possession, all over the front steps and at the dining-room windows and along the drawing-room balcony.

PRINTED BY WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD.
PLYMOUTH, ENGLAND

The Novels of
Dorothy Richardson

By MAY SINCLAIR

Extracts from an article published in “The Egoist,” April, 1918.

... By imposing very strict limitations on herself she has brought her art, her method, to a high pitch of perfection, so that her form seems to be newer than it perhaps is. She herself is unaware of the perfection of her method. She would probably deny that she has written with any deliberate method at all. She would say: “I only know there are certain things I mustn’t do if I was to do what I wanted.” Obviously, she must not interfere; she must not analyse or comment or explain. Rather less obviously, she must not tell a story or handle a situation or set a scene; she must avoid drama as she avoids narration. And there are some things she must not be. She must not be the wise, all-knowing author. She must be Miriam Henderson. She must not know or divine anything that Miriam does not know or divine; she must not see anything that Miriam does not see. She has taken Miriam’s nature upon her. She is not concerned, in the way that other novelists are concerned, with character. Of the persons who move through Miriam’s world you know nothing but what Miriam knows. If Miriam is mistaken, well, she and not Miss Richardson is mistaken. Miriam is an acute observer, but she is very far from seeing the whole of these people. They are presented to us in the same vivid but fragmentary way in which they appeared to Miriam, the fragmentary way in which people appear to most of us. Miss Richardson has only imposed on herself the conditions that life imposes on us all. And if you are going to quarrel with those conditions you will not find her novels satisfactory. But your satisfaction is not her concern.

And I find it impossible to reduce to intelligible terms this satisfaction that I feel. To me these three novels show an art and method and form carried to punctilious perfection. Yet I have heard other novelists say that they have no art and no method and no form, and that it is this formlessness that annoys them. They say that they have no beginning and no middle and no end, and that to have form a novel most have an end and a beginning and a middle. We have come to words that in more primitive times would have been blows on this subject. There is a certain plausibility in what they say, but it depends on what constitutes a beginning and a middle and an end. In this series there is no drama, no situation, no set scene. Nothing happens. It is just life going on and on. It is Miriam Henderson’s stream of consciousness going on and on. And in neither is there any grossly discernible beginning or middle or end.

In identifying herself with this life, which is Miriam’s stream of consciousness, Miss Richardson produces her effect of being the first, of getting closer to reality than any of our novelists who are trying so desperately to get close. No attitude or gesture of her own is allowed to come between her and her effect. Whatever her sources and her raw material, she is concerned and we ought to be concerned solely with the finished result, the work of art. It is to Miriam’s almost painfully acute senses that we owe what in any other novelist would be called the “portraits” of Miriam’s mother, of her sister Harriett, of the Corries and Joey Banks in Honeycomb, of the Miss Pernes and Julia Doyle, and the North London schoolgirls, in Backwater, of FrÄulein Pfaff and Mademoiselle, of the Martins and Emma Bergmann and Ulrica and “the Australian” in Pointed Roofs. The mere “word-painting” is masterly....

It is as if no other writers had ever used their senses so purely and with so intense a joy in their use.

This intensity is the effect of an extreme concentration on the thing seen or felt. Miss Richardson disdains every stroke that does not tell. Her novels are novels of an extraordinary compression, and of an extenuation more extraordinary still. The moments of Miriam’s consciousness pass one by one, or overlapping; moments tense with vibration, moments drawn out fine, almost to snapping-point.