Homepage
Login
Profile
BookClubs
dmBox
Read Ebook: The Trap: Pilgrimage Volume 8 by Richardson Dorothy M Dorothy Miller
Font size:
Background color:
Text color:
Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page
Ebook has 503 lines and 30224 words, and 11 pages
ess. That would be there on all the nights. Each one, dumb and dead. The prospect was unnerving. There was something of the atmosphere of the sick-room in this awful calm. Miss Holland's candle was the nightlight, keeping going the hot pressure of the evening. Yet most people probably disliked a rattling window, the sound that made a stillness in the room and in the street. It was bad to be so different and to like being different.
How difficult to sleep in this consciously quiet enclosure. For it was not the quiet of a still night, the kind of night in which you listen to the expanse of space. It was a stillness filled with the coiling emanation of a humanity recognising only itself, intent only on its own circlings. The darkness when it presently came would be thick with the remainder of the continuous coiling and fret of all those people who live perpetually at war with everything that is not perfectly secure.
Miss Holland's light was out. She was apparently sitting up in bed arranging draperies at great length.
"I have not locked the door," she said, suddenly: Miriam despaired.
"I think for to-night it does not matter. We can make a point of remembering it in future."
"Have you not been in the habit of locking your door?"
"I never even thought of it."
"Strange," said Miss Holland. And Miriam began to suppose that it was strange. She ran over in her mind some of the odd people from time to time sharing her lonely top floor. Foreign waiters when Mrs. Bailey was doing well, or queer odd men who could not afford the downstairs rooms. She had never, at night, given them a single thought. But that was not the sort of thought Miss Holland meant, or not consciously. But all this was perfectly horrible.... Yet was it foolish, or perhaps unkind, never to have been aware? O'Laughlin, dear O'Laughlin. She had been aware of him. Sorry.
"There was," she said, "a drunken Irish journalist who used to come blundering up the stairs at all hours of the night."
"Horrible, horrible," breathed Miss Holland.
"His door," it occurred to her for the first time, "was at right angles to mine." Miss Holland was gasping. "He used to stumble about on the landing, and sometimes, poor dear, be sick."
"Dear, dear, dear! It was a most extraordinary establishment. But I think the oddest thing is that you should not have made fast the door."
"I suppose so. But I would trust Tommy O'Laughlin drunk or sober, now I come to think of it.... He never paid his bills, poor dear, and he borrowed."
"He must have been a worthless creature."
"He was a gentleman, Tommy was, and a dear. Though he once embarrassed me frightfully. It was at dinner. Of course he was intoxicated, though not looking so. In the midst of a long tirade about Home Rule he burst into tears and said if he had only seen Miss Henderson earlier in his life he would have been a different fellow."
"No doubt he admired you immensely!"
"I'd never spoken to him."
Miss Holland laughed wisely, but a little scornfully. No ch?telaine, of course, would boast of scalps.
"He was married!"
"Dear, dear!" breathed Miss Holland.
"Trying for a divorce."
Miriam awoke in the darkness abruptly. About her were the images that had filled her mind when Miss Holland's candle had gone out. She regarded them sleepily, wondering what could so soon have called her back. What was calling her now, urgently, out from the thickness of sleep. She stirred and woke completely.
"Are you awake?" Miss Holland's voice coming anxious and reproachful through the stillness was added to the minute unmistakable irritations.
"Yes, are you? I mean are you being devoured alive?"
"It's weird," said Miriam, lunging. "Where can they all come from? I'm going to get up."
"Indeed, that is all we can do. Light candles and make instant warfare."
"I'm so sleepy. I think I shall change in the dark."
"I fear that will be useless," groaned Miss Holland, striking a match. "I fear, I fear the worst."
Out on the green floor and with the two candles cheerfully gleaming.... Alone such an adventure would have been misery.
She grew interested in following Miss Holland's instructions, and was almost disappointed when the white expanse of her bed offered no further prey.
"Seven," she announced.
"All drowned?" asked Miss Holland suspiciously.
"Mm, poor things."
"I fear I do not share your solicitude," chuckled Miss Holland.
"Well, perhaps I associate them with summer. In a London summer there are always one or two, having their little day. I've tried once or twice to keep still and endure."
"And then?"
"I shake my nightgown out of the window, but always feel mean."
"You speak French delightfully, toote ah fay kom oon Parisienne."
"The floor, the floor, I fear."
"Heaven and earth! We must leave at once."
"Well, I think perhaps with perchloride in the cracks ..."
"Meantime?"
"We must do our best."
"It goes from the brain to the toes."
"Do you mean to say there are people ..."
"I do indeed. During my first period of training in the slums I was amazed at the complete insensibility of many of my fellow-workers. Amazed, and under the circumstances, envious."
"Oh, I don't envy them a bit. Those people with skins like felt; they miss everything."
"I agree. At the same time, I think a moderately thick skin is a boon. I see no disadvantage in escaping intolerable discomforts. It is possible to have too thin a skin."
"For survival, yes. Blond people are dying out, they say."
"Blondes have not a monopoly of thin skins."
"No. I have a friend who slums. She loathes the poor."
Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page