Read Ebook: The Trap: Pilgrimage Volume 8 by Richardson Dorothy M Dorothy Miller

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 503 lines and 30224 words, and 11 pages

"No. I have a friend who slums. She loathes the poor."

"Dear, dear; a most unfortunate qualification for her work."

"Not their poverty. Their sameness. She is one of the kindest people I know."

"Strange...."

"They ought to be pensioned."

"The poor?"

"Everybody. I should love to be pensioned."

"And remain in idleness and dependence? Oh, no."

"Not dependence. Interdependence. No compulsion."

"What would you do?"

"Spend several years staring; and then go round the world."

"You are delightful! I am not sure that I approve of the years of staring. But to go round the world would, of course, be most enchanting."

"Yes: but I should not want to improve my mind. I should still stare. If I went. Probably I shouldn't go. Nothing short of dynamite will shift me. I am astounded to find myself shifted here."

"I fear at the moment you must be wishing yourself safely back again."

She had no realisation of the adventure it was to be anywhere at all. To her it was not a strange, strange adventure that their two voices should be sounding together in the night, a double thread of sound in a private darkness, making a pattern with all the other sounds in the world. But she had accepted the compliment. There was a vibration in her voice: joyful.

Again and again they were awakened for battle, until their slumber was too deep to be disturbed.

St. Pancras bells were cheerfully thumping the air when Miriam got up to wander about in the dark brilliance that filled the room like the presence of a guest, and was so exaggerated that it not only supplied a topic wherewith to start the morning, but an occupation engrossing enough to free her, even in thought, from descent into the detail of the day. It held everything off and yet kept her in happy communion with Miss Holland moving busily the other side of the curtain.

Yet the night had done its work. A host of statements were plucking at her mind: balancing the quality of life here and life at Tansley Street. At week-ends. Behind them was a would-be disquieting assertion of the now complete remoteness of both her working life and the eventful leisure that had for so long ousted the old-time Tansley Street evenings. It was a bill of costs, flourished; demanding to know what she had done.

But it stood off, powerless to gain the centre of her attention, making no break in her sense of being nowhere; of inhabiting, within a shadowless brilliance, a living peace that held her immensely unoccupied, and ready, whenever things should once more present themselves in detail, to see them all in a fresh light.

For a while it seemed that they could never again so present themselves. The light as she gazed into it was endless, multiplying upon itself; drawing her away from all known things. Life henceforth would more fully attain her, lived as at this moment she knew it could be lived, uncalculating from the deeps of a masked splendour.

It would not last. Already the strange moments were linking themselves with kindred strange moments in the past. But like them it set itself while it lasted over against the rest of her experience, with a challenge.

It was growing steadily darker.

"It's a thunderstorm."

"I think so. The air is most oppressive."

Miss Holland came and stood at her own half of the window so that they were side by side and visible to each other. Above the curtain screening the lower part of their window, they looked across to the white pillar of candle. A flash of bright daylight lit up the grey street, and soon the wheels of the storm rumbled high up across the sky. Heavy drops fell slowly, increasing until they came in a torrent.

"That will carry it off."

"Sometimes I don't mind storms. I don't to-day."

They held their places at the window, watching the pale lightning light the rain, hearing the thunder follow more swiftly. Presently a blinding white fire and a splintering crash just above their heads made them both exclaim.

As the thunder rolled bumping and snarling away across the sky they saw the figure of a man appear from the darkness beyond the candle and stand pressed close to the window with arms upstretched and laid against the panes. Through the sheets of rain his face was not quite clear. But he was dark and pale and tall and shouting at the storm. So he lived there alone. The storm was a companion. He was alone and aware. Had he seen the new people across the way?

A brilliant flash lit up the white face and its frame of heavy hair. The dark eyes were looking straight across.

"The strange room," said Miss Holland, who also had left the window, "has a tenant as eccentric as itself."

"It is Sayce. E. W. Sayce ... the poet."

"Indeed?" exclaimed Miss Holland delightedly. "A poet. That is charming. Quite enchanting to feel that poetry is being written so near at hand."

She was peering out, as if looking for verses on the air between the opposing windows. She had no feeling of shyness in mentioning his work. If unobserved she could catch him at it, she would note his methods. Perhaps he would sit there at work in his window. But the least they could do, having innocently become witnesses of his workshop, would be to stand off and leave him free.

To disperse Miss Holland's concentration, she rushed into speech.

"I've known him by sight for years, wandering about in a black cloak. One night I was strolling along the strip of pavement round one of the Square gardens. It was quite dark under the trees between the stretches of lamplight, and there was nobody about. Suddenly in a patch of light I was confronted by a tall figure, also strolling. We both stood quite still, staring into each other's eyes with thoughts far away, each taking in only the fact of an obstruction. Then I realised it was Sayce. I can't remember how we got past each other. One of us must presently have plunged into the gutter. But, looking back, it seems as if we walked through each other."

Miss Holland produced a series of bird-like sounds, each seeming in turn to refuse to make a word.

The storm was moving on and the strange light, lifting as the sky cleared, left a blankness.

Later in the morning the light from a clear high sky broke up the harmony between the things in the room and set a pallor upon the green pathway to the window. It was the end of a story, the story of the first morning--a single prolonged moment that would last.

It was over, and here she was, conscious of her surroundings.

Something must be swiftly woven up with the treasure she held in her hands or she would drop into the crude spaces of this midday light and lose the threads. She heard Miss Holland, as if in response to her need, leave the little back room and go upstairs. It would be in order, the little back room. A room apart, like Mag's and Jan's old sitting-room in Kenneth Street that used to seem such a triumph of elaborate living. Her spirit went forth and nested incredulously within the little back room.

"It will mean growing plump and sedentary. Not wanting to sail forth and see people. Wanting people to come to me, hear the tinkle of my tea-things, sink into the world a bright little afternoon-tea scene makes on Sundays for people who have no centre."

Miss Holland was audible upstairs rattling saucepan lids. They were to feed up there, kept warm by the ugly oil-cooker, and reserve the back room for elegant life and tea-parties.

She tipped herself off the little bed that made such an excellent sofa, and strolled into the back room.

It was darker than ever. Round and round she looked, taking in the things. Looking for more, and different, things. Absurdly half believing that the things she saw would change, would somehow become different under her eyes.

Green serge curtains, patched and faded, hung dismally on either side of the window. Two easy-chairs covered with faded threadbare cretonne filled, with their huge ugliness, the main part of the floor-space. Between them stood a stained and battered bamboo table and an ancient footstool, worn colourless. Pushed into a corner was a treadle sewing-machine, and at its side a small round table bearing a tarnished lamp. That was all. That was all there would be in their sitting-room.

The worst was that nothing shone. Nothing reflected light. It suddenly struck her as an odd truth that nothing of Miss Holland's reflected light. Even the domed wooden cover of the sewing-machine, which was polished and should have shone, was filmed and dull.

The only suggestion of life in the room would be the backs of the books stacked in piles on the mantelshelf. She found relief for her oppression in the minute gilded titles of some of the books. They gleamed faintly in the gloom, minute threads of gold.

Well, here it was, the lovely little sitting-room....

She moved about in it, still unable quite to exorcise the idea that it would change. With eyes cast down, she made her way from part to part, imagined varnish on the floor. Flowers set about. People, hiding the chairs. It would be pain to bring friends in. Cruelty to ask anyone to endure the room for an hour.

There would be no tea-parties.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet