Backwater

I

A swarthy turbaned face shone at Miriam from a tapestry screen standing between her and the ferns rising from a basket framework in the bow of the window. Consulting it at intervals as the afternoon wore on, she found that it made very light of the quiet propositions that were being elaborated within hearing of her inattentive ears. Looking beyond it she could catch glimpses between the crowded fernery, when a tram was not jingling by, of a close-set palisade just across the roadway and beyond the palisade of a green level ending at a row of Spanish poplars. The trams seemed very near and noisy. When they passed by the window, the speakers had to raise their voices. Otherwise the little drawing-room was very quiet, with a strange old-fashioned quietness. It was full of old things, like the Gobelin screen, and old thoughts like the thoughts of the ladies who were sitting and talking there. She and her mother had seemed quite modern, fussy, worldly people when they had first come into the room. From the moment the three ladies had come in and begun talking to her mother, the things in the room, and the view of the distant row of poplars had grown more and more peaceful, and now at the end of an hour she felt that she, and to some extent Mrs. Henderson too, belonged to the old-world room with its quiet green outlook shut in by the poplars. Only the trams were disturbing. They came busily by, with their strange jingle-jingle, plock-plock, and made her inattentive. Why were there so many people coming by in trams? Where were they going? Why were all the trams painted that hard, dingy blue?

The sisters talked quietly, outlining their needs in smooth gentle voices, in small broken phrases, frequently interrupting and correcting each other. Miriam heard dreamily that they wanted help with the lower school, the children from six to eight years of age, in the mornings and afternoons, and in the evenings a general superintendence of the four boarders. They kept on saying that the work was very easy and simple; there were no naughty girls—hardly a single naughty girl—in the school; there should be no difficult superintendence, no exercise of authority would be required.

By the time they had reached the statement of these modifications Miriam felt that she knew them quite well. The shortest, who did most of the talking and who had twinkling eyes and crooked pince-nez and soft reddish cheeks and a little red-tipped nose, and whose small coil of sheeny grey hair was pinned askew on the top of her head—stray loops standing out at curious angles—was Miss Jenny, the middle one. The very tall one sitting opposite her, with a delicate wrinkled creamy face and coal-black eyes and a peak of ringletted smooth coal-black hair, was the eldest, Miss Deborah. The other sister, much younger, with neat smooth green-grey hair and a long sad greyish face and faded eyes, was Miss Haddie. They were all three dressed in thin fine black material and had tiny hands and little softly moving feet. What did they think of the trams?

“Do you think you could manage it, chickie?” said Mrs. Henderson suddenly.

“I think I could.”

“No doubt, my dear, oh, no doubt,” said Miss Jenny with a little sound of laughter as she tapped her knee with the pince-nez she had plucked from their rakish perch on the reddened bridge of her nose.

“I don’t think I could teach Scripture.”

An outbreak of incoherent little sounds and statements from all three taught her that Miss Deborah took the Bible classes of the whole school.

“How old is Miriam?”

“Just eighteen. She has put up her hair today.”

“Oh, poor child, she need not have done that.”

“She is a born teacher. She used to hold little classes amongst her schoolfellows when she was only eight years old.”

Miriam turned sharply to her mother. She was sitting with her tired look—bright eyes, and moist flushed face. How had she heard about the little classes? Had there been little classes? She could not remember them.

“She speaks French like a Parisienne.”

That was that silly remark made by the woman in the train coming home from Hanover.

“Eh—we thought—it was in Germany she was—”

“Yes, but I learned more French.”

The sisters smiled provisionally.

“She shared a room with the mademoiselle.”

“Oh—er—hee—hay—perhaps she might speak French with the gels.”

“Oh no, I couldn’t speak.”

There was a tender little laugh.

“I don’t know French conversation.”

“Well, well.”

The sisters brought the discussion to an end by offering twenty pounds a year in return for Miriam’s services, and naming the date of the beginning of the autumn term.

On the way to the front door they all looked into the principal schoolroom. Miriam saw a long wide dining-room table covered with brown American cloth. Shelves neatly crowded with books lined one wall from floor to ceiling. Opposite them at the far end of the room was a heavy grey marble mantelpiece, on which stood a heavy green marble clock frame. At its centre a gold-faced clock ticked softly. Opposite the windows were two shallow alcoves. In one stood a shrouded blackboard on an easel. The other held a piano with a high slender back. The prancing outward sweep of its lid gave Miriam the impression of an afternoon dress.

Miss Deborah drew up one of the Venetian blinds. They all crowded to the window and looked out on a small garden backed by trees and lying in deep shadow. Beyond were more gardens and the brownish backs of small old brick houses. Low walls separated the school garden from the gardens on either side.

“On our right we have a school for the deaf and dumb,” said Miss Perne; “on the other side is a family of Polish Jews.”

“Mother, why did you pile it on?”

They would soon be down at the corner of Banbury Park where the tram lines ended and the Favorite omnibuses were standing in the muddy road under the shadow of the railway bridge. Through the jingling of the trams, the dop-dop of the hoofs of the tram-horses and the noise of a screaming train thundering over the bridge, Miriam made her voice heard, gazing through the spotted veil at her mother’s quivering features.

“They might have made me do all sorts of things I can’t do.”

Mrs. Henderson’s voice, breathless with walking, made a little sound of protest, a narrowed sound that told Miriam her amusement was half annoyance. The dark, noisy bridge, the clatter and rattle and the mud through which she must plunge to an omnibus exasperated her to the limit of her endurance.

“I’d got the post,” she said angrily; “you could see it was all settled and then you went saying those things.”

Glancing at the thin shrouded features she saw the faint lift of her mother’s eyebrows and the firmly speechless mouth.

“Piccadilly—jump on, chickie.”

“Let’s go outside now it’s fine,” said Miriam crossly.

Reaching the top of the omnibus she hurried to the front seat on the left hand side.

“That’s a very windy spot.”

“No it isn’t, it’s quite hot. The sun’s come out now. It’s rained for weeks. It won’t rain any more. It’ll be hot. You won’t feel the wind. Will you have the corner, mother?”

“No, chick, you sit there.”

Miriam screwed herself into the corner seat, crossing her knees and grazing the tips of her shoes.

“This is the only place on the top of a bus.”

Mrs. Henderson sat down at her side.

“I always make Harriett come up here when we go up to the West End.”

“Of course it’s the only place,” she insisted in response to her mother’s amused laugh. “No one smoking or talking in front; you can see out in front and you can see the shops if there are any, and you’re not falling off all the time. The bus goes on the left side of the road and tilts to the left.”

The seats were filling up and the driver appeared clambering into his place.

“Didn’t you ever think of that? Didn’t you ever think of the bus tilting that way?” persisted Miriam to her mother’s inattentive face. “Fancy never thinking of it. It’s beastly on the other side.”

The omnibus jerked forward.

“You ought to be a man, Mimmy.”

“I liked that little short one,” said Miriam contentedly as they came from under the roar of the bridge. “They were awfully nice, weren’t they? They seemed to have made up their mind to take me before we went. … So I think they like us. I wonder why they like us. Didn’t you think they liked us? Don’t you think they are awfully nice?”

“I do. They are very charming ladies.”

“Yes, but wasn’t it awfully rum their liking us in that funny way?”

“I’m sure I don’t see why they should not.”

“Oh, mother, you know what I mean. I like them. I’m perfectly sure I shall like them. D’you remember the little one saying all girls ought to marry? Why did she say that?”

“They are dear funny little O.M.’s,” said Mrs. Henderson merrily. She was sitting with her knees crossed, the stuff of her brown canvas dress was dragged across them into an ugly fold by the weight of the velvet panel at the side of the skirt. She looked very small and resourceless. And there were the Pernes with their house and their school. They were old maids. Of course. What then?

“I never dreamed of getting such a big salary.”

“Oh, my chickie, I’m afraid it isn’t much.”

“It is, mother, it’s lovely.”

“Oh—eh—well.”

Miriam turned fiercely to the roadway on her left.

She had missed the first swing forward of the vehicle and the first movements of the compact street.

They were going ahead now at a steady even trot. Her face was bathed in the flow of the breeze.

Little rivulets played about her temples, feeling their way through her hair. She drew off her gloves without turning from the flowing roadway. As they went on and on down the long road Miriam forgot her companion in the tranquil sense of being carried securely forward through the air away from people and problems. Ahead of her, at the end of the long drive, lay three sunlit weeks, bright now in the certainty of the shadow that lay beyond them … “the junior school” … “four boarders.”

They lumbered at last round a corner and out into a wide thoroughfare, drawing up outside a newly-built public house. Above it rose row upon row of upper windows sunk in masses of ornamental terra-cotta-coloured plaster. Branch roads, laid with tram lines led off in every direction. Miriam’s eyes followed a dull blue tram with a grubby white-painted seatless roof jingling busily off up a roadway where short trees stood all the way along in the small dim gardens of little grey houses. On the near corner of the road stood a wide white building, bulging into heavy domes against the sky. Across its side, large gilt letters standing far apart spelled out “Banbury Empire.”

“It must be a theatre,” she told herself in astonishment. “That’s what they call a suburban theatre. People think it is really a theatre.”

The little shock sent her mind feeling out along the road they had just left. She considered its unbroken length, its shops, its treelessness. The wide thoroughfare, up which they now began to rumble, repeated it on a larger scale. The pavements were wide causeways reached from the roadway by stone steps, three deep. The people passing along them were unlike any she knew. There were no ladies, no gentlemen, no girls or young men such as she knew. They were all alike. They were … She could find no word for the strange impression they made. It coloured the whole of the district through which they had come. It was part of the new world to which she was pledged to go on September 18th. It was her world already; and she had no words for it. She would not be able to convey it to others. She felt sure her mother had not noticed it. She must deal with it alone. To try to speak about it, even with Eve, would sap her courage. It was her secret. A strange secret for all her life as Hanover had been. But Hanover was beautiful, with distant country through the Saal windows with its colours misty in the sunlight, the beautiful, happy town and the woodland villages so near. This new secret was shabby, ugly and shabby. The half-perceived something persisted unchanged when the causeways and shops disappeared and long rows of houses streamed by, their close ranks broken only by an occasional cross road. They were large, high, flat-fronted houses with flights of grey stone steps leading to their porchless doors. They had tiny railed-in front gardens crowded with shrubs. Here and there long narrow strips of garden pushed a row of houses back from the roadway. In these longer plots stood signboards and showcases. “Photographic Studio,” “Commercial College,” “Eye Treatment,” “Academy of Dancing.” … She read the announcements with growing disquietude.

Rows of shops reappeared and densely crowded pavements, and then more high straight houses.

She roused herself at last from her puzzled contemplation and turned to glance at her mother. Mrs. Henderson was looking out ahead. The exhausted face was ready, Miriam saw, with its faintly questioning eyebrows and tightly-held lips, for emotional response. She turned away uneasily to the spellbound streets.

“Useless to try to talk about anything. … Mother would be somehow violent. She would be overpowering. The strange new impressions would be dissolved.”

But she must do something, show some sign of companionship. She began humming softly. The air was so full of clamour that she could not hear her voice. The houses and shops had disappeared. Drab brick walls were passing slowly by on either side. A goods’ yard. She deepened her humming, accentuating her phrases so that the sound might reach her companion through the reverberations of the clangour of shunting trains.

The high brick walls were drawing away. The end of the long roadway was in sight. Its widening mouth offered no sign of escape from the disquieting strangeness. The open stretch of thoroughfare into which they emerged was fed by innumerable lanes of traffic. From the islands dotted over its surface towered huge lamp standards branching out thin arms. As they rattled noisily over the stone setts they jolted across several lines of tramway and wove their way through currents of traffic crossing each other in all directions.

“I wonder where we’re going—I wonder if this is a Piccadilly bus,” Miriam thought of saying. Impossible to shout through the din.

The driver gathered up his horses and they clattered deafeningly over the last open stretch and turned into a smooth wide prospect.

“Oh bliss, wood-paving,” murmured Miriam.

A mass of smoke-greyed, sharply steepled stone building appeared on the right. Her eyes rested on its soft shadows.

On the left a tall grey church was coming towards them, spindling up into the sky. It sailed by, showing Miriam a circle of little stone pillars built into its spire. Plumy trees streamed by, standing large and separate on moss-green grass railed from the roadway. Bright white-faced houses with pillared porches shone through from behind them and blazed white above them against the blue sky. Wide side streets opened showing high balconied houses. The side streets were feathered with trees and ended mistily.

Away ahead were edges of clean bright masonry in profile, soft tufted heads of trees, bright green in the clear light. At the end of the vista the air was like pure saffron-tinted mother-of-pearl.

Miriam sat back and drew a deep breath.

“Well, chickie?”

“What’s the matter?”

“Why, you’ve been very funny!”

“How?”

“You’ve been so dummel.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Oh—eh.”

“How d’you mean I’ve been funny?”

“Not speaking to poor old mum-jam.”

“Well, you haven’t spoken to me.”

“No.”

“I shan’t take any of my summer things there,” said Miriam.

Mrs. Henderson’s face twitched.

“Shall I?”

“I’m afraid you haven’t very much in the way of thick clothing.”

“I’ve only got my plaid dress for every day and my mixy grey for best and my dark blue summer skirt. My velveteen skirt and my nainsook blouse are too old.”

“You can wear the dark blue muslin blouse with the blue skirt for a long time yet with something warm underneath.”

“My grey’s very grubby.”

“You look very well in it indeed.”

“I don’t mean that. I mean it’s all gone sort of dull and grubby over the surface when you look down it.”

“Oh, that’s your imagination.”

“It isn’t my imagination and I can see how Harriett’s looks.”

“You both look very nice.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill, my chick.”

“I’m not making anything. The simple fact is that the grey dresses are piggy.”

Mrs. Henderson flushed deeply, twining and untwining her silk-gloved fingers.

“She thinks that’s ‘gross exaggeration.’ That’s what she wants to say,” pondered Miriam wearily.

They turned into Langham Place.

She glanced to see whether her mother realised where they were.

“Look, we’re in the West End, mother! Oh, I’m not going to think about Banbury Park till it begins!”

They drew up near the Maison Nouvelle.

“Stanlake is,” said a refined emphatic voice from the pavement.

Miriam did not look for the speaker. The quality of the voice brought her a moment’s realisation of the meaning of her afternoon’s adventure. She was going to be shut up away from the grown-up things, the sunlit world, and the people who were enjoying it. She would be shut up and surrounded in Wordsworth House, a proper schooly school, amongst all those strange roadways. It would be cold English pianos and dreadful English children—and trams going up and down that grey road outside.

As they went on down Regent Street she fastened, for refuge from her thoughts, upon a window where softly falling dresses of dull olive stood about against a draped background of pale dead yellow. She held it in her mind as shop after shop streamed by.

“These shops are extremely récherché.”

“It’s old Regent Street, mother,” said Miriam argumentatively. “Glorious old Regent Street. Ruby wine.”

“Ah, Regent Street.”

“We always walk up one side and down the other. Up the dolls’ hospital side and down Liberty’s. Glory, glory, ruby wine.”

“You are enthusiastic.”

“But it’s so glorious. Don’t you think so?”

“Sit back a little, chickie. One can’t see the windows. You’re such a solid young woman.”

“You’ll see our A.B.C. soon. You know. The one we go to after the Saturday pops. You’ve been to it. You came to it the day we came to Madame Schumann’s farewell. It’s just round here in Piccadilly. Here it is. Glorious. I must make the others come up once more before I die. I always have a scone. I don’t like the aryated bread. We go along the Burlington Arcade too. I don’t believe you’ve ever been along there. It’s simply perfect. Glove shops and fans and a smell of the most exquisite scent everywhere.”

“Dear me. It must be very captivating.”

“Now we shall pass the parks. Oh, isn’t the sun A1 copper bottom!”

Mrs. Henderson laughed wistfully.

“What delicious shade under those fine old trees. I almost wish I had brought my en-tout-cas.”

“Oh no, you don’t really want it. There will be more breeze presently. The bus always begins to go quicker along here. It’s the Green Park, that one. Those are clubs that side, the West End clubs. It’s fascinating all the way along here to Hyde Park Corner. You just see Park Lane going up at the side. Park Lane. It goes wiggling away, straight into heaven. We’ve never been up there. I always read the name at the corner.”

“You ridiculous chick—ah, there is the Royal Academy of Arts.”

“Oh yes, I wonder if there are any Leightons this year.”

“Or Leader. Charles Leader. I think there is nothing more charming than those landscape scenes by Leader.”

“I’ve got three bally weeks. I can see Hyde Park. We’ve got ages yet. It goes on being fascinating right down through Kensington and right on up to the other side of Putney Bridge.”

“Dear me. Isn’t it fascinating after that?”

“Oh, not all that awful walk along the Upper Richmond Road—not until our avenue begins—”

Miriam fumbled with the fastening of the low wide gate as her mother passed on up the drive. She waited until the footsteps were muffled by the fullness of the may trees linking their middle branches over the bend in the drive. Then she looked steadily down the sunflecked asphalted avenue along which they had just come. The level sunlight streamed along the empty roadway and the shadows of the lime trees lay across the path and up the oak palings. Her eyes travelled up and down the boles of the trees, stopping at each little stunted tuft of greenery. She could no longer hear her mother’s footsteps. There was a scented coolness in the shady watered garden. Leaning gently with her breast against the upper bars of the gate she broke away from the sense of her newly-made engagement.

She scanned the whole length of the shrouded avenue from end to end and at last looked freely up amongst the interwoven lime trees. Long she watched, her eyes roaming from the closely-growing leaves where the green was densest to the edges of the trees where the light shone through. “Gold and green,” she whispered, “green and gold, held up by firm brown stems bathed in gold.”

When she reached the open garden beyond the bend she ran once round the large centre bed where berberus and laurestinus bushes stood in a clump ringed by violas and blue lobelias and heavily scented masses of cherry-ripe. Taking the shallow steps in two silent strides she reached the shelter of the deep porch. The outer door and the door of the vestibule stood open. Gently closing the vestibule she ran across the paved hall and opened the door on the right.

Harriett, in a long fawn canvas dress with a deep silk sash, was standing in the middle of the drawing-room floor with a large pot of scented geraniums in her arms.

“Hullo!” said Miriam.

Putting down her pot Harriett fixed brown eyes upon her and began jumping lightly up and down where she stood. The small tips of her fawn glacé kid shoes shone together between the hem of her dress and the pale green of the carpet.

“What you doing?” said Miriam quietly shutting the door behind her and flushing with pleasure.

Harriett hopped more energetically. The blaze from the western window caught the paste stone in the tortoiseshell comb crowning her little high twist of hair and the prisms of the lustres standing behind her on the white marble mantelpiece.

“What you doing, booby?”

“Old conservatory,” panted Harriett.

Miriam looked vaguely down the length of the long room to where the conservatory doors stood wide open. As she gazed at the wet tiling Harriett ceased hopping and kicked her delicately. “Well, gooby?”

Miriam grinned.

“You’ve got it. I knew you would. The Misses Perne have engaged Miss Miriam Henderson as resident teacher for the junior school.”

“Oh yes, I’ve got it,” smiled Miriam. “But don’t let’s talk about that. It’s just an old school, a house. I don’t know a bit what it’ll be like. I’ve got three bally blooming weeks. Don’t let’s talk about it.”

“Awri.”

“What about Saturday?”

“It’s all right. Ted was at the club.”

“Was he!”

“Yes, old scarlet face, he were.”

“I’m not.”

“He came in just before closing time and straight up to me and ast where you were. He looked sick when I told him, and so fagged.”

“It was awfully hot in town,” murmured Miriam tenderly.

She went to the piano and struck a note very softly.

“He played a single with the duffer and lost it.”

“Oh, well, of course, he was so tired.”

“Yes, but it wasn’t that. It was because you weren’t there. He’s simply no good when you’re not there, now. He’s perfectly different.”

Miriam struck her note again.

“Listen, that’s E flat.”

“Go on.”

“That’s a chord in E flat. Isn’t it lovely? It sounds perfectly different in C. Listen. Isn’t it funny?”

“Well, don’t you want to know why it’s all right about Saturday?”

“Yes, screamingly.”

“Well, that’s the perfectly flabbergasting thing. Ted simply came to say they’ve got a man coming to stay with them and can he bring him.”

“My dear! What a heavenly relief. That makes twelve men and fourteen girls. That’ll do.”

“Nan Babington’s hurt her ankle, but she swears she’s coming.” Harriett sniffed and sank down on the white sheepskin, drawing her knees up to her chin.

“You shouldn’t say ‘swears.’ ”

“Well, you bet. She simply loves our dances.”

“Did she say she did?”

“She sat on the pavilion seat with Bevan Seymour all the afternoon and I was with them when Ted was playing with the duffer. She told Bevan that she didn’t know anywhere else where the kids arranged the dances, and everything was so jolly. It’s screaming, my dear, she said.”

“It’s horrid the way she calls him ‘my dear.’ Your ring is simply dazzling like that, Harry. D’you see? It’s the sun.”

“Of course it’ll mean she’ll sit out in a deck chair in the garden with Bevan all the time.”

“How disgusting.”

“It’s her turn for the pavilion tea on Saturday. She’s coming in her white muslin and then coming straight on here with two sticks and wants us to keep her some flowers. Let’s go and have tea. It’ll be nearly dinner time.”

“Has Mary made a cake?”

“I dunno. Tea was to be in the breakfast-room when you came back.”

“Why not in the conservatory?”

“Because, you silly old crow, I’m beranging it for Saturday.”

“Shall we have the piano in there?”

“Well, don’t you think so?”

“Twenty-six of us. Perhaps it’ll be more blissful.”

“If we have the breakfast-room piano in the hall it’ll bung up the hall.”

“Yes, but the Erard bass is so perfect for waltzes.”

“And the be-rilliant Collard treble is so all right in the vatoire.”

“I thought it was Eve and I talked about the Collard treble.”

“Well, I was there.”

“Anyhow we’ll have the grand in the conservatory. Oh, Bacchus! Ta-ra-ra-boom-deay.”

“Tea,” said a rounded voice near the keyhole.

“Eve!” shouted Miriam.

The door opened slightly. “I know,” said the voice.

“Come in, Eve,” commanded Miriam, trying to swing the door wide.

“I know,” said the voice quivering with the effort of holding the door. “I know all about the new Misses Perne and the new man—Max Sonnenheim—Max.”

“This way out,” called Harriett from the conservatory.

“Eve,” pleaded Miriam, tugging at the door, “let me get at you. Don’t be an idiot.”

A gurgle of amusement made her loosen her hold.

“I’m not trying, you beast. Take your iron wrists away.”

A small white hand waggled fingers through the aperture.

Miriam seized and covered it. “Come in for a minute,” she begged. “I want to see you. What have you got on?”

“Tea.”

The hand twisted itself free and Eve fled through the hall.

Miriam flung after her with a yell and caught at her slender body. “I’ve a great mind to drag down your old hair.”

“Tea,” smiled Eve serenely.

“All right, I’m coming, damn you, aren’t I?”

“Oh, Mimmy!”

“Well, damn me, then. Somebody in the house must swear. I say, Eve?”

“What?”

“Nothing, only I say.”

“Um.”