The Tunnel

To
M. K.

I

Miriam paused with her heavy bag dragging at her arm. It was a disaster. But it was the last of Mornington Road. To explain about it would be to bring Mornington Road here.

“It doesn’t matter now,” said Mrs. Bailey as she dropped her bag and fumbled for her purse.

“Oh, I’d better settle it at once or I shall forget about it. I’m so glad the things have come so soon.”

When Mrs. Bailey had taken the half-crown they stood smiling at each other. Mrs. Bailey looked exactly as she had done the first time. It was exactly the same; there was no disappointment. The light coming through the glass above the front door made her look more shabby and worn. Her hair was more metallic. But it was the same girlish figure and the same smile triumphing over the badly fitting teeth. Miriam felt like an inmate returning after an absence. The smeariness of the marble-topped hall table did not offend her. She held herself in. It was better to begin as she meant to go on. Behind Mrs. Bailey the staircase was beckoning. There was something waiting upstairs that would be gone if she stayed talking to Mrs. Bailey.

Assuring Mrs. Bailey that she remembered the way to the room she started at last on the journey up the many flights of stairs. The feeling of confidence that had come the first time she mounted them with Mrs. Bailey returned now. She could not remember noticing anything then but a large brown dinginess, one rich warm even tone everywhere in the house; a sharp contrast to the cold harshly lit little bedroom in Mornington Road. The day was cold. But this house did not seem cold and when she rounded the first flight and Mrs. Bailey was out of sight the welcome of the place fell upon her. She knew it well, better than any place she had known in all her wanderings—the faded umbers and browns of the stair carpet, the gloomy heights of wall, a patternless sheen where the staircase lights fell upon it and in the shadowed parts a blurred scrolling pattern in dull madder on a brown background; the dark landings with lofty ceilings and high dark polished doors surmounted by classical reliefs in grimed plaster, the high staircase windows screened by long smoke grimed lace curtains. On the top landing the ceiling came down nearly level with the tops of the doors. The light from above made the little grained doors stare brightly. Patches of fresh brown and buff shone here and there in the threadbare linoleum. The cracks of the flooring were filled with dust and dust lay along the rim of the skirting. Two large tin trunks standing one upon the other almost barred the passageway. It was like a landing in a small suburban lodging-house, a small silent afternoon brightness, shut in and smelling of dust. Silence flooded up from the lower darkness. The hall where she had stood with Mrs. Bailey was far away below and below that were basements deep in the earth. The outside of the house with its first-floor balcony, the broad shallow flight of steps leading to the dark green front door, the little steep flight running sharply down into the railed area seemed as far away as yesterday.

The little landing was a bright plateau, under the skylight, shut off by its brightness from the rest of the house, the rooms leading from it would be bright and flat and noisy with light compared with the rest of the house. From above came the tap-tap of a door swinging gently in a breeze and behind the sound was a soft faint continuous murmur. She ran up the short twisting flight of bare stairs into a blaze of light. Would her room be a bright suburban bedroom? Had it been a dull day when she first called? The skylight was blue and gold with light, its cracks threads of bright gold. Three little glaring yellow grained doors opened on to the small strip of uncovered dusty flooring; to the left the little box-loft, to the right the empty garret behind her own and in front of her her own door ajar; tapping in the breeze. The little brass knob rattled loosely in her hand and the hinge ran up the scale to a high squeak as she pushed open the door and down again as it closed behind her neatly with a light wooden sound. The room was half dark shadow and half brilliant light.

She closed the door and stood just inside it looking at the room. It was smaller than her memory of it. When she had stood in the middle of the floor with Mrs. Bailey she had looked at nothing but Mrs. Bailey, waiting for the moment to ask about the rent. Coming upstairs she had felt the room was hers and barely glanced at it when Mrs. Bailey opened the door. From the moment of waiting on the stone steps outside the front door everything had opened to the movement of her impulse. She was surprised now at her familiarity with the detail of the room … that idea of visiting places in dreams. It was something more than that … all the real part of your life has a real dream in it; some of the real dream part of you coming true. You know in advance when you are really following your life. These things are familiar because reality is here. Coming events cast light. It is like dropping everything and walking backwards to something you know is there. However far you go out you come back. … I am back now where I was before I began trying to do things like other people. I left home to get here. None of those things can touch me here. They are mine. …

… The room asserted its chilliness. But the dark yellow graining of the wallpaper was warm. It shone warmly in the stream of light pouring through the barred lattice window. In the further part of the room darkened by the steep slope of the roof it gleamed like stained wood. The window space was a little square wooden room, the long low double lattice breaking the roof, the ceiling and walls warmly reflecting its oblong of bright light. Close against the window was a firm little deal table covered with a thin brightly coloured printed cotton tablecloth. When Miriam drew her eyes from its confusion of rich fresh tones the bedroom seemed very dark. The bed drawn in under the slope showed an expanse of greyish white counterpane, the carpet was colourless in the gloom. She opened the door. Silence came in from the landing. The blue and gold had gone from the skylight. Its sharp grey light shone in over the dim colours of the threadbare carpet and on to the black bars of the little grate and the little strip of tarnished yellow grained mantelpiece, running along to the bedhead where a small globeless gas bracket stuck out at an angle over the head of the bed. The sight of her luggage piled up on the other side of the fireplace drew her forward into the dimness. There was a small chest of drawers battered and almost paintless but with two long drawers and two small ones and a white cover on which stood a little looking glass framed in polished pine … and a small yellow wardrobe with a deep drawer under the hanging part and a little drawer in the rickety little washstand and another above the dusty cupboard of the little mahogany sideboard. I’ll paint the bright part of the ceiling; scrolls of leaves. … Shutting the quiet door she went into the brilliance of the window space. The outside world appeared; a long row of dormer windows and the square tops of the larger windows below them, the windows black or sheeny grey in the light, cut out against the dinginess of smoke grimed walls. The long strip of roof sloping back from the dormers was a pure even dark grey. She bent to see the sky, clear soft heavy grey, striped by the bars of her window. Behind the top rim of the iron framework of the bars was a discoloured roll of window blind. Then the bars must move. … Shifting the table she pressed close to the barred window. It smelt strongly of rust and dust. Outside she saw grey tiles sloping steeply from the window to a cemented gutter beyond which was a little stone parapet about two feet high. A soft wash of madder lay along the grey tiles. There must be an afterglow somewhere, just out of sight. Her hands went through the bars and lifted the little rod which held the lattice half open. The little square four paned frame swung free and flattened itself back against the fixed panes, out of reach, its bar sticking out over the leads. Drawing back grimed fingers and wrists striped with grime she grasped the iron bars and pulled. The heavy framework left the window frame with a rusty creak and the sound of paint peeling and cracking. It was very heavy but it came up and up until her arms were straight above her head and looking up she saw a stout iron ring in a little trap door in the wooden ceiling and a hook in the centre of the endmost bar in the iron framework.

Kneeling on the table to raise the frame once more and fix it to the ceiling she saw the whole length of the top row of windows across the way and wide strips of grimy stucco placed across the house fronts between the windows.

The framework of the freed window was cracked and blistered but the little square panes were clean. There were four little windows in the row, each with four square panes. The outmost windows were immovable. The one next to the open one had lost its bar, but a push set it free and it swung wide. She leaned out holding back from the dusty sill and met a soft fresh breeze streaming straight in from the west. The distant murmur of traffic changed into the clear plonk plonk and rumble of swift vehicles. Right and left at the far end of the vista were glimpses of bare trees. The cheeping of birds came faintly from the distant squares and clear and sharp from neighbouring roofs. To the left the trees were black against pure grey, to the right they stood spread and bunched in front of the distant buildings blocking the vista. Running across the rose-washed façade of the central mass she could just make out “Edwards’s Family Hotel” in large black letters. That was the distant view of the courtyard of Euston Station. … In between that and the square of trees ran the Euston Road, by day and by night, her unsleeping guardian, the rim of the world beyond which lay the northern suburbs, banished.

From a window somewhere down the street out of sight came the sound of an unaccompanied violin, clearly attacking and dropping and attacking a passage of half a dozen bars. The music stood serene and undisturbed in the air of the quiet street. The man was following the phrase, listening; strengthening and clearing it, completely undisturbed and unconscious of his surroundings. “Good heavens,” she breathed quietly, feeling the extremity of relief, passing some boundary, emerging strong and equipped in a clear medium. … She turned back into the twilight of the room. Twenty-one and only one room to hold the richly renewed consciousness, and a living to earn, but the self that was with her in the room was the untouched tireless self of her seventeenth year and all the earlier time. The familiar light moved within the twilight, the old light. … She might as well wash the grime from her wrists and hands. There was a scrap of soap in the soap dish, dry and cracked and seamed with dirt. The washstand rocked as she washed her hands; the toilet things did not match, the towel-horse held one small thin face towel and fell sideways against the wardrobe as she drew off the towel. When the gas was on she would be visible from the opposite dormer window. Short skimpy faded Madras muslin curtains screened a few inches of the endmost windows and were caught back and tied up with tape. She untied the tape and disengaged with the curtains a strong smell of dust. The curtains would cut off some of the light. She tied them firmly back and pulled at the edge of the rolled up blind. The blind streaked and mottled with ironmould came down in a stifling cloud of dust. She rolled it up again and washed once more. She must ask for a bath towel and do something about the blind, sponge it or something; that was all.

A light had come in the dormer on the other side of the street. It remained unscreened. Watching carefully she could see only a dim figure moving amongst motionless shapes. No need to trouble about the blind. London could come freely in day and night through the unscreened happy little panes; light and darkness and darkness and light.

London, just outside all the time, coming in with the light, coming in with the darkness, always present in the depths of the air in the room.

The gas flared out into a wide bright flame. The dingy ceiling and counterpane turned white. The room was a square of bright light and had a rich brown glow, shut brightly in by the straight square of level white ceiling and thrown up by the oblong that sloped down, white, at the side of the big bed almost to the floor. She left her things half unpacked about the floor and settled herself on the bed under the gas jet with the Voyage of the Beagle. Unpacking had been a distraction from the glory, very nice, getting things straight. But there was no need to do anything or think about anything … ever, here. No interruption, no one watching or speculating or treating one in some particular way that had to be met. Mrs. Bailey did not speculate. She knew, everything. Every evening here would have a glory, but not the same kind of glory. Reading would be more of a distraction than unpacking. She read a few lines. They had a fresh attractive meaning. Reading would be real. The dull adventures of the Beagle looked real, coming along through reality. She put the book on her knee and once more met the clear brown shock of her room.

The carpet is awful, faded and worn almost to bits. But it is right, in this room. … This is the furnished room; one room. I have come to it. “You could get a furnished room at about seven shillings rental.” The awful feeling, no tennis, no dancing, no house to move in, no society. The relief at first when Bennett found those people … maddening endless roads of little houses in the east wind … their kind way of giving more than they had undertaken, and smiling and waiting for smiles and dying all the time in some dark way without knowing it. Filling the rooms and the piano and the fern on the serge table cloth and the broken soap dish in the bath room until it was impossible to read or think or play because of them, the feeling of them stronger and stronger till there was nothing but crying over the trays of meals and wanting to scream. The thought of the five turnings to the station, all into long little roads looking alike and making you forget which was which and lose your way, was still full of pain … the relief of moving to Granville Place still a relief, though it felt a mistake from the first. Mrs. Corrie’s old teacher liking only certain sorts of people knew it was a mistake, with her peevish silky old face and her antique brooch. But it had been the beginning of London. … Bond Street that Sunday morning in the thick fog; these sudden pictures gleaming in a window, filmy … von Hier. Adelina Compayne, hanging out silk stockings on the top balustrade. “I love cawfy” … that was the only real thing that had been said downstairs. There was no need to have been frightened of these two women in black silk evening dresses. None of these clever things were real. They said young Asquith is a really able man to hide their thoughts. The American Academy pupils talked together to keep everybody off, except when they made their clever jokes … “if anyone takes that top bit there’ll be murder Miss Spink.” When they went out of the room they looked silly. The young man was real somewhere else.

The little man talking about the wonders of the linotype in the smoking room. … How did I get into the smoking room? Someone probably told Miss Spink I talked to him in the smoking room and smoked a cigarette. Perhaps his wife. If they could have seen. It was so surprising to hear anybody suddenly talking. Perhaps he began in the hall and ushered me into the smoking room. There was no one there and I can’t remember anything about the linotype, only the quiet and the talking face and suddenly feeling in the heart of London. But it was soon after that they all began being standoffish; before Mr. Chamberlayne came; before Adela began playing Esther Summerson at the Kennington. They approved of my going down to fetch her until he began coming too. The shock of seeing her clumsy heavy movements on the stage and her face looking as though it were covered with starch. … I can think about it all, here, and not mind.

She was beautiful. It was happiness to sit and watch her smoking so badly, in bed, in the strip of room, her cloud of hair against the wall in the candlelight, two o’clock … the Jesuit who had taught her chess … and Michael Somebody, the little book The Purple Pillar. He was an author and he wanted to marry her and take her back to Ireland. Perhaps by now she was back from America and had gone, just out of kindness. She was strong and beautiful and good, sitting up in her chemise, smoking. … I’ve got that photograph of her as Marcia somewhere. I must put it up. Miss Spink was surprised that last week, the students getting me into their room … the dark clean shining piano, the azaleas and the muslin shaded lamp, the way they all sat in their evening dresses, lounging and stiff with stiff clean polished hair. … “Miss Dust here’s going to be the highest soprano in the States.” … “None of that Miss Thicker.” … “When she caught that top note and the gold medal she went right up top, to stay there, that minute.”

She was surprised when Mrs. Potter took me to hear Melba. I heard Melba. I don’t remember hearing her. English opera houses are small; there are fine things all over the world. If you see them all you can compare one with the other; but then you don’t see or hear anything at all. It seems strange to be American and at the same time stout and middle-aged. It would have got more and more difficult with all those people. The dreadful way the Americans got intimate and then talked or hinted openly everywhere about intimate things. No one knew how intimate Miss O’Veagh was. I shall remember. There is something about being Irish Roman Catholic that makes happiness. She did not seem to think the George Street room awful. She was surprised when I talked about the hole in the wall and the cold and the imbecile servant and the smell of ether. “We are brought up from the first to understand that we must never believe anything a man says.” She came and sat and talked and wrote after she had gone … “goodbye—sweet blessed little rose of Mary” … she tried to make me think I was young and pretty. She was sorry for me without saying so.

I should never have gone to Mornington Road unless I had been nearly mad with sorrow … if Miss Thomas disapproved of germs and persons who let apartments why did she come and take a room at George Street? She must have seen she drove me nearly mad with sorrow. The thought of Wales full of Welsh people like her, makes one mad with sorrow. … Did she think I could get to know her by hearing all her complaints? She’s somewhere now, sending someone mad.

I was mad already when I went to Mornington Road.

“You’ll be all right with Mrs. Swanson” … the awful fringes, the horror of the ugly clean little room, the horror of Mrs. Swanson’s heavy old body moving slowly about the house, a heavy dark mountain, fringes, bulges, slow dead eyes, slow dead voice, slow grimacing evil smile … housekeeper to the Duke of Something and now moving slowly about heavy with disapproval. She thought of me as a business young lady.

Following advice is certain to be wrong. When you don’t follow advice there may be awful things. But they are not arranged beforehand. And when they come you do not know that they are awful until you have half got hold of something else. Then they change into something that has not been awful. Things that remain awful are in some way not finished. … Those women are awful. They will get more and more awful, still disliking and disapproving till they die. I shall not see them again. … I will never again be at the mercy of such women or at all in the places where they are. That means keeping free of all groups. In groups sooner or later one of them appears, dead and sightless and bringing blindness and death … although they seem to like brightness and children and the young people they approve of. I run away from them because I must. They kill me. The thought of their death is awful. Even in heaven no one could explain anything to them if they remain as they are. Wherever people advise you to go there is in the end one of those women. …

When she turned out the gas the window spaces remained faintly alight with a soft light like moonlight. At the window she found a soft bluish radiance cast up from below upon the opposite walls and windows. It went up into the clear blue darkness of the sky.

When she lay down the bed smelt faintly of dust. The air about her head under the sharply sloping ceiling was still a little warm with the gas. It was full of her untrammelled thoughts. Her luggage was lying about, quite near. She thought of washing in the morning in the bright light on the other side of the room … leaves crowding all round the lattice and here and there a pink rose … several pink roses … the lovely air chilling the water … the basin quite up against the lattice … dew splashing off the rose bushes in the little garden almost dark with trellises and trees, crowding with Harriett through the little damp stiff gate, the sudden lineny smell of Harriett’s pinafore and the thought of Harriett in it, feeling the same, sudden bright sunshine, two shouts, great cornfields going up and up with a little track between them … up over Blewburton … Whittenham Clumps. Before I saw Whittenham Clumps I had always known them. But we saw them before we knew they were called Whittenham Clumps. It was a surprise to know anybody who had seen them and that they had a name.

St. Pancras bells were clamouring in the room; rapid scales, beginning at the top, coming with a loud full thump on to the fourth note and finishing with a rush to the lowest which was hardly touched before the top note hung again in the air, sounding outdoors clean and clear while all the other notes still jangled together in her room. Nothing had changed. The night was like a moment added to the day; like years going backwards to the beginning; and in the brilliant sunshine the unchanging things began again, perfectly new. She leaped out of bed into the clamorous stillness and stood in the window rolling up the warm hair that felt like a shawl round her shoulders. A cup of tea and then the bus to Harriett’s. A bus somewhere just out there beyond the morning stillness of the street. What an adventure to go out and take a bus without having to face anybody. They were all out there, away somewhere, the very thought and sight of them, disapproving and deploring her surroundings. She listened. There they were. There were their very voices, coming plaintive and reproachful with a held-in indignation, intonations that she knew inside and out, coming on bells from somewhere beyond the squares—another church. She withdrew the coloured cover and set her spirit lamp on the ink-stained table. Strong bright light was standing outside the window. The clamour of the bells had ceased. From far away down in the street a loud hoarse voice came thinly up. Referee—Lloyd’s—Sunday Times—People—pypa. … A front door opened with a loud crackle of paint. The voice dropped to speaking tones that echoed clearly down the street and came up clear and soft and confidential. Referee? Lloyd’s? The door closed with a large firm wooden sound and the harsh voice went on down the street.

St. Pancras bells burst forth again. Faintly interwoven with their bright headlong scale were the clear sweet delicate contralto of the more distant bells playing very swiftly and reproachfully a five finger exercise in a minor key. That must be a very high-Anglican church; with light coming through painted windows on to carvings and decorations.

As she began on her solid slice of bread and butter St. Pancras bells stopped again. In the stillness she could hear the sound of her own munching. She stared at the surface of the table that held her plate and cup. It was like sitting up to the nursery table. “How frightfully happy I am,” she thought with bent head. Happiness streamed along her arms and from her head. St. Pancras bells began playing a hymn tune in single firm beats with intervals between that left each note standing for a moment gently in the air. The first two lines were playing carefully through to the distant accompaniment of the rapid weaving and interweaving in a regular unbroken pattern of the five soft low contralto bells. The third line of the hymn ran through Miriam’s head a ding-dong to and fro from tone to semitone. The bells played it out, without the semitone, with a perfect satisfying falsity. Miriam sat hunched against the table listening for the ascending stages of the last line. The bells climbed gently up, made a faint flat dab at the last top note, left it in the air askew above the decorous little tune and rushed away down their scale as if to cover the impropriety. They clamoured recklessly mingling with Miriam’s shout of joy as they banged against the wooden walls of the window space.

II

“Been to church?” said Gerald digging his shoulders into his chair.

“No. Have you?”

“We’ve not been for weeks. … Everybody thinks us awful heathens.”

“P’raps you are.”